America

Submitted by Tom Englehardt via TomDispatch.com,

Over the past 12 months, America has had front row seats for a real-life experiment with across-the-board wage hikes.

In January of last year, a grinning Doug McMillon appeared in a video message posted to Wal-Mart’s website to announce that the world’s biggest retailer was set to implement one of the “largest single-day, private-sector pay increases ever.”

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt breaks down an important 2014 study indicating that the Social Justice Warrior phenomenon on campus is not a trend, but instead marks a deep cultural shift. The paper is not by Haidt, but it’s long, so he summarizes it for his readers. Excerpts (all boldface in Haidt’s original):

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Leon Hadar does a good job making some sense out of Trump’s recent rambling interviews on foreign policy with The New York Times and Washington Post:

We should reassess the American role in NATO and the rationale for continuing to maintain it. But Trump needs to explain to us why we need to do that, not like a technocrat going through the books but as a political leader with coherent vision of the role the U.S. should play in the world. We do foreign policy not to make a profit but in order to protect the country and advance its interests.