Featured Stories | NLF Categories

In marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, commenters frequently lamented the contrast between progress toward legal equality and the persistence of economic inequality today. “The decision to pursue purely legal change, and to leave economic relation- ships alone, says much about the intellectual and moral limitations of midcentury liberalism,” wrote journalist Clay Risen.

Featured U.S. Politics & Society

2015-01-17 Hannah Appel and Astra Taylor

Education with a Debt Sentence: For-Profit Colleges as American Dream Crushers and Factories of Debt

Imagine corporations that intentionally target low-income single mothers as ideal customers. Imagine that these same companies claim to sell tickets to the American dream—gainful employment and the chance for a middle-class life. Imagine that it’s all a lie.

Featured U.S. Politics & Society

2015-01-17 Leo Casey

The Charter School Challenge

Do charter schools pose an existential threat to public education and teacher unions? One need look no further than post-Katrina New Orleans, widely touted as a national model of education reform, to understand why many observers now answer this question in the affirmative. Today, charter schools enroll more than nine in every ten public school students, a share that continues to grow.

Class Featured On the Contrary

2015-01-17 Richard Kahlenberg and Julie Park

Class-Based Affirmative Action

In the press, debates over affirmative action in higher education pit liberals (who support taking race into account in admissions) and conservatives (who oppose it). But there is a third way on the issue—affirmative action based on class, rather than race—which is far more progressive than our current system of racial preferences, the class-based approach is quickly gaining ground.

Featured U.S. Politics & Society

2014-10-01 Kim Phillips-Fein

The Business Lobby and the Tea Party

David Cote is the CEO of Honeywell, a technology conglomerate and defense contractor that also dabbles in energy. In 2012, he clocked in at number five on the Forbes list of the highest paid CEOs, with an annual compensation in the ballpark of $55 million. Named CEO of the year last year by a publication called Chief Executive, he would seem to be doing quite well.

Featured U.S. Politics & Society

2014-10-01 Kevin Young and Michael Schwartz

Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: How Corporate Power Shaped the Affordable Care Act

Among the many promises of Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign was a thorough reform of U.S. healthcare. The radical inefficiency of the existing system was obvious: although per-capita healthcare costs were about twice as high as in other industrialized countries, at least forty-six million people still lacked health insurance.

Featured Precarious Work

2014-05-23 Joshua Sperber

Yelp and Labor Discipline: How the Internet Works for Capitalism

Notwithstanding the optimism surrounding the progressive potential of the Internet, that medium has helped sustain, and even intensify, prevailing inequalities. The Internet, especially following the 1996 Telecommunications Act, has been effectively dominated by the media oligopolies that rule the networks.

Featured

2012-08-01 Joshua B. Freeman and Steve Fraser