Explainer: What is wrong with America’s civic education

Any election demands knowledge, attention and wisdom from the whole electorate. When a campaign season does not seem to be going well, there’s often angst about whether the public has been sufficiently educated.

Anxious eyes turn to our public schools.

For instance, writing in The Atlantic recently, Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of education and history at New York University, decried the incivility of the 2016 campaign and named “a flaw with civic education.” He wrote:

Put simply, schools in the United States don’t teach the country’s future citizens how to engage respectfully across their political differences.

The 4th Largest Economy In The World Just Generated 90 Percent Of The Power It Needs From Renewables

by Jeremy Deaton

On Sunday, for a brief, shining moment, renewable power output in Germany reached 90 percent of the country’s total electricity demand.

That’s a big deal. On May 8th, at 11 a.m. local time, the total output of German solar, wind, hydropower, and biomass reached 55 gigawatts (GW), just short of the 58 GW consumed by every light bulb, washing machine, water heater and personal computer humming away on Sunday morning. See the graph below, courtesy Agora Energiewende, a German clean energy think tank. (It’s important to note that most likely, not all of that 55 GW could be used at the time it was generated due to system and grid limitations, but it’s still noteworthy that this quantity of power was produced.)

3 Simplistic Conservative Beliefs That Completely Slow All Progress

These three simplistic conservative beliefs are accepted by virtually all Republicans and, unfortunately, by many Democrats.

By John Ehrenreich

For there to be any possibility of a progressive resurgence, we have to confront the conservative narrative and address the question of why so many Americans buy in to it. George W. Bush famously told then-Senator Joseph Biden, “I don’t do nuance.” The right has been very successful at reducing complex issues to simple slogans. The examples are many: the “Contract with America,” the “Right to Work,” the “Right to Life,” “death panels,” “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns,” “weapons of mass destruction.” Complexity is a confusing issue to the Left. We are caught between wanting to imitate the Right, with its catchy phrases, and a respect for the much more complex truth.

Three sets of simplistic conservative belief stand out, accepted by virtually all Republicans and, unfortunately, by many Democrats. First: “We can’t.” The most pressing problem in the United States and the key to most of its problems, say conservatives, is our unbalanced budget and the resultant overwhelmingly large national debt. Raising taxes to deal with it is unthinkable. Higher taxes would burden ordinary taxpayers and businesses, the “job creators,” and would threaten our international competitiveness. The bottom line is that we simply can’t afford to expand government programs (for example, the social safety net).

Report: 2008 Bank Bailouts Are Still Alive

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens

The U.S. is now in its eighth year since the Wall Street bank collapse of 2008 and most members of the general public believe the bailouts are long finished. That’s a fallacy. Last Friday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report showing that there are 16 banks still involved in the original bailout program – one of which, First Bancorp, owes the government $124.97 million or 49 percent of the funds owed by the other 15 banks combined. First Bancorp continues to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock symbol, FBP. The common stock of First Bancorp has declined from over $150 a share in 2009 to close last Friday at $3.72. According to the company’s 10K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for year-end December 31, 2015, the U.S. government still owned 4.8 percent of the company’s common stock at that time.

Paul Krugman: The Making of an Ignoramus

Truly, Donald Trump knows nothing. He is more ignorant about policy than you can possibly imagine, even when you take into account the fact that he is more ignorant than you can possibly imagine. But his ignorance isn’t as unique as it may seem: In many ways, he’s just doing a clumsy job of channeling nonsense widely popular in his party, and to some extent in the chattering classes more generally.

Last week the presumptive Republican presidential nominee — hard to believe, but there it is — finally revealed his plan to make America great again. Basically, it involves running the country like a failing casino: he could, he asserted, “make a deal” with creditors that would reduce the debt burden if his outlandish promises of economic growth don’t work out.

They’re still not telling the real story: Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and the analysis you won’t hear on cable news

From Fox News to MSNBC, the pundits are too obsessed with this very second to notice the massive changes underfoot

Paul Rosenberg

After every presidential primary, we were treated to a new round of conventional wisdom about what things mean for both parties going forward. Yet, there’s every reason to be deeply skeptical of these discussions among people who never saw either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders coming. They represent a chattering class that both expected and normalized a “war of dynasties” between Bushes and the Clintons, then marveled at the “depth” of the Republican bench, and spent months obsessing over whether Joe Biden would run, as if he were a figure of mythic proportions.

You can laugh, if you want, but the out-of-touch nature of these treasured campaign narratives now lives on in a new form: an obsessive focus on this election cycle, when, if anything, the one thing it has to tell us is that much larger, long-range changes are afoot, and have been creeping up on us, below the radar, for quite some time. If you’re going to cover politics almost exclusively as a horse race, it makes perfect sense, of course. But that narrow-minded focus is an integral part of the very system that voters are furiously struggling to reject.

Paul Krugman: Truth and Trumpism

How will the news media handle the battle between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump? I suspect I know the answer — and it’s going to be deeply frustrating. But maybe, just maybe, flagging some common journalistic sins in advance can limit the damage. So let’s talk about what can and probably will go wrong in coverage — but doesn’t have to.

First, and least harmful, will be the urge to make the election seem closer than it is, if only because a close race makes a better story. You can already see this tendency in suggestions that the startling outcome of the fight for the Republican nomination somehow means that polls and other conventional indicators of electoral strength are meaningless.

They Pretend to Think, We Pretend to Listen

Liberalism in the tank

Ken Silverstein

To understand just how Thomas Friedman, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Gail Collins have been repurposed as purveyors of bold new ideas, it helps to see how the world of liberal think tanks has been upended, ever so gently, by a steady onrush of corporate funding—and corporate-friendly policy agendas

Try to conjure up the dullest, most vapid intellectual experience you can possibly imagine. A Matthew Perry film festival. A boxed set of Kenny G’s entire discography. Al Gore “in conversation” with Wolf Blitzer.

Now imagine something worse. Far, far worse. Once you’ve hit the speculative bottom of the unexamined life, you’d be hard pressed to outdo Thomas Friedman holding forth on “Climate Change and the Arab Spring.” What’s still more disturbing is that Friedman’s maunderings—unlike the foregoing litany of intellectual failures—actually took place, and were recorded for posterity, during a panel event this February at the Center for American Progress, America’s most influential liberal think tank. The great globalizing muse of the New York Times op-ed page was joined on stage by Anne-Marie Slaughter, the Princeton University professor and former State Department deputy to Hillary Clinton.

You may be assured that the trite speculations came fast, flat, and furious. Between numerous mentions of his 2008 book Hot, Flat, and Crowded (not to be confused with 2005’s The World Is Flat), Freidman offered a mix of insights, delivered with his trademark flair for anecdotage in the vein of a Mad Libs pamphlet. Friedman informed the audience, for example, that algebra is an Arabic word—and so clearly the challenge ahead for the tumultuous Arab world is to integrate algebra as well as Islam into its emerging governments. He then went on to sagely counsel the crowd that understanding the Islamic world requires examining ethnic and religious divisions, as opposed to more recent national rivalries—as though no one else had ever heard about the nearly 1,400-year-old Sunni-Shia split that emerged after Muhammad’s death.

ALEC Appoints New Chair To Climate Denial Task Force

Submitted by Jamie Corey

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has named a new corporate chair for its task force that works to oppose action to tackle climate change: Jennifer Jura of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA).

NRECA is a powerful trade association that represents more than 900 independent electric utilities. Its annual spending lobbying Congress regularly exceeds $2 million each year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. This has included lobbying in support of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. It's Political Action Committee gives nearly $3 million per electoral cycle, with the majority going to Republicans.

FCC Approves Horrible Merger, Hurting Consumers Nationwide

Bad news: According to several news reports, the FCC has voted to approve the Charter-Time Warner Cable merger.

by Mary Alice Crim

With Chairman Tom Wheeler at the helm, the agency ignored hundreds of thousands of people who urged it to block this disastrous deal. Instead of standing with the people who use the Internet, he sided with the companies that want to control it.

Here’s Where Things Stand:

Charter now rivals Comcast in size. Together the two companies will offer service to nearly 80 percent of U.S. households. In more than half of Charter’s territory, customers will have no other real option for bundled broadband and pay-TV services. Without real competition, Charter can charge whatever it wants.

And Charter has to charge more: This deal is saddling it with nearly $27 billion in new debt. To repay that, Charter will have to raise its already steep prices. This merger will hit low-income communities and low-income people of color the hardest, forcing many offline.

Climate change is corroding our values, says Naomi Klein

The need for fossil fuels is destroying regions and communities, causing war and famine in the process, argues the activist and author

John Vidal

Climate change is spawning injustice, racism, intolerance and wars, according to author and political activist Naomi Klein.

“It is not about things getting hotter and wetter but things getting meaner and uglier, unless we change the corrosive values that are pitting people against each other,” she said in a lecture held in memory of Palestinian literary critic and political activist Edward Said at the Royal Festival Hall in London’s Southbank Centre on Wednesday.

“Fossil fuels, which are the principal driver of climate change, require the sacrifice of whole regions and people. Sacrificial zones like the Niger delta and the tar sands in Alberta, Canada, dot the world.

Paul Krugman: The Diabetic Economy

LISBON — Things are terrible here in Portugal, but not quite as terrible as they were a couple of years ago. The same thing can be said about the European economy as a whole. That is, I guess, the good news.

The bad news is that eight years after what was supposed to be a temporary financial crisis, economic weakness just goes on and on, with no end in sight. And that’s something that should worry everyone, in Europe and beyond.

Doctors call for single-payer health reform, cite need to move beyond Affordable Care Act

American Journal of Public Health publishes physicians' call for sweeping single-payer reform with detailed proposal signed by over 2,200 doctors nationwide

Physicians for a National Health Program

n a dramatic show of physician support for deeper health reform - and for making a decisive break with the private insurance model of financing medical care - 2,231 physicians called today [Thursday, May 5] for the creation of a publicly financed, single-payer national health program that would cover all Americans for all medically necessary care.

Single-payer health reform, often called "Medicare for All," has been a hotly debated topic in the presidential primaries, thanks in part to it being a prominent plank in the platform of Sen. Bernie Sanders. The new physicians' proposal is strictly nonpartisan, however.