Joseph Palermo: The spectacle of British Petroleum literally killing off the Gulf of Mexico before our eyes while the Obama Administration apparently believes that BP is honorable enough to be trusted to dutifully clean it up is depressing beyond belief. Hearing Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal complain about the lagging federal response after he built his political career trashing the federal government is just too pathetic and stupid to even bother to ridicule.
Closing Tax Loopholes For Billionaires
May 24, 2010 By
Robert Reich: It’s not as if these investment fund managers are worth a $20 billion subsidy. Nonetheless they argue that if they have to pay at the normal rate they’ll be discouraged from investing in innovative companies and startups. But if such investments are worthwhile they shouldn’t need to be subsidized. Besides, in the years leading up to the crash of 2008, hedge-fund and private equity fund managers weren’t exactly models of public service. Many speculated in ways that destabilized the whole financial system.
BP, Corporations, Capitalism, Progressivism, and Government
May 24, 2010 By
Walter Moss: We can grant that capitalism can have many beneficial effects and that other systems like socialism can have their defects, nevertheless the essence of capitalism is the selling of goods and services and making a profit, and it has no higher moral goal. Essentially an economic system, it provides no adequate answers for how to deal with such problems as unsafe working conditions, unfair business practices, pollution and other environmental degradation, public health, slum housing, or the abuse of child labor. This absence of any higher comprehensive social philosophy led to efforts to supplement it by providing an overall philosophy of the public good. This absence led to Progressivism.
Promoting Positive Body Images
May 24, 2010 By
K. Danielle Edwards: By the time I’d reached high school, no longer chunky, I’d developed a fat phobia that resulted in all sorts of unhealthy behaviors. I skipped meals, counted calories, restricted my diet, filled up on water, and did cardio most days of the week. I got into single-digit clothes sizes and seriously challenged my genetic predisposition toward curves and muscle. My practices probably resulted in me depriving myself of an extra inch of height
Judging the Judges 2010
May 23, 2010 By
Sharon Kyle: Studies have shown that the average voter goes to the polls with little to no information on judicial races.Every election cycle, we are asked to vote for people few of us have heard of for offices that few of us know very much about. Yet these offices carry tremendous power.
Will Marcy Winograd Pull a Sestak?
May 23, 2010 By
Linda Milazzo: In Kentucky, political neophyte, libertarian extremist, and Tea Party enthusiast, Rand Paul, clobbered the hand-picked candidate of Senator Mitch McConnell, the most powerful Republican in Washington. Both election results send an earsplitting message to the leadership of America’s two dominant parties, warning that: ‘Your choices, endorsements and power don’t matter. We’re electing who WE want.’
Cyril Neville Joins Voices Crying from the Louisiana Delta
May 22, 2010 By
Georgianne Nienaber: Amidst additional news that British Petroleum has been slow or negligent in the release of flow data and videos of the catastrophic rupture of the Transocean/Deepwater Horizon wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico, there is another story that is crying for attention. A revered Chief of the Chahta Indians, the youngest brother of the Neville Brothers Band, and a Catholic nun know the stories of the dispossessed Indians, shrimpers, fishermen and women, oysterers and business owners deep in the wetlands and bayous of south Louisiana. They want to be heard.
InnerCity Struggle Wins Real School Change in East Los Angeles
May 22, 2010 By
Maria Brenes: East Los Angeles schools will have the opportunity to become a model for school transformation through the implementation of five Pilot Schools. Coordinated by the Los Angeles Education Partnership, the five Pilot Schools will work in collaboration as a Community School responsible for the academic success and emotional well-being of students.
Why Not Blame It on a Black Man
May 22, 2010 By
David Love: I just read a pilot study that CNN released on the racial attitudes of children. And nearly 60 years after the watershed Brown v. Board of Education case – in which the Supreme Court invalidated Jim Crow school segregation – it seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Return of the Doughfaces
May 22, 2010 By
Berry Craig: The Republicans of the 1850s were democratic revolutionaries. The Tea Baggers are reactionary counterrevolutionaries. Their movement – not coincidentally almost all white — represents some of the worst traits in the body politic, notably racism, sexism, nativism, militarism, jingoism, homophobia, religious bigotry and greed.
TeaBag T-shirts, the Summer Job Connection
May 22, 2010 By
Tom Hall: Republican activist Dick Armey claims that he built the Teabag movement to energize Republican right wing activists. Is there an army of Teabaggers eager to wear T-shirts proclaiming “I’m a soldier in Dick Armey’s army of dicks!”
Friday Feedback: Backtrack on Afghanistan
May 21, 2010 By
Cheating Harvard
May 21, 2010 By
Rev. Irene Monroe: We live in a society that is hypercritical of failure and super exuberant about success. As a culture, we have developed a false and damaging dichotomy about the relationship between failure and success that success has become a public affair of celebration and failure a private funeral of condemnation.
Obama Suggests Lincoln-Like Humility
May 21, 2010 By
Walter Moss: One of the great ego traps for any president is being surrounded by “yes men and women” who tell him (and maybe someday her) that he is always right. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama wrote of an occasion when President Bush’s “eyes became fixed, his voice took on the agitated, rapid tone of someone neither accustomed to nor welcoming interruption. His easy affability was replaced by an almost messianic certainty. As I watched my mostly Republican Senate colleagues hang on his every word, I was reminded of the dangerous isolation that power can bring, and appreciated the founders’ wisdom in designing a system to keep power in check.”
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