Trump’s Neofascism Isn’t Going Away, Even if Trump Does
Trump represents a new strain in American politics: low wage full employment and the protection of the status of big business through violent discipline.
Read more...Category Archives: Social policy
Fiscal Cost of Refugees in Europe
Data in Sweden shows that even with generous support for refugees, the costs are not high.
Read more...“This is Just Evil”: Massive Private License Plate Database Tracks Car Locations Over Years
Large-scale logging of time and location stamped license plate data, retained over years, means Big Brother knows where you have been.
Read more...A Lesson for 2016: Upton’s Sinclair’s 1934 End Poverty in California (EPIC) Gubernatorial Campaign
Upton Sinclair put forward radical plan for combatting the desperate conditions of the Great Depression. They illustrate how blinkered our vision has become.
Read more...New York Review of Books on How Oligarchs Use Philanthropy to Advance Their Social Agendas (and a Shout Out to NC)
How the 0.1% are using philanthropy as a Trojan Horse for social engineering.
Read more...Robert Reich: Why the White Working Class Abandoned the Democratic Party
The history of the political calculus that led the Democratic Party to turn its back on its traditional base, the working class, and how that’s coming back to bite now.
Read more...Lost in Assumptions: Assessing the Economic Impact of Migrants
Yves here. This post is more important than it seems for several reasons. First, it reveals one of the dirty secrets of modeling: if you tweak assumptions within plausible ranges, you can come up with wildly different outcomes. Second, it identifies what some of these assumptions are in the now-hot-topic of whether letting more migrants […]
Read more...Why Letting the Koch Brothers Create a “Center for Free Enterprise” at Public University WCU is a Bad Idea
The hidden strings in a Koch Brothers gift to Western Carolina University, and why its faculty is opposed.
Read more...What’s Your Threat Score?
Pre-crime has arrived.
Read more...Neoliberal Capitalism, Its Crisis, and What Comes Next
The fundamental contradictions of neoliberal capitalism are pushing it to the breaking point.
Read more...2015: A Failing Fiscal Policy
Although the case study is the UK, this post is yet another example of how counterproductive austerity is, from both an economic and a social perspective.
Read more...Koch Brothers’ Culture Grab: Latest Donation, to Western Carolina University, for “Center of Study of Free Enterprise” Despite Faculty Vote “No”
How the Koch Brothers are using educational purchases, um, donations, to make cultural norms even more business-friendly.
Read more...The Anglo-Saxon Hide, Adam Smith, Karl Marx and the 35 Hour Work Week
How the Doomsday book,and the unit of assessment called the “hide,” suggest that medieval laborers had very civilized work weeks.
Read more...Are Charter Schools the New Subprime Mortgages?
How fraud and mistreatment of students are embedded in the charter school system.
Read more...Michael Olenick: The Lesson of Newtown – Time to Charge for the True Cost of Gun Ownership
Yves here. The headline of an article at NBC says it all: Small-Bore? President Obama’s Actions on Guns Make Marginal Changes. Michael Olenick proposed a more effective approach…of a type that curiously has been absent from proposals on how to curb gun ownership. This post first ran on December 17, 2012 By Michael Olenick, a […]
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