Oct 22nd, 2008
Way back in August 2006, when I was living in San Francisco and writing for SF Weekly, I had a story come out about Communities of Opportunity, a multimillion-dollar public/private partnership between the city, local foundations, and corporations to help SF’s poorest residents. My basic thesis was that the city was doing a killer job [...]
Oct 21st, 2008
I get why politicians spend so much time talking about helping the middle class. Because of the economic segregation of America, we all think we’re middle class, even if we’re making $400,000 per year. So we think the campaigners are talking to us, and then we’re more likely to vote for them. But for much [...]
Oct 17th, 2008
I reviewed I.O.U.S.A., a frightening work of documentary film about the national debt and the looming uber-financial crisis, for the upcoming issue of Miller-McCune. It’s an imperfect movie, but does a pretty amazing job of describing some important issues that are super-boring and hard to explain. The basic argument is that the budget deficit (the [...]
Oct 15th, 2008
I’m now officially a HuffingtonPost blogger. If you live in Chicago, check out their local site, edited by ex-Sun-Times reporter Ben Goldberger. It’s clearly still in beta, but they’re doing a better job of aggregating Chicago news/opinion than any other local outlet.
Oct 14th, 2008
Another day, another bogus trend story in the Chicago Tribune, this time on the front page. The headline “Is College Worth It?” says it all — the sort of manufactured, fear-inducing question headline typical of the new Trib. The story is almost as disingenuous. The writer found a cocktail waitress who is making — well, [...]
Oct 13th, 2008
I received several e-mails & comments (mostly positive) after writing about the Chicago Council’s midwest/globalization conference. Their suggestions and links sent me to two groups of under-40s who are actually engaging on these issues: Rust Belt Bloggers (self-explanatory) Great Lakes Urban Exchange (young idealist types trying to put together a network to make a rust [...]
Oct 10th, 2008
I have a new review in the upcoming issue of Miller-McCune, recently posted online, of a book called The Private Abuse of the Public Interest: Market Myths and Policy Muddles. The book’s main argument is that the rampant deregulation that began with the Nixonian Friedmanites is a very bad thing. They claim that letting markets [...]
Oct 8th, 2008
On Monday, I attended the first Globalization and the Midwest conference, organized by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. (I’ve been on deadline since then, so I didn’t get a chance to write about what I heard and saw.) This is a macro issue that affects basically everything I write about, since most of what [...]