Kudos to John Nichols & The Nation, Independent Journalists fighting $$ in Politics!

[RiverLover]

Ok, I'm a little late to the party here. I'm sure many here at DU are familiar with John Nichols(The Nation) who co-wrote Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America.

I wasn't & maybe I'm not alone?

I just stumbled on this video with Mr Nichols & had to share it with you guys. Not finding it on youtube or vimeo, embedding it isn't possible. To me, this is the most concise & brilliant video in 3:55 short mins (although all are really good)~ http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4535160/money-politics

Here are some other fantastic talks by John Nichols which are available to embed & he's spreading the word & standing up to the massive takeover of our govt by Moneyed Interests~

Between John Nichols & Katrina vanden Heuvel, I'm thinking of all the independent news sources, The Nation should be our most treasured & supported.

Ie

5/14/2015, front page of The Nation
Why Progressives Want to Rewrite the Rules—and the Story—of the US Economy
Zoë Carpenter

...Let’s dig into some of the choices that have been made, particularly starting in the 1970s, which is when the report says the trend really began. Can you explain how they led to concentration of wealth at the top and stagnation at the bottom?

People use the term “deregulation,” but what we really mean is re-regulation. It’s not like there are fewer rules, necessarily. It’s that they are enforced by different people, or they work in favor of private interests or established interests.

Look at the growth of the financial sector, which contributed to the housing bubble. We know that’s destructive. Previously finance was kind of a boring job. It was well paid, but it wasn’t superstars. We look at corporate governance; CEO pay fundamentally shifts in the 1980s. Before it was something like 30 times the average salary. Now it’s something like 300 times the average salary. [In 1978 the CEO-to-worker pay ratio was about 30 to 1. In 2013 it was 296 to 1.] It’s a huge shift. And there’s a huge shift of power to shareholders, which means there’s a new kind of short-termism in a lot of the industry.

Taxes came down for the very wealthy, which gave them a huge incentive to rent-seek. If the top tax rate is 80 percent, which it was in the 1970s, a board might not pay out a superstar salary, because 80 percent is immediately going to go to the government. But now there’s a huge incentive to inflate CEO value and we don’t see any real economic boost.

There’s the active dismantling of the labor unions, and then there’s the benign neglect of not updating labor rules. The economy became much more service-oriented, and those jobs—which have traditionally been considered female—do not have strong labor protections. There’s a question of whether or not we’re going to enforce standard labor rules for those sectors. Women’s labor force participation has been falling, though it’s increasing in our peer countries. That’s entirely the result of institutions, like not having access to pre-K.

All of these changes very clearly impact inequality, but there’s no evidence our economy is stronger....

http://www.thenation.com/blog/207329/why-progressives-want-rewrite-rules-and-story-us-economy

Will close this tribute, blathering w/e you want to call it, with John Nichol's latest article from May 5th~

Can Bernie Sanders Break Through the Status Quo?
http://www.thenation.com/article/206521/bernies-race

("He already has&quot