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Lessons from the Crisis: Ending Too Big to Fail - Minneapolis Federal Reserve President

Neel Kashkari, Pres. Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
The Federal Reserve's newest bank president, a Republican who served as a top Treasury Department official during the financial crisis, called for policy makers to consider breaking up big banks to prevent future government bailouts. His proposals also include: Turning large banks into public utilities; and taxing leverage throughout the financial system. Seven years after the crisis, it is now time to move forward and end TBTF.

New York Times Invents Left-Leaning Economists to Attack Bernie Sanders

Dean Baker; Doug Henwood
All the news that's fit...well, it seems the NYT news story has been tailored to fit the editorial views of the paper. There are undoubtedly many left of center economists who have serious objections to the proposals Sanders has put forward, there are also many who have publicly indicated support for them. He has not given a fully worked out proposal for many of his ideas, nor is it reasonable to expect a fully worked out proposal from a candidate for the presidency.

Tidbits - February 18, 2016 - Reader Comments: Protest Music; How Social Change Happens; Bernie, Hillary, Kissinger and Scalia; Announcements and more...

Portside
Reader Comments: How Social Change Happens; Bernie, Hillary, Kissinger and Scalia; AFL-CIO Election Survey; DNC Lets Lobbyists Back In; Bernie as the Peace Candidate and Remembering 1972; Teaching - With Protest Music; Obama's Military Aid to Israel; Announcements - 50 Years After the Mississippi Summer Project; Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism; Labor for Bernie and Beyond - National Meeting;

The Radicalism of Shelley

Matthew Cookson rs21 - revolutionary socialism in the 21st century
Portraying her subject as a radical voice of the dispossessed, author Jacqueline Mulhallen presents the poet Shelley less as a romantic and more as a traitor to his own class for his revolutionary politics. Here is the Shelley who, though writing when the British working class was in its infancy, grasped and wanted to overturn the oppression under which they lived. It's that red Shelley who inspired among others Karl Marx, even as his poetry became part of the canon.

Autoworker Union Endorsement Could Come Too Late To Influence Michigan Primary

Emily Lawler MLive
Senator Bernie Sanders visits United Automobile Workers Local 600 in Dearborn, Michigan. The problem is that the union won't endorse any candidate until after the Michigan primary. AFSCME which has 60,000 to 65,000 in Michigan endorsed Secretary Hillary Clinton will be campaigning for her. Other unions will be campaigning for both candidates.

The Enduring Solidarity of Whiteness

TA-NEHISI COATES The Atlantic
Black poverty is fundamentally distinct from white poverty—and so cannot be addressed without grappling with racism.

Can the New Left Govern Europe?

Conn Hallinan Foreign Policy in Focus
After a year of earthshaking victories and devastating setbacks, Europe's new progressive parties are slowly learning how to balance governance with activism.

My Visit to Logan Prison

Alan Mills Uptown People's Law Center
Alan Mills, executive director of Uptown People's Law Center (UPLC), shares the stories of several women incarcerated at Logan Prison in Illinois who are members of the plaintiff class in UPLC's recently-settled case challenging the way people with mental illness are treated in Illinois prisons (Rasho v. Baldwin). This essay was originally posted on UPLC's blog.

Lester K. Spence's 'Knocking The Hustle'

Brandon Soderberg The City Paper
The idea that "everything and everybody everywhere should operate as if they were a business" has emerged a working definition of contemporary neoliberalism. Another way of putting it is that "everything and everybody everywhere" should actually be a business. Lester K. Spence shows how this philosophy pains most of us while focusing on neoliberalism's effects on black politics. Brandon Soderberg offers an introduction to Spence's argument.