Labor

When last we checked in with billionaire Sam Zell, the real estate mogul was busy offloading some $5.4 billion in apartments from Equity Residential’s portfolio. The 23,000 units were sold to Barry Sternlicht’s Starwood Capital and as we noted at the time, Zell has traditionally had a very keen nose about such things as "market peaks": the 74 years old is credited with calling the top of the real-estate market in 2007, when he sold another one of his companies, Equity Office Properties Trust, to Blackstone for $23 billion.

There are now 130 million Americans who are involved in co-ops and credit unions, the latter being in possession of $1 trillion in assets. In addition, 10 million Americans are now members of worker-owned companies. Plus, there are now 2000 publicly owned municipal utilities. Indeed, 25% of America's electricity is now produced by these kinds of socialist institutions.

TPP? Don't let these "conservative" politicians pretend they are for anything except rigging the rules for the giant corporations and billionaires that fund their campaigns, and hire them at lucrative, obscene reward-salaries after they leave office.

The "Walmart model" has become the model of our economy. The billionaires that model creates use their wealth to bribe -- I mean, "influence" -- our government to keep things the way they are. It is time to take back our government from the billionaires, fix trade, fix taxes and fix wages.