Why We’re Still Not Intervening In Syria

The Article: Why We’re Still Not Intervening in Syria by Michael Hirsch in The Atlantic.

The Text: Bashar al-Assad is, finally, having a very good week.

The latest allegations of chemical-weapons use against the Syrian dictator don’t matter nearly as much as other dramatic developments–in particular, the United States’ willingness to stand aside while Assad’s autocratic brethren in the Egyptian junta cold-bloodedly killed some one thousand protesters, supported by the Saudis and Gulf states.

And this week, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, finally said plainly what Obama administration officials have been thinking privately since June, the last time Washington said its “red line” had been crossed and pledged military aid to the Syrian rebels–then did nothing. In a letter to Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., Dempsey said flatly that U.S. aid to the rebels know would just end up arming radical, possibly al-Qaida-linked groups. And Obama wasn’t going to allow that to happen.

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Meet Mitch McConnell’s Challenger

Putting monied interests over the public interest and the preservation of his ego before the perseverance of the union for decades, Mitch McConnell has got to go. Meet his challenger, Alison Lundergan Grimes. 2014 should be an interesting year.

When Does A Crime Become A Scandal?

The sad thing is that if you have enough money, it’s not even a scandal anymore; it’s life as normal.

Why We Need To Start Treating College Funding Like We Do High School

The Article: Start funding college like high school by David Sirota in Salon.

The Text: Whether or not President Obama’s speech today is in direct response to Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi’s eye-opening must-read on the college loan crisis, it is great news that the White House is evidently now taking the crisis more seriously. The credit bubble in college loans has ballooned into a systemic threat to the nation’s economy. Additionally, as Taibbi documents, economic and political trends are now converging to force an entire generation into a truly no-win situation: either don’t get a post-secondary education and severely harm your ability to get a job in an already weak economy, or get a post-secondary education and condemn yourself to a lifetime paying off debt that you may never be able to pay off because the economy is so weak and your job prospects are still not guaranteed.

The economic trend that is fueling this perfect storm is about job credentials. Peruse employment data and you’ll see that the New York Times was right when it declared that “the college degree is becoming the new high school diploma: the new minimum requirement, albeit an expensive one, for getting even the lowest-level job.” Though the Times notes that the weak economy means the job outlook for college grads “is rather bleak,” it is even more bleak if you don’t have a post-secondary degree.

So, in terms of job-market competitiveness, some form of higher education is now increasingly as necessary as high school education. Yet, that’s the thing: in its financing models, America isn’t treating it as such. Just consider the critical distinction between how high school and college education are funded.

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Why The Middle Class Is Disappearing

Hint: the middle class doesn’t appear on its own. It’s created and fought for. And it has to be maintained by those who helped forge it: labor unions.