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How Wall Street Skims Higher Education

Wall Street skim is driving up the cost of college. Students are saddled with higher tuition and student debt. Taxpayers are covering risky loans and high interest rate for institutional borrowing. And for-profit colleges are overcharging students to drive profit.

Tidbits - May 29, 2014

Portside
Reader Comments - Cecily McMillan; Prison Labor; William Worthy; Syria; Timothy Geithner and Wall Street's Bailout; College Debt; U.S. Subversion in Latin America; Venezuela; Announcements - This Weekend - Left Forum (May 30 - June 1) - Reform and/or Revolution: Imagining a World with Transformative Justice; Raising America's Pay - Launches June 4; Meet UnionWiki; Call for Papers - Fighting Inequality: Class, Race, and Power

Michael Lewis' 'Flash Boys'

Janet Maslin New York Times
Lewis’s depicts the kind of high-frequency trading that can transmit stock market information from New York to Chicago and back in one-tenth of the blink of an eye and has divided the world of stock traders into the haves and have-nots, depending on what speeds they can afford.

Tidbits - March 27, 2014

Portside
Reader Comments - Ukraine; Russia; Climate Change; Wall Street; Capitalism; Wanted: Populist Movement of the 99%; Angela Davis; Charter Schools; Government Spying, NSA; NCAA Racism; TPP Announcements - Left Labor Project - Election Strategy Discussion -New York -Apr 3; Need 100 Jewish voices in New York against anti-boycott bill; 2014 Moving Beyond Capitalism Conference; New resource - Politics and ideology in the American Historical Profession

Sins of the Fatcat

Andrew Cockburn Harpers
... most people are aware that Wall Street crashed the economy and rode out of town scot-free, collecting unimaginably huge bonuses along the way. But vagueness breeds passivity. Fortunately, we now have Bob Ivry’s Seven Sins of Wall Street as an indispensable guide for tracking down live villains and unburied bodies. By the time you reach the end, all the sheer fury anyone with the merest flutter of a moral pulse felt back in 2008/2009 wells up again, white hot.

Wolves

Jeff Danziger amuniversal.com

Profits Over Pupils: Philadelphia's True Priorities

George Bezanis From the Teacher's Desk
Should public school educators be as optimistic about the coming year as the rising stock prices of our numerous Fortune 500 corporations? Not so fast. As those entities earning record profits continue to shirk their responsibilities, the District is forced to balance its budget on the backs of the only individuals they have some sort of control over - their teachers.

Overthrow the Speculators

Chris Hedges Truthdig
We can wrest back control of our economy, and finally our political system, from corporate speculators only by building local movements that decentralize economic power through the creation of hundreds of publicly owned state, county and city banks.

Wall Street Moving in on American Dream

Mary Ellen Podmolik Chicago Tribune
The arrival of national landlords has raised questions about the long-term effects on mom-and-pop landlords, neighborhoods and affordability.
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