Top Menu

Subjects Archives: Inequality

Flipping the Race Card

Teaching ethnic studies is hard.  You have, on one side, folks who would universalize all human experience, not out of meanness but out of sincerity: “I know how you feel,” they say, “because my uncle had a similar experience, and let me tell you. . . .”  Of course the uncle’s experience is nothing like […]

Continue Reading

Migrant Workers in Post-Gaddafi Libya

In Libya after Muammar Gaddafi, the situation of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa is worsening. Most of them had come to this rich African country looking for jobs. Now, thousands of them are arrested and taken to detention centers, where they are targeted for abuse by their captors, most of whom are illegal armed groups.

Continue Reading

Free Market Health Care: True Stories

I recently wrote an article about my personal experiences in dealing with the medical system while undergoing surgery (“Free Market Medicine: A Personal Account”).  In response, a number of readers sent me accounts of their own experiences trying to get well in America. Health care in this country is hailed by conservative boosters as “the […]

Continue Reading

Human Rights in the New Libya

Victor Nieto is a cartoonist in Venezuela.  Cf. “A Libyan diplomat who served as ambassador to France for Muammar Gaddafi died from torture within a day of being detained by a militia from Zintan, Human Rights Watch said in a statement on Friday. . . .  On January 26, humanitarian group Medecins Sans Frontieres said […]

Continue Reading

Occupying the Immigration Debate

People in the United States may not be as rabidly anti-immigrant as we’ve been led to believe. An article posted on the Center for American Progress website in December, “The Public’s View of Immigration,” summarizes five recent U.S. opinion polls.  Authors Philip E. Wolgin and Angela Maria Kelley find that while the media and the […]

Continue Reading

Free-Market Medicine — A Personal Account

When I recently went to Alta Bates hospital for surgery, I discovered that legal procedures take precedence over medical ones.  I had to sign intimidating statements about financial counseling, indemnity, patient responsibilities, consent to treatment, use of electronic technologies, and the like. One of these documents committed me to the following: “The hospital pathologist is […]

Continue Reading

Camila Vallejo, Proud of Being Communist

  The Chilean student leader doesn’t mince her words. “The ideas of communists today have real significance for they make sense in the context of people’s awakening,” said Camila Vallejo, a militant of the Communist Youths and one of the main leaders of the student movement which has been demanding structural reforms of education for […]

Continue Reading

Prison vs. Princeton

  It costs the state of New Jersey more money to hold a prisoner for one year than to fund one Princeton student’s tuition.  Here’s an overview of the disturbing trend of prioritizing prison over higher education in the US. PublicAdministration.Net was created as an online informational resource for individuals looking to pursue public administration-related […]

Continue Reading

A Requiem for Humanitarianism

There is no history of a revolution which is not at the same time a history of barbarism.  (Inspired by Walter Benjamin) And the almost live pictures of Colonel Qaddafi’s freshly killed body, covered in human blood, dirt and mud, dragged on the streets of Sirte, followed by the footage of his rotting corpse on […]

Continue Reading

The American Revolution (#OWS Remix)

Has Wall Street become the site, the space, the barricaded-yet-porous position of the next American Revolution?  Is Zuccotti Park, the 33,000-square-foot privately owned yet publically accessible sliver of real estate across the street from the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan the new streets of Chicago (October 1968) or the new streets of Seattle […]

Continue Reading

Health Care Employment Drives Weak Job Growth

The Labor Department reported that the economy added 103,000 jobs in September.  This increase, together with upward revisions to the prior two months’ data brought average job growth over the last three months to 99,000 per month, almost exactly the number needed to keep pace with the growth of the labor force.  Consistent with this […]

Continue Reading