dirkthedog

a compilation of interesting articles and websites.

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Creative Ways To Market Yourself As A Designer

Creative Ways To Market Yourself As A Designer

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How I survive as a freelance graphic designer

How I survive as a freelance graphic designer

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Does the fiscal-crisis story even make sense?

. . . .  the tax hikes and spending cuts scheduled to kick in at the end of this year are precisely not what we want to see happen in a still-depressed economy.

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Instead of blaming workers, we should be holding the incompetent managers to account and cheering on any and every effort to rescue Hostess from the clutches of the vulture capitalists.

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This cost-shifting, though extremely problematic for workers in the short-term, may mean that in the long-term Americans will finally say goodbye to employment-based health insurance coverage altogether and demand a single-payer, Medicare-like system for all.

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The bottom line is that raising the age of eligibility for either Social Security benefits or Medicare would be destructive, making Americans’ lives worse without contributing in any significant way to deficit reduction. Democrats, in particular, who even consider either alternative need to ask themselves what on earth they think they’re doing. . . .

What we know for sure is that there is no good case for denying older Americans access to the programs they count on. This should be a red line in any budget negotiations, and we can only hope that Mr. Obama doesn’t betray his supporters by crossing it.

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fueled by the very same forces that drove subprime mortgages through the roof: Wall Street’s seemingly endless appetite for new ways to make profit. In this case, investor demand for student loan asset backed securities (SLABS) resulted in private student lenders—primarily Sallie Mae, Citi, Wells Fargo, and the other big banks—to relax lending standards and aggressively begin marketing these loans directly to students. . . . The largest percentage of private loans taken out in 2008 were by students at for-profit colleges. In 2008, just 14 percent of all undergrads took out a private loan while 42 percent of students at for-profit colleges took them out. And as we now know, these loans are sinking borrowers—with absolutely no ability to discharge these loans by filing bankruptcy. . . .

Over the last two decades, our nation—in a major shift from its historical roots—slowly privatized and financialized the responsibility of paying for college. The result is a system in which the entire pipeline of student loans—now the largest source of “aid” for most students—is fueled, serviced, and collected by Wall Street.

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Hispanic population boom will reshape Texas politics, but question is when - Dallas Morning News

See on Scoop.it - My Liberal Politics

Macon Telegraph (blog)Hispanic population boom will reshape Texas politics, but question is whenDallas Morning NewsThe hope in this year's election for Texas Democrats, still stuck in the unrelenting freeze-out of every state office, was watching...

See on dallasnews.com

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Afghan girl tells court she hid behind father as he was shot - CNN.com

See on Scoop.it - My Liberal Politics

A 7-year-old Afghan girl testified Sunday she hid behind her father as he was killed during a shooting rampage in southern Afghanistan.

See on edition.cnn.com

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A Progressive Surge | The Nation

See on Scoop.it - My Liberal Politics

In election 2012, a 'rising American electorate' carried Obama and a strong slate of Democrats to victory.

See on thenation.com

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I'm Worth More than You Are (According to SuperPACs)

See on Scoop.it - My Liberal Politics

by MICHAEL CHARNEY

  I feel pretty strongly about this whole SuperPAC thing, about the way that money in politics has so dramatically bastardized the election process.

  Long ago it was "one person/one vote," but now it seems to be "one dollar/one vote."

  According to this NPR video (full credit where credit is due), it's not even that anymore... Seems that I'm worth over $5.00 because I live in New Hamphsire. Only Nevada's denizens are worth more than I am and, if you're in California, you're worth pretty much nothin'.

  Don't believe me? Watch...

See on chasingglennbeck.com

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Arizona Defends Its Restrictive Abortion Ban Because Fetal Birth Defects Are “The Woman’s Problem”

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A federal appeals court panel on Monday considered Arizona’s stringent abortion ban, which has the distinction of being the most restrictive in the nation because it criminalizes almost all abortions after just 20 weeks.

  An example of how dysfunctional the right wing has become, and how very anti-women.

See on thinkprogress.org

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still struggling to keep it ours

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Bernie Sanders

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Crazy bad

See on Scoop.it - My Liberal Politics See on facebook.com

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Warren takes aim at ‘too big to fail’: Reinstating Glass-Steagall a ‘top three’ priority

See on Scoop.it - My Liberal Politics

by Stephen C. Webster, Raw Story

  Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren said Sunday on a call with volunteers that restoring Glass-Steagall, the depression-era finance rule that prevented banks from becoming “too big to fail,” would be among the top three Wall Street reforms on her agenda if voters elect her to the Senate.

  Warren, a Harvard professor who helped create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) after the global financial crash of 2008, mentioned the depression-era rule in a response to a volunteer who asked, “What can we do to hold Wall Street accountable and keep [a collapse] from happening again?”

  “We fought [the fight for Dodd-Frank] out in the open, to try and get financial reforms passed,” she said. “We finally got the consumer agency in place and got some reforms, and then after Dodd-Frank had passed they went back to the regulatory commissions. They were supposed to write regulations… I thought the fight was over. I thought that the good guys had won. But it turned out the lobbyists, the big financial institutions just decided to move the fight into the shadows.”

  Warren said that what’s happened since is a case study in how Congress seems to function all too often: “They have been lobbying the regulators to try to weaken the rules, to put loopholes in them, to try to delay them and try to get rid of them outright,” she lamented. [MORE]

See on rawstory.com

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The Triggers of Economic Inequality. Perfect graph to show what is happening to the US wealth

See on Scoop.it - My Liberal Politics

What purposeful political acts created and sustained the huge gap between the super-rich and the rest of America?

  by Troy Oxford and Lauren Feeney, Moyers & Company

  In recent years, the rich have seen their wealth grow dramatically while the poor and middle class have basically flatlined. It’s no accident, argue Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson in their book Winner-Take-All Politics. The infographic below, which draws from Hacker and Pierson’s book, explains how our politicians — on both sides of the aisle — fell under the spell of corporate dollars and re-engineered our economic system to favor the wealthy. The dark green line shows the income trajectory for the top 1 percent since 1970, while the light green line shows the bottom 90 percent. Click the orange triangles to learn about critical turning points that helped create the skewed system we have today.

  [MORE including Interactive graph]

    See on billmoyers.com