Donald Cohen

Economic development in Arizona is now by corporations for corporations and the public is left to in the dark as to how its tax dollars are spent. Last year the state's Department of Commerce was replaced by the public-private Arizona Commerce Authority (ACA), steered by a board of...

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is proposing a bold new plan to rebuild the city's aging infrastructure. He has lined up financing giants including Citibank NA, Citi Infrastructure Investors, Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets Inc. and JPMorgan Asset Management Infrastructure Group willing to invest $1.7 billion in...

The Supreme Court's deliberation on the Affordable Care Act goes to the heart of differing visions of the American concept of "freedom" and "liberty." It's a debate worth having.

In court this week, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. described what real freedom looks like. "There will...

On July 4, 1966, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) into law, establishing the public's right to access to government information. Surprisingly, Republican Congressman Donald Rumsfeld helped deliver Republican votes to pass the groundbreaking law.

Since then, state governments followed suit and began passing open...

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, to the surprise of many, said recently that he supports increasing the minimum wage to keep up with the rising cost of living. That's news since 2008 presidential candidate Romney was decidedly, well, undecided about automatic increases in the minimum wage. "You know, I...

Two hundred and thirty six years ago, in January 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense, the wildly popular pamphlet that made the case for American freedom and helped to spark a revolution.

This year, the Tea Party hopes to turn the 2012 elections into a fight for American freedom. Their...

An effort to get American children to eat more fruits and vegetables should, even in hyper-polarized Washington, be a no-brainer. Last week, Congress declared pizza sauce to be a vegetable in school lunches. Now, major food manufacturers are escalating their attacks against healthy food, calling proposed food marketing guidelines "job...

Earlier this month, thirty-six House Republicans filed an amicus court brief to support corporate America's war on workers' rights. They are embracing a suit filed by the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Restaurant Association , and other business lobbies to block a new ruling by...

GOP members of the House and Senate have proposed a flurry of bills that would roll-back, and in some cases effectively repeal, some of the nation's most important environmental, health and safety laws.

They are wrapping their proposals in anti-government rhetoric to avoid saying they want more polluted air, dangerous...

The boldest attack on the Denver Paid Sick Leave Voter Initiative isn't from the Chamber of Commerce. With large majorities supporting the November 2011 ballot measure, opponents know they have to do more than simply argue against the common sense notion that people shouldn't go to work sick....

An apple a day and eating your peas used to lead to good health. Now, according to major food manufacturers, they are "job killers" that will devastate the American economy.

In April of this year, the Federal Trade Commission, along with three other federal agencies (FDA, CDC and USDA),...

Progressives and liberals should hope that before he delivers his speech to Congress next Thursday, President Barack Obama channels the fictional President Andrew Shepherd in the film The American President.

In the 1995 movie, President Shepherd (a young liberal Democrat and widower, played by Michael Douglas) abandons support for a...

Federal investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the horrific gas pipeline explosion that killed 8 people in the Bay Area city of San Bruno was the result of a "litany of failures" by Pacific Gas and Electric.

Investigators charged PG&E with "poor record-keeping, inadequate inspection...

Some hotel guests may be getting a better night sleep these days, but at the expense of the housekeepers who clean their rooms. In what has been called an "amenities arms race," many hotels now use luxury mattresses that weigh more than 100 pounds. Multiply those 100 pounds by the...

Two decades ago Congress directed the EPA to expand the Clean Air Act to control mercury, arsenic, chromium and other air toxic emissions from power plants. Now the House Republicans are willing to shut down the Federal government to make sure that it still doesn't happen.

After twenty...

Americans tend to be fascinated by what's new and to be indifferent to the past, except when they can use "tradition" to reinforce current prejudices and power arrangements. This has had an unfortunate effect on how we govern ourselves. We forget important lessons, and repeat old mistakes.

A century ago,...

President Barack Obama will walk across Lafayette Park on Monday to address the United States Chamber of Commerce at its headquarters. What should he tell them?

Since the November elections, Obama has been trying to repair his relationship with business leaders, who believe that the President's occasional efforts to slap...

You may think it's a way to help your spouse or aging parent recover from a devastating illness, but to the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) California's Paid Family Leave (PFL) law, enacted in 2002, is a "job killer" that costs employers billions of dollars and drives jobs out...

Newly emboldened as chair of the House's key investigative committee, Congressman Darrell Issa, a conservative California Republican, this week sent letters to more than 150 business lobby groups, asking them to identify government rules that they want eliminated

Issa wants to hand the government over to the U.S. Chamber of...

Will raising income taxes on the rich hurt or help the economy? That's the key question that Congress will be debating as they consider whether to extend the tax cuts enacted by President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003, which are set to expire at the end of the...