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Aug 28, 2024 | 
publicseminar.org | Carl Landauer |Chelsea Ebin |Basak Kus |John Stoehr
Inferno, Canto XXXIV: Dante and Virgil witnessing the gigantic Satan, with his three mouths biting on the sinners Cassius, Judas, and Brutus (ca. 1450) | Priamo della Quercia / Public DomainOver the summer, I committed myself to reading the entirety of Project 2025, a policy document compiled by the Heritage Foundation, with contributions from many veterans of the Trump administration, which I printed out in four thick three-ring binders.
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Aug 26, 2024 | 
publicseminar.org | Chelsea Ebin |Claire Potter |Basak Kus |Dorothy Potter Snyder
, DC (2007) | c.berlit / CC BY-SA 3.0, color adjustedFor the past four decades, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has published policy proposals ahead of presidential elections. The most recent installment of the “Mandate for Leadership” series, published in 2023, is a 900-page collection of essays written by a host of right-wing thinkers and advised by more than fifty conservative organizations that has come to colloquially be known as Project 2025.
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Jul 15, 2024 | 
socialeurope.eu | Basak Kus
Growth is falling, its rewards are ill-shared and it is bursting planetary boundaries. Time for a rethink. Economic growth has long been considered the primary indicator of prosperity and a sacred policy goal, above any other measure. It has also been seen as the silver lining to the inequalities produced by capitalism.
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Jul 15, 2024 | 
socialeurope.eu | Basak Kus
Let’s tax EU billionaires! Sign and share the petition
We need one million signatures to tax the billionaires in the EU! Sign and share the European Citizens’ Initiative ‘Taxing great wealth to finance the ecological and social transition’!
Why?
• The richest 1 per cent in Europe owns half of European wealth.
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Jun 5, 2024 | 
publicseminar.org | Claire Potter |Evangeline Riddiford Graham |Gregory Laski |Basak Kus
Picture this: it’s 1936, the depths of the Great Depression in New York City, and you are a bright, Jewish, first-generation American man. You are a teenager, maybe even as young as fifteen or sixteen, from the Lower East Side, Brownsville, Brooklyn, or the Bronx. You’re smart, you’ve finished high school, and what your parents want more than anything else is for you to get a college degree and be a professional, not a garment worker or shopkeeper like they are.
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Jun 5, 2024 | 
publicseminar.org | Claire Potter |Evangeline Riddiford Graham |Gregory Laski |Basak Kus
It was May 12, 2009. A crowd had assembled at the White House for a program billed as “An Evening of Poetry & Music & The Spoken Word.” Barack Obama, the first Black president of the United States, and his wife, Michelle, had been in residence for less than five months. I doubt that anyone remembers who else performed that night.
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May 31, 2024 | 
publicseminar.org | Basak Kus |Teresa Ghilarducci |Rick McGahey |Nicole Hemmer
“Study of two hands” (1844–5) | Daniel Huntington / Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum / CC0 In the realm of social theory, few analogies capture the essence of state functions as vividly as Pierre Bourdieu’s portrayal of its “left hand” and “right hand”: the left hand involves provisions of health, education, and welfare, representing the state’s duty to nurture and provide, while the right hand represents austerity and discipline imposed by “the technocrats of the Ministry of Finance,...
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May 3, 2024 | 
publicseminar.org | Claire Potter |Mitchell Abidor |Marija Kavtaradze |Basak Kus
On July 21, 2023, amid a culture war manufactured by Republican party activists, Vice President Kamala Harris gave a speech in Jacksonville, FL. The occasion? A set of standards for teaching African American history just issued by the Florida Board of Education that evaded or denied much of what we know about the history of Black people in the Americas.
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May 1, 2024 | 
publicseminar.org | Basak Kus |Pat Garofalo |Josephine Houman |Chloe Cheimets
Digital currency | Sasin Paraksa / ShutterstockThe history of capitalism is dotted with periods of public controversy about the nature of money and the ways societies should manage monetary systems. We are living through one of those periods. Shifts in macroeconomic policy in advanced economies since the 2008 financial crisis have challenged orthodoxies about money and its management by states.
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Apr 30, 2024 | 
publicseminar.org | Basak Kus |Teresa Ghilarducci |Rick McGahey |Pat Garofalo
Consumer rights and consumer protection | William Potter / ShutterstockFrom the Progressive Era to the 1980s, except for a brief hiatus in the 1920s, the United States continually advanced consumer protections, setting rigorous standards in drug approval, food safety, chemical use, banking, and financial services. Although often claimed to be “un-American” in today’s political discourse, this protective approach was not foreign to American governance or capitalism.
