Robert Letcher: With this country’s students ranking only 16th among industrialized nations, it’s clear that we as a country have to work on more hot-button issues than just”cost”.
About Robert Letcher
Robert A. Letcher, Ph.D. is a political economist who describes himself as "an academic without portfolio, writer, political activist, and Qigong practitioner who tries to help people learn".
Developing Civil Discourse
April 27, 2011 By
Bob Letcher: If we as Earthlings, occupants of various bio-regions of Earth, are ever to hope to return some sort of sanity to our living on Earth, we’re going to have to add that item to our already long and still growing list of efforts that we must talk about.
Understanding Senator Kyl’s “Logic”
April 19, 2011 By
Bob Letcher: How did you intend everyday people who are out here woozily wondering how to grasp your intention in “putting it that way” to go about—well… grasping your intention in putting it that way?
A Question for Governor Kasich
March 22, 2011 By
Bob Letcher: Do you have an approach for getting people past the bitterness that divides them, so that they can reinvent capitalism together; or, do you think that capitalism doesn’t need reinventing,?”
An Old Hippie Ponders a Haircut
February 14, 2011 By
Bob Letcher: I just never forgot that my maternal grandfather was an immigrant bricklayer. I didn’t want to “dress-up” because going “up” might distract me from my commitment to working for justice for “little guys”.
So, Did Anything Unusual Happen Over Last Weekend?
January 17, 2011 By
Robert Letcher: With all the violence and contempt that seemed “in the air”, it was starting to feel like some “Tucson” was bound to happen, but there wasn’t enough actionable information: no “when”, no “where”. Nor were resources available to “look into the situation”, as they had been to President Bush.
An Early Post-Mortem: A National Day of Pouring?
November 2, 2010 By
Bob Letcher: Regardless of who “wins” and who “loses” next Tuesday’s election, can there be any doubt that the results will end the country’s slow downward slide… and send it plunging headlong toward disaster of the sort and scale that the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, must have foreseen when he admonished the citizenry, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
Being There to Be Counted Isn’t the Only Thing That Counts
September 22, 2010 By
In the end, if mutual respect and solidarity are ever to be constructed “interfaithedly”, even the most ardent of believers will have to learn how to present what they see as The Truth as instead, Their Truth.
Frog Economy?—A Reaction to Professor Reich’s Tortoise Economy
September 20, 2010 By
Bob Letcher: The workforce has become as dilapidated as the proverbial rust-belt factory. It took a long time for us all to get us all into this mess, and it’s going to take at least as long for us all to work ourselves back out of it
An Old Fart’s Admonition: Please, Don’t Let Yourself Get Disillusioned
September 14, 2010 By
Bob Letcher: NPR reported that many of the first-time voters in 2008, whose votes provided Obama his winning margin, might stay home in the upcoming elections. To them I say, please vote.
Education is THE Economic Issue of Our Time
September 13, 2010 By
Bob Letcher: In the few weeks since President Obama so emphatically linked his education program to his effort to revive the US political economy, the President has not been pressed to detail either the substance of his education program or his procedure for winning support from a public that is increasingly cynical, skeptical, frightened, and angry.
Technology as a System: An Approach to Creating Jobs
July 2, 2010 By
Robert Letcher: It has become a very cruel world out there, and latecomers are cruelly left out. Until a new economic order emerges, only the technologically aware have a chance to prosper. We hope our approach will help us to that end.
Further “Finds” in the Video of T-People Acting Badly Toward an Old Guy Afflicted with Parkinson’s
May 3, 2010 By
Bob Letcher: With all that snapping and unsnapping and re-snapping going on, how could a person who was never quoted as saying either “I apologize,” or “I am sorry.”—and never said either directly to me, or to the millions of Americans whom his pure ugliness offended, or to the millions of people around the world who count on America as a symbol of relative decency in a sea of that same ugliness he exhibited—how could he even begin to claim to have been sincere in his apology? And wouldn’t an insincere apology be oxymoron?
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Report from an Unclear Front
Bob Letcher: In the face of last year’s healthcare reform efforts, opponents screamed the inherently violent and hardly constructive “Kill the bill”; now, it’s opponents of reducing collective bargaining rights for public employees who are screaming the still inherently violent and hardly constructive “Kill the bill”.