Media

Our political class is feuding about whether Rep. Paul Ryan is a racist. Rather than fearing that this donnybrook degrades political discourse, we should welcome it.

Ryan sparked the controversy when he blamed poverty on “a tailspin of culture” in our “inner cities,” while  invoking for support Charles Murray, notorious for postulating the genetic inferiority of blacks. Within hours, Rep. Barbara Lee rebuked Ryan for launching “a thinly veiled racial attack.”

This is a needlessly emotional roller coaster.  

McDonald's has come under fire lately for cheating workers out of wages they were owed, and this is just the latest example of the spotlight being shined on the bad treatment of workers by some of America's biggest employers. 

If you ask many progressives what changes they'd like to see long-term, and encourage them to think big, they might imagine an America that looks something like Denmark. Indeed, last year Bernie Sanders traveled around Vermont with the Danish ambassador to the United States to tout all the great things that that country does. As Sanders wrote in an article after the road trip: 

New York is on the cusp of adopting a campaign finance reform that would amplify small donations with matching funds, reducing the power of big special interest money over the state's politics. It would also allow New Yorkers to claim the mantle of the first state to take back their democracy in the era of Citizens United and unprecedented campaign spending.

But adopting Fair Elections would accomplish something else badly needed in our democracy: more diverse representation in our political leadership.

SACRAMENTO – In a victory for voting rights, the state of California has agreed to mail voter registration cards to nearly 4 million Californians who have signed up for health insurance through the state health exchange, Covered California, and to ensure that Californians who apply for health benefits through the exchange going forward are provided voter registration opportunities.

A frustrating thing about the minimum wage debate is that it often plays out in a theoretical void. Some economists tout models that say pay hikes are a jobs killer, others present models that show the opposite. 

While attention focuses on Paul Ryan’s remarks about inner city culture, another dog-whistle theme continues its slow roil: food stamp abuse. More even than Ryan’s twisting narrative, the brouhaha around food stamps helps make clear that conservatives seek to conjure a much bigger bogeyman than “lazy” minorities.

Currently under consideration by state legislature, SB 975 is the third attempt to legalize payday loans (PDLs) in Pennsylvania since 2010. It claims to accommodate many of the criticisms against its predecessors, but the tweaks are superficial, and the basic impasse remains: that which makes payday lending profitable also makes it dangerous.