2018 – American Delusions

Recently Noted – PhDs on Food Stamps – Labor in US Higher Ed

December 24, 2018 Comments Off

American higher education, once the envy of the world, is continuing to slump towards a becoming a factory for debtors. With falling public tax support around the country for our two and four year colleges and universities, students are underwriting the enormous growth in tuition and administrators’ salaries with student --->> read more -->>

project blog

House Cleaning at AmericanDelusions

December 18, 2018 Comments Off

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 to AmericanDelusions included the note: “Missing But Not – Two topics that do not appear in --->> read more -->>

Women Continue To Face A Big Pay Gap – and on into the future

December 18, 2018 Comments Off

In 2017, female full-time, year-round workers made only 80.5 cents for every dollar earned by men, 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 --->> read more -->>

American Wars – The Secrets of Vietnam and Afghanistan

December 6, 2018 Comments Off

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 that fall under our imperial domain and simultaneously keep the American people in the dark --->> read more -->>

Medicare for All – Cheaper and Better

December 3, 2018 Comments Off

“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 new support from a study released last week. The research report, “Economic Analysis of Medicare --->> read more -->>

The Monopolization of America

November 26, 2018 Comments Off

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 was marked by a deep reaction to the monopolistic practices of large companies then. This --->> read more -->>

justice/jails

Recently Noted – Serial the Podcast – More Evidence of the Delusion of Justice –

November 4, 2018 Comments Off

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 criminal justice system is almost exclusively a system of plea bargaining, negotiated behind closed doors --->> read more -->>

photo by Lance Wheeler for Columbia-Greene Media. State St Hudson NY 6/12/2018

Recently Noted – Hudson NY and Its SWAT Team

September 1, 2018 Comments Off

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 has been plenty of concern over its use here in the last couple of years, --->> read more -->>

Inequality, Jeff Bezos, Amazon and Bernie Sanders

August 22, 2018 Comments Off

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 a billion seconds is 31 years gives some shape to the dimensions of inequality, it --->> read more -->>

Plastics and Run Amuck Capitalism

August 20, 2018 Comments Off

Plastic packaging is swamping the world with refuse that never degrades and flows into mountains of trash in land dumps and pollutes the oceans. For example, the bottled water industry produces over 50 billion bottles per year for the American market alone. Roughly 38 billion are not recycled and end --->> read more -->>

President Authorizes Coup in Iran

August 19, 2018 Comments Off

Intervention in Iran – 65th Anniversary On August 19, 1953 President Eisenhower authorized the CIA to support British efforts to launch a coup against the popularly elected government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in favor of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. At immediate issue were plans by Mossadegh to nationalize --->> read more -->>

illustration by Adam Maida in 8/21/17 New Yorker

Do Protests Work? – Time for Class Warfare

May 21, 2018 Comments Off

In the August 21, 2017 edition of The New Yorker Nathan Heller writes about the efficacy of protest as a method for social and political change. “Out of Action – do protests work?” raises many interesting questions about protest movements as a means to achieving change. Protected by the First Amendment --->> read more -->>

White Affirmative Action – Martin Luther King in 1968

May 13, 2018 Comments Off

White Affirmative Action – Martin Luther King in 1968 In recent years scholars and activists have begun to point out how white privilege is supported by many decades of government action that affirmatively transfers money and resources to whites while explicitly denying the same support to African-Americans. To my knowledge --->> read more -->>

Gun Regulation, the 2nd Amendment, and Scalia’s Majority Opinion

May 9, 2018 2

Gun Regulation, the 2nd Amendment, and Scalia’s Majority Opinion Fire arms proponents make much of the 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller in which the Supreme Court absolutely affirmed the right to bear arms as a constitutionally guaranteed right. Lost in this rhetoric is the fact that no rights --->> read more -->>