Elizabeth Warren Archives - Public Seminar

Corporations

Inside the Fight to Save Local Journalism

State and federal lawmakers are aiming at Big Tech’s ability to destroy local news

April 11, 2023 • by Pat Garofalo

The decline in local news coverage is bad for communities for a whole host of reasons. ...

Inside the Fight to Save Local Journalism

Education

Biden Must Not Bail on Four Million Older Americans

The President is quietly betraying a generation of indebted students

November 15, 2022 • by Chivas Sandage

The fact that representatives referred only to “students” and “young people” suggests that they didn’t yet know it is older Americans who are being abruptly left behind. We were never warned that we could soon be treated as “a separate and unequal class.”...

Biden Must Not Bail on Four Million Older Americans

Education

Student Loans: The Origins of a Racket

The road to student loan hell was paved with good intentions

February 18, 2021 • by Devan Lindey

"Education can lift people and propel the country’s economy, but it can’t do that if it leaves many of its beneficiaries weighed down by life-altering amounts of debt." - Devon Lindey ...

History

Why Race Still Matters

We don’t need to know what race is — we need to know what it does

December 9, 2020 • by Alana Lentin

————— The work, most prominently, of anthropologist Franz Boas and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois in the early twentieth century went a long way to establishing the predominantly correct view that race has no basis in actual physical differences between groups of human beings. The anthropologist of race Ashley Montagu, ...

Democracy

The Democrats’ Four-Year Reprieve

How did Donald Trump manage to win an even larger number of votes than in 2016, despite lies, corruption, and a bungled pandemic response?

November 19, 2020 • by Dani Rodrik

As Joe Biden eked out a victory in the U.S. presidential election after a few suspenseful days, observers of American democracy were left scratching their heads. Buoyed by polls, many expected a landslide for the Democrats, with the party capturing not only the White House but also the Senate. How ...

Capitalism

Why Business Depends on Big Government

The economy was meant to be underwritten by tax dollars—but Americans don’t want to know that

October 20, 2020 • by Lawrence Glickman

————— One of the most telling statements of our political era was made by Republican Dick Cheney in a Vice Presidential debate with Democrat Joe Lieberman on October 5, 2000, 20 years ago this month. Lieberman jibed that Cheney, the Republican nominee, had profited handsomely from the job he had recently ...

Capitalism

There’s a Hidden Economic Trendline That Is Shattering the Global Trade System

Why economic nationalism is suddenly a fashionable excuse for countries to decrease their reliance on the existing global supply chains

July 8, 2020 • by Marshall Auerback and Jan Ritch-Frel

Covid-19 has accelerated a process that was well underway before it, spreading beyond U.S.-China-EU trade negotiations and into the world’s 50 largest economies. As much as many defenders of the old order lament this trend, it is as significant a shift as the dawn of the World Trade Organization (WTO) ...

There’s a Hidden Economic Trendline That Is Shattering the Global Trade System

Activism

Americans Have Been in the Streets for Almost Ten Years

The legacies and lessons of Occupy Wall Street, the Women’s Resistance, and Black Lives Matter

June 11, 2020 • by Peter Dreier

In his call with governors on June 1, President Donald Trump said the current protests are “like a movement, and it’s a movement that if you don’t put it down, it’ll get worse and worse. This is like Occupy Wall Street.” Astonishingly, like that broken clock that is correct twice a ...

Americans Have Been in the Streets for Almost Ten Years

Activism

What Is to Be Done?

Three scholars of democracy respond to the protests

June 4, 2020 • by Eli Zaretsky, Jeffrey C. Goldfarb and Elzbieta Matynia

I believe this extraordinary nationwide mobilization is the best answer possible to the Democrats who engineered the destruction of the Sanders primary campaign -- I mean Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, James Carville, James Clyburn, Pete Buttigieg, and the innumerable reporters and media “experts” who from the beginning insisted ...

North America

America’s Weimar Moment, Redux

A preface to our symposium on the left

May 28, 2020 • by James Miller

It seems like an eternity. But it was only a few months ago, before the pandemic and subsequent lockdown, that it seemed possible that the Democratic Party might have as its Presidential candidate an avowed socialist – Bernie Sanders. On February 6, 2020, Public Seminar ran a comment entitled “America’s Weimar ...

Exiles on 12th Street

Nevertheless, She Persisted

Exiles on 12th Street, Episode Eight

May 10, 2020 • by Claire Potter

This is the eighth episode of Public Seminar’s podcast, Exiles on 12th Street. If you like it, go to iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe. Thanks to the bravery of several generations of activist women, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920, finally granting women in the ...

From the Editors

Remember, Remember, It’s All About November. And Coronavirus.

Joe Biden’s resounding victory over Bernie Sanders reflects voter fatigue and voter fear, but also confidence in the establishment

March 10, 2020 • by Claire Potter

Pryzbyla pointed out that farmers in the Upper Peninsula, many of whom voted for Bernie Sanders in 2016 and then for Donald Trump, are now going bankrupt because of Trump’s immigration policies. The cherries for which they are so famous rotted in the fields last summer. But Sanders’s socialism scared them ...