Tag Archives: politics

I am posting this NPR Fresh Air radio article here because it talks about a part of our society that has not been talked about much.  When it comes to discussion of taxation, social programs, how our economy works, the basic premise of free market misses an awful lot. From the page: For many poor families in America, eviction is a real and ongoing threat. Sociologist Matthew Desmond estimates that 2.3 million evictions were filed in the U.S. in 2016 — a...

Unresolved Issues In Happiness Economics From The Conference Honoring The Retirement Of The Field’s Founder That would be Richard A. Easterlin, age 92, retiring this spring from the U. of Southern California after being there since 1981, following an earlier stint at U. of Penn, where he got his PhD under Simon Kuznets.  Kuznets in turn got his from Wesley Clair Mitchell, who was in turn the student of Thorstein Veblen, and it was mentioned (by me...

When we published our latest book – Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World – last September, Thomas Fazi and I approached the UK Guardian to see if they would publish an Op Ed by us summarising the main arguments presented in the book. We received no response. Pluto tell us that the book is one of their better sellers since it was published. And it is not as if the topic is irrelevant in the Guardian’s assessment. That is clear from the fact...

Pseudo-Equity: Further Remarks on the Politics of Mandatory Diversity Training at Evergreen This post follows the previous one and explains why I get so exercised about the politics of equity at a place like Evergreen State College.  The single issue at the heart of activism at Evergreen for the past two years is mandatory diversity training for faculty.  This was first proposed by the Equity Council (which was set up by the college administration and...

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump blasted the FBI and special counsel Robert Mueller on Monday following news that investigators had raided the office of his personal attorney, calling the search “an attack on our country.” Earlier in the day before the president met with senior military leaders at the White House, the FBI raided the New York office and residence of Michael Cohen, seeking information about a $130,000 payment the attorney made to porn...

From time to time, Angry Bear has featured Steve Hutkins, (Save The Post Office Blog) and Mark Jamison’s (retired NC Postmaster) commentary on the efforts of various political and commercial interests to close down the United States Postal Service and give it over to the likes of UPS, FedX, and other commercial enterprises. Most recently, President Trump’s inane Twitter comments have again gained undeserving national coverage about Amazon having a...

Trump and his administration love to brag about the number of jobs created since he became president.  But the only reason he gets away with claiming that a record number of jobs have been created since he took office is the poor job the press does reporting economic data. It only takes a quick glance at the data to see that job creation under Trump has been essentially identical to Obama’s record during the expansion phase of this cycle.  Excluding the...

Evergreen Looks in the Mirror and Says It’s OK The “Independent” External Review Panel on The Evergreen State College Response to the Spring 2017 Campus Events (quotes not in the original) just released its report, and it says that everything campus administration has done in connection with this episode and everything it is now doing in response to it is beyond reproach.  It repeats the arguments of the college’s “equity” faction (again my quotes—it has...

A Half Century Ago Today  A half century ago today Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot dead in Memphis, Tennessee.  This remains one of the saddest events in our history.  This will not be a long post other than remembering this event that ended the life of this great man.  I have only two observations. One is that in yesterday’s Washington Post there was a long article about how King’s family believe he was not shot by James Earl Ray and that it was...

A thought for Sunday: 2018 arctic ice cover The National Snow and Ice Data Center reports that the peak in arctic ice cover this winter was the second lowest on record, just slightly above that of one year ago. The three next lowest peaks were in the three years just prior: All of these are something like three standard deviations below the norm from 1980-2010. The biggest abnormality this winter was that the Bering Sea between Alaska and Siberia...