Progressive Media Advocates
Stanley I. Kutler: For the past year, the media, reflecting disenchantment with Barack Obama, their very own rock star, have “predicted” huge Democratic losses for 2010. Like blackbirds who fly off the line (as Eugene McCarthy once said), the media follows in lockstep.
Craig Williams: One way for the Democrats to approach a jobs campaign would be invest or launch a grassroots effort in districts where Republicans hold the Congressional seat.
David Love: That anyone can actually utter the words “the recession is over” at a time of mass unemployment, foreclosures, homelessness and general despair tells you all you need to know about America. The nation actually exists as two nations: the few that have, and the many who don’t.
Sherwood Ross: President Obama has U.S. taxpayers paying billions to meet the costly payrolls of 50,000 troops and 190,000 contractors in Iraq while 20-million-plus jobless are looking for work in USA and can’t find it.
Robert Reich: Face it: The national economy isn’t escaping the gravitational pull of the Great Recession. None of the standard booster rockets are working.
Adam Eran: Acting together solved problems in FDR’s philosophy. Such action was the problem, in Reagan’s. Now we have experienced roughly 40 years of each. Which one produces better results?
Sherwood Ross: Get it straight: the best remedy for what ails America is to pay working people fairly. It is the toil and dollars of the American people that made America great.
Meet Progressive Candidate Marcy Winograd who has set the CA36 Democratic Primary Race on its ear! Marcy will present her Green New Deal. Hosted by Dean & Ruth Goodman, Todd Darling & Nina Merson. Joining the discussion: –>Todd Darling, Director, “A Snowmobile for George” –>Stephen Fiske, Founder and Producer of Venice Eco Fest –>The Reverend [...]
Ron Briley: Unfortunately, this debate over standards often rages with little input from history teachers who are expected to implement mandated curriculum. This attitude derives from a fundamental lack of respect in our culture for teachers. Thus, it is assumed that dentists and real estate agents are better equipped to make curricular decisions than are history educators.
Brad Parker: Americans, behavior-modified to trust advertising, swimming in the dead pool of propaganda environmentally disguised as benign advertising and Infotainment, continue to cop to the Triangulating Fog Machine’s all sizzle no steak obfuscation. The only question left to ask, now that the confidence game is more widely known, is – will they keep buying it like a beaten dog or wake up and demand their money and government back?
Robert Reich: Regardless of what happens at the White House’s health care meeting , we’ve got to make sure health insurers compete for every one of our dollars. The Federal Trade Commission should launch an investigation immediately, and end the health care trusts.
The question is whether today’s conservative Republicans understand that they cannot save their party by destroying it. Too many on the right have tried to conciliate a base that craves ideological purity. But ideological purity does not lead to victory. It leads to irrelevance.
As we note, the heightened attention to the crisis, and hopefully proposals for Congressional action, the alarming jobless figures will be repeated over and over. The employment situation is dire and from all indications it is going to get worse.
One of the striking aspects of the job stats so far this year is the number of out-of-work college graduates. It keeps on growing.
The benchmarks in which we in America seek to establish “acceptance” in the labor force generally come without much fanfare. New hires commonly have 90-day, sometimes six-month, probation periods that affirm their competency and synergetic fit in the workplace. Now, we’ve seen probation periods before. We generally see them come and go. But never has [...]
With the economy tanking and unemployment skyrocketing, you’d think the Obama administration would be doing all it could to save jobs. But if its auto bailout plan is any indicator of its current direction, we’re on our way to losing a lot more jobs.
Gordon Gecko had a long run of it, but now the party is over. I’m talking, of course, about the character in the film Wall Street, that conniving titan of finance who would sell his mother for a buck and a quarter, and there is scant evidence that he had not already accomplished that goal. [...]
After presiding over the Democratic Party’s most successful national grassroots mobilizing campaign since the New Deal, Howard Dean is returning to Democracy for America, the organization he founded nearly five years ago. Dean’s return to DFA got scant attention in the traditional media, which has underestimated the former Vermont Governor from his 2004 presidential campaign [...]
The stock market reached a six-year low today. Why? Some blame loose talk (including that of former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan) about nationalizing the nation’s banks. Others blame Obama’s new plan for helping homeowners who may not be able to pay their mortgages. But the real culprit is the accelerating decline in aggregate demand — [...]
Since the economic crisis we’re now in is being compared to the Great Depression, the solutions being offered are being routinely compared to the New Deal. Republicans in particular have been quick to pronounce the New Deal a failure as a way of justifying their opposition to the new stimulus package and any other federal [...]
The election of Barack Obama has generated speculation that he can—and will—emulate the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the manner in which he manages the problems that overwhelmed George W. Bush in his second term. In The Politics Presidents Make, Stephen Skoronek argues that presidents who come into office opposed to an existing vulnerable [...]
Tuesday, January 20th, marks the beginning of Barack Obama’s first 100 days in office. On that day the new President will begin tackling a host of economic problems currently plaguing the nation, including the loss of nearly 2 million jobs in 2008. Obama’s economic team has already formulated a recovery plan to create jobs, over [...]
At the conclusion of today’s concert for president-elect Barack Obama 89-year-old Pete Seeger joined Bruce Springsteen for a sing-along with perhaps half a million people of Woody Guthrie’s “This Your Land is Your Land,” which I dare say practically everyone in the country knows from childhood. But sly old Pete, who actually hoboed with Woody [...]
by Eileen Boris, Lisa Levenstein, and Sonya Michel President-elect Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan has provoked comparisons with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. Like Roosevelt, Obama is promising to pull the country out of a depression with massive job creation through infrastructure spending. But, like FDR before him, it looks as if Obama is on [...]
by Robert Brent Toplin– Ronald Reagan rarely catches any blame these days for the present economic mess that is destabilizing markets in the United States and around the world. In fact, Americans often praise the former president for taking the country in bold new directions during his years in the White House. Politicians contribute to [...]
Sikivu Hutchinson: Black Skeptics Los Angeles spearheaded its First in the Family Humanist Scholarship initiative, which focuses on providing resources to undocumented, foster care, homeless and LGBTQ youth who will be the first in their families to go to college.
Carl Matthes: Despite the much-heralded 2008 success of Prop 8 in California to stop same-sex marriage, that vote, and it’s subsequent ramifications, provided not only 18,000 lesbian and gay couples with legal marriages, but the accelerant for the Prop 8 case currently being decided by SCOTUS.
Randy Shaw: Obama could regain young people’s support by lowering student loan rates, enacting immigration reform and rejecting the Keystone XL Pipeline, but time—and his political capital—is running out.
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Picking Up Where FDR Left Off
A Global New Deal As the economic crisis ripples through the world, some liberal commentators say that the only solution to it is a Global New Deal. A Global New Deal is a fine idea if it globalizes the heart of the domestic New Deal: the promise of protecting everyone from the threat of abject [...]