Thanks to the college admissions scandal the issue of inequality and access to postsecondary education is now in our national conversation, but despite the glitz of the bribery scandal, the real issue is a much more mundane form of reverse affirmative action that allows wealthy Americans to dominate college admissions, muscling out better candidates from poorer backgrounds, especially Black students.
Tag: everybody knows
Americans have no savings, with good reason: housing, education and health care costs are out of control, wages are stagnant, and the Fed has suppressed interest rates
The American savings crisis is a time-bomb, as multiple generations hurtle toward retirement with effectively no savings, and experts are now saying that having $1 million in the bank on retirement day isn’t enough. Future generations will either have to let their parents starve or compromise their own ability to produce the next generation while caring for the previous one (this is the crisis underway in China and Japan right now).
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Obama’s legacy: eight years of not holding executives criminally responsible for their companies’ misdeeds
The most remarkable criminal justice story of 2017 is that the FBI has arrested a real corporate criminal, a VW executive who tried to engineer a coverup of the Dieselgate scandal, and that he might go to jail — it’s remarkable because the Obama administration spent eight years resolutely not sending criminal executives to jail, preferring instead to let their corporations buy their way out of criminal sanctions with huge fines, a doctrine pioneered by Obama Attorney General Eric Holder back when he worked for Bill Clinton’s administration. But while Clinton rejected this idea, Obama put it into practice.
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Politics got weird because neoliberalism failed to deliver
Ian Welsh says that the USSR collapsed because its promises — “a cornucopia and a withering away of the state” — conspicuously failed to materialize; now, neoliberalism’s promises (“If the rich have more money, they will create more jobs; Lower taxes will lead to more prosperity; Increases in housing and stock market prices will increase prosperity for everyone; Trade deals and globalization will make everyone better off”) are likewise being shown to be lies, and so we’re in crisis.
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Leonard Cohen wrote the perfect anthem for our times
I first heard it in Pump Up the Volume, a severely underrated movie about kids and rebellion that was always in my mind while I wrote Little Brother.
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Everybody knows: FBI won’t confirm or deny buying cyberweapons from Hacking Team
Back in July, a hacker dumped the emails and other files from Hacking Team, Italy’s notorious cyber-arms dealer. Coincidentally, Vice had recently filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI, asking if they were buying cyberweapons from Hacking Team.
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