Here’s A REAL DC Scandal

The Article: You Want A Scandal? Here’s A Scandal by Jonathan Bernstein in The Washington Post.

The Text: Want a real Washington scandal — one worse than the (phony) Benghazi scandal and the (apparently real, but apparently limited) IRS scandals combined? Try the continuing, and possibly accelerating, obstruction of executive branch nominees by Senate Republicans.

Don’t think it’s a scandal? It’s pretty basic: Republicans, by abusing their Constitutional powers, are — deliberately, in several cases — preventing the government from carrying out duly passed laws.

The New York Times yesterday highlighted two of the more recent ways that Republicans have manipulated loopholes in Senate rules to delay confirmation of Secretary of Labor nominee Thomas Perez and Environmental Protection Agency nominee Gina McCarthy. It’s worth stepping back and realizing: what’s happening here is that Republicans are delaying these nominations beyond their eventual insistence that almost all nominees must get 60 votes. In other words, they’re filibustering on top of their own filibusters.

Continue Reading

A Rhode Island Teacher Says Goodbye To Broken Education System

Another good teacher lost to a system that favors statistics over students’ lifelong learning.

The Truth About American Priorities

Recovering from student debt can take longer than that of a gun wound, too. Since a good amount of recent graduates work in fields that don’t require college degrees, the average student debt one accumulates (currently hovering around $26,000) will take that much longer to scar over and disappear.

Ayn Rand’s America

The Article: Ayn Rand USA by Paul Buchheit in AlterNet.

The Text: yn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” fantasizes a world in which anti-government citizens reject taxes and regulations, and “stop the motor” by withdrawing themselves from the system of production. In a perverse twist on the writer’s theme the prediction is coming true. But instead of productive people rejecting taxes, rejected taxes are shutting down productive people.

Perhaps Ayn Rand never anticipated the impact of unregulated greed on a productive middle class. Perhaps she never understood the fairness of tax money for public research and infrastructure and security, all of which have contributed to the success of big business. She must have known about the inequality of the pre-Depression years. But she couldn’t have foreseen the concurrent rise in technology and globalization that allowed inequality to surge again, more quickly, in a manner that threatens to put the greediest offenders out of our reach.

Ayn Rand’s philosophy suggests that average working people are ‘takers.’ In reality, those in the best position to make money take all they can get, with no scruples about their working class victims, because taking, in the minds of the rich, serves as a model for success. The strategy involves tax avoidance, in numerous forms.

Continue Reading

Chomsky On Climate Change

From The Nation: The growing threats of nuclear war and environmental catastrophe make it hard to bet on the survival of our species.