Media

White flight, corporate flight . . .

I grew up just outside Detroit and have felt an ache in my heart for this bleeding city for so many years now. It's long been one of the country's designated loser cities, beginning in the 1960s, when change hit it hard. The phrase at the time was "urban blight," a social cancer with unexamined causes that, in the ensuing years, has gotten progressively worse.

BBC News reports on the President's recently announced executive order, which could make companies pay overtime to America's white collar workers.

Kelli Jo Griffin will stand trial next week in Iowa for registering to vote. Unfortunately, Griffin happens to live in a state where such activity is illegal for people like her with a past felony conviction. When she registered to participate in an election last year in her small town of Montrose, she checked on the form that she was not disqualified from voting due to a felony.

Adolph Reed, Jr., has a dispiriting essay in the current issue of Harper's on the "long, slow surrender of American liberals." He argues there is no longer a "dynamic left" and charts the decline of a forceful alternative progressive vision over the past half century.

In theory, Congress should pass laws and legislation (which hit a record low in 2013)—and in a representative democracy, its members should listen to constituents and reflect their concerns and priorities.

In an economic address last year, President Obama declared that his highest priority would be addressing economic inequality and reversing the long erosion of middle-class security. “Whatever executive authority I have to help the middle class, I'll use it,” the president announced. He wasn’t kidding.

Anyone who wonders how employers managed to so completely rig the labor market in their favor should familiarize themselves with the research of David Weil, a professor at Boston University who's been nominated by President Obama to lead the Wage and Hour Division at the U.S. Department of Labor.

The unprecedented bankruptcy proceedings for Detroit lay bare the witch’s brew of fiscal devastation caused by the Great Recession and poor policy decisions that plague state and local governments throughout the land.