Math and reading scores for America’s 13-year-olds dropped to their lowest levels in decades, with math proficiency sinking by the largest margin ever recorded, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal test considered to be the nation’s report card. All of this in the wake of COVID-related disruptions which attenuated classroom learning …
Manufacturing has been considered the backbone of the U.S. economy since the Industrial Revolution, yet with recent trade policies encouraging offshoring, there’s been a sense that America has lost its edge in this sector. More often than not, we hear that America’s economy has become one built on a services and not hard goods. Given …
Bryan Stevenson(“Just Mercy”) considers him his mentor. He’s been the subject of books and a film for his work to correct the injustices that race and poverty play in our criminal justice system. In that pursuit, he has fought and won capital cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and was the recipient of the American …
ESG investment products have environmental, social and governance considerations at their root. ESG investing grew out of the United Nations’ Principles for Responsible Investing. A former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wanted to encourage investors to be more mindful of how their investments might dovetail with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Thus, they encouraged investors …
The richest nation in the history of the world can do better. Let’s be honest. Whether you live in a pocket of destitution, or just drive by it, don’t you get the sense that something is wrong if millions of people, urban and rural, live in the squalor that you can see, even just passing …
According to our guest, there is a lost chapter of American foreign policy–the century following the Civil War in which the United States carved out a sphere of influence and became the only great power in modern history to achieve regional hegemony. The ways in which America achieved complete supremacy in the Americas was at …
Every October we wait to see what cases the US Supreme Court will be taking on in the coming session. And every June we wait to see how they rendered their judgments. On today’s podcast, we tell you ‘the rest of the story.’ You see almost 99 percent of the court’s decisions take place on …
Private equity is a growing sector of investment financing in America where whole companies, not shares in them, are purchased with money from the principals in the private equity firms, as well as outside investors, while the rest is borrowed, often with the company being purchased assuming that debt liability while the investors cash in …
As the wealthiest nation on earth, America should have made poverty a historical curiosity. Yet it is still with us and the wealth inequality gap continues to widen. As the major existential threat we face–climate change-is showing up everywhere in the form of floods, wildfires and intense hurricanes, some among us still doubt its existence …
Exclusionary zoning, practiced throughout most of the United States, is one of the most damaging forms of class discrimination. There is a racial component to it in many suburbs, but it really falls on a strata of society which is generally less educated and less affluent. Interestingly, liberal communities actually engage in the practice at …