As promised, a couple of good Labor Day reads: From The New Republic, we’ve got this personal essay reflecting upon the cultural loss we’ve suffered in our weakened labor movement. From The American Prospect, there’s this article detailing why a strong labor movement matters.  I’ll highlight my favorite paragraph for you now: “A good jobRead moreRead more

It’s an accepted truism that late summer/back-to-school time makes for a slow news cycle.  Opportunists, like someone I’ll refer to as “Blenn Veck”, take advantage of this to get their name into the headlines as much as possible.  Others look to the slowdown in national events as a period offering more in-depth analysis, or aRead moreRead more

This past spring, “Ugly Betty” ended its four-year run.  I had stopped watching the show after its (not very good) second season, but when I heard it was over, I headed over to abc.com to see how it ended — and the final episodes were so well-done that I joined Netflix for the sole purposeRead moreRead more

(The title is a lame Monopoly pun.  I apologize.) Being a good union-loving, tree-hugging, anti-corporate liberal as I am, I have read so many takedowns of Wal-Mart that I can’t even keep track of all the reasons why they are evil.  This essay, however (a few years old, but still excellent) takes a new perspective:Read moreRead more

The New York Review of Books has an excellent essay discussing a bit of history that we’ve been quick to forget: that Muslims are hardly the first religious group to be seen as a radical threat to some kind of innately Protestant “Americanism”.  The New York Review of Books also gets a gold star forRead moreRead more

Two good posts (both short) about America’s particular resistance to sensible regulations: this one, from Grist, discusses plastic bag use; this excellent piece, from Mother Jones, looks at the differing approaches between the US and Europe when it comes to regulatory policy.  The European version, I must say, seems to have a lot more logicRead moreRead more

Maybe it’s our persistent idealism of the American Dream, but when we think of the richest people in America today, there are three names that come up most often: Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Oprah.  These are reassuring reminders that hard work can bring great success (no matter what color you are!), and that greatRead moreRead more

I’m a bit under the weather, so I’m just going to continue posting interesting links rather than try to say anything worthwhile myself: This bit, from NPR, does a wonderful job of taking Dr. Laura to task for her recent spaz-out over her “first amendment rights”.  The situation itself is minor, but the point itRead moreRead more

This story has been bugging me since I read it last night.  Look, tenure is an imperfect system, but why has it become such a knee-jerk reaction to blame labor for organizational faults?  Union membership is way down in the US, and as we saw during the Great Auto Company Crisis of ‘09, people areRead moreRead more

Currently, the British government is pushing the idea of something called the “Big Society,” a response to the financial crisis in which markets are more regulated and the public sector is cared for, with a (hypothetical) resulting increase in both opportunity and access.  It’s the sort of social-program-heavy government intervention that most liberals were expectingRead moreRead more