"Saving Capitalism from Itself"
BY PHILIP KOTLER and CHRISTIAN SARKAR Trump’s dismantling of America’s public institutions is not just about governance. It is about who we are as a people. Do we believe in a shared inheritance—our parks, our schools, our justice system, our history—or do we surrender them to power, profit, privatization, and propaganda? Trump’s second term is … Continue reading Trump’s Institutional Destruction: Ending Democracy in the USA
BY Maurizio Valsania, Università di Torino If there are any limits to a president’s power, it wasn’t evident from Donald Trump’s speech before a joint session of Congress on March 4, 2025. In that speech, the first before lawmakers of Trump’s second term, the president declared vast accomplishments during the brief six weeks of his presidency. … Continue reading Trump is the kinglike president many feared when arguing over the US Constitution in 1789 – and his address to Congress showed it
BY CHRISTIAN SARKAR Trump 2.0 can be described as a kakistocracy – a state or society governed by its least suitable or competent citizens. Let’s process that. Donald Trump and the Republican Party have made dismantling Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives a core part of their political platform, claiming these programs undermine merit and lower standards. Yet, … Continue reading The Kakistocracy: Exposing Trump’s Hypocrisy and the GOP’s War on DEI
BY Rebekkah Markey-Towler, The University of Melbourne On his first day back in office as United States president, Donald Trump gave formal notice of his nation’s exit from the Paris Agreement – a vital global treaty seeking to rein in climate change. Before signing the order, Trump declared his reasons to an arena of cheering supporters, … Continue reading Trump has withdrawn the US from the Paris Agreement. Here’s why that’s not such a bad thing
BY CHRISTIAN SARKAR Is your business degenerative? Is it following the well-thumbed playbook of corporate crapitalism? Here’s an undeniable truth: most businesses are degenerative. They exploit, extract, and destroy – decimating the Common Good. Let’s confront the ugly reality of how most companies operate: 1. You Can’t Kill Your Customer and Call It Value Creation … Continue reading Crapitalism and the Degenerative Enterprise
BY AMY COOTER President-elect Donald Trump has reaffirmed that once he takes office he plans to declare a national emergency and use the military on American streets to accomplish his promises to round up and deport millions of undocumented migrants. Many experts’ concerns about this program have included the facts that immigrants contribute enormous value … Continue reading As Trump touts plans for immigrant roundup, militias are standing back, but standing by
BY PHILIP KOTLER and CHRISTIAN SARKAR Predicting the winner of a U.S. Presidential election is especially hard in this election year. The candidates are running close to 50-50 and voters are highly polarized. The two candidates have extremely different views of what is the Common Good. So we choose not to make a prediction. However, we … Continue reading Who Will Win the U.S. Presidency in 2024?
BY JULIA CONLEY The National Labor Relations Board was prevented on Tuesday from moving forward with an unfair labor practices case against the social services tech company Findhelp, after a Trump-appointed judge granted the Texas-based firm’s request for a temporary injunction. “This is yet another move by a Trump-appointed judge in favor of wealthy corporations.” … Continue reading Alarm as Trump Judge Sides With Company Claiming NLRB Is Unconstitutional
BY FRAN SHORE As more campuses join the protests against Israel’s continuing engagement in war crimes in Gaza, one common thread runs through the student demands. It’s this: divest from supplying the Netanyahu government and the IDF with weapons of mass destruction. What compels many of these youthful demonstrators to occupy the public spaces and … Continue reading Gaza, Campus Protest, and the Fierce Urgency of Now
BY JESSICA CORBETT When Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives elected Louisiana Congressman Mike Johnson as speaker last week, critics quickly sounded the alarm about his previous calls to cut trillions of dollars from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—and the GOP leader triggered a fresh wave of fears on Thursday with related comments to … Continue reading ‘MAGA Mike Johnson’ Wants Commission to Cut Social Security Formed ‘Immediately’
BY CHRISTIAN SARKAR Has capitalism taken us over the cliff? And why can’t we stop? Marjorie Kelly‘s most recent book, Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises is one of the most important explanations of how wealth and power have created an unlivable world and sacrificed the future for … Continue reading Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises [Book Review]
BY RICHARD ESKOW The real goal of billionaire-funded Social Security rhetoric is to prevent the public from drawing a connection between Social Security’s finances, the working-class retirement crisis, and the ludicrous amounts of wealth held by America’s billionaires. Consider the billionaire. I’m not talking about people who were born into wealth; they have their own issues. … Continue reading Why Billionaires Hate Social Security
BY CHRISTIAN SARKAR, PHILIP KOTLER, ENRICO FOGLIA In our book – REGENERATION: The Future of Community in a Permacrisis World, we point out that in the US today, we see that our politicians can’t even stand up to the NRA, let alone address climate collapse. Instead, they distract us with culture wars and fake controversy – banning books, … Continue reading Does Your Government Care? A Citizen’s Checklist for Regenerative Government
BY ARCHON FUNG and LAWRENCE LESSIG Could organizations use artificial intelligence language models such as ChatGPT to induce voters to behave in specific ways? Sen. Josh Hawley asked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman this question in a May 16, 2023, U.S. Senate hearing on artificial intelligence. Altman replied that he was indeed concerned that some people … Continue reading How AI could take over elections – and undermine democracy
BY HOWARD MANLY No one needs to tell Salman Rushdie about the cost of free speech. In 1989, Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” triggered the ire of Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who called for the writer’s death. Protests against Rushdie’s novel ignited violent attacks against bookstores across the world, and the book was later … Continue reading Salman Rushdie renews fight against book-banning – 3 essential articles on right-wing challenges to what schoolkids can read
BY JESSICA CORBETT “The MAGA House is more interested in sweeping any corruption amongst their ranks under the rug and performing political stunts against the Biden administration than they are doing anything constructive,” said one critic. Government watchdog groups on Monday blasted plans by U.S. House Republicans to gut an independent, nonpartisan ethics office that was … Continue reading ‘This Must Be Stopped': House Republicans Plan to Gut Ethics Office
BY KARRIN VASBY ANDERSON, Colorado State University After the FBI completed a lawful search of former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate on Aug. 8, 2022, conservative politicians responded with one of three strategies: silence, circumspection and attack. Many responses echoed Trump’s own framing of the search. In his Aug. 8 message he claimed his residence was … Continue reading GOP ‘message laundering’ turns violent, extremist reactions to search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago into acceptable political talking points
BY GEORGE MICHAEL, Westfield State University President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election were brazenly antidemocratic. Yet Trump and his supporters nonetheless justified their actions under the dubious pretense of preserving American democracy – as a matter of getting the vote right, of reversing voter fraud. There’s a good reason they … Continue reading An antidemocratic philosophy called ‘neoreaction’ is creeping into GOP politics
BY – STANLEY F. STASCH From the late 1940s to the mid-1970s, ordinary people in the United States enjoyed a tremendous increase in their prosperity. It was the highest level of prosperity the world had ever experienced, and it resulted in the creation of the great American middle class. That period was immediately followed by the … Continue reading The U.S. Government’s Program Of Welfare For The Wealthy
BY JULIA CONLEY Releasing a new study showing that world governments spend at least $1.8 trillion annually to subsidize activities which worsen the climate crisis, global subsidies experts on Thursday said leaders must eliminate or redirect the financial supports as part of an ambitious Global Biodiversity Framework at an upcoming summit in China. The B Team … Continue reading Humanity Subsidizing ‘Our Own Extinction,’ Warns Study
BY Betsy Weatherhead, University of Colorado Boulder With the United Nations’ climate conference in Scotland turning a spotlight on climate change policies and the impact of global warming, it’s useful to understand what the science shows. I’m an atmospheric scientist who has worked on global climate science and assessments for most of my career. Here are … Continue reading The science everyone needs to know about climate change, in 6 charts
BY Matthew Shillito, University of Liverpool Many of the world’s richest and most powerful people are in the spotlight for the wrong reasons – again. The Pandora papers is the third and largest leak of documents in which the secret financial practices of the wealthy are exposed in the media. They highlight mass tax avoidance and … Continue reading Pandora papers: media rage at billionaire tax cheats ignores Boris Johnson’s failure to reform tax havens
BY SYLVIA TASCHKA, Wayne State University Comparisons between the United States under Trump and Germany during the Hitler era are once again being made following the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Even in the eyes of German history scholars like myself, who had earlier warned of the troubling nature of such analogies, Trump’s … Continue reading How can America heal from the Trump era? Lessons from Germany’s transformation into a prosperous democracy after Nazi rule
BY PHILIP KOTLER & CHRISTIAN SARKAR The cover of the May 20, 2020 issue of Forbes magazine carries a picture of Larry Ellison, billionaire founder of Oracle Corporation. On page 114, there’s a Billionaires Index that runs six more pages in very small print. The following becomes clear: Almost every country has billionaires. Even Venezuela and … Continue reading Why Can’t Billionaires Advance the Common Good?
BY Georgios Samaras, King’s College London When a wave of right-wing extremism hit Greece in 2012, few would have predicted that Golden Dawn, one of the groups involved, would grow to become the third largest party in the Greek parliament. This was the beginning of a long period of turmoil in Greek politics that saw a … Continue reading The end of Golden Dawn: has Greece shown us how to deal with neo-Nazis?
BY CHRISTIAN SARKAR and PHILIP KOTLER In our work on cultural narratives, we’ve proposed that cultural narratives create meaning for our place in the world, and provide a map for the journey ahead. The structure of a cultural narrative can be diagrammed as follows: In politics, the structure of a cultural narrative becomes an ideological framework for living … Continue reading Biden vs. Trump: A Tale of Two Narratives
BY PHILIP KOTLER I know that Presidential debates have occurred in each past U.S. election. I know that Biden earlier said that he would accept debating with Trump. But I would advise Biden to not debate even if this is the first time this has happened. Biden is entitled to a first time, given that … Continue reading Why Biden Should Decline a Debate with Trump
BY JON QUEALLY Government watchdogs, Democratic lawmakers, and pro-democracy advocates declared it a “Friday Night Massacre” for the U.S. Postal Service after news broke in a classic end-of-the-week dump that Louis DeJoy—a major GOP donor to President Donald Trump and the recently appointed Postmaster General—had issued a sweeping overhaul of the agency, including the ouster of … Continue reading ‘Friday Night Massacre’ at US Postal Service as Postmaster General—a Major Trump Donor—Ousts Top Officials
BY ROBERT REICH Trump will do anything to be re-elected. His opponents are limited because they believe in democracy. Trump has no limits because he doesn’t. Here’s Trump’s re-election playbook, in 25 simple steps: 1. Declare yourself above the law. 2. Use racist fearmongering. Demand “law and order” and describe protesters as “thugs”, “lowlife” and … Continue reading Trump Doesn’t Believe in Democracy—Here’s His 25-Step Reelection Plan
BY JOE SALTZMAN, University of Southern California, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism When Americans think of journalists attacked, arrested or imprisoned while doing their job, they think of it happening in distant lands – in places like Russia, Syria, Afghanistan, El Salvador and Mexico. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are so ingrained … Continue reading It can’t happen here – and then it did
BY JESSICA CORBETT A new report examining the federal budget illuminates the deep connections between the climate emergency and the U.S. military, arguing that the shift to a green economy requires a just transition away from both fossil fuels and endless war.The report, entitled No Warming, No War: How Militarism Fuels the Climate Crisis—and Vice … Continue reading ‘No Warming, No War': Report Details How US Militarism and Climate Crisis Are Deeply Interwoven
BY JESSICA CORBETT In a new video from The Intercept, author and activist Naomi Klein explains how the Trump administration and other governments across the globe are “exploiting” the coronavirus outbreak “to push for no-strings-attached corporate bailouts and regulatory rollbacks,” and urges working people worldwide to resist such efforts and demand real support from political … Continue reading ‘We Know This Script': Naomi Klein Warns of ‘Coronavirus Capitalism’ in New Video Detailing Battle Before Us
BY HEATHER ALBERRO, Nottingham Trent University From transport and housing to food production and fashion, our civilisation is driving climate and ecological breakdown. It’s no coincidence that almost every single sector of industry is contributing to the planet’s downfall, either. A deeper issue underlies each one’s part in the malaise enveloping the planet’s ecosystems – and … Continue reading Humanity and nature are not separate – we must see them as one to fix the climate crisis
BY CHRISTIAN SARKAR and PHILIP KOTLER Maybe they’ve been spooked by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Or maybe they decided that it’s time to reclaim the political conversation before America turns full-fascist. Whatever the reason, the CEOs of this great nation published their own manifesto under the august umbrella of the Business Roundtable. In it, they finally … Continue reading “Now that CEOs found purpose, what are they going to do with it?”
BY PHILIP KOTLER – A recent news item mentioned that a group of 18 ultra-wealthy Americans including George Soros and Abigail Disney and members of the Pritzker and Gund families published an open letter asking presidential candidates to support a moderate wealth tax of 1 percent. The wealth tax revenue would be used to fund environmental initiatives, fuel economic growth, and … Continue reading Can Billionaires Save America?
by PHILIP KOTLER – Revolutions occur when the income and wealth gap between the rich, the middle class and the poor reaches a boiling point. We may be near the boiling point. This gap launched the Russian Revolution of 1917. Social injustice led to Castro’s takeover of Cuba and Mao Tse Tung’s takeover of China. The picture … Continue reading What To Do About The Growing U.S. Income Gap Between The Rich And Everyone Else
by PHILIP KOTLER and CHRISTIAN SARKAR – For some time now we’ve been saying that the wheels have fallen off our democracy. Things aren’t looking good around the world. The Guardian reports the world’s 26 richest billionaires own as many assets as half the planet. 26 plutocrats own as much wealth as 3.8 billion people. Welcome to serfdom. And … Continue reading The Flywheel of Corruption: Why Our Democracy Isn’t Working
Let’s drop the dead-end debate of capitalism versus socialism and focus on choosing terms that capture what we really mean—an open, fair, and accountable market essential to real democracy. by FRANCESS MOORE LAPPE My headline poses a question I struggle with. “Capitalism” refers to an economy driven by owners of private capital, typically with the aim … Continue reading “I’m a Capitalist,” Says Warren…But Why?
BY PHILIP KOTLER – The Trump administration released its defense budget on February 12, 2018. It asked for $686 billion, which is 62 percent of the proposed total federal spending budget. The defense cost is even higher if you include other costs in the total budget, such as the $88.9 billion that pays for the War on Terror, including military … Continue reading Is The U.S. Defense Budget Too Large?
BY PHILIP KOTLER – No democracy is perfect. Some democracies work better than others. Swiss democracy works well. Canada’s democracy works pretty well. American democracy has fallen on hard times. In 2016, I published Democracy in Decline in which I cite many problems and solutions. We have voter suppression and low voter turnout. We let politicians choose their … Continue reading “Let Us Fix American Democracy”
BY JON QUEALLY – “I mean we can talk for a very long time about all these stupid philanthropy schemes… But we’ve got to be talking about taxes. That’s it. Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit in my opinion.” While the private jets have mostly left the airport outside of Davos, Switzerland following the … Continue reading Historian’s Advice to Davos Elite Worried About Pitchforks: ‘Stop Talking About Philanthropy’ and Start Paying Higher Taxes
BY JAKE JOHNSON – In a bid to loosen the stranglehold corporate money has on the political process and “restore democratic power to the American people,” a bipartisan group of House lawmakers on Thursday introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s deeply unpopular 2010 Citizens United decision. “Let’s not mince words here—for too long, … Continue reading In Bid to ‘Get Big Money Out of Politics,’ House Lawmakers Introduce Constitutional Amendment to Overturn Citizens United
BY JAKE JOHNSON – As corporations in the United States and around the world continue to reap record profits thanks to enormous tax cuts, widespread tax avoidance schemes, and business-friendly trade and investment policies, an analysis by Global Justice Now (GJN) published Wednesday found that the world’s most profitable companies are raking in revenue “far in excess … Continue reading At the Heart of Global Woes, 157 of World’s 200 Richest Entities Are Now Corporations, Not Governments
BY JESSICA CORBETT “It comes as no surprise that ExxonMobil and other oil companies are calling for anything and everything short of moving off fossil fuels entirely—most notably, the unwieldy and unproven concept of carbon taxes.” Amid warnings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that there’s a closing window to act to prevent a … Continue reading ‘This Is a Scam”: ExxonMobil-Backed Carbon Tax Will Not Save the Planet
BY MARK BLESSINGTON – The US has high income inequality compared to other large economies. While income inequality in the US is close to China, it is rising in the US while declining in China. Many studies use the Gini statistic to measure income inequality. A Gini of 100% represents maximum income disparity, and a Gini … Continue reading What Drives US Income Disparity?
BY JAKE JOHNSON – “Town by town, city by city, local leaders are taking back everyone’s right to connect and communicate.” As advocacy groups and open internet defenders in Congress continue their efforts to repeal the Republican-controlled FCC’s attack on net neutrality, the mayors of 11 cities have signed a new pledge vowing to refuse to … Continue reading 11 Mayors Applauded for Refusing to Do Business With Companies That Don’t Support Net Neutrality
BY PHILIP KOTLER – Donald Trump was elected U.S. President one year ago. He gave his first State of the Union address on January 31, 2018, lauding all the positives of his record. But what has he actually accomplished? What damage has he done? What role has been played by his personality quirks? Trump attracts both lovers … Continue reading Trump’s One-Year Scorecard
BY CHRISTIAN SARKAR Alba’s Dream (2017) The public has not forgotten Puerto Rico, and neither has Patrick McGrath Muñiz. After experiencing Harvey in Houston, and witnessing Hurricane Maria passing over Puerto Rico and Irma in Florida, where most of his family and friends live, the issue of climate change has become even more personal for the … Continue reading Lamentations: Disaster-Capitalism, Puerto Rico, and the Art of Patrick McGrath Muñiz
BY PHILIP KOTLER – We all grew up in a world of work. To live, we had to work. And there was much work to do. We trusted that there will always be jobs requiring workers. Today a new disruption has taken place in our job picture. The robots are coming! Most of us were not well … Continue reading Life, Death, and Taxes in a Jobless World
BY PHILIP KOTLER – The answer to the question depends on who you ask. CHRISTIAN SARKAR Capitalism Works For Me! True/False, 2011 (aluminum and electrical) by Steve Lambert How well is American Capitalism working? The answer to the question depends on who you ask. If you ask America’s corporate executives, their answer is that American … Continue reading How Well is American Capitalism Working?
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