Big Money
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Jim Webb for President
There are things that Jim Webb has said and done over the years that have rubbed me the wrong way, but better him than Hillary. He's an economic populist who is to the left of Hillary's foreign policy and someone who resides in Glenn Greenwald's Hall of Fame for integrity. That alone makes him preferrable
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Lapham and Frank
A must read article, crackling with interesting ideas–too much to excerpt for a quote here, but I'll put this one up since it relates to something that came up here last week. A questioner in the audience asks: A Russian scholar drew a map of the United States where it sort of dissolved into four
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Another approach to putting the predators back in their cages
Not clear what the criteria are to get to his goals, and who decides which candidates gets the thumbs up, but I'm for it until there's a reason I shouldn't be. A little quixotic, maybe, and I'm not given to the quixotic, but this is a walk I'd like to take–at least it gets
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The Tea Party and the Mythos of ‘Real’ Americans
People in Red America are in pain, and it's deeper than just economic. I'd argue that a good deal of the pain comes from the disjunction between its mindset and the real world in which Red America lives. The world no longer makes sense for a mindset that was developed in the early 19th century.
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The Logic behind Vouchers, Charters, and Privatization in General
Today’s American right is an uneasy coalition among libertarian plutocrats and working-class and middle-class whites who depend on Social Security and Medicare and can’t afford to send their children to expensive private schools. The need to win white middle American votes means that the right can’t simply promise to abolish public services, leaving the mass
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Third Way vs. Elizabeth Warren
Alex Parene: [Third Way is] not afraid that Warren will run for president, they’re afraid that she’ll be so popular that other senators to start acting like her. They’re worried that she’ll have money to direct to candidates who share her views. They’re worried that Warren might embarrass Democrats into passing stricter bank regulations. They’re
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Sawant on Boeing
“If Boeing executives want to leave the state, they are welcome to do that,” she told a cheering crowd at Town Hall Seattle in 2012. “The fact is, the workers are here. The factories are here. … We are therefore calling for the democratic, public ownership by workers and by the community of the workplaces
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Crashing the Frame
I've thought a lot over the years about persuasion and why it's so difficult, especially when it comes to political values and opinions, and the best conceptual tool that helps me to understand the difficulty is 'frames'. There are individual and group mindframes, and more often than not you can predict the individual's thinking if
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Quote of the Day: David Graeber
What the 1% are is, effectively, a ruling class, they represent the point where concentrated wealth can be turned into political power. National politics in the US has been reduced to battles between different factions of that 1%. This is not just a traditional Marxist bourgeoisie though—and this is where I think it dovetails with
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Common Core State Standards: More Top-Down Stupidity
I remember when I first heard about the idea of having a national common core standards in K-12 education, it didn't seem like a bad idea. Why not set standards to insure a basic minimum so that we can be sure that every child is getting the education he or she deserves? But, like many