Lynn Parramore

Fire Teachers; Hire Guns: The New Plan for National Security

This week’s civics lessons for America’s schoolchildren: Your education is a threat to national security.

The connection between war spending and education budgets was thrown into stark relief as Congress wrestled with the passage of a $33 billion supplemental war bill. To recap: the House tried to add $20 billion in new domestic spending to the bill, including $10 billion to save teachers’ jobs. But last Thursday, the Senate struck out the education assistance needed to save teacher jobs in the fall. Majority Leader Harry Reid conceded that the Senate will have to look for other ways to pass education funding.…

Trading Places: A North/South Reversal on Civil Rights

Raleigh native Lynn Parramore on the Wake Country public school system’s praiseworthy diversity policy.

Today in Raleigh, North Carolina, protesters have raised a ruckus against the actions of the newly-elected school board. Certain members, supported by local Republicans, want to separate schools into racially distinct enclaves of rich and poor by killing a long-standing diversity policy. There have been lawsuits, candlelight vigils, news conferences, and arrests. A month before the rally, NC NAACP President Rev. William Barber was hauled to jail from a sit-in. He’s on the steps of the capital today along with church groups and other citizens determined not to roll back…

Fed Up with FinReg: Rooseveltians React

With financial reform on its way to the President’s desk, the Roosevelt Institute’s fellows and colleagues weigh in on the bill’s weaknesses and the way forward.

Robert Johnson, Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow and Director of the Project on Global Finance; Executive Director, INET:

Scott Brown made them go back to the woodshed, and that made them look worse once again, but other than that, the bill is the same industry-crafted/not-up-to-the-task/so-called “accomplishment” that leaves 4 out of 5 Americans in the Bloomberg survey yesterday suggesting that they wouldn’t feel protected from a future financial crash.  They missed on Too Big to Fail, on Derivatives…

ND20 Interview: Elizabeth Warren Says Big Banks Must Stop Blocking Reform

Senate Dems are making the final push on financial reform this week, but will big banks really change the way they do business? Or will we still be pawns in a game rigged in their favor?  I caught up with Elizabeth Warren to talk about the need to reform Wall Street culture, the pernicious influence of bank lobbies, and the debt-fueled threat to America’s middle class. **Warren will discuss these issues and more at this weekend’s Hamptons Institute symposium, sponsored by Guild Hall in collaboration with the Roosevelt Institute (details below).

LP: Has the financial crisis changed the culture of Wall Street?

EW:…

Of Agee, Oil, and Outhouses

Artists can change hearts and minds, and the government can transform lives. But sometimes it takes a radical approach.

Summer, 1936. The Depression rages. Journalist James Agee and photographer Walker Evans road-trip down to Alabama to produce an article for Fortune magazine on the plight of white sharecroppers. They come out of America’s agricultural netherworld with one of the most influential books of the 20th century, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

This book — as startling and vivid today as it was then — plunges readers headlong into the lives of three families condemned to debt and hunger by a system that…

James K. Galbraith’s Testimony Blasts Fiscal Commission

James K. Galbraith, one of the country’s most respected economists and a ND20 contributor, offered a statement today to the Fiscal Commission on behalf of Americans for Democratic Action, an organization co-founded in 1949 by (among  others) by Eleanor Roosevelt. We at New Deal 2.0 recommend that you grab a coffee, sit back, and read this elegant, blistering, and brilliant description of why the Commission is both misguided and malignant.

Read full text of testimony here.

For a quick snapshot, Galbraith’s testimony is divided into ten sections, which address the following points:

-That the Commission’s work is illegitimate

-That current deficits and rising…

“Disappointing and Inspiring”: Warren, Johnson, Black and More React to FinReg

Roosevelt Institute fellows and colleagues explain the good, the bad, and the ugly on the FinReg bill.

Robert Johnson, Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow and Director of the Project on Global Finance; Executive Director, INET:

The financial reform legislation is both disappointing and inspiring. The legislation is the product of a broken government process where dollars overwhelm voters. Lobbying in the gazillions predictably stopped the needed major structural reforms that were revealed by the scope and scale of the financial crisis. As a result we still have “too big to fail” firms with the perverse incentive (subsidy) that their default-free status confers upon them.…

Summer Read: Grapes of Wrath Revisited

The title sounds a bit dated and strange. But the book’s message could scarcely be more contemporary.

In 1939, Steinbeck lobbed a Molotov cocktail into the fortifications of American complacency. As you’ll recall from your freshman lit course, Grapes follows a Depression-era family of sharecroppers as they battle the human-made ecological disaster of the Dust Bowl that ruined their livelihood and contend with the capitalist forces that threaten to crush their spirit. Through Steinbeck’s unflinching portrayal, we see the Joad family sputtering on dust clouds, chased from their homes by bank reps, fleeced by con men, and beaten down as they search…

Gen. Ric Sanchez, Bobby Kennedy, Jr., James Spader, and others talk accountability

Last night at NYU’s Skirball Center, a packed house gathered to address a question that we, as Americans, have been loath to ask ourselves. Just how much do we value accountability?

The Culture Project (which galvanizes social change through art) presented the second theater-journalism-film event in its “Blueprint for Accountability” series. The program, focused on the various ways that the rule of law in America has been shredded, featured archival footage, dramatic readings by James Spader, Liev Schreiber, Mariska Hargitay, and others, and a panel moderated by the feisty Vince Warren, Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Panel participants included outed CIA…

Superfreaky: The Wild World of Geoengineering

Geoengineering will follow Murphy’s Law of Unintended Consequences: whatever can go wrong, will, and it’s probably something you didn’t think of.

Our ancestors imagined the gods as beings who controlled the forces of nature. Zeus hurled the thunderbolts. Aeolus ruled the winds. Even Yahweh launched his career as a volcano god. They used their powers to keep human beings in line, and didn’t hesitate to wipe us out when we didn’t behave.

No wonder we have always dreamed of turning the tables. Ever since Prometheus stole fire from the gods, harnessing the forces of nature has been a human obsession.

Is geoengineering the…