The Elephant in the Race

The Elephant in the Race

| Mar 2, 2016 | Rights / DemocracyThe audience in the theater takes its seats and slowly settles down. The curtain rises on a conventional living room in a conventional American home, neither squalid nor opulent. Middle class, it whispers. A woman of a certain age sits in a chair in the middle of the...
For-Profit Colleges Are Scandal Machines

For-Profit Colleges Are Scandal Machines

| Dec 30, 2015 | Economy / BusinessThe nation’s for-profit, private college industry is a study in horror. Start with the fact that it actually calls itself an “industry.” Excuse me, but education is a social investment — not an industrial product. Next, this so-called...
The Only Game in Town

The Only Game in Town

| Sep 9, 2015 | Economy / BusinessThe stock market is down. It must be some crazy thing China has done. Those Communist countries just don’t understand how capitalism works. No, wait! The market just went up. Did China fix its capital markets already? Not really. More likely it’s that our Federal...
Shielding Wall Street from the Ravages of Bigotry

Shielding Wall Street from the Ravages of Bigotry

| Aug 19, 2015 | Economy / BusinessPhil Gramm, the former right-wing senator from Texas, has surprised me. I assumed he had zero charitable instincts. In office, he kept trying to kill safety net programs, such as food assistance: “We’re the only nation in the world where all our poor...