Portside

Why aren’t insurance companies aggressively fighting climate change, and minimizing catastrophes? Look at their balance sheets.

The crisis of 2020 has created the greatest wealth gap in history. The middle class, capitalism and democracy are all under threat. What went wrong and what can be done?

Biden’s investment plan addresses longstanding needs in the country. We will likely have to reduce other spending in the economy to make room for it. A financial transactions tax is a great place to look for some of the offset.

Can Biden Achieve Progress Where It Matters While Avoiding a New Cold (or Hot) War?

Robbing workers’ pension funds has long been central to Wall Street's business model. A recent Supreme Court ruling opened the door for financial managers to take their looting of those pension funds even further.

No private, unelected entity should have the power over the economy that BlackRock has, without a legally enforceable fiduciary duty to wield it in the public interest.

...decades of redlining and discrimination...pushed poor minorities into ghettos, gentrification is pushing them out. The paradox is...young liberals, whose ideals theoretically go against these phenomena, are in fact producing that very effect.

This article is excerpted from Ellen Brown's new book Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age, available in paperback June 1.

In her new book, All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power, Nomi Prins traces the hundred-year history of collusion between Washington and Wall Street. Prins reveals how a small number of bankers have played critical roles in shaping a century’s worth of financial, foreign and domestic policy in the United States including the Federal Reserve, the response to the Great Depression, and the founding of the IMF and the World Bank.

Mayor Bloomberg pushed through re-zoning of nearly 40 percent of New York City. Bill de Blasio campaigned against urban gentrification. Can the new mayor reverse the trend? Can big-city electoral coalitions buck the trend of the real estate and financial speculators? Author Michael Hirsch reviews the new book about Chicago's mayor Rahm Emanuel - the mayor of the 1% in the second largest city of the country.