Progressive Media Advocates
Joseph Palermo: It’s as if the baby boomers, having gotten their own quality schooling for a fraction of the price students pay today, are kicking the ladder out from under their children and grandchildren and substituting it with a shoddy, privatized product to which they, in their youth, never would have succumbed.
Carl Bloice: If the country were really impoverished, there would be some legitimacy to the idea that we really couldn’t afford to properly meet the needs the elderly, people with disabilities and the poor.
James Livingston: When David Brooks and Rush Limbaugh suggest that the Occupy Wall Street crowd might be speaking “an anti-Semitic code,” you know the times, they are hysterical.
Carl Bloice: Why is it that the richest and most powerful nation on earth cannot provide adequately for both its students and its retirees?
Carl Bloice: I guess the message is obvious. The cadre of the “real tea party,” the Tea Kettle party, the truly conservatives and the austerity brigades have one thing in common: if they come to power life will become a lot harder to pubic workers, students, the elderly and a whole lot of others. Class bias speaks loud.
Carl Bloice: In most of the rest of the world the prescribed method for dealing with economic crisis is austerity. That’s what it is when, in order to deal with the economic malfunctioning, you cut education budgets and fire teachers, enact special taxes that hit working people hardest, reduce services for the indigent and threaten to reduce or eliminate retirement and medical programs for seniors. It comes down to who, in a pinch, is going to be required to lower their living standards, and which individuals and families are expected to lead more austere lives.
Carl Bloice: The “moderate Republican” has gone the way of the typewriter. As the tea party people and their ilk become more racist and reactionary – and their rhetoric more incendiary, each day – the GOP encourages them and endeavors to pull them into its embrace. Meanwhile the “bluedog Democrats” become increasingly irrelevant with each passing day, their bark more in evidence than their bite.
Shamus Cooke: The nonchalance which Friedman calls for cutting Social Security is indicative of the climate in Washington, where the last remnants of liberalism have been suffocated under the heavy demands of profit-hungry corporations, especially financial institutions and big banks.
Ron Wolff: “So we’re paralyzed in the face of mass unemployment and out-of-control health care costs…Blame our political culture, a culture that rewards hypocrisy and irresponsibility rather than serious efforts to solve America’s problems…I’m sorry to say this, but the state of the union — not the speech, but the thing itself — isn’t looking very good.”
When the total number of honor students in China in any given year outnumbers the total number of students in public education in America, that should give us pause.
President Barack Obama has taken the first step toward reversing United States policies and actions aimed at Iran that have failed both countries for the past 56 years. “My administration is now committed to diplomacy that addresses the full range of issues before us and to pursuing constructive ties among the United States, Iran, and [...]
by Joseph Palermo – In yet another cynical ploy from the good offices of the George W. Bush Administration, we are now told that after “tough” negotiations the Iraqi Parliament has approved a December 31, 2011 exit date for American combat troops.
In “Green the Bailout,” (New York Times, September 28, 2008, WK 11) Thomas Friedman argues that, confronting the crisis on Wall Street, “we don’t just need a bailout. We need a buildup. We need to get back to making stuff, based on real engineering not just financial engineering.” Citing an Indian-American immigrant friend, he argues [...]
It really makes the Iraq debate easy for John McCain when he throws around words like “win” and “victory” and “prevail” and “success” without really defining what they mean. A short time ago he was calling for American troops to remain in Iraq forever and that Obama was “naive” for suggesting otherwise. Now that the [...]
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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