StickWithANose

Want to know how far down the road to serfdom [pun intended] we’ve travelled? Look no further than the Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal! [proxy]
Those of us who live near the top of the income pyramid are doing very nicely, thank you. Yet our government keeps showering us with Christmas presents. [...]

I’d like to apologize to readers [all 20-30 of you!] for my recent excursions beyond education policy and issues related to schooling [my areas of expertise], but this week’s news offers us some perspective on the Orwellian state of public discourse that impacts everything in our society, including debates over public education.
Yesterday, I posted on [...]

Today’s news offers yet more evidence to back up the central claim from yesterday’s post… The political machinery of think tanks, policy institutes, and foundations created by the Captains of the Universe over that past 30-40 years do not even rise to the title of intellectual frauds but are, instead, the propagandists of early 21st [...]

HatTip to The Big Picture

Much like the Panic of 1907, the Great Recession of 2007-2009 has only amplified the contradictions of global political economy and set the stage for the bigger calamity to come… “First time tragedy, second time farce.” Archein
What we are witnessing in Europe and the US is an increasing divergence of wealth and the vast [...]

And it doesn’t look very healthy right now… The sad part is that it doesn’t look like we’re capable at this point of doing anything about it.

Today, Dean Baker offers his readers concrete evidence that there are still good paying jobs to be had by un-skilled laborers.
[Thomas] Friedman shows that the U.S. economy still has good paying jobs for people without skills by writing a column that addresses economic issues with no apparent awareness of most of the relevant [...]

I’m plugging back into the Matrix after a whirlwind weekend trip, so I’ve got precious little to offer in the realm of education policy. However, I found this Invictus post over at the Big Picture to be telling. While the scooter store crowd is being whipped up over Team Obama’s “out of control spending”, an [...]

There is an interesting trend afoot in popular political discourse that seems to be on full display today… A spreading Doctrine of Doom! No where is this more apparent than these two posts [1][2] by Paul Farrell at Marketwatch. The posts are built around interviews of and writings by Nicolas Taleb and Peter Morici and [...]

This is outside the usual fare offered here, but I found this opinion piece on the great Austerity experiment underway in the EU to be insightful. Evans-Pritchard can lean toward the bombastic. However, his mind is sharp and his essays are thought-provoking.
The lesson of the 1930s is that politics can turn ugly as slumps drag [...]