Victoria Defrancesco Soto: Whether it’s salsa or gun legislation, there are some things Americans may not embrace from the Big Apple. Michael Bloomberg’s $12 million gun violence ad campaign is a case in point.
The Growing Divide Between Elites and Average People
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Wendy McElroy: There has been a creeping difference in the attitudes of many politicians and the politically connected. In grabbing for power, they are often almost casually blatant, as though their authority is so secure that there is no longer a need to sugarcoat their motives.
‘Lean In’ All You Want — But If You Want a Better Job, Unionize!
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Brigid O’Farrell: “Leaning in” might well help get more women into the top echelons of the corporate world and that is progress for equality. Sheryl Sandberg sets an important precedent by going home for dinner with her family, but can a non-management worker at Facebook do the same?
Steve Zimmer Defeats the Billionaire Boys Club With a Cost-Effective Los Angeles School Board Campaign
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Peter Dreier: The Zimmer-Anderson school board race attracted national attention, including articles in the New York Times, because it was seen as a test of the effort by corporate power-brokers to run schools like businesses, a strategy that they and the media misleadingly call “school reform.”
Who Are the Billionaires Trying to Defeat Steve Zimmer?
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Peter Dreier: The outcome of Tuesday’s LA School Board District 4 election has national implications in terms of the billionaires’ battle to reconstruct public education in the corporate mold.
My Vision for Revitalizing Public Education
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Mark Naison: I think you begin with creating a child-friendly environment. That means sharply reducing the number of tests, leaving ample room for exercise and play, giving primacy to the arts, and having instructions in subject areas, when possible, incorporate hands-on learning and project based activity.
Homeless Family Population Soars By 10% After Sandy
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Charley James: More than a week after Sandy ended tens of thousands of families and individuals remain without their own roof over their head. For many, it may be months before they have a place to live.
The Army Occupying America’s Public Schools
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Mark Naison: Many teachers, parents, union leaders, and school administrators secretly despise the policies being imposed on them; but see no way off opposing them with sacrificing their careers or children’s welfare.
Expanding Waistlines: Shrinking Sodas a Start
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Tina Dupuy: Here’s the thing with the obesity epidemic: Doing nothing is not fixing the problem.
10 Most Read Articles: 23-30 June 2012
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Sharon Kyle’s “Corporate Feudalism” led the pack this week:. Technological advances in communications, transportation, automation and the like have changed the mutual dependencies that once existed between the American middle class and the super rich.
Intimidating the Poor: The Ugly Underside of Hipster New York
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Mark Naison: New York is the greatest city in the world if you have cash in your pocket and love culture and the arts, but if you are poor, and a person of color, Michael Bloomberg’s New York can be an expensively maintained prison,
Rodney King Dead: How He Put Police Brutality on the Map
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David Love: It is ironic that Rodney King died on the day that Rev. Al Sharpton led a march to protest New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “stop and frisk” policy.
Goldman Sachs: An Old-School Mafia Family?
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Joseph Palermo: The amazing thing about Mr. Smith’s decision to break the code of omertà at Goldman was the fact that an employee existed there at all who was still capable of making a moral or ethical judgment and could even express something resembling remorse.
Wendy Greuel Charms Audience, Eludes Questions
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Stephen Box: Greuel navigated the hot topics of land use and urban design without hitting any potholes or committing to any controversial positions on topics that ranged from Farmers Field to affordable housing to corruption within City Hall.
Turning the Tide: An Historian’s View of School Reform
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Mark Naison: Over time, people of courage and integrity will turn the tide and begin to restore sanity to educational discourse and develop a powerful alliance of teachers, parents and students, supported first by the Occupy movement, and later by unions, religious organizations and progressive politicians.
Who Will Be the Un-Bloomberg? What Mayors Should Say About Wall Street
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Tom Hayden: In light of the police actions in New York, Berkeley, Oakland, Denver, Portland and beyond—and as massive national demonstrations are about to take place—it’s not too late for the mayors to use their political stature to speak out about the crises befalling their cities.
Occupy Wall Street Shut Down
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Sharon Kyle: In a surprise sweep in New York City, while many of the Occupiers were asleep, the New York City Police Department entered the Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zuccotti Park and cleared it out.
Bloomberg to Treasury
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Brent Budowsky: Naming Bloomberg Treasury secretary would be a bold move by Obama to seek a post-partisan truce against gridlock in Washington and to escalate an urgent bid to create jobs, revitalize housing and revive the economy.
Profiteering and Union-Busting Repackaged as School Reform
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David Love: But the larger picture here is that corporate education reform is big business. And the rightwing, plutocratic agenda – of school privatization, government austerity measures and deunionization – clashes with the needs of poor, working class, and disproportionately black and brown public school students.
Our Predictions for 2011
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Randy Shaw: The biggest story will be President Obama’s “new” relationship with Congressional Republicans; as if the president had not reached out to obstructionist Republicans from the start. We will be deluged with stories describing the “idealism and vision” of newly seated House Republicans, despite their allegiance to large corporations and goal of restoring failed Hoover-era policies.
Mayor Bloomberg: The DREAM Act Makes Dollars and Sense
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Seth Hoy: Mayor Bloomberg is one of the founders of Partnership for a New American Economy, a growing bipartisan group of mayors and business leaders who are urging others to consider the economic benefits of immigration reform.
The Lessons of Harry Reid
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Brent Budowsky: President Obama can rejuvenate his presidency by mobilizing every weapon against the aggressive war being waged against him, while seizing the high ground by offering Republicans a genuine role in a national unity program that the majority of voters want.
Fetishizing School Chiefs Hurts Kids
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Randy Shaw: Unfortunately, the media’s excessive and irrational devotion to school chiefs as saviors for the nation’s schools ignores the reality that no school chief, can overcome inadequate school funding by running schools like corporate turnaround specialists, and fetishizing their importance distracts from schools’ real needs. Education seems to be the only field where rising to the top requires no experience. Careers spent in the profit-driven corporate world are now identified as the best backgrounds for public school leadership.
Third Party in 2012
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America has moved from a president elected in 2008 for hope and change to a midterm election in 2010 dominated by massive dumps of mud and sludge on voters sickened and disgusted by both political parties. Is America ready for a president who could write a $3 billion check for his campaign and never need [...]
Why Arlen Specter’s Defection Should Terrify the GOP
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On August 11, 1971, John Lindsay, the Republican mayor of New York City, radiating calm and charm after a 10-day camping trip in Colorado and Utah, stepped before a crowd in the ballroom of Gracie Mansion to announce that he was becoming a Democrat. After explaining where he believed his party had gone astray—Vietnam, wiretapping, [...]
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