The median parental income of the parents of new med school students in America is $100,000 -- twice the national average. In Cuba, America's brilliant, working class med students pay nothing -- free tuition, lodging and meals -- and they come home to America and provide front-line medical services to families who are frozen out of the US system, in which debt-saddled doctors opt for lucrative specialties instead of family medicine.
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Nixon's War on Drugs, Reagan's three strikes rules, and Clinton's "superpredator" crime bill turned America into history's greatest imprisoner, a carceral state where a racially biased justice system was made worse with every passing day, thanks to the campaign contributions and lobbying by the private prison industry, led by Corrections Corporation of America.
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Philosopher John Danaher's new paper "Will life be worth living in a world without work?
Technological Unemployment and the Meaning of Life" assumes that after the robots take all our jobs, and after the economic justice of figuring out how to share the productivity games can be equitably shared among the robot-owning investor class and the robot-displaced 99%, there will still be a burning question: what will give our life meaning?
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The US Republican Party welds together two separate and sometimes conflicting ideologies: dogwhistles to Christian conservatives on abortion, LGBTQ issues, etc; and a doctrinaire commitment to "free markets" and deregulation, often at the expense of the working class Christian conservatives whose votes are coaxed forth with the campaign dollars funded by the one percenter beneficiaries of the deregulation movement.
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More Americans are riding public transit than ever before, and not a moment too soon, because between oil's direct and indirect costs, climate change, the expense of roadworks, and the scaling problems of private cars, the increasingly urbanized nation needs something to keep its cities from imploding under the logistical challenge of getting everyone everywhere.
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Though they are legally required to disclose the names of any members or donore who give them more than $5K, the Commercial Energy Working Group -- which lobbies against energy sector regulations -- refuses to name any of its backers.
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In Understanding overconfidence: Theories of intelligence, preferential attention, and distorted self-assessment, an open access paper published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, psych researchers from Washington State U, Florida State U and Stanford report on their ingenious experiments to investigate how subjects' beliefs about intelligence affect their own intelligence.
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Public and private universities alike have been transformed into financial shell-games for Wall Street's wealthiest hedge-funds, while tuition and student debt soar, adjuncts are exploited, and the lifetime expected returns on a university degree plummet.
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After an exhaustive (and, no doubt, exhausting) survey of Trump's speeches and interviews with his supporters, Thomas Frank concludes that while Trump's outlandish statements get all the headlines, the most consistent theme in Trumpism is that trade deals have destroyed the prospects of American middle-class workers, and this view is, if anything, even more heterodox to the parties' establishments than Trump's dumb wall.
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Two business-school researchers have published a literature survey in the Harvard Business Review that makes the case against using performance-pay to motivate senior managers.
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A federal judge called America's move to forced arbitration and bans on class-action suits -- bans favored and enabled by Scalia -- "among the most profound shifts in our legal
history."
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Americans are being evicted from their homes at record levels, and the evictees are disproportionately single mothers of color.
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Trade agreements like TPP and the US-EU TTIP are notorious for their Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) clauses, which let corporations sue governments in secret proceedings, in order to force them to get rid of environmental, safety and labor laws that reduce profits.
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Right up until Gerry Ford, American presidents routinely refused any kind of directorships, paid lecture tours, or other opportunities to commercialize the office -- instead, they relied upon the generous presidential pension, currently at $200k/year plus a staff and expenses.
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India's Internet activists have scored an epic victory in their battle against Facebook and its attempt to become gatekeeper to the Internet in India.
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They started as "Millennials for Jeb" and now they're called "Millennials Rising," but since the beginning, the dark-money-spouting Super PAC has been 95% funded by rich white guys over the age of 60.
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