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Best Web OpEds |
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| # | Date | Link |
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| #1 | 5/31/2022 | Old McDonald Backs Assault Weapons Ban: Satire Old McDonald stood outside his barn to speak with reporters at 4 a.m. The nationally televised session woke up the political world when the long-time farmer came out in favor of an assault weapons ban. The crusty farmer wasted no time taking on Republican politicians who know how to lie, and dodge, and get re-elected, but don't know how to respect the sanctity of life. He specifically took verbal aim at Sen. B... |
| #2 | 2/5/2022 | "Undue Hardship" Claim Can Lead to Student Debt Relief The Biden Administration, under pressure to wipe out up to $50,000 of student debt per person, reversed course and agreed to pull an appeal of a bankruptcy ruling it initially challenged. The ruling found that a student was entitled to bankruptcy protection because the debt incurred created an "undue hardship," according to a Newsweek article. "A Delaware bankruptcy judge discharged almost $100,000 in stud... |
| #3 | 1/24/2022 | It's Time to Grow the Texas Democratic Party from the Bottom Up Carroll G. Robinson has announced his candidacy to become Chairman of the Texas Democratic Party. The attorney and professor, who is chair of the Texas Coalition of Black Democrats, spelled out some steps the party can take to regain power in the Lonestar State, and then grow and stand up for more Texans. His Guest Opinion piece at What's Going On, my free Substack newsletter, gives him space to lay out his case. |
| #4 | 9/2/2021 | Corruptible President
Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani was formed in elite universities, given US citizenship, trained in neoliberal economics by the World Bank, and glorified in media as an “incorruptible” technocrat.
When Western media say "incorruptible," it has been proven that the opposite is true.
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| #5 | 5/27/2020 | Malicious Bots and Trolls Spread Vaccine Misinformation
Social media have become one of the preeminent ways of disseminating accurate information about vaccines. However, a lot of the vaccine information propagated across social media in the United States has been inaccurate or misleading. At a time when vaccine-preventable diseases are on the rise, vaccine misinformation has become a cause of concern to public health officials.
A 2018 study showed that a lot of anti-vacci...2 |
| #6 | 2/18/2020 | How to hold Texas legislators accountable for gun violence on their watch, a plan by Beto O'Rourke More than 3,500 Texans died in firearm deaths in 2017, the most recent year for which we have data. We claim four of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history. And in our state, women are 24% more likely to be the victims of gun homicides compared to the national average, due in part to our weak laws to disarm domestic abusers. There’s also alarming inequality when it comes to the race of the victim: the ... |
| #7 | 12/8/2019 | Socialist Finland is Actually a Capitalist Paradise
"Our income was trickling in unreliably from temporary gigs as independent contractors. Our access to health insurance was a constant source of anxiety, as we scrambled year after year among private employer plans, exorbitant plans for freelancers, and complicated and expensive Obamacare plans. With a child, we’d soon face overwhelming day-care costs. Never mind the bankruptcy-sized bills for education ahead, whether fo...4 |
| #8 | 8/12/2019 | Neoliberalism Has Met Its Match in China
…making American products cheaper abroad will do little for the American economy because we no longer have a competitive manufacturing base or products to sell. Today’s workers are largely in the service industries – cab drivers, hospital workers, insurance agents and the like. A cheaper dollar abroad just makes consumer goods at Walmart and imported raw materials for US businesses more expensive. What is m...1 |
| #9 | 3/24/2019 | MY VIEW Keeping an art university in Santa Fe (after our University of Art and Design Closed) Florence has the Lorenzo de’ Medici Academy; Savannah has Savannah College of Art and Design (with branches in Hong Kong, Atlanta and France); Los Angeles and New York both have educational entities focused on art. Something could evolve out of the very successful NM School for the Arts with its 501(c)(3) capacity, if it wants to take on such a project after the move to the old Sanbusco? We presently see only weeds... |
| #10 | 3/7/2019 | Improved education will happen - just listen to NM Education Secretary Karen Trujillo For all concerned about education, this Santa Fe New Mexican editorial is important.Most encouraging in the hearing was Education Secretary Karen Trujillo’s understanding of schools' needs to provide services (health care, food, social work, even clothing). The educational system can't improve unless children are in their seats able to learn. That’s no excuse for low performance, but children in the state need g... |
| #11 | 2/26/2019 | Growing calls for nation-wide struggle as unions work to shut down Oakland teachers strike The strike by over 3,300 Oakland, California teachers begins its third day today. The struggle has won widespread support within the working class of Oakland and across the Bay Area. It is the latest expression of the growth of the class struggle within the United States and internationally. There is strong sentiment in Oakland, throughout California and across the country for a united fight by teachers and other sections of... |
| #12 | 2/4/2019 | Gutting US foreign language education will cost us for generations (NYU Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat) Speaking a language other than English in public can be a sign that you are not a "real" American or don't "belong" here. A mathematician speaking with accent escorted off airplane, suspected of terrorism, for scribbling equations that looked like Arabic; people detained by border agents at in Montana, expelled from businesses in Florida, and verbally abused in Manhattan delicatessens, ... |
| #13 | 1/31/2018 | Race and Class Segregation Encouraged by Charter and Voucher Echo Chamber Every statistical study done about test scores in the United States for the last fifty years points to one fact: the biggest gains in test scores in the United States were achieved in the mid 1970s when schools reached their zenith of integration. We have gone back toward racial and class segregation since, and the charter and voucher movements are merely accelerating the pace of segregation.y Our current problem is that thes... |
| #14 | 12/10/2017 | Closing Schools in Chicago for Gentrification
On December 1, the Board of Education of the Chicago Public Schools
announced its plan to shutter Harper, Hope, Robeson, and Team Englewood
High Schools. All of these high schools are located in the predominantly
African American Englewood neighborhood. With their planned closing
there will be no neighborhood open enrollment public high schools left
in this community of 30,000 people.
Schools are the cornerstones o...1 |
| #15 | 10/24/2017 | New Yorker Magazine: "The Danger of President Pence"
Pence, who has dutifully stood by the President, mustering a devotional gaze rarely seen since the days of Nancy Reagan, serves as a daily reminder that the Constitution offers an alternative to Trump. The worse the President looks, the more desirable his understudy seems. The more Trump is mired in scandal, the more likely Pence’s elevation to the Oval Office becomes, unless he ends up legally entangled as well.Pence&r...11 |
| #16 | 8/7/2017 | Half of America is In or Near Poverty
The costs of food and housing and education and health care and transportation and child care and taxes have been well-defined by organizations such as the Economic Policy Institute, which calculated that a U.S. family of three would require an average of about $48,000 a year to meet basic needs; and by the Working Poor Families Project, which estimates the income required for basic needs for a family of four ...1 |
| #17 | 7/16/2017 | Pew Survey: Only 10% of Americans With a Postgraduate Degree Are "Consistently Conservative"
t's a well-worn (if not-entirely-agreed-upon) idea that college makes people more liberal. But a new report adds a twist to this: the most educated Americans have grown increasingly liberal over the last couple of decades.A report from the Pew Research Center finds a wide partisan gap between highly educated and non-highly-educated Americans. Not only that, but the share of college grads and post-graduates who are "consi...1 |
| #18 | 7/16/2017 | 35% of Americans Without a College Education Have Switched to the Republican Party Since 1992
Donald Trump declared in February that he loved "the poorly educated." And people with less formal education — generally less than a college degree — loved him back, helping him win the Republican presidential nomination.It was an event in GOP history that has been a long time in the making.
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| #19 | 5/27/2017 | Will Corporate Reformers Ever Admit They Were Wrong? After years of denigrating classroom teachers and unions who did not see the supposed righteousness of test-driven, competition-driven reform, neoliberals now condemn conservatives with the same venom for not agreeing to the top-down imposition of incentives and disincentives. Now they ridicule conservatives, as they did educators, for not agreeing that a corporate system of rewards and punishment are supposedly e... |
| #20 | 3/30/2017 | When the President Is Ignorant of His Own Ignorance
I invite anyone who thinks Trump deserves an open-ended “chance” to read this article. Are all these experts being partisan and unfair? Quote:Given the magnitude of the problems that lie ahead and the embedded contradictions that make them difficult to solve, we face precisely the kind of world President Trump is least equipped for, mentally and morally.
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| #21 | 12/1/2016 | Thousands of Africans Rise Up Against Bill Gates Interesting... isn't this the same Bill Gates who is pushing 'common core' and privatized schools in the United States? Africans are rising up against Bill Gates and forcing the closure of a chain of schools funded by the billionaire because the schools are ignoring the laws of the land and putting the “life and safety” of thousands of young children on the line. |
| #22 | 7/24/2016 | Will the DNC Vilify the Messenger rather than the Corrupt/Unresponsive Leadership, the True Cause of Revolution?
Berniecrats are going to Philly because they care about:
The country and the future of this world
Our rigged political system from the toxic money that’s
helping destroy our government.
Our disastrous foreign trade policies that have seen workers
be exploited around the globe under the guise of free trade.
Our schools, medical bills and fair wage
Our waters, the environment and sustainable energy
Po...2 |
| #23 | 2/12/2016 | There should be no compromise on Native American mascots from The Oregonian Sam Sachs sees much wrong with continuing to have Native American mascots and team names in Oregon Schools. Sachs isn't an American Indian, but is a Jewish American journalist who has researched the damage Indian mascots and team names do to young children and adolescents. "What qualifies me? I have spoken to and heard from literally hundreds of students, elders and members of the Native American community in our state wh... |
| #24 | 2/5/2016 | College Students' Answers to These Basic Questions Will Shock You The "Guns Up" mascot of the Texas Tech Red Raiders doesn’t seem to be one who would know much about the Civil War, but ask a member of the student body a series of historical questions and you will gain an understanding of what they have been trained to observe. |
| #25 | 9/15/2015 | Can Democracy Survive Our Dumbing Down Media and Education System?
The short answer to this question is an obvious and resounding "no." Citizens who have been numbed into a narcotized trance by fake infotainment media, a media controlled mostly by corporations whose bottom-lines would be hurt by a critically thinking electorate, are not the kind of citizens capable of preserving our democracy. Neither are the victims of a public mis-education system which has sold its soul to the high-stakes ...27 |
| #26 | 6/8/2015 | Salon: Bernie Sanders isn't a "crackpot" -- and the progressive agenda isn't "left-wing"
The progressive agenda isn't "left wing." (Can anyone using the term even define what "left wing" means anymore?) The progressive agenda is America's story -- from ending slavery to ending segregation to establishing a woman's right to vote to Social Security, the right to organize, and the fight for fair pay and against income inequality. Strip those from our history and you might as well contract America out to the US Chambe...4 |
| #27 | 5/28/2015 | The Great Charter School Rip-Off: Finally, the Truth Catches Up to Education 'Reform' Phonies Last week when former President Bill Clinton meandered onto the topic of charter schools, he mentioned something about an "original bargain" that charters were, according to the reporter for The Huffington Post, "supposed to do a better job of educating students." A writer at Salon called the remark "stunning" because it brought to light the fact that the overwhelming majority of charter schools do no better than traditiona... |
| #28 | 5/24/2015 | How Liberals Ruined College In a 2014 interview with New York magazine, comedian Chris Rock told journalist Frank Rich that he had stopped playing college campuses because of how easily the audiences were offended. Rock said he realized some time around 2006 that "This is not as much fun as it used to be" and noted George Carlin had felt the same way before he died. Rock attributed it to "Kids raised on a culture of 'We're not going to keep score in the ... |
| #29 | 5/4/2015 | Los Angeles teachers face political fight to defend public education
More than 35,000 teachers are currently voting on the agreement reached between the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) and the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second-largest public school system in the United States with 670,000 students.
The deal is a stab in the back to the district's teachers and other school employees, which opens the door for an escalation of the attacks on the jobs, wages and cond...1 |
| #30 | 4/18/2015 | What We Don't Mention About Unemployment "In this year's State of the Union address, President Obama mentioned jobs 19 times, repeating it more than any other word with any policy implications. 'Our economy is growing and creating jobs at the fastest pace since 1999,' he said in his opening remarks. Shortly thereafter, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) delivered the GOP rebuttal, using the word at nearly twice the rate, in admittedly less rosy terms. "Focusing on jobs in p... |
