Adjunct teachers are paid so poorly that many qualify for food stamps. Meanwhile students across the country are underwriting ever higher tuition through debt. —>> read more –>>
New Topics Prompted by comments from a reader I’ve undertaken some changes in the organization of the site. Most significant are four new categories: education environment inequality women. Gone are the days when my Introduction —>> read more –>>
“Women are almost half of the workforce. They are the sole or co-breadwinner in half of American families with children. They receive more college and graduate degrees than men. Yet, on average, women continue to earn considerably less than men. In 2017, female full-time, year-round workers made only 80.5 cents for every dollar earned by men, a gender wage gap of 20 percent.” —>> read more –>>
The recent movie The Post (about the Washington Post newspaper and its involvement with the Pentagon Papers – see below) poses interesting reminders of the power of the US government to rain death on countries —>> read more –>>
“We therefore estimate that Medicare for All could reduce U.S. Health Consumption Expenditures by about 9.6 percent while also providing decent health care coverage for all U.S. residents” The Medicare for All movement gained some —>> read more –>>
Adam Smith discussed the harms caused by monopolies in the frequently, ritualistically cited book, The Wealth of Nations. The progressive politics of the end of the 19th century and into the beginning of the 20th —>> read more –>>
We have written earlier about the fact that effective legal representation and trial by jury is a rarity making one of our cultural icons a complete sham. As Jed Rakoff has noted: In actuality, our —>> read more –>>
Hudson NY and Its SWAT Team Even here in our little city of Hudson NY (population ~ 7,000) we have a police SWAT team, benignly referred to officially as the Columbia County Shared Services Team. There —>> read more –>>
It is always useful to put a face to trends. The grotesque yawning extent of inequality is one of those trends that begs for the concrete. Knowing that a million seconds is 12 days while —>> read more –>>
The earth is burdened by the tsunami of plastic refuse that will never degrade. Government needs to protect us from capitalist enterprises delight in externalizing costs to our detriment and their short-term benefit. —>> read more –>>
©Mark Orton 2019