“As the sociologist Mitchell L. Stevens has put it, “affluent families fashion an entire way of life organized around the production of measurable virtue in children.” Measurable, here, means capable of showing up on a college application. We are not teaching to the test; we’re living to it.””
“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.”’ Warlock-Williams””
“but then William Vanderbilt stepped forward to pay the entire expense. The U.S. Navy bought a ship in Egypt expressly to move the piece.””
“Congress passed the measure, and Grant signed the bill on his last full day in office, giving General William Tecumseh Sherman, commander of the U.S. Army, the opportunity to choose which island.””
“But the pull of newspapering was strong. Eighteen months later, Grozier moved to New York and became personal secretary to Joseph Pulitzer, the Hungarian-born editor of the New York World and a journalism legend in the making. Pulitzer pioneered a formula of compelling human-interest stories, social justice crusades, and sensational battles with William Randolph Hearst and the New York Journal. Under Pulitzer, the World became the most profitable and most copied newspaper in the nation. Edwin Grozier had a front-row seat, and he was in thrall to Pulitzer: “I never saw anyone to equal him. His mind was like a flash of lightning, illuminating the dark places.””
“The Clinton administration’s Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLBA) of 1999, also known as the Financial Services Modernization Act, is probably the most illustrious example of this deregulatory frenzy: this repealed the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933, which separated commercial and investment banking and is widely credited with giving the United States 50 crisis-free years of financial stability. With the passage of the Financial Services Modernization Act, commercial banks, investment banks, securities firms and insurance companies were once again allowed to consolidate. Today, many consider the repeal (followed in 2004 by the lifting of the leverage cap on US investment banks) to be an important cause of the late 2000s financial crisis.””
“The European Union has effectively become a sovereign power with the authority to impose budgetary rules and structural reforms on member states outside democratic procedures and without democratic control.””
“It matters because the emerging civic structures and spatial arrangements of the digital era will profoundly affect our access to economic opportunities and public services, the character and content of public discourse,””
“Nations do not exist in isolation. Peoples have always roamed the globe in search of different opportunities. Nations principally trade to expand their consumption possibilities. In a world where we produce to consume, receiving goods and services is better in material terms than sending them elsewhere.””
“While export spending boosts national income, we consider exports to be a cost in the sense that they deprive the domestic population of the use of thereal resources that are used up in the production of the goods and services sold abroad.””
“An MMT understanding allows us to appreciate that there would be no financial impediment for a government building national industries, funding research and development, providing first-class universities and apprenticeship training and the rest. If a nation with its own currency slides into oblivion by closing its manufacturing sector, cutting career public sector jobs and relying on low-paid and precarious service sector jobs for employment creation, then that has little to do with running external deficits, andeverything to do with political choices.””
“For less developed countries, a currency-issuing government faces different issues to that of an advanced nation, especially where essentials like food and energy must be imported. In the case of less developed countries, specific problems cannot be easily overcome by just increasing fiscal deficits.””