This week I hosted a blogger call to discuss the outcome of last week’s Friday/Saturday meetings between President Obama and Chinese President and General Secretary of the Communist Party of China Xi Jinping. None of this matters much, unless you care about your job, wages, retirement, kids, community, democracy — and just possibly if things [...]
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With the House Republican caucus still squabbling over what ransom they should demand for an increase in the debt limit, Speaker John Boehner issued his own threat yesterday. According to Roll Call, Boehner wants “another round of spending cuts beyond the sequester.” Cuts how big? In Boehner’s word, “greater than the increase in the debt [...]
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The growing revolution against top-down education mandates based on high-stakes testing and standardization has been building over the months into a widespread Education Spring. Every revolution needs a declaration calling for a positive, new way forward. This week, the Education Opportunity Network, the Institute for America’s Future and the Opportunity to Learn campaign released such [...]
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The Senate is on the verge of preventing an initial filibuster of the bipartisan immigration reform bill, with several Republican votes in support of proceeding. Despite all the trumped up “scandals,” the Republican Party shows little interest in derailing the top item on the President’s second-term agenda. The path to final passage is still tricky, [...]
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When a kid snatches an old lady’s purse, it’s punished as a crime. But when a corporation manipulates bankruptcy law to deny thousands of retired coal miners benefits they labored their entire lives to earn, it’s endorsed by federal court. Late last month, a bankruptcy judge sanctioned a scheme in which corporations create shill companies [...]
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You might have heard that “austerity is dead.” You’ll certainly be hearing it, and with good reason: the U.S. deficit is down more than 50 percent from what President Bush left behind, projections of the rise in medical costs that drove future deficits are way down, the “intellectual foundation” that justified the push for cutting [...]
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It should be self-evident that recent NSA revelations bring up some grave concerns about civil liberties. But they also raise other profound and troubling questions – about the privatization of our military, our culture’s inflated expectations for digital technology, and the increasingly cozy relationship between Big Corporations (including Wall Street) and Big Defense. Are these [...]
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One of our nation's richest men, billionaire Nick Hanauer, just destroyed the GOP's economic talking points. In a testimony before the Senate Banking Committee, Hanauer explained why rich people like him are not, in fact, the real job creators. He said, “In the same way that it's a fact that the sun, not earth, is the center of the solar system, it's also a fact that the middle class, not rich business people like me, are the center of America's economy.”
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