“Please excuse our mess”: It’s a sign that all of us have encountered at a construction site at one time or another. It tells customers and passersby that, despite the current disorder, a more impressive setting will emerge — hopefully in the near future. Looking back on the performance of the North Carolina [Continue Reading...]
As the United States enters its fourth year of economic struggle, the political right continues to insist that cutting government spending, taxes, and regulation will return us to prosperity. While that promise seems rosy to many desperate people, this prescription is all wrong for what ails the economy. The right-wing economic agenda continues [Continue Reading...]
The North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys recently launched an all-out assault on the state’s newly implemented Racial Justice Act. Sadly, the attack came before the fledgling law (which was designed to prevent the state putting someone to death because of racial bias) has even had a chance to prove its value. As [Continue Reading...]
This summer, state legislators constructed a budget that undermined public schools, the health care system and the future of many North Carolina children. If legislators reconvene later in the month for a fourth time this year, they should put aside partisan plans to tinker with election law and focus on fixing the mess [Continue Reading...]
In survey after survey, North Carolinians have told pollsters that the Number One priority of state and national policymakers should be creating jobs. Yet the strategies for creating jobs championed by those policymakers are frequently at odds with what actually works. In North Carolina, leaders from both major political parties often tout tax [Continue Reading...]
As the world impatiently awaits a statement of purpose and list of demands from the Occupy movements across the country and world, former Charlotte mayor Pat McCrory perhaps unintentionally and unwittingly framed it perfectly in a television interview last week when he said “You can’t allow the people to take over.” How telling [Continue Reading...]
The Occupy Wall Street movement demonstrates that the United States still has a Left, despite recent electoral misfortunes, and its weaker political infrastructure. The American Left does not own a television network. It is out-gunned by the sheer number of conservative talk radio shows and stations. Conservative think tanks are less intellectual than [Continue Reading...]
Though the Great Recession technically ended two years ago, North Carolina is still feeling its devastating impact. A classic case in point is the state’s Unemployment Insurance system. This month, the state was forced to pay out $78 million as its first interest payment toward the $2.5 billion it borrowed from the federal [Continue Reading...]
More than a decade ago, North Carolina’s system for providing services to individuals with mental health needs, developmental disabilities and addictive disease was deeply troubled. Allegations of fraud, mismanagement and conflicted governance signaled poor accountability mechanisms. In response, the General Assembly directed the state Auditor to investigate the situation. In April 2000, the [Continue Reading...]
Editor’s note: Tuesday afternoon Bank of America issued a press release saying that after “listening to our customers very closely” it no longer intends to implement a debit usage fee. I have been a Bank of America customer since 1996. The bank has been a constant during my 15 years of moving through [Continue Reading...]
It’s hard to read or watch the news these days without coming across at least one story that centers around the economic hardships facing our nation – rising unemployment; falling housing prices; climbing national debt, which now sits at more than $14 trillion. And the U.S. infamously spends a larger portion of its [Continue Reading...]
In June, Wake County Superior Court Judge Howard Manning issued a decision in the long-running Leandro litigation over the state’s public education system. The judge found that the General Assembly’s 20% cuts to pre-kindergarten services for at-risk students violated the state’s constitution. Manning’s directive was quite clear: “The State of North Carolina shall [Continue Reading...]
On October 1, 2011, North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue proclaimed October 2011 Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Less than five days after the proclamation was issued, news media outlets reported that a man from Havelock shot his wife and assaulted one of his minor daughters during a “heated argument.” While the media outlets described [Continue Reading...]
It seems that a middle-class life is increasingly out of reach for many North Carolinians. New data from the U.S. Census Bureau released last week shows that the state’s poverty rate bumped up to 17.5 percent in 2010, a 22 percent increase since 2007 when the Great Recession started. The 368,614 North Carolinians [Continue Reading...]
We know that healthy children learn better, grow stronger and become more successful adults. Unfortunately, children in eastern North Carolina have traditionally suffered from disproportionately high rates of obesity, infant mortality, smoking and other health-related problems. Rather than closing the gap between eastern North Carolina and the rest of the state, the 2011-13 [Continue Reading...]
