StickWithANose

West Tennessee Edition:

The Hamptons Edition: from The Big Picture
The slowing economic growth may be what most people are focusing on, but the brutally apparent trend here is on luxe spending. Conspicuous consumption may have had its setbacks the past few years, but its on full display out here.
We went to several very nice, quite pricey [...]

One of the current elements of today’s political dynamic that is most disturbing from a democratic perspective is the slickly packaged media techniques being employed by political actors both private and public. An entire knowledge industry has emerged over the past 35 years funded primarily by the business sector with the express purpose of naturalizing [...]

In doing the research for my dissertation, I read all of the popular texts* addressing education policy and reform produced by six major think-tanks between 1998-2008. One of the many things that struck me was the degree to which the books produced identical narratives that employed the same talking points and political sloganeering and the [...]

My intention for today’s post was to focus on the news that several states are seeking federal waivers to cut special education funding in response to budget crises. I intended to discuss the impact that these kinds of cuts have on poorer urban schools that have higher proportions of students classified as having learning disabilities [...]

As with all new media that preceded it, there is a new wave of dire warnings that computer and internet technology is turning us all into shallow thinkers with the attention span of a shitzu puppy on speed. Cherry-picking psychological studies that, in their haste to be “scientific”, create an abstract context in which the [...]

Why I hate SmartBoards and other useless education gadgets: Washington Post
Bi-partisan commission identifies $100 billion of savings in Defense Budget… The press yawns: Project on Defense Alternatives
Lykins smacks down Fiscal Conservatives on Military Budget: KnoxViews
For the Thousandth Time… Freddie and Fannie did not cause the financial crisis: The Big Picture
Predatory Banks & billionaire authoritarian Pete [...]

Between propagandistic “documentaries” scaring the uninformed and economically illiterate and a President who willing adopts right-wing narratives as being responsible and “post-partisan”, it is becoming increasingly clear that the next big fight in the American republic will center around our ballooning debt and the ill-advised austerity proposals being bandied about for addressing that debt. Looks [...]

One of the tragedies of this most current era of globalization is the degree to which exploitation remains hidden from those who benefit from it. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, exploited workers often lived in close proximity to the middle and upper classes who accumulated wealth from their labor. The exploitation of [...]

This weekend’s must read comes from the always sharp Yves Smith over at Naked Capitalism. Yves builds off of this piece by Simon Schama in the Financial Times to discuss the possibility of a societal backlash against the [on-going] greatest transfer of wealth in human history from ordinary citizens to the financiers of Wall Street [...]