Americans are understandably upset about profits without prosperity. Corporate executives seem to be the big winners, while the middle class is declining and young people face a bleak economic future. How did this happen? It's easy to blame technology, especially the automation that supposedly displaces workers. But that's not the...

Corporations are not working for the 99 percent. But this wasn’t always the case. In a special five-part AlterNet series, William Lazonick, professor at UMass, president of the Academic-Industry Research Network, and a leading expert on the...

Corporations are not working for the 99 percent. But this wasn’t always the case. In a special five-part series, William Lazonick, professor at UMass, president of the Academic-Industry Research Network, and a leading expert on the business corporation, along...

Rather than invest profits in building a strong economy, corporate executives invest in their own pay.

Occupy Wall Street is keeping our focus on the insatiable greed and undemocratic influence of those who run our major financial institutions. But the quest for personal wealth and political power by the top...

Co-authored with Matt Hopkins

Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0

Solyndra, a venture-backed solar panel maker founded in 2005, was the poster child of the Obama administration's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). It was the first company to receive federal loan guarantees under the already existing Energy Policy...

Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0.

With the unemployment rate still at over 9 percent and the U.S. economy facing a possible double-dip recession, President Obama's jobs plan can only help. If, however, the main point of the plan is to put the employment situation in decent shape by a year...

The U.S. does have an investment problem, but the blame lies with Big Business, not Big Government.

Remember when the United States led the world in industrial technology? The peak of U.S. supremacy was back in the 1960s, when the "military-industrial complex" was in full force. Then in the mid-1970s...

Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0:

To claim that something is "perfect" is to say that it cannot be done better. With the start of another academic year, hundreds of thousands of college students who take introductory microeconomics courses will learn from their professors that the best possible allocation...

If you want to talk job creation, let's talk China. While the United States suffers through a prolonged jobless recovery, with another recession on the horizon, the Chinese economy has continued to boom. In the second quarter of 2011 the China's GDP growth rate slowed to 9.5% year-on-year, down...

Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0.

As is only too well known, for the last decade U.S.-based business corporations have been engaged in the massive offshoring of good jobs to high-growth, low-wage areas of the world, especially China and India. In general, these companies have found offshoring to be...

Focusing on shareholder return is a very bad way for companies to govern the allocation of their resources. Public shareholders simply trade outstanding stock, but taxpayers and workers make risky investments in the innovation process and should be able to lay claim to a fair share of the...

Want to solve the mystery of the American economy's current employment and competitiveness problems? Take a close look at the current corporate obsession with "maximizing shareholder value." It sounds like a sound business principle, but in reality, it's based on a flawed ideology that leaves something crucial out of the...

At one of the town hall meetings that preceded the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), President Barack Obama read an exhortation from a woman enrolled in Medicare: "I don't want government-run health care. I don't want socialized medicine. And don't touch my Medicare.'" This woman should perhaps now...

Among the most powerful and vociferous opponents of health care reform are the executives of publicly listed health insurance companies and their lobbyists. The prime concern of these executives is that, by ensuring that Americans will have the access to better, or even some, health care coverage at affordable costs,...