How the managers of the Postal Service, in conjunction with politicians, have worked to undermine the effectiveness of a public infrastructure that is capable of producing broad economic and social benefits.
Read more...Based on developments in our post-9/11 world, we could be watching the birth of a new American political system and way of governing for which, as yet, we have no name.
Read more...It’s hard to fathom Greece’s approach to its dealings with its oppressors, um, creditors.
Read more...This article describes how the creation of a misguided corporatized governance structure and undermining of public-interest-related objectives undermined the Post Office. The very fact that offices are being shuttered in rural areas that depend on the Post Office as a local anchor, leading to the death of communities, shows how far the modern Post Office deviates from its founders’ objectives.
Read more...One reason for our continued coverage of the IMF generosity to Ukraine isn’t simply to demonstrate how the institution is bending its rules to support US adventurism. It’s also to highlight the striking contrast with the treatment of Greece. While Greece has a class of oligarchs that specialize in tax-evasion, Ukraine is widely recognized as a spectacularly corrupt country, to the degree that it makes Greece look like a paragon of virtue.
Read more...The attack on the U.S. Postal Service is based on ideology and punitive, misleading accounting. It’s not too late to save it.
Read more...This Real News Network interview describes why the coming mayoral runoff in Chicago is in many ways a referendum on failed neoliberal policies, such as privatizing schools. The very fact that this race is taking place at all reveals an unexpectedly large degree of popular discontent with misrule by what passes for our elites
Read more...Let us begin with what should be indisputable: the Eurogroup agreement that the Greek government was dragged into on Friday amounts to a headlong retreat.
Read more...The negotiations between Greece and the Eurogroup are on a worse trajectory than conventional wisdom would have you believe.
Read more...After a collapse of negotiations over whether and how to resolve Syriza’s demands for a new deal with the Eurozone with the insistence of its counterparties that the new government adhere to the terms of its existing deal, technical discussions are set to resume Friday. The drop-dead date is Monday, since any extension or modification of the current so-called bailout needs to happen by February 28, when it expires. The lead time is necessary because the Germany Bundestag and the Finnish Parliament must approve any new or extended deal. But what is the real state of play?
Read more...One of the sorriest chapters in recent American history was how we allowed an unprecedented opportunity to assist Russia in managing the end of its Communist era to turn into a looting exercise by well-placed insiders, including advisors under contract to Harvard.
onathan Hay ran the day-to-day operations of the Russia Project. He was found guilty of violating three counts of the False Claims Act and was debarred from serving in USAID. But he’s managed to resurface in Ukraine, working in the local operations of a Polish think tank. Nicely played.
Read more...Yves here. This is a terrific piece on the thinking, such as it is, that has come to dominate the Beltway, and how these preoccupations keep the US lurching forward in a costly, destructive policy trajectory.
Read more...On the Senate’s last day in session in December, it approved the government’s $1.1 trillion budget for coming fiscal year.
Few people realize how radical the new U.S. budget law was. Budget laws are supposed to decide simply what to fund and what to cut. A budget is not supposed to make new law, or to rewrite the law. But that is what happened, and it was radical.
Read more...I never dreamed that a class I took in college, The Politics of Popular Education, which covered the nineteenth century in France and England, would prove to be germane in America. I didn’t have any particular interest in the topic; the reason for selecting the course was that the more serious students picked their classes based on the caliber of the instructor, and this professor, Kate Auspitz, got particularly high marks. The course framed both the policy fights and the broader debate over public education in terms of class, regional, and ideological interests.
The participants in these struggles were acutely aware that the struggle over schooling was to influence the future of society: what sort of citizens would these institutions help create?
As the post below on the march of school privatization in Wisconsin demonstrates, those concerns are remarkably absent from current debates. The training of children is simply another looting opportunity, like privatizing parking meters and roads.
Read more...Rather than growing closer in the coming post-bankruptcy era, many residents fear that these two Detroits — already so separate and unequal — will have increasingly divergent futures.
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