Sunday, August 12. 2007
Several election cycles ago, there was a Washington flap over whether or not China was a "strategic partner" of the United States. Echoing old racist language, National Review labelled the Clinton administration's self-characterization of its China policy, "inscrutable." By the time of 2000 US presidential election campaign, candidate George W. Bush rejected the idea of a partnership, framing China instead as a competitor. In a matter of months, with Bush now at the helm of the American government, China and the US were taken to the brink of confrontation over the downing of a US airplane allegedly in Chinese airspace. That was then!
Continue reading "The Partnership"
Thursday, March 9. 2006
Forget about soaring trade deficits, volatile energy prices, and assorted attempts to inflame religious civil wars! Forget also about the slowest economic recovery in recent US history. Forbes magazine reports that the number of billionaires around the world has soared by 102 to 793! Cumulatively our billionaires are now worth $2.6 trillion. Interestingly, the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) help explain this 15% surge in the numbers.
Wednesday, November 16. 2005
Two recent research notes on immigration, one by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the other by the Boston Redevelopment Authority, provide both immigrant advocates and nativists data to support their causes. MGA, decidedly in the former camp, accepts the data adduced but believes that there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the social and policy implications issuing from the numbers.
Sunday, October 30. 2005
Amidst the indicments, failed nominations, body counts and tropical depressions, there is little reason from optimism, let alone gloating on the part of the progressive movement. Even in moral defeat, in the normally harsh glare of negative public opinion, the right-wing flaps on... Witness the suspension of Davis Bacon in NOLA, the issuing of vouchers for use at private schools, new initiatives to undermine foreign governments (Iran & Syria), etc. Even with the Bush Administration's failure to provide the necessary resources to strengthening international public health systems, it seems poised to revive the politics of fear with the Avian Flu threat. The surest index of right-wing success and resilience in the face of moral failure, though, is the corporate bottom line.
Continue reading "Scams, Scandals and Scoundrels - What's Next? Fear the Non-Scandal"
Friday, October 21. 2005
This Monday, October 24, 2005, at 1 p.m., Massachusetts Global Action members and allies from around the state will offer testimony in support of MA House Bill 1333, “An Act to Preserve Public Water and Sewer Systems.” If the reading public needs any proof regarding why the passage of a bill that will ban the private ownership or contractual control of public water and sewer systems, then one need look no further than the ongoing situation in Holyoke, MA—as covered in this week’s Republican (Springfield, MA).
Friday, October 7. 2005
MA Governor Mitt Romney, and for that matter some of the regional press, seem to think that funding retroactive raises for thousands of staffers at state public colleges is some kind of optional thing. It is not. These are unionized workers, and the raises were part of negotiated contracts that state government has been reneging on in one way or another for years.
Friday, September 23. 2005
One big story this week, that saw virtually no progressive spin in any media outlet, was the Massachusetts State Senate's passage of a nasty bill that will bring the Commonwealth down to the truly brutal welfare standards of the rest of the nation.
Continue reading "MA House Minority Leader Lees is a Bad Bad Man"
Thursday, September 15. 2005
The pro-MCAS (Massachusetts' high stakes test for the pre-college set), Business Roundtable created, non-profit, Mass Insight Education, was in the news yesterday for a new plan being flogged by a gaggle of their pet local school superintendants to group together all the lowest performing school districts in the Commonwealth, run them together as a single district through a new state administration scratch-built for the purpose, and experiment with kid-popular policies like year-round schools--all for the questionable purpose of getting higher MCAS scores out of the districts.
The cost? $35 million a year. Best reaction? Massachuetts Teachers Association Vice President Anne Wass: "I wish they would just take the money they were going to sink into this program, and give it to the schools that need it. This would do a lot more good, a lot faster, than all this red tape," she said.
Friday, September 9. 2005
The Center for Regional and Economic Policy, a "think and do tank" at Northeastern University, recently released their 2004 Housing Report Card for Boston. Their most important finding--that Boston has the most expensive housing in the U.S. and is, therefore, the most expensive city in the U.S. to live--has received significant media coverage.
What has received less attention is the report’s conclusion that young people are fleeing the state, and why building lots of public housing could reverse that trend.
Continue reading "Boston Most Expensive City; Public Housing Needed"
Friday, September 2. 2005
Here are excerpts from articles on the growing tragedy in the Gulf and New Orleans, LA (NOLA), in particular. At some later date, the American people may do a proper accounting. At that time the delayed responses and aid, the prior and continuing diversion of resources for war, and the context pressures of global warming will have to take their place alongside another matter: the calculated destruction of the public sector. For now however, please see the following selections with links that cover some of the immediate issues.
Continue reading "NOLA: Reading around"
Friday, August 19. 2005
The Boston Globe continues their strange reportage of the ongoing job crisis in Massachusetts with a piece on last month’s stats from the Division of Employment and Training.
Despite the fact that the Commonwealth has only gained back a mere 25 percent of the jobs lost during the first year of the 2001 recession, the headline reads “State Reports Robust Jobs Gains.” But as the article makes clear, while the official gains are about 9500 jobs in July (in a job market of over 3,000,000, mind you), even that tepid number is actually overstated by not properly adjusting the figure for the transitory impact of seasonal jobs.
Thursday, July 14. 2005
Continuing the assault upon the commons here in Massachusetts, selectmen in both Wellfleet and Webster have decided to consider privatization of their water services despite mounting evidence that this approach is not just morally questionable, but almost certainly financially a bust.
Continue reading "Water Privatization Threat Looms in Wellfleet and Webster"
Tuesday, July 12. 2005
It was shocking to discover that Massachusetts workers are only 31st in the nation in wasting time on the job. We blow off an average of a mere 1.9 hours a day—not including lunch. This according to a Boston Herald report on a survey by Needham, MA based Salary.com.
Monday, June 20. 2005
Early in June, a group of Yale behavioral economists published their observations on an experiment involving Capuchin monkeys. Making headlines, of course, was their unexpected and almost inadvertent discovery that a monkey exchanged sex for money. Primary investigator M. Keith Chen clearly lived up to his School of Management billing: "bringing unorthodox tools to bear on problems at the intersection of Economics, Psychology, and Biology."
The Associated Press (6/20/05) has noticed that American undergraduates are no longer see prospects of a high-income job in the tech sector as realistic. This is consistent with Gartner's research showing that 15% of tech workers will drop out of the profession by 2010.
Continue reading "Everyone a Manager?"
Saturday, June 18. 2005
Yesterday’s Boston Globe editorial “ Workforce Work” exercises the same peculiar kind of logic that has hamstrung progressives’ ability to advance a successful course of action on the ongoing Massachusetts jobs crisis. While its argument for a better-educated workforce is certainly something to support, the Globe ignores the forest for the trees.
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