Portside

Twenty years since its passage, NAFTA has displaced workers on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, depressed wages, weakened unions, and set the terms of the neoliberal global economy.

“The numbers make it look like an epidemic. Well, it’s not. It’s preposterous,” Dr. Conners, a psychologist and professor emeritus at Duke University, said in a subsequent interview. “This is a concoction to justify the giving out of medication at unprecedented and unjustifiable levels.”

The biggest issue . . . is that this is a budget that will continue to impose a drag on the economy . . . While the stimulus approved by Congress boosted growth and added between 2-3 million jobs, the steep deficit reduction of the last three years has slowed the economy, costing millions of jobs. With the housing bubble gone, we are missing close to $1 trillion in annual demand and no mechanism in the private sector that will cause it to replace this demand on its own.

But there is another element to the changing political landscape in Honduras, and that is the role of the country’s grassroots resistance movements, which will not give up their struggles for land, fair wages and justice even after the last votes have been tallied. The country’s public sector is in turmoil, and while doctors and teachers are currently working, fresh strikes cannot be ruled out in the new year.

If we understood the important role that our government played in segregating our nation, we would feel a greater obligation to press our government to integrate it. But if we believe that segregation was an unintended byproduct of private forces, it is too easy to say there is little now that can be done about it.

Many subprime borrowers were led straight into the debt buzz-saw by companies that were actively trying to "squeeze" every last bit of revenue out of their clients. There were people who qualified for prime loans who got nudged into more lucrative alternative loans, and people who had simple 30-year fixed mortgages who found themselves frantically trying to pay off unforeseen penalties.

From Silicon Valley, the Rocketship chain of charter schools is hoping to expand across the country. It’s backed by some of the biggest names in the tech world and claims high test scores. But what are these schools preparing kids for? And what are the real costs of Rocketship's low-cost model?