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 to AmericanDelusions included the note: “Missing But Not – Two topics that do not appear in —>> 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 nearly continuous puffing up of Silicon Valley, the construction of an enormous bio-pharma complex in Cambridge, and other examples of high tech ebullience are offered up by the mass media and the business press as evidence of a dynamic economy. The actual facts show a different story that should —>> read more –>>
The government and mass media use the phrase “in the national interest” as a ritual phrase to introduce almost every story about our involvement in affairs around the world. It has its variant as “the national security interests” Official Definitions of “National Interests” Here is a definition of our “national —>> 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 that fall under our imperial domain and simultaneously keep the American people in the dark —>> 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 new support from a study released last week. The research report, “Economic Analysis of Medicare —>> read more –>>
The term “white supremacy” has come into widespread usage to identify racist organizations and adherents, especially so in the wake of the Charlottesville incident (8/12/2017) and the ongoing dog-whistle politics of Trump and the Republican Party. “White supremacy or white supremacism is the racist belief that white people are superior —>> 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 was marked by a deep reaction to the monopolistic practices of large companies then. This —>> 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 criminal justice system is almost exclusively a system of plea bargaining, negotiated behind closed doors —>> 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 has been plenty of concern over its use here in the last couple of years, —>> read more –>>
The Oklahoma land rush of 1889 is the subject of much lore including paintings, photographs, movies, and more. The background of how this hord of white people came to acquire stakes in what had been Indian Territory under the removal acts of the pre-Civil War era is an example of —>> 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 a billion seconds is 31 years gives some shape to the dimensions of inequality, it —>> 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 –>>
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 –>>
Countering White Male Top 10% Affirmative Action The continuing advances of elite white males requires action. They live and procreate in a closed loop of social, educational, and political advantages and protections. Wealth flows to them behind the uniformed doormen of the Upper East Side and the hedges of the —>> read more –>>
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 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 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 –>>
Mass incarceration, largely through the War on Drugs, combined with white racism has produced a catastrophe for African Americans. It is hard to imagine that if young whites, despite being no more likely to offend drug laws than blacks, were subjected to these laws that we would have seen a sharp reaction from the white majority. Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow is important reading and a call to action. —>> read more –>>
Since corporations have reason not to worry about safety and efficacy, we do need the government to represent us. Common sense and ethics suggest that a company establish the safety and efficacy of products and services BEFORE selling them. In a world better balanced to the needs and interests of the vast majority this would be a required step. Heart stents and tricycles are examples of the failings of our current system. —>> read more –>>
Corporate concentration of income and wealth are core features of capitalism. From its earliest cheerleaders like Adam Smith, the drive for corporations to get ever larger and in the doing drive their competitors out of the market was noted and warned against. John Oliver provides a thorough and amusing introduction. —>> read more –>>
The new digital economy is displaying the same drive to concentration, monopolies and oligopolies, that capitalism has always displayed. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are just a new face of the predatory monopolists of the Rockefeller Standard Oil age. —>> read more –>>
Fake news is now a political strategy used around the world. How can we defend ourselves, how can we identify it and its sources? Here is a beginning from FactCheck.org and the New Orleans Public Library. —>> read more –>>
We have argued here repeatedly that the US healthcare system is not about healthcare all. No one anywhere here gets paid for keeping you healthy. The system is designed from top to bottom to produce as many prescriptions, tests and procedures as possible. And the prices for these are completely —>> read more –>>
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