We Fight Low Information
ecently, news reporters have been sounding almost giddy, saying that unemployment is dropping, housing prices are rising and the stock market is growing to new highs. But, these reports do not ring true with what people see around them. When you look beyond the sunny headlines, the sad reality is mirage recovery. The economy is limping [...]
Brent Budowsky: Obama needs to contemplate the possibility that his legacy will be “the jobless president.” He should fight to become “the jobs president.”
Walter Brasch: The American people broadly rejected Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan in 2010. They need to now reject Ryan’s so-called new budget that proves the Republicans are nothing more than the lackeys of corporate greed at the expense of the rest of us.
Johnny Townsend: Trying to recover from all the damage caused by water pollution and carbon emissions and other toxins will cost the country a great deal more than the short-term profits waiting to be made now.
Charley James: Democrats generally, and the President specifically, must forget trying to do deals with a party that has no interest in making one and shout from the rooftops that it’s time to spend money and put America back to work.
Steve Hochstadt: Despite the continuing economic disaster, despite lingering racism across white America, despite the daily uncertainties of the world outside our borders, Barack Obama wins again. His victory in 2012 means that Republican ideology is a failure.
Stephen Lendman: Monthly Labor Department (BLS) data report inaccurately. America’s broken jobs engine isn’t explained. The latest 7.8% unemployment rate is blarney. Based on the 1980s calculation model, real unemployment approaches 23%.
JP Sottile: We can talk cavalierly about the “paranoid style in American politics,” but just beyond the Birthers and latter-day Red Scarecrows who populate the Tea Party and Rep. Allen West’s townhall meetings, there is a deeper, darker secret that we all basically know and lament.
Nia-Malika Hendewrson and Rachel Weiner: Two days after Romney reignited his campaign with a winning debate performance, Republicans were struggling once again to find their footing after a positive September jobs report muted the campaign’s main talking point.
Robert Reich: RBoth Obama and Romney assume the recovery will continue, even at a slow pace, and that we’ll be back to normal at some point. But I’m not at all sure. “Normal” is what got us into this mess in the first place.
Heather Gautney: We need to start pressing for things that our politicians did NOT discuss at the conventions. Real solutions–like universal education, debt forgiveness, wealth redistribution, and participatory political structures—that would empower us to decide together what’s best. Not who’s best.
Steve Hochstadt: When Romney and the Republicans talk about cutting back on government, they mean much larger cuts in local government spending than what has happened so far.
Anthony Samad: Damn near every street in the southland is torn up from construction, as is damn near every freeway. I purposely look for BMWs (Black Men Working). I rarely see any and I’m not the only one who notices this. It’s often a point of conversation in the circles I run in.
Shamus Cooke: Both parties are not talking about the fiscal cliff because they share the exact same solution: austerity -cuts to social programs, government layoffs, and other measures to make working people pay for the nation’s debt instead of the rich and corporations.
ardly a day goes by without a new headline screaming about the scandal of youth unemployment, which has been pinned at the outrageous levels of 50 percent in Spain and Greece and above 20 percent in the eurozone. There’s just one problem – those numbers are derived from a flawed methodology, which misrepresents the true [...]
Joseph Palermo: Wall Street banks should be pouring money into Obama’s reelection since he’s been so good to them, and the neocons should be rejoicing in his establishing precedent for more unchecked executive power.
Tanya Acker: People who can’t read, however, are very easy to divide and even easier to command. No demagoguery can save us from that.
Robert Reich: @idening inequality is the underlying culprit. As long as almost all the gains from economic growth continue to go to the top, the vast middle class doesn’t have the purchasing power to boost the economy on its own.
Shamus Cooke: Portland is simply following a national trend on a city, state, and federal level where Democrats and Republicans have agreed that taxing the wealthy and corporations must not be an option in addressing the social crisis that resulted from the Great Recession, regardless of the vast inequality of wealth that has erupted over the last 30 years.
Victoria DeFrancesco Soto: The GOP, however, shouldn’t hold its breath. The idea that Latinos are social conservatives akin to white evangelicals is simply off-base.
Mark Naison: Are 28 percent of the homes in the United States under water because of union teachers? Can they also be blamed for the 44 percent Black unemployment rate in the city of Milwaukee?
Kathleen Peine: The unemployment report came out recently, and Punxatawny Phil saw a service sector job — that means six more years of growth. Or something like that. It’s all very complicated.
Robert Reich: Government should extend unemployment benefits, and not cut spending until the nation’s rate of unemployment is down to 5 percent. Then, and only then, should we move toward budget austerity.
Julie Driscoll: What the left views as weakness and the right views as radicalism, I view as brilliance. Anyone who thinks he’s weak hasn’t been paying attention.
Carl Bloice: The average period of unemployment now exceeds 26 weeks, well above the previous peak in July 1983 of just 21.2 weeks. This is critical because the longer that people of any age are out of work, the less likely they are to find another job.
Jasmyne Cannick: Why it’s going to take more than a college degree and a clean criminal record for Shameicka to get a job today.
Rachel Burstein: For many, participating in Occupy Detroit may appear to mean cutting off the hand that feeds them—and failing to address the structural issues underlying Detroit’s poor economic state.
Rev. Irene Monroe: It’s not easy for any person of African descent to be LGBTQ in our black communities, but our transgender brothers and sisters might feel the most discrimination.
Seth Hoy: With an increasing unemployment rate of more than 12%, California legislators concluded that it “must pursue all avenues in facilitating and incubating job development and economic growth.”
Dan Bluemel: Women’s rights advocates entered a Walgreens pharmacy this week in downtown Los Angeles to protest the Obama administration’s efforts to restrict access to the emergency contraceptive commonly known as the morning-after pill.
Robert Reich: Is the central goal of his second term to achieve a grand bargain on the budget deficit? Or progress on gun control? Or restore jobs? Or reform the immigration laws? It is difficult to tell.
Brent Budowsky: Ryan famously tried to employ Catholic theology on behalf of his budget austerity against the poor, and was quickly forced to retreat as the absurdity of this view became obvious.
PCL offers monthly Open House Events on the 2nd Saturday at 2pm and 3rd Thursday at 6pm. Click here to learn more.
Top 10 Most Read Led by “Blaming Schools and Teachers”
Topping this week’s list is, once again, Mark Naison, the Fordham University professor and editor of With a Brooklyn Accent, who writes so passionately on issues of education and race..