Whenever David Brooks and Thomas Friedman begin singing from the same hymnal you can bet the next public policy catastrophe is knocking at the door. This time around they’ve become boosters for online college courses as a panacea to cure the ills afflicting public colleges and universities. Brooks and Friedman’s new interest in higher...
With the stroke of a pen Michigan Governor Rick Snyder reduced the earning potential of millions of people, lowered the quality of the state’s schools and government services, and set up the next fiscal crisis when, lo and behold, they discover that low-wage workers have little means to pay taxes adequate to meet the...
In the 1930s, during the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell recorded in his book, Homage to Catalonia, the seemingly endless squabbles between the factions, sects, and tendencies among his comrades in the anti-fascist resistance. The conflicts ranged from the ideologically profound to the parochially mundane: Communists vs. Socialists, Trotskyists vs. Stalinists, Anarchists vs. Communists,...
Nothing better illustrates the core critique of the Occupy Wall Street movement against the financial sector’s dominance of our political institutions than the spectacle of high-profile Democrats, like former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell and Newark Mayor Cory Booker, fretting over the “tone” of the Obama campaign’s advertisements targeting Mitt Romney’s days as a vulture...
“It makes me ill how callously people still talk about ripping off clients,” the Goldman Sachs whistleblower, Greg Smith, wrote in his March 14th public resignation letter. The 33-year-old executive who quit the company’s London office where he ran its derivatives shop reinforces the public perception of Goldman Sachs less as a venerable Wall...
Stephen Colbert’s super PAC exposes the corporate news media’s incapability to express what would be in normal life circumstances a totally justified sense of righteous outrage. Why do people become upset with the notion of anonymous corporate donors filling the coffers of Super PACS and corporations being considered “people?” It must offend a sense...
When MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow recently asked the journalist and commentator Frank Rich on her show if he believed the “physical manifestation of discontent” was imperative to the Occupy Wall Street movement’s cause, Rich replied that it was “not always that important” since the movement was polling well among Americans. I disagree. The ideas that...
In an admirable bit of reporting, Nelson Schwartz and Eric Dash of the New York Times did us all a favor by asking bankers, hedge fund and money managers what they think about the Occupy Wall Street protesters. Said one top hedge fund director who wished to remain anonymous: “Most people view it as...