Apr 11
Treatises on education are often ordeals of blurry thinking, but no such complaint can be leveled against Diane Ravitch’s latest. From the title — Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools — to the final paragraph, Ravitch marshals her arguments and her evidence in clear declarative sentences. …
Apr 02
Today’s decision in the McCutcheon case allows you and me to join the 650 individuals who felt frustrated at only being able to spend $123,200 for access to national politicians in the last election cycle. We maxed out donating to only 18 Congresspersons! Horrors! Thanks to the 5-4 Supreme Court majority in McCutcheon, we can …
Mar 31
A Big Bang shook the neighborhood this afternoon during a thunderstorm, knocking a picture frame off the wall of my office. The lightning bolt struck a sixty-foot redwood tree two blocks away and blew it up. All that was left of the giant was a jagged, shattered stump. Twisted, stripped fragments rested on …
Mar 28
On the theme of the invasion of the body snatchers, artist Sandy Sanders of the Berkeley Post Office Defenders has created this postcard (below) showing corporate invaders snatching the Post Office and the jobs that go with it. The downtown Staples store, along with dozens of other Staples elsewhere, now hosts an ersatz Post Office …
Mar 27
Growing up in the fifties and sixties we generally heard the phrase “overthrow the government” linked with communists. That’s so ancient history! In more recent times we’ve seen a white guy be the best rapper and a black guy the best golfer, and now the capitalists are the best at overthrowing governments. The capitalists overthrew …
Mar 22
Sunshine, the saying goes, is the best disinfectant. But sometimes letting the sunshine in takes extraordinary measures. Bringing the cleansing rays to bear on the rotten state of the FBI in 1971 took nothing less than forcefully breaking and entering. Betty Medsger’s new book, The Burglary, the Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI (Knopf …
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