By Rachel Goldfarb, originally published on Next New Deal
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Data Shows Democrats Fully Embraced by Surveillance Industry (The Real News Network)
Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Tom Ferguson speaks to Jaisal Noor about his new working paper, which drew a connection between the surveillance state and campaign donations. When PRISM became public, it was hard to miss the connection in the data.
- Roosevelt Take: "Party Competition and Industrial Structure in the 2012 Elections," by Tom Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen, is available here.
Post-Partisan: Fixing our ideological divide (Reuters)
Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Jonathan Soros argues that geographic segregation among ideological lines is causing more partisanship then gerrymandering. Changing district lines won't fix that, but some alternative election models might.
Politics and Reality Radio (Public Reality Radio)
Roosevelt Institute Fellow Mike Konczal speaks with Joshua Holland about how the rollout of Healthcare.Gov vindicates an old-school New Deal style of liberalism. Neoliberal approaches to social insurance are causing the problems here, not progressive ideas.
- Roosevelt Take: Mike wrote about this topic for Next New Deal last week.
Making government simpler is complicated (WaPo)
Roosevelt Institute Fellow Mike Konczal considers what a "simple" regulation really means. If "simple" policies aren't easy to implement with clear and simple results, are they are simple, or just inefficient nudges?
The Republicans' War on the Poor (Rolling Stone)
Elizabeth Drew writes on the GOP's assault on food stamps, which ignores the program's decades of success. This is a prime example of the current government dysfunction, in which the Tea Party disrupts long-standing policies for its anti-Obama crusade.
Bipartisan Budget Love Suddenly in the Air (NY Mag)
Jonathan Chait suggests that there may finally be space for compromise in budget negotiations. For one thing, some Republicans are finally admitting that compromise doesn't mean that the Democrats give in to all their demands.
For Some, Joblessness Is Not a Temporary Problem (NYT)
Floyd Norris looks at the international problem of long-term unemployment, which is even worse in other developed countries than in the U.S., where for the first time since World War II, more people have been unemployed for over a year then for less then four weeks.