Nearly 100 years ago two young Detroit girls visited a now-vanished island park that had a dance pavilion, amusement rides, and swimming, and wrote that they were “having fun” on a piece of paper. Then they put the paper in a bottle and tossed it into the St. Clair River, where a diver found it last June. [...]
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While meandering the streets of Paris, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman apparently awakened to the fact that the assignment of claims to wealth through patents, copyrights, and other forms of intellectual property is a really big deal. This is good news for those who have been jumping up and down yelling about this fact [...]
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MORNING MESSAGE: Time Is Running Out To Stop Student Loan Rate Hikes OurFuture.org’s Jane Yurechko: “The rates for federally-backed student Stafford loans will double from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent on July 1. And what has Congress done to help these already struggling students? Absolutely nothing … The House has managed to pass a bill, [...]
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A new CNN/ORC International poll released today reveals that Democrats may be in trouble during the 2014 midterm elections. Amid political controversies, an anemic economy and high unemployment, President Obama’s approval rating dropped eight percentage points in a single month. Standing now at only 45 percent, this is the president’s lowest approval rating in more [...]
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Texas Governor Rick Perry is on a “job-poaching” trip to New York. Let’s say he “attracts” some businesses to move to his low-wage, low-tax state. That means good-paying jobs in one part of our country become low-paying jobs in another and business taxes that supported good schools in one part of our country don’t support [...]
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MORNING MESSAGE: Fighting For Our Classrooms, and For the Human Beings Inside Them OurFuture.org’s Richard Eskow: “The Wall Street crowd wants us to think of education in terms of means – which usually means finding ways to spend less – rather than ends. But when it comes to education, the ‘ends’ are our children. And [...]
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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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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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You know how big-company lobbyists get some states to pass laws that block cities and counties from doing something about problems like tobacco or guns? Well there is a “trade” treaty called the Trans-Pacific Partnership in the works that sets down international rules that would keep our Congress and our states from regulating the giant [...]
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Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, argued that “trade policy needs to adapt to global challenges” and “trade done right creates prosperity for the middle class” during a speech on the “Competitive Agenda for a Global Economy” at the Center for American Progress on Friday. Brown urged that now with goods and services trade accounting for nearly [...]
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