You’ve probably heard it said a gazillion times that nearly all Americans think of themselves as middle class, even if they are dirt poor or filthy rich. This everyman mindset is supposedly a big reason that class consciousness has always been so low in the United States. Which is all nonsense, according to polling data […]

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Last year, legislators in Illinois passed a law that decreases pension benefits for public employees, and in Detroit a bankruptcy judge required municipal employees to get in line with other creditors owed money by the bankrupt city. The focus on these trouble spots feeds a misperception that public pensions, generally, are in crisis. In reality, […]

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  Detroit Exactly one week before Christmas, 18 lawyers huddled in front of a bankruptcy judge in a federal courtroom in downtown Detroit. All were white, one was a woman, most were from the Jones Day law firm. There was one African-American attorney sitting on the side of the bar reserved for counsel, principals, and […]

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(Mike Ilitch)  On the Friday before Christmas, I was interviewing 15 members of the AFSCME Local 98 Retirees Executive Board when one man became impatient with my questions. In less than 700 words, Mark Phillips described the winners and losers in a city controlled by an emergency manager who has turned pensioners into creditors in […]

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(The aftermath of the explosion in West, Texas) When we spoke at the Bullitt Foundation building in Seattle last fall, Denis Hayes sounded almost resentful of the Clinton and Obama administrations’ focus on health care. “In my ideal world, I would have preferred that they address climate change, because there you are dealing with something […]

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