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2 weeks ago | 
dissentmagazine.org | Michael Kazin |Bob Master |Peter Dreier |Donald Cohen
Incoherent Heroism
Trump’s National Garden of American Heroes will be a monument to randomness and a lazy, perhaps unthinking, version of the ideology he is supposed to despise.
▪ May 1, 2025
Since Donald Trump took office in January, the National Endowment for the Humanities has cancelled thousands of grants, including ones it had already awarded.
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Oct 31, 2023 | 
thenation.com | Joan Walsh |Nick Hanauer |Donald Cohen
It’s a fight that’s been going on for centuries—and it continues to this day. Copyright © 2023 by Nick Hanauer, Joan Walsh, and Donald Cohen. This excerpt originally appeared in their Corporate Bullsh*t. Published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission.
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Oct 31, 2023 | 
thenation.com | Joan Walsh |Nick Hanauer |Donald Cohen |Adolph Reed Jr.
Photographer Hannah La Follette Ryan documented the many hands of protesters demonstrating across New York City in support of Palestine. Ever since the Israel-Gaza war broke out, the worlds of the arts and academia have seen a wave of repression against people who dare to speak up for Palestine. Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen signed an open letter condemning Israeli war crimes and saw his appearance at New York’s 92Y canceled.
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Oct 6, 2023 | 
currentaffairs.org | Nick Hanauer |Joan Walsh |Donald Cohen |Nathan J. Robinson
One reason it’s useful to study history is that it teaches you to spot patterns. You come to understand certain regularities in how human societies operate and how improvements in social conditions occur (or are thwarted). Seeing what has come before trains you for present-day struggles. So, for instance: when you see how propaganda campaigns against Social Security and Medicare worked in the 1940s and 1960s, you can see their echoes in present-day fearmongering about Medicare For All.
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Oct 6, 2023 | 
currentaffairs.org | Nick Hanauer |Joan Walsh |Donald Cohen |Nathan J. Robinson
A new book shows that the same talking points have been recycled for centuries, to oppose every form of progressive change. One reason it’s useful to study history is that it teaches you to spot patterns. You come to understand certain regularities in how human societies operate and how improvements in social conditions occur (or are thwarted). Seeing what has come before trains you for present-day struggles.
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Sep 26, 2023 | 
donaldcohen.substack.com | Donald Cohen
There's a housing crisis in America. Everyone I talk to, in every city, talks about the crazy high cost of housing in their town. There's also a student debt crisis. It costs too damn much to get a college degree so people either don't do it, or they do it and spend the rest of their lives paying for it. Thanks for reading Public Things! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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Sep 11, 2023 | 
gwinnettdailypost.com | Donald Cohen
For most of us, even those perfectly happy to pay taxes, actually filing our tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service is a frustrating, complicated and opaque process. And if you make a small mistake, you could be threatened with additional fines, or even prison. Recently, IRS leadership, with support from the Biden administration, proposed modernizing the filling process to make it easier for most Americans to file, bringing it in line with nations like New Zealand, Japan and Denmark.
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Aug 16, 2023 | 
powells.com | Nick Hanauer |Joan Walsh |Donald Cohen
SynopsisHow can regular Americans name, blame, and shame our corporate overlords? With this illustrated and entertaining guide to decoding decades of free market hypocrisy and deception Since the invention of capitalism, people have gone to astonishing, often morally indefensible lengths to defend their profits, and they always use the same rhetoric: pro-social arguments to defend anti-social outcomes.
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Jul 25, 2023 | 
bookshop.org | Zachary Roth |Nick Hanauer |Joan Walsh |Donald Cohen
Praise for Corporate Bullsh*t: "Corporate Bullsh*t by Nick Hanauer, Joan Walsh, and Donald Cohen performs a useful public service by amassing a wealth of quotations from across 150 years of American social policy to show how a certain set of talking points recurs over and over in the effort to stymie progressive social change." --Current Affairs "A welcome user's guide to maneuvering the thicket of lies that constitutes so much discourse today." --Kirkus Reviews "If you ever feel like you're...
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Jul 11, 2023 | 
donaldcohen.substack.com | Donald Cohen
Jeez, can we stop falling into the neoliberals’ trap of saying “market failure” when we’re talking about public goods! Huh? Let me explain. I'm in lots of meetings discussing how to come up with alternatives to neoliberalism. It's one of those terms that we all assume we know what we're talking about. Maybe? At one of them, Dorian Warren, co-president of Community Change (among other things), gave the simplest and clearest definition I’d heard.
