Monday a bipartisan group of 130 members of Congress, ranging from Dennis Kucinich on the left to Joe Wilson on the right, wrote to President Obama asking him to stop Chinese currency manipulation. The Congressman wrote:

By pegging the renminbi (RMB) to the U.S. dollar at a fixed exchange...

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how big banks refused to renegotiate deceptive, Greek-style interest rate swaps with local governments throughout the US. Such swaps cost local governments approximately $29 billion a year when local governments are laying off badly needed public employees and cut services.

After...

J. Justin Wilson is the corporate version of that creepy hit man from No Country for Old Men. Oh he'll get you. When I told a fellow Campaign for America's Future staffer I was going to take on J. Justin Wilson, he immediately hide under his desk and called...

According to an article in the Examiner the other day, Senator Michael Bennet was shocked when a pair of Chamber of Commerce representatives came to lobby him against the Employee Free Choice Act. Bennet asked the lobbyists why they were visiting him for a bill that won't even be coming...

The numbers are outrageous, sickening even. How can anyone stand to look at them?

Since 2000, the U.S. has lost 5.5 million manufacturing jobs, with 2.1 million of those jobs being lost in the last two years alone. Since 2001, over 42,400 factories have closed in the...

Just when you thought Wall Street couldn't get any more clever in their attempts at predatory lending, they have.

Big Banks have created an exotic financial  instrument that is the equivalent of a payday loan for cash-strapped state and local governments, innocently labeled an "interest rate swap."

In...

Earlier today, I learned from trusted sources on the Hill that Senator Harry Reid will propose only a 15 day unemployment and COBRA extension.

Such a move is absolutely pathetic and unacceptable. 1.2 million Americans are expected to lose their unemployment benefits at the end of the month....

GOP Chairman Michael Steele blasted the Obama administration in a fund-raising email earlier this week for allowing stimulus money designated for clean energy solutions to be spent on overseas companies. Which is interesting, because stimulus money going to overseas firms was the direct result of conservative opposition to attempts to...

Protecting manufacturing jobs has long been considered an issue that only people in the Midwest or in unions cared about. However, a recent USA Today/ Gallup Poll showed that Americans believe the number one way to solve the jobs crisis is to keep manufacturing jobs in the U.S.

This past week the Northeast has been ravaged by blizzards not seen in several decades. However, states facing increasing budget cuts have been unable to meet the challenges of keeping the roads clear and open.

States like New Jersey and Delaware, as this article by a local CBS station...

With two feet of snow on the ground, there wasn't a car on the roads of Northwest Washington, D.C.

However, the roads were packed -- packed full of people walking to the great snowball fight of Malcolm X Park. The fight was the talk of my neighborhood, organized spontaneously...

It was a cold February night when I got together with Irene to watch Obama's first budget address to Congress. Irene was a drop-dead gorgeous woman whose beauty was matched only by her intellect. I had met her at a party a few days earlier, and already I was...

Earlier today, Jane Hamsher wrote a piece entitled "Big Banks: Unions Stopped Fighting, and the Entire Left Got Punched" in which she said that unions hadn't lead the way on the financial reform fight out of fear of upsetting the Administration. As someone who works heavily with both...

Last night during the State of the Union, President Obama, while calling for tough financial reform said, he "was not interested in punishing the banks." Besides being an awful sound bite, it misses the point that there are literally thousands of crimes the banks have committed that that...

I have made friends with a lot of people in my life. But as a working-class kid from Pittsburgh, perhaps my most unusual friendship was with a Goldman Sachs executive, Pedro Henrique Fragoso Pires Garcia.

Typically in Brazil, people abbreviate their names, but Pedro used his full name. including...

Whatever happened to the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA)? Is it dead?

I remember sitting in a meeting last May with Senate staff who said that after Al Franken was sworn in, EFCA would be an eight-week fight and then a vote in the Senate. It has been nearly...

Today as I leave for Brazil, I go back to a place and a people that literally saved my life.

Without Brazil, I wonder how I would even be alive today. Brazil was the place that taught me to finally be happy with myself despite my numerous defects.

I was shocked when I heard that my conservative Grandma had stormed out of church after her pastor denounced "being gay as the worst sin." My 81-year-old grandmother, who has two gay grandchildren, wasn't taking any of that shit, and made my mother, my aunt, uncle and cousins leave...

Here she goes again: Wall Street's favorite Democrat, Rep. Melissa Bean, D-Ill., is once again shilling for the banks.

As I wrote back in October, Bean misrepresented the views of financial watchdog Elizabeth Warren in arguing that states should not be able to set tough laws against the...

Somebody call up Pat Robertson! Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein is going around claiming he's "doing God's work."

That's exactly what he's quoted as saying last week in an interview for the Times of London. A group of around 200 protesters gathered outside the company's Washington headquarters Monday to...