The Angry Bear

Guest Author: Alan Collinge, StudentLoanJustice.Org,Both Alan and I have written various posts on the student loan crisis. Alan has been featured on Angry Bear Blog from time to time. If you are in college and looking for something worthy to fight for today; as a student, you should consider the student loan issue. Student loans and how they are administered are the national injustice of our time reaching threatening proportions and impacting the...

On The Relationship Between Wahhabism And Salafism I apologize if this seems an esoteric topic, but it is one that seems to be a matter of seriously contentious dispute, as well as one that Iis relevant to various controversies and issues in the Middle East now. It is triggered by the biggest argument I have ever had with Juan Cole, whom I usually agree with, and indeed I agree with the vast majority of his recent...

Given that I consider jobs and wages for average Americans my #1 focus, it’s only fair that I write about this week’s release of the real median household income for 2016, don’t you think? A few years ago I wrote that real median household income was the most misused statistic in the entire econoblogosphere.  That’s because: it is NOT a measure of real wages.  It includes all income — things like pensions, dividends, and social security. it...

Douglas F. Dowd Is Dead Douglas Fitzgerald Dowd has died at age 97 in Bologna, Italy.  A scholar of Thorstein Veblen and expounder of a radical view of US economic history that strongly influenced Howard Zinn and Daniel Ellsberg, among others, he was also a serious political activist.  After serving as a bomber pilot in the Pacific in World War II, he managed the 1948 presidential campaign of Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace from Berkeley, CA,...

How to kill Social Security in 2 easy steps Here’s Kevin Drum advocating for step 1:  the best way to address retirement security is to continue reforming 401(k) plans and to expand Social Security—but only for low-income workers. Middle-class workers are generally doing reasonably well, and certainly as well as they did in the past. We don’t need a massive and expensive expansion of Social Security for everyone, but we do need to make Social Security...

Last year in Chicago: Among the Sun-Times’ findings, based on a review of police and Cook County medical examiner’s reports, court files and interviews: • The vast majority of those killed in Chicago in the first half of this year — 90 percent —died from a gunshot wound. • Seventy-two percent were African-American men, their average age 29. • Four out of five had faced criminal charges in Cook County at some point, mostly for drug offenses — the leading...

Election Tax Returns In an effort to force our present president when running for re-election and future presidential candidates to release income tax returns, California passed SB249 Disclose Act. California became the first state to require presidential candidates to release their tax returns in order to appear on the state ballot. Lawmakers sent Gov. Jerry Brown AB249 Friday requiring candidates to publicly share five years of returns. This comes after...

“ In Cutting Deals With Trump, Are Democrats Walking Into a Trap?” Over the weekend the mainstream press published a flurry of articles about Donald Trump, the pragmatic independent outsider who has no loyalty to any party and will work with anyone to Get Things Done. This excited reaction was in response to the president’s agreement to raise the debt ceiling and fund disaster relief with the help of Democrats. But that’s nothing compared to the delirium...

Via Alternet: Why a Case Against a Dark Money Charter School Group Is Great News for Democracy Billionaire charter school backers in Massachusetts wanted their identities kept secret. In one of the most important decisions ever about dark money in politics, a Massachusetts charter school advocacy group has been ordered to make the names of its donors public, and pay the largest campaign finance fine in state history. The case is likely to reverberate...