How the Supreme Court Could Make Your Life More Dangerous

I know regulations don’t sound very exciting, but they’re how our government keeps us safe.

Remember when lots of romaine lettuce was recalled because it was causing E.coli outbreaks? That was the Food and Drug Administration protecting us from getting sick. 

Working in a warehouse? The Occupational Safety and Health Administration sets standards to ensure you don’t breathe in dangerous chemicals like asbestos. 

Enjoying the fresh air on a clear, sunny day? Thank the Environmental Protection Agency for limiting the amount of pollution that can go into our air.

These agencies save lives. Since OSHA was established a half-century ago, its workplace safety regulations have saved more than 618,000 workers’ lives.

Republicans have been trying to gut these agencies for decades. Now, with the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority solidly in place, they have their best chance yet.

In January 2022, the Supreme Court blocked OSHA’s vaccine-or-testing mandate from going into effect, which was estimated to prevent a quarter-million hospitalizations.

The Court claimed that Covid isn’t an “occupational hazard” because people can become infected outside of work, and that allowing OSHA to regulate in this manner “would significantly expand” its authority without clear Congressional authorization.

This is absurd on its face. Section 2 of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 clearly spells out OSHA’s authority to enact and enforce regulations that protect workers from illness, injury, and death in the workplace. Congress doesn’t need to list every specific workplace hazard before OSHA can protect workers.

What this ruling tells us is that the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court are intent on gutting the power of agencies to issue regulations.

This term, the Court will also hear a case regarding the EPA’s authority to enforce the Clean Water Act. If the Court undermines the EPA’s authority, it will put our environment – and our health – at risk. Remember when the Cuyahoga River caught on fire because it was brimming with oil, acid, and factory chemicals? That’s what we may be returning to.

And what’s next? Will they gut the Federal Trade Commission and put us all at risk of being defrauded? Target the Securities and Exchange Commission and deregulate the financial sector, sparking another financial crisis?

Beware. If Republican appointees on the Supreme Court succeed in gutting regulatory agencies, we all lose. This agenda is anti-worker, anti-consumer, and anti-environment. The only thing it’s good for is corporate profits.

On Friday, Amazon – America’s wealthiest, most powerful, and fiercest anti-union corporation, with the second-largest workforce in the nation (union-busting Walmart being the largest), lost out to a group of warehouse workers in New York who voted to form a union.

If anyone had any doubts about Amazon’s determination to prevent this from ever happening, its scorched-earth anti-union campaign last fall in its Bessemer, Alabama warehouse should have put those doubts to rest.

In New York, Amazon used every tool it had used in Alabama. Many of them are illegal under the National Labor Relations Act but Amazon couldn’t care less. It’s rich enough to pay any fine or bear any public relations hit.

The company has repeatedly fired workers who speak out about unsafe working conditions or who even suggest that workers need a voice.

As its corporate coffers bulge with profits — and its founder and executive chairman practices conspicuous consumption on the scale not seen since the robber barons of the late 19th century — Amazon has become the poster child for 21st-century corporate capitalism run amok.

Much of the credit for Friday’s victory over Amazon goes to Christian Smalls, whom Amazon fired in the spring of 2020 for speaking out about the firm’s failure to protect its warehouse workers from COVID. Smalls refused to back down. He went back and organized a union, with extraordinary skill and tenacity.

Smalls had something else working in his favor, which brings me to Friday’s superb jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The report showed that the economy continues to roar back to life from the COVID recession.

With consumer demand soaring, employers are desperate to hire. This has given American workers more bargaining clout than they’ve had in decades. Wages have climbed 5.6 percent over the past year.

The acute demand for workers has bolstered the courage of workers to demand better pay and working conditions from even the most virulently anti-union corporations in America, such as Amazon and Starbucks.

Is this something to worry about? Not at all. American workers haven’t had much of a raise in over four decades. Most of the economy’s gains have gone to the top.

Besides, inflation is running so high that even the 5.6 percent wage gain over the past year is minimal in terms of real purchasing power.

But corporate America believes these wage gains are contributing to inflation. As the New York Times solemnly reported, the wage gains “could heat up price increases.“

This is pure rubbish. But unfortunately, the chair of the Federal Reserve Board, Jerome Powell, believes it. He worries that “the labor market is extremely tight,” and to “an unhealthy level.”

As a result, the Fed is on the way to raising interest rates repeatedly in order to slow the economy and reduce the bargaining leverage of American workers.

Pause here to consider this: The Commerce Department reported Wednesday that corporate profits are at a 70-year high. You read that right. Not since 1952 have corporations done as well as they are now doing.

Across the board, American corporations are flush with cash. Although they are paying higher costs (including higher wages), they’ve still managed to increase their profits. How? They have enough pricing power to pass on those higher costs to consumers, and even add some more for themselves.

When American corporations are overflowing with money like this, why should anyone think that wage gains will heat up price increases, as the Times reports? In a healthy economy, corporations would not be passing on higher costs — including higher wages — to their consumers. They’d be paying the higher wages out of their profits.

But that’s not happening. Corporations are using their record profits to buy back enormous amounts of their own stock to keep their share prices high, instead.

The labor market isn’t “unhealthily” tight, as Jerome Powell asserts; corporations are unhealthily fat. Workers don’t have too much power; corporations do.

The extraordinary win of the workers of Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse is cause for celebration. Let’s hope it marks the beginning of a renewal of worker power in America.

Yet the reality is that corporate America doesn’t want to give up any of its record profits to its workers. If it can’t fight off unions directly, it will do so indirectly by blaming inflation on wage increases, and then cheer on the Fed as it slows the economy just enough to eliminate American workers’ new bargaining clout.

The Rise of the Centibillionaires!

The word “‘billionaire” didn’t even exist until 1844. Fifty years later, we got “multibillionaire.” And for the next 127 years, that was enough. 

But in 2020, while the working class faced near-record unemployment during the pandemic, the wealthiest Americans faced a different problem. Some of them had gotten so rich, there was no longer a word to describe just how rich they were. 

That’s why I want to bring you one of the newest additions to the English language: “centibillionaires,” people with $100 billion or more.  

What’s it like being one of history’s first centibillionaires? It’s hard to even imagine, but let’s try it by comparing them to the less fortunate. By which I mean just … regular … billionaires. 

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If you’re a regular billionaire, you can afford a private jet. If you’re a centibillionaire, you can afford a brand-new Gulfstream jet every single day for more than ten years. (Not sure what you’d do with a new Gulfstream every day — maybe give one to each of your closest 4,000 friends?)

A regular billionaire would struggle to buy their own professional baseball team. Sad, I know. But a centibillionaire could easily buy every team in the entire major league. 

If you’re a regular billionaire, you can donate to your alma mater and get your name on a building. If you’re a centibillionaire, you could single-handedly give every teacher in America an $8,000 raise for 5 straight years. 

Of course, that’s not all you could do. $100 billion is enough to wipe out all the medical debt in the United States. Or provide permanent shelter for every homeless person in America. Or buy Covid-19 vaccines for the entire world.

Basically what I’m saying is, $100 billion is a lot of money. 

More than two and a half million times what the average American worker makes in a year. 

So here’s the big question. Are these centibillionaires so rich because they work two and half million times harder than the average American? Are they really 100 times smarter than the typical billionaire?

I don’t think so. The reason for the rise of centibillionaires is that for decades, wealth hasn’t trickled down, it’s gushed up, all the way to the very top. 

That’s not an accident. As it turns out, the system that the super-rich themselves carefully crafted and lobbied for, benefits… the rich! 

And while you may not own more private jets than your average centibillionaire, you probably do pay a higher tax rate. And thanks to legal loopholes and the Trump tax cuts, when the wealthiest Americans die, they get to pass on most of their centibillions to their kids tax-free. 

We’ve got two choices as a country. We can tax the richest Americans fairly, and invest that money in ways that benefit all of us.

Or we can keep doing what we’re doing, and watch as centibillionaires get even richer while the rest of us get left behind. 

If you think wealth and power are too concentrated in the hands of a privileged few now, just imagine what a few more years of trickle-down nonsense will bring.

Of course, it won’t be all bad. At least “trillionaire” is easy to say.

How We Stop a Gerrymandering Catastrophe

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s ruling and allowed Alabama’s egregious gerrymandered Congressional map to remain in place.

There’s no reason to sugarcoat this. Across the country, Republican state legislatures are using extreme gerrymandering to cement their power for decades, and the window to stop them is closing fast.

Senate Democrats must use every tool at their disposal to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act before the GOP rigs their way back to power in the midterms.

Know the truth about how we got into this gerrymandering mess - and what we can do to get out of it.

Our best shot at saving our democracy is right now. It’s time to act.

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The Hidden Link Between Corporate Greed and Inflation

Inflation! Inflation! Everyone’s talking about it, but ignoring one of its biggest causes: corporate concentration.

Now, prices are undeniably rising. In response, the Fed is about to slow the economy — even though we’re still 2 million jobs short of where we were before the pandemic, and millions of American workers won’t get the raises they deserve.

Meanwhile, Republicans haven’t wasted any time hammering Biden and Democratic lawmakers about inflation.

Don’t fall for their fear mongering.

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Everybody’s ignoring the deeper structural reason for price increases: the concentration of the American economy into the hands of a few corporate giants with the power to raise prices.

If the market were actually competitive, corporations would keep their prices as low as possible as they competed for customers.

Even if some of their costs increased, they would do everything they could to avoid passing them on to consumers in the form of higher prices, for fear of losing business to competitors.

But that’s the opposite of what we’re seeing. Corporations are raising prices even as they rake in record profits. Corporate profit margins hit record highs last year. You see, these corporations have so much market power they can raise prices with impunity.

So the underlying problem isn’t inflation per se. It’s a lack of competition. Corporations are using the excuse of inflation to raise prices and make fatter profits.

Take the energy sector.

Only a few entities have access to the land and pipelines that control the oil and gas  powering most of the world. They took a hit during the pandemic as most people stayed home. But they are more than making up for it now, limiting supply and ratcheting up prices.

Or look at consumer goods.

In April 2021, Procter & Gamble raised prices on staples like diapers and toilet paper, citing increased costs in raw materials and transportation. But P&G has been making huge profits. After some of its price increases went into effect, it reported an almost 25% profit margin.

Looking to buy your diapers elsewhere? Good luck. The market is dominated by P&G and Kimberly-Clark, which—NOT entirely coincidentally—raised its prices at the same time.

Another example: in April 2021, PepsiCo raised prices, blaming higher costs for ingredients, freight, and labor. It then recorded $3 billion in operating profits through September. How did it get away with this without losing customers?

Pepsi has only one major competitor, Coca-Cola, which promptly raised its own prices. Coca-Cola recorded $10 billion in revenues in the third quarter of 2021, up 16% from the previous year.

Food prices are soaring, but half of that is from meat, which costs 15% more than last year. There are only four major meat processing companies in America, which are all raising their prices and enjoying record profits.

Get the picture?

The underlying problem is not inflation. It’s corporate power. Since the 1980s, when the U.S. government all but abandoned antitrust enforcement, two-thirds of all American industries have become more concentrated.

Most are now dominated by a handful of corporations that coordinate prices and production. This is true of: banks, broadband, pharmaceutical companies,  airlines, meatpackers, and yes, soda.

Corporations in all these industries could easily absorb higher costs — including long overdue wage increases — without passing them on to consumers in the form of higher prices. But they aren’t.

Instead, they’re using their massive profits to line the pockets of major investors and executives — while both consumers and workers get shafted.

How can this structural problem be fixed? Fighting corporate concentration with more aggressive antitrust enforcement. And imposing a windfall profits tax on profitable corporations that are using this period of rising costs to gouge consumers. 

So don’t fall for the fear mongering about inflation. The real culprit here is corporate power.

I used to believe several things about the twenty-first century that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Donald Trump’s election in 2016 have shown me are false. 

I assumed:

Nationalism is disappearing. I expected globalization would blur borders, create economic interdependence among nations and regions, and extend a modern consumer and artistic culture worldwide.

I was wrong. Both Putin and Trump have exploited xenophobic nationalism to build their power. (Putin’s aggression has also ignited an inspiring patriotism in Ukraine.)

Nations can no longer control what their citizens know. I assumed that emerging digital technologies, including the Internet, would make it impossible to control worldwide flows of information and knowledge. Tyrants could no longer keep their people in the dark or hoodwink them with propaganda.

Wrong again. Trump filled the media with lies, as has Putin. Putin has also cut off Russian citizens from the truth about what’s occurring in Ukraine.

Advanced nations will no longer war over geographic territory. I thought that in the “new economy” land was becoming less valuable than technological knowhow and innovation. Competition among nations would therefore be over the development of cutting-edge inventions.

I was only partly right. While skills and innovation are critical, land still provides access to critical raw materials and buffers against potential foreign aggressors.

Major nuclear powers will never risk war against each other because of the certainty of “mutually assured destruction.” I bought the conventional wisdom that nuclear war was unthinkable.

I fear I was wrong. Putin is now resorting to dangerous nuclear brinksmanship.

Civilization will never again be held hostage by crazy isolated men with the power to wreak havoc. I assumed this was a phenomenon of the twentieth century, and that twenty-first century governments, even totalitarian ones, would constrain tyrants.

Trump and Putin have convinced me I was mistaken. Thankfully, America booted Trump out of office — but his threat to democracy remains.

Advances in warfare, such as cyber-warfare and precision weapons, will minimize civilian casualties. I was persuaded by specialists in defense strategy that it no longer made sense for sophisticated powers to target civilians.

Utterly wrong. Civilian casualties in Ukraine are mounting.

Democracy is inevitable. I formed this belief in the early 1990s when the Soviet Union had imploded and China was still poor. It seemed to me that totalitarian regimes didn’t stand a chance in the new technologically driven, globalized world. Sure, petty dictatorships would remain in some retrograde regions. But modernity came with democracy, and democracy with modernity.

Both Trump and Putin have shown how wrong I was on this, too.

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Meanwhile, Ukrainians are showing that Trump’s and Putin’s efforts to turn back the clock on the twenty-first century can only be addressed with a democracy powerful enough to counteract autocrats like them.

They are also displaying with inspiring clarity that democracy cannot be taken for granted. Democracy is not a spectator sport. It’s not what governments do. Democracy is what people do.

Ukrainians are reminding us that democracy survives only if people are willing to sacrifice for it. Some sacrifices are smaller than others. You may have to stand in line for hours to vote, as did tens of thousands of Black people in America’s 2020 election. You may have to march and protest and even risk your life so others may vote, as did iconic civil rights leaders like the late John Lewis and Martin Luther King, Jr.

You may have to knock on hundreds of doors to get out the vote. Or organize thousands to make your voices heard. And stand up against the powerful who don’t want your voices heard.

You may have to fight a war to protect democracy from those who would destroy it.

The people of Ukraine are also reminding us that democracy is the single most important legacy we have inherited from previous generations who strengthened it and who risked their lives to preserve it. It will be the most significant legacy we leave to future generations — unless we allow it to be suppressed by those who fear it, or we become too complacent to care.

Putin and Trump have convinced me I was wrong about how far we had come in the twenty-first century. Technology, globalization, and modern systems of governance haven’t altered the ways of tyranny. But I, like millions of others around the world, have been inspired by the Ukrainian people — who are reteaching us lessons we once knew.

The January jobs report from the Labor Department is heightening fears that a so-called “tight” labor market is fueling inflation, and therefore the Fed must put on the brakes by raising interest rates.

This line of reasoning is totally wrong.

Among the biggest job gains in January were workers who are normally temporary and paid low wages (leisure and hospitality, retail, transport and warehousing). This January employers cut fewer of these low-wage temp workers than in most years, because of rising customer demand and the difficulties of hiring during Omicron. Due to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s “seasonal adjustment,” cutting fewer workers than usual for this time of year appears as “adding lots of jobs.”

Fed policymakers are poised to raise interest rates at their March meeting and then continue raising them, in order to slow the economy. They fear that a labor shortage is pushing up wages, which in turn are pushing up prices — and that this wage-price spiral could get out of control.

It’s a huge mistake. Higher interest rates will harm millions of workers who will be involuntarily drafted into the inflation fight by losing jobs or long-overdue pay raises. There’s no “labor shortage” pushing up wages. There’s a shortage of good jobs paying adequate wages to support working families. Raising interest rates will worsen this shortage.

There’s no “wage-price spiral,” either (even though Fed chief Jerome Powell has expressed concern about wage hikes pushing up prices). To the contrary, workers’ real wages have dropped because of inflation. Even though overall wages have climbed, they’ve failed to keep up with price increases – making most workers worse off in terms of the purchasing power of their dollars.

Wage-price spirals used to be a problem. Remember when John F. Kennedy “jawboned” steel executives and the United Steel Workers to keep a lid on wages and prices? But such spirals are no longer a problem. That’s because the typical worker today has little or no bargaining power.

Only 6 percent of private-sector workers are now unionized. A half-century ago, more than a third were. Today, corporations can increase output by outsourcing just about anything anywhere because capital is global. A half-century ago, corporations needing more output had to bargain with their own workers to get it.

These changes have shifted power from labor to capital — increasing the share of the economic pie going to profits and shrinking the share going to wages. This power shift ended wage-price spirals.  

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Slowing the economy won’t remedy either of the two real causes of today’s inflation – continuing worldwide bottlenecks in the supply of goods, and the ease with which big corporations (with record profits) are passing these costs to customers in higher prices.

Supply bottlenecks are all around us. (Just take a look at all the ships with billions of dollars of cargo idling outside the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, through which 40 percent of all U.S. seaborne imports flow.) 

Big corporations have no incentive to absorb the rising costs of such supplies — even with profit margins at their highest level in 70 years. They have enough market power to pass these costs on to consumers, sometimes using inflation to justify even bigger price hikes. “A little bit of inflation is always good in our business,” the CEO of Kroger said last June. “What we are very good at is pricing,” the CEO of Colgate-Palmolive added in October.

In fact, the Fed’s plan to slow the economy is the opposite of what’s needed now or in the foreseeable future. COVID is still with us. Even in its wake, we’ll be dealing with its damaging consequences for years — everything from long-term COVID, to school children months or years behind.

The January jobs report shows that the U.S. economy is still 2.9 million jobs below what it had in February 2020. Given the growth of the US population, it’s 4.5 million short of what it would have by now had there been no pandemic.

Consumers are almost tapped out. Not only are real (inflation-adjusted) incomes down, but pandemic assistance has ended. Extra jobless benefits are gone. Child tax credits have expired. Rent moratoriums are over. Small wonder consumer spending fell 0.6 percent in December, the first decrease since last February.

Many people are understandably gloomy about the future. The University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey plummeted in January to its lowest level since late 2011, back when the economy was trying to recover from the global financial crisis. The Conference Board’s index of confidence also dropped in January.

Given all this, the last thing average working people need is for the Fed to raise interest rates and slow the economy further. The problem most people face isn’t inflation. It’s a lack of good jobs.

When I was a young teenager near the middle of the last century, I asked the high school librarian if I could borrow J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Why did I want to read it? she asked. I lied and told her my parents told me it was excellent literature.

The real reason I wanted to read The Catcher in the Rye was it had been banned from the library. I knew the librarian kept one copy behind her desk, and I was determined to get it. She reluctantly handed it to me. I read it voraciously.

There’s no better way to get a teenager to read a book than to ban it.

Which is why it was so clever of the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board to vote to remove Maus from its eighth grade curriculum. Maus is a Pulitzer-winning graphic novel by Art Spiegelman that conveys the horrors of the Holocaust in cartoon form. The board cited “objectionable language” and nudity.

Before the board made its decision, teenagers in McMinn County probably weren’t particularly eager to read about the Holocaust, even in the form of a graphic novel. But now that Maus has been banned for objectionable language and nudity, I bet they’re wildly trading whatever threadbare copies they can get their hands on.

Since it was banned, half the teenagers in America seem to have bought Maus (or insisted their parents do). Two weeks ago, the book wasn’t even in the top 1,000 of Amazon’s bestseller list. Now it’s hovering around number 1.

Way to go, McMinn County school board! Get teenagers all over America excited to read about the Holocaust!

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Even the McMinn County school board has been outdone by the Matanuska-Susitna school board in Palmer, Alaska, which presumably had a more serious problem on its hands than getting teenagers excited to read about the Holocaust. It couldn’t even get them to read the great novels of American literature.

So the Matanuska-Susitna school board voted 5 to 2 to ban Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Brilliant! I bet nearly every teenager in Palmer, Alaska is now deep into these books. They’re probably having intense discussions about them online late at night, away from their parents and other snooping adults. “Why do you think Ellison called himself ‘invisible?’” “How did Angelou come up with those amazing metaphors?” “Why did Daisy Buchanan reject Jay Gatsby?” “Wait! Gotta go! My parents are right outside my room! Call back in 20 minutes!”

The Great Gatsby was required reading when I went to high school. I admit I never read it. Had it been banned, I probably would have devoured it.

Beginning last fall, at least 16 school districts in a half-dozen states have demanded school libraries ban Out of Darkness. It’s a young adult novel about a love affair between two teenagers, a Mexican American girl and Black boy, set against the backdrop of the 1937 natural gas explosion at a New London, Texas plant that claimed nearly 300 lives. The book received lots of favorable reviews and literary rewards, but only a handful of teenagers read before it was banned. Now, it’s hot.

It’s the cleverest marketing strategy I’ve ever seen. Publishers must be clamoring to have school districts ban their books. (Why haven’t my books been banned, dammit?)

An influential group called “No Left Turn” is partly responsible. Just take a look at their website of books “used to spread radical and racist ideologies to students.” (Here’s the link: https://www.noleftturn.us/exposing-books/) You can bet teenagers across America are now lining up to read them.

Can Congress Really Use Insider Information to Trade Stocks? 

Members of Congress use privileged information to make money on the stock market, while they’re supposed to be working for you. Make no mistake, it’s legalized corruption.

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There’s no good reason for elected officials to trade individual stocks at all. Unless you have special insider knowledge, buying and selling individual stocks is a terrible way to get rich. It’s gambling, plain and simple. That’s why many Americans with retirement accounts prefer to invest in index funds — which are tied to the performance of the entire stock market

But many members of Congress continue to invest in individual stocks, and some do quite well. How do they do it?

Consider this: just before the economy crashed in 2008, several lawmakers frantically shifted their holdings to “safer” investments. This frenzy came just after private meetings with Treasury officials who had warned that an economic disaster was imminent.

I imagine most of you weren’t invited to these meetings — I certainly wasn’t. But those lawmakers were — and likely chose to act on that information.

When this story came to light, people were naturally outraged. After immense public pressure Congress passed the STOCK Act in 2012. The act required lawmakers to disclose their stock sales, and those of their spouses, within 45 days. By forcing these transactions to be public, the hope was that lawmakers would stop making questionable trades.

And it worked. Well… partially.

In January 2020, a handful of senators — including Richard Burr, Dianne Feinstein, and Kelly Loeffler — all made significant trades after receiving a classified briefing on COVID-19, well before the public knew the full extent of the threat.

Few, if any, lawmakers have faced serious consequences for violating the spirit or the letter of the law, as insider trading is notoriously difficult to prove.

In 2021 alone, news outlets identified 43 lawmakers who failed to properly disclose their trades. Their punishment? Nothing. Lawmakers are supposed to face a paltry $200 fine for failing to report on time —  but congressional ethics officials usually waive it.

There is an obvious solution to all this: bar members of Congress from trading individual stocks.

The proposed Ban Conflicted Trading Act does just this. Lawmakers would have six months after being elected to sell their individual holdings, transfer them to a blind trust over which they have no control, or hold onto them until they leave office without trading them.

But Congress has yet to hold a vote on this bill, even though 67 percent of Americans agree it’s a good idea to prevent members of Congress from trading individual stocks.

As usual, follow the money: a majority of lawmakers are millionaires, who likely get a sizable chunk of their wealth from investments and trades. So they won’t support this bill unless there’s enough public outcry to make them. 

That’s where you come in.

With distrust in government near an all-time high, even the appearance of a conflict of interest hurts our democracy. Members of Congress are elected to represent the interests of the people, not the money in their brokerage accounts.

Banning members of Congress from trading individual stocks is a no-brainer. Let’s get it done.

Taking on Your Tweets

People like to argue with me on Twitter, but a lot of what they have to say is just plain wrong (and sometimes mean). Billionaire defenders. Austerity enthusiasts. Good old fashioned trolls. They all have something to say — and limiting my responses to 280 characters doesn’t do a lot of these justice. 

So I decided to take the time to respond to a few of the more compelling critiques I get on Twitter.

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