AndyKroll.com

Below is a collection of much of my published work, with links to original publication locations. I’ve also included a brief preview for each article—usually the first paragraph or two—so that you get the sense of the article. Enjoy!

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MotherJones.com, “Primary-palooza,” 8 June 2010

If you thought the May 18 primaries were big, just wait until you get a load of June 8th’s. We’re talking six senate primaries, six gubernatorial races, and a whopping 96 House primaries—and that doesn’t even count the key runoff election in Arkansas. By Tuesday night, we’ll know a lot more about what—and who—to expect in November. Will more longtime incumbents go down in flames? Will Tea Partiers continue to push out GOP moderates? Will the unions claim their first major scalp of the election cycle? Here’s your guide to June’s biggest election night.

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MotherJones.com, “Can Financial Reform Save Harry Reid?” 24 May 2010

Last week’s passage in the Senate of a historic and comprehensive financial reform bill clinched a personal victory for Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). And Reid is a man in need of big wins. He’s facing double-digit deficits in midterm election polling and an anti-incumbent mood sweeping the country. Will financial reform give Reid the boost he needs to defeat his Republican opponent?

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MotherJones.com, “Will the Senate Give Predatory Student Loans a Pass?” 13 May 2010

You’ve heard of subprime mortgages—the risky, high-interest-rate, often toxic home loans doled out like candy to borrowers who lacked the ability to repay them. In the Senate’s financial reform overhaul, a new consumer protection bureau would crack down on these shady loans and the predatory brokers who peddled them. But the Senate is poised to give a big pass to another form of subprime lending on the rise—high-risk student loans, a corner of the financial industry New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo branded the “Wild West” of lending.

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MotherJones.com, “BP: From Oil Spilling to Financial Reform Killing,” 10 May 2010

Oil giant BP may be overwhelmed with the clean-up from the collapse of its Deepwater oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. But the corporation has still found time to fight tougher financial reforms on Capitol Hill. The corporation is a member of the Coalition for Derivatives End-Users, a collection of companies actively pushing for a loophole in new regulations governing derivatives, the complex and opaque products used to hedge risk and bet on fluctuations in the financial markets. Derivatives, experts say, exacerbated the 2008 financial crisis, and lawmakers and the White House have sought to drag that market into the sunlight. The financial reform legislation now in Congress, says President Obama, will “close the loopholes that allowed derivatives deals so large and risky they could threaten our entire economy.”

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MotherJones.com, “Why Didn’t Obama Back Busting Up Big Banks?” 7 May 2010

Late on Thursday night, an effort to rein in the mega-banks that brought the American economy to the brink of disaster died on the Senate floor. Sens. Ted Kaufman (D-Del.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) had offered an amendment that would have broken up the biggest banks and forced them to scale back the amount of money they borrow to amplify their bets in the financial markets (a reform known as leverage limits). Experts said the Kaufman-Brown amendment, which failed by a vote of 60-33, would have helped safeguard the economy against another crisis. So why did the Obama administration, which has urged Congress to overhaul the financial system, distance itself from—and even oppose—this measure?

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MotherJones.com, “Did Goldman’s Mortgage Guru Lie Under Oath?” 29 April 2010

During Tuesday’s 10-hour grilling of past and present Goldman Sachs executives and traders before a Senate subcommittee, the questioning frequently centered on four mortgage-related products the company had sold to investors as the subprime market was about to implode. At one point, an indignant Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) said, “Every one of these [deals] looks like a wreck waiting to happen.” And he asked Daniel Sparks, the former head of Goldman’s mortgage department, how he “in good faith” could peddle these mortgage-related products to clients when it was clear the mortgage market was close to complete collapse—and when Goldman itself had begun “shorting,” or betting against, this very same market. Sparks—whose overall evasiveness drew the ire of Senate investigations subcommittee chair Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and other lawmakers—replied: “At the time we did those deals, we expected those deals to perform.” Numerous documents released by the subcommittee, however, indicate that Sparks, who left Goldman in the spring of 2008, and his former employer knew otherwise. And his testimony raises a serious question: whether he lied to Congress under oath.

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MotherJones.com, “Gunning for Government,” 19 April 2010

Gun rights advocates flocked to the Washington, DC, area on Monday to push for greater access to firearms and protest against the Obama administration. Near the Washington Monument on the National Mall, activists assembled for a “Second Amendment March.” Sponsors listed on the website include the Oath Keepers, as well Gun Owners of America, led by Larry Pratt, who has a long history of involvement with far-right groups. GOP Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia addressed the crowd.

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MotherJones.com, “Tax to Grind,” 15 April 2010

They rapped about free markets and patriots. (“Limited government is the only solution / Our only salvation should be our Constitution.”) They stretched Barack Obama’s nose to epic, Pinocchioan lengths. They stuck Nancy Pelosi’s head in a toilet bowl with “We the People” toilet paper at the ready. This was the scene at the Tea Party’s Tax Day rally today at (where else?) the Freedom Plaza in downtown Washington DC, a few blocks from the White House.

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MotherJones.com, “Financial Reform: Five Fights to Watch,” 14 April 2010

Back in action after its two-week recess, Congress will soon take up its latest daunting legislative battle: rewriting the rules of the American financial system. In their nearly year-long debate, lawmakers have clashed over everything from the creation of a new consumer protection agency to protecting the economy from too-big-to-fail mega-banks.

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MotherJones.com, “The Mormon Crusade Against Gay Marriage,” 18 March 2010

When gay-rights activist Fred Karger started following the money behind the 2008 ballot measure to ban same-sex marriage in California, he discovered that the campaign was overwhelmingly funded and overseen by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Karger estimates that Mormons contributed $30 million of the $42 million total raised in support of Proposition 8, which passed in November 2008. “They completely altered the landscape,” he says. “They took over every aspect of the campaign.” This wasn’t the Mormons’ first foray into the fight over same-sex equality. The church has long frowned upon homosexuality; more recently, it has focused on opposing gay-marriage initiatives across the nation. (Though it should be noted that not all Mormons oppose gay marriage.) Thanks to Karger, that once-quiet effort has been outed. This slideshow explores the Mormon Church’s ongoing campaign to roll back gay rights.

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MotherJones.com, “JPMorgan’s War on Nature,” 30 March 2010

Unlike virtually all of its competitors, JPMorgan Chase steeled itself early for the collapse of the subprime market and emerged from the rubble of the global financial meltdown with both its balance sheet and reputation intact. But the storied firm stands alone among its Wall Street rivals in another area, too. JPMorgan backstops one of the most destructive mining practices in the world: mountaintop removal coal mining. And it continues to do so even as other major banks have cut ties to this practice.

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MotherJones.com, “The Fed’s Spectacular Comeback,” 16 March 2010

When Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) unveiled his long-awaited version of a Wall Street reform bill on Monday, two unlikely winners emerged: the Federal Reserve and its chairman, Ben Bernanke. The Fed, according to Dodd’s plan, would retain some of its most crucial regulatory powers, like overseeing the 40 or so big banks with more than $50 billion in assets. But it would also gain more regulatory muscle. A new consumer-protection agency would be housed within its walls, and the Fed chairman would sit on a council of regulators created to tackle banks that are too big or too interconnected to fail. Bernanke and his team would also be empowered to regulate large non-banking financial firms—like subprime mortgage companies—if the council of regulators deem that they threaten the economy. How did the Fed go from congressional punching bag to regulatory darling?

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TomDispatch.com, “Ponzi Nation,” 12 March 2010

Every great American boom and bust makes and breaks its share of crooks. The past decade—call it the Ponzi Era—has been no different, except for the gargantuan scale of white-collar crime. A vast wave of financial fraud swelled in the first years of the new century. Then, in 2008, with the subprime mortgage collapse, it crashed on the shore as a full-scale global economic meltdown. As that wave receded, it left hundreds of Ponzi and pyramid schemes, as well as other get-rich-quick rackets that helped fuel our recent economic frenzy, flopping on the beach.

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MotherJones.com, “Chris Dodd’s Race to the Bottom,” 4 March 2010

In just six months, Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), the stately front man of the Senate’s campaign to crack down on Wall Street, has transformed from financial-reform avenger, scourge of the Federal Reserve, and ally of the average consumer to a GOP pushover. Last fall, the veteran Senator and chairman of the banking committee opened financial reform talks as if shot out of a cannon: He rallied around an independent consumer-protection agency, labeled the Fed’s regulatory efforts “an abysmal failure,” and proposed a super regulator who would rein in banks and lenders, instead of the existing muddle of offices that let the worst financial crisis in a generation unfold under their noses. “Dodd is basically starting out by out-reforming the administration,” a congressional staffer told the Washington Post.

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MotherJones.com, “Is the Senate Bungling Its Wall Street Crackdown?” 24 February 2010

The last thing Democrats want is for Congress’ long-promised Wall Street crackdown to become a rerun of health care reform. That is, the House passes a bill, only to see grueling negotiations grind to a halt in the Senate, as health care legislation did last fall. But as Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), chair of the Senate banking committee, prepares to release his proposal for financial reform this week, House lawmakers who have worked on the issue tell Mother Jones they’re worried that the talks will once again paralyze the Senate and produce only flimsy restrictions on financial firms.

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Mother Jones, “Always Be Foreclosing” (online title: “Can Anyone Stop the Predatory Lenders?”), March/April 2010

NO ONE TOLD Deanna Walters she was about to lose her home. Not when her mortgage servicing company foreclosed on it, nor when it landed on the county auction block and sold to the highest bidder. She realized what was happening only when a man taped a note to the front door of her well-kept house in a leafy corner of Stockton, California, last January. “My son went out and took it down,” recalls the 43-year-old single mother of two, “and that’s when he told me it was a ‘three-day or quit’ notice.”

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MotherJones.com, “Lawyers, Guns, and Money,” 3 February 2010

Among Bank of America’s 50 million customers, Pierre Falcone was far from ordinary. An infamous global arms dealer who unlawfully sold weapons to Angola for its civil war and an international fugitive, Falcone was convicted of tax fraud and illegal arms dealing in 2007 and 2009 and is currently serving six years behind bars. Yet for nearly two decades, Falcone and his relatives freely used 29 different bank accounts to funnel at least $60 million into the US from secretive havens like the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, and Singapore, and from shell corporations and secret clients. Despite his criminal record and worldwide notoriety, Bank of America essentially treated him like any other depositor.

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Mother Jones, “We’re Paying WHOM to Fix Mortgages?” January/February 2010

The Treasury Department has allocated $75 billion to entice lenders to let beleaguered borrowers stay in their homes. And the companies getting most of that money—well, they’re the same companies that got the borrowers into this mess. At least 21 of the top 25 recipients in the Home Affordable Modification Program were major subprime lenders, according to the Center for Public Integrity. Meanwhile, not even 1 in 5 homeowners eligible for the program has gotten help.

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Mother Jones, “Big Finance’s 10 Favorite Lawmakers,” January/February 2010

Here’s how to reap Wall Street’s largesse on Capitol Hill: Represent New York, sit on a financial committee, hold a leadership position—or, if you’re Chuck Schumer, trifecta!

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Mother Jones, “The Bankers on Obama’s Team,” January/February 2010

GOLDMAN SACHS CEO turned Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson wasn’t the first, or the last, to use therevolving door between Wall Street and Washington. Here’s a short list of Obama officials who got their start in the private sector—many, like Paulson, at “Government Sachs.”

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TomDispatch.com, Introduction to “The Dust Bowl of Babylon” by Martin Chulov, 13 December 2009

With each passing day, the transfer of power from American forces to the Iraqi government looks less like a peaceful exchange and more like a bloody descent into chaos. On December 8th, a series of bombings in Baghdad killed at least 121 people and struck two Iraqi government institutions, an appeals court and the Finance Ministry. Those institutions had only recently been relocated after a similarly devastating attack in October, that killed 155 and wounded 500, destroyed their previous buildings. Iraq’s security situation remains grim enough that one Iraqi politician said, “We can only hope that not every day will turn into Bloody Days.”

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TomDispatch.com, “Housing Meltdown, Ground Zero,” 30 November 2009

A man crooning about mortgage relief, retired couples camping in a parking lot for counseling appointments, 4,000 exhausted “fans” cheering announcements of 2% fixed interest rate loans as if they were so many slam dunks — after a day at “Save the Dream,” you’d be forgiven for thinking that, when it came to working class and middle class Americans, the housing market and the American economy in general hadn’t exactly improved since its implosion in the fall of 2008. Surveying the organized chaos in the Cow Palace, you might also be forgiven for thinking that all the talk of “recovery” was little more than that — unless you happened to work for Goldman Sachs. Indeed, the beleaguered faces of the desperate homeowners at “Save the Dream” brought to my mind a famous Dorothea Lange photo of a Depression-era bread line in San Francisco’s Mission District, an image captured 75 years earlier just miles from where I stood.

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Mother Jones, “The Long and Warming Road,” November/December 2009

Who coined “the greenhouse effect”? Which year was the hottest on record? A timeline of climate change milestones, from 1800 to now.

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MotherJones.com, “Is Foreclosure Relief Failing?” 14 October 2009

Is the Obama administration’s signature foreclosure relief program succeeding? Absolutely, according to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who last Thursday trumpeted the news that 500,000 mortgages had been modified—on a trial basis—under the Home Affordable Modification Program, a month ahead of the administration’s November 1 benchmark for reaching this goal. A day later, however, the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP) reached a far different conclusion when it released its own evaluation of the Treasury Department’s foreclosure prevention efforts. According to the financial watchdog, the efficacy of HAMP is very much in doubt, and the program may wind up doing little to assuage the growing foreclosure mess.

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MotherJones.com, “The Doctor Can’t See You Now,” 5 October 2009

It’s a year from now, and you wake up with a sore throat. You’re not worried, because not too long ago the Obama administration successfully passed comprehensive health care reform, expanding coverage to you and many of the 46 million Americans previously without it. So you call your family doctor to schedule an appointment; the doctor, however, is booked, and can’t see you for two months. You decide to wait it out. A couple weeks pass; your throat worsens. Fearing something more serious, you go where you know a doctor will treat you: the emergency room. There, after a couple of hours of waiting, a physician and his team run you through a battery of complicated, expensive tests. The mystery ailment? Strep throat—something your doctor could’ve spotted in 10 minutes and for maybe $50 or $60. For the four hours you spent in the ER, the cost is 10 times that.

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MotherJones.com, “Meet the Taxpayers’ $3 Trillion Watchdog,” 30 September 2009

When a haggard-looking Hank Paulson, Jr., then Secretary of the Treasury, assured the American people last fall that the government’s multibillion-dollar Troubled Asset Relief Program wouldn’t cost taxpayers a dime, he sounded confident. “This is an investment, not an expenditure, and there is no reason to expect this program will cost taxpayers anything,” he said at the time. Well, that was then. Last week Neil Barofsky, one of the leading TARP watchdogs on Capitol Hill (and a dead ringer for a young Richard Nixon), offered a far less rosy assessment of the largest bailout of its kind in American history. “It is extremely unlikely that the taxpayer will see a full return on its TARP investment,” Barofsky testified to the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. Barofsky’s thorny review comes as little surprise. As the bailout’s one-year anniversary looms, no one on Capitol Hill has put more pressure on the Treasury to beef up its oversight of the labyrinthine, taxpayer-funded TARP and ensure that taxpayer dollars went to good use.

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TomDispatch.com, “Obama vs. the Lobbyists: A Scorecard for the Future of American Politics,” 15 September 2009

At the end of this summer of discontent, of death panels and unplugging poor Grandma, of birthers and astroturfers and rifle-toting picketers, the halcyon early days of the Obama administration feel increasingly like hazy, gilt-edged memories. The president’s sprawling legislative agenda — a health-care overhaul, financial regulation reform, slashing wasteful military spending, and climate change legislation legislation — is slowly grinding its way through the halls of Congress. Barack Obama’s sheen, his administration’s unflagging confidence, and all the bipartisan, post-racial aspirations have been replaced by the hard realities of Washington politicking. And with the media’s lens more tightly focused than ever on Washington’s every move and utterance 24/7, anything said a few months back feels like a lifetime ago.

Spending eye-popping sums of money, deploying armies of lobbyists, dispatching grassroots foot soldiers as agents of disruption, the special interests have fought fiercely to derail the White House reform agenda. It’s now apparent that Obama and his advisers, including Rahm Emanuel, underestimated their strength. Even if Congress were to move in all four areas targeted for reform, the concessions already made, the softening of prospective regulations and restrictions, would likely signal a series of genuine victories for those special interests.

…What does it mean when an intelligent, ambitious, and well-liked president, who broke through one of the nation’s most glaring racial barriers and enjoys majorities in both houses of Congress, can’t overcome the deeply rooted interests that now seem thoroughly embedded in the American political system? A look at the unprecedented opposition to Obama’s plans reveals why Rahm Emanuel might want to pocket that scorecard.

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Mother Jones, “Fast Times at Recruitment High,” 30 August 2009

When Arne Duncan stepped down as the head of the Chicago Public Schools to become the secretary of education in January, the school district he left behind had little to brag about. While Duncan served as its chief executive officer, CPS received mostly average or below average rankings in “The Nation’s Report Card,” a Department of Education assessment of the country’s largest urban school districts. Its high school graduation rates lingered at around 50 percent, well short of the national average of 70 percent. And since 2004, CPS has failed as a district to meet No Child Left Behind‘s “adequate yearly progress” standards. In one area, however, Chicago’s schools stood out: In large part to Duncan’s efforts, they were—and remain—the most militarized in America.

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Mother Jones, “The Foreclosure Rescue Mirage,” 26 August 2009

Fausto Ordoñez tells his story for what must be the 10th or the 15th time, but the edge in his voice is as fresh as if this were the first. It began near the end of 2007, as the Great Housing Crisis swept across the country and all but wiped out Ordoñez’s real estate business in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Unable to keep up with his mortgage payments, Ordoñez turned to his mortgage company, Texas-based Saxon Mortgage Services, looking for options to help him save his home. Yet more than a year later, as the crisis deepened and the federal government rolled out its multibillion-dollar homeowner relief initiative, Ordoñez’s fate was as unclear as ever—and his drawn-out negotiations with Saxon had turned into a nightmare.

…Believe it or not, Ordoñez is one of the lucky ones. It wasn’t easy, but he was able to take part in the government’s program and keep his home. Thousands of struggling homeowners have been less fortunate, which raises serious questions about the efficacy of the administration’s foreclosure rescue strategy. Interviews with homeowners, consumer advocates, attorneys, government officials, and lending experts all suggest that HAMP, now almost six months old, has struggled mightily to live up to its hype. Hundreds of pages of congressional testimony likewise detail the program’s flaws and shortcomings. And the numerous lawsuits filed against mortgage servicers participating in HAMP alleging shoddy lending practices suggest the companies the Treasury is relying on to execute HAMP may be ill suited to rescue struggling homeowners. Just the same, they are poised to receive millions—even billions—in taxpayer money for participating in the program.

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Mother Jones, “Should Obama Try to Reset the Planet’s Thermostat?” 30 June 2009

On Monday, the Waxman-Markey climate bill moved to the Senate floor after narrowly passing the House. It’s a step, yes—but as everyone knows, cooling the planet will require a lot more than closing an emissions deal. That’s why earlier this month the august National Academy of Sciences (NAS) brought together in Washington, DC, leading scientists, economists, policy experts, philosophers, and a menagerie of other experts for a two-day workshop to discuss a crazy-sounding idea: Should the US consider geoengineering the planet’s atmosphere to combat global warming?

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TomDispatch.com, “The Greatest Swindle Ever Sold,” 26 May 2009 (republished at Mother Jones, The Nation, Truthout, among others)

What cannot be disputed … is the financial bailout’s biggest loser: the American taxpayer. The U.S. government, led by the Treasury Department, has done little, if anything, to maximize returns on its trillion-dollar, taxpayer-funded investment. So far, the bailout has favored rescued financial institutions by subsidizing their losses to the tune of $356 billion, shying away from much-needed management changes and — with the exception of the automakers — letting companies take taxpayer money without a coherent plan for how they might return to viability.

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Truthout.org, “The Corporatization of Public Education,” 15 April 2009

Before an audience of big-city mayors and school superintendents in late March, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan offered an early – and troubling – indication of his vision for the future of public K-12 education in the United States. Duncan told audience members at the Mayors’ National Forum on Education in Washington, DC, that more mayors need to take control of low-performing, urban school districts, and that he was prepared to do whatever it takes to shift leadership of urban districts from school boards to City Halls. “I’ll come to your cities. I’ll meet with your editorial boards. I’ll talk with your business communities,” Duncan said. “I will be there.”

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TomDispatch.com, “Shut Out: How the Cost of Higher Education Is Dividing Our Country,” April 2 2009 (republished at Salon, Huffington Post, Truthout, among others)

A few months ago, Bobby Stapleton, a 21-year-old student at the University of Michigan, received a phone call from his younger brother. The good news came first: a senior in high school, he, too, had been accepted by the university, the fourth sibling in his family to have the opportunity to make the move to Ann Arbor from rural Hemlock, Michigan.

Then came the bad news: his brother had no intention of telling their parents, because as Bobby put it, “he knew the money just wasn’t there anymore, and that it wasn’t realistic.” The financial crisis had plunged the Stapleton family into severe debt. At this point, paying Michigan’s modest (by college standards) $11,000 tuition for another child appeared unlikely. As his younger brother told their younger sister, Bobby recalled, “Things were just going to have to be different for the two of them.”

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The Michigan Daily, “Handling the financial crisis,” part four (and the final part) of the Daily’s “The Anatomy of an Endowment” series, 18 March 2009

Like so many other investment portfolios, the years of spectacular returns for college and university endowments abruptly ended last fall as the scope of the global financial crisis grew and markets plunged worldwide.

Now, instead of enjoying 10-, 15- and even 20-percent returns, endowment managers across the country are announcing losses of equal magnitude.

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The Michigan Daily, “Giving voice to the endowment,” part three in the Daily’s “The Anatomy of an Endowment” series, 17 March 2009

The purpose of the University of Michigan’s endowment is simple.

As University Chief Financial Officer Timothy Slottow wrote in his “Statement on University Investment Policies” in November 2005, “There is one overarching principle related to our endowment and investment strategy: The University’s governing board and officers have a fiduciary responsibility to protect our assets for the long term, so that we may leave to succeeding generations a University at least as strong as the one with which we have been entrusted.

“Therefore, the primary purpose of our endowment,” he concluded, “is to generate the greatest possible income, subject to an appropriate amount of risk, in support of the University’s missions of teaching, research and service.”

But for nearly as long as colleges and universities have had endowments, there has been pressure on these institutions to not only focus on maximizing endowment gains, but also to act as engaged, socially responsible shareholders with an interest in the policies, practices and transparency of the companies and corporations in which they invest.

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The Michigan Daily, “The University’s multi-billion-dollar backbone,” part one in the Daily’s “The Anatomy of an Endowment” series, 15 March 2009

It’s often said that the University of Michigan, the state’s flagship institution of higher education, is about as close to a private school as a public university can get.

On the one hand, this can be attributed to the University’s impressive alumni base and the fundraising success that comes with such a vast alumni network — both characteristics of elite private universities.

But declining state funding has pushed the University further in the private direction. Since the 2002 fiscal year, annual appropriations funding from the state government has decreased almost $97 million when measured for inflation.

As a result, the University has been forced to rely more than ever on its multi-billion-dollar endowment to fund its academic departments, provide financial aid for students, pay for other University operations and essentially keep the University in business.

Yet despite the endowment’s increasingly vital importance to the University, very few people understand what the endowment is, what it’s comprised of, how it functions, who manages it and, most of all, how decisions are made concerning how much of those billions of dollars can be spent at any given time.

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CampusProgress.org, “No Comment,” review of Stanley Fish’s book Save the World on Your Own Time, 10 February 2009

The modern American university has lost its way. So argues prominent intellectual and New York Times columnist Stanley Fish in his latest book, Save the World on Your Own Time, a short, well-reasoned polemic on what he considers to be the failings of American higher education and what must be done to correct them. Rather than focusing on teaching and conducting research, he writes, today’s colleges and universities aim to solve the ills of the world, tackle social injustices like racism and American imperialism, and mold students into worldly citizens. Any number of college mission statements—which read more like panaceas than declarations of academic core principles—confirms this ambition. Faculty members, the intellectual lifeblood of any college or university and the focus of Fish’s book, are equally at fault, bringing personal beliefs and politics into the classroom where they don’t belong.

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The Statement magazine, The Michigan Daily, “Erik Lundberg: The man who manages the University’s billions,” profile of University of Michigan chief investment officer Erik Lundberg, 4 February 2009

The most important office in the entire University of Michigan system isn’t even on University property. About a mile from the Ann Arbor campus, it’s at the corner of Huron Street and Main Street, where a towering, angular office building looms large over the city’s business district.

In a fifth floor suite of that building, a team of finance specialists in the University Investment Office are hard at work managing the school’s vast investment portfolio.

The largest of these is the University’s multi-billion-dollar endowment — a portfolio of over 6,000 different investments in stocks, bonds, venture capital, real estate and energy, among others — and the school’s financial backbone.

At the entrance to the Investment Office is a glass door that bears the University seal, a reminder of nearly 200 years of history. And it’s the job of the investors on the other side of that door to lay the financial groundwork for another couple centuries of maize and blue.

Leading that team is Erik Lundberg, the University’s 49-year-old, Norwegian-born chief investment officer.

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TomDispatch.com, “The Duncan Doctrine: The Military-Corporate Legacy of the New Secretary of Education,” 18 January 2009

On December 16th, a friendship forged nearly two decades ago on the hardwood of the basketball court culminated in a press conference at the Dodge Renaissance Academy, an elementary school located on the west side of Chicago. In a glowing introduction to the media, President-elect Barack Obama named Arne Duncan, the chief executive officer of the Chicago Public Schools system (CPS), as his nominee for U.S. Secretary of Education. “When it comes to school reform,” the President-elect said, “Arne is the most hands-on of hands-on practitioners. For Arne, school reform isn’t just a theory in a book — it’s the cause of his life. And the results aren’t just about test scores or statistics, but about whether our children are developing the skills they need to compete with any worker in the world for any job.”

Though the announcement came amidst a deluge of other Obama nominations — he had unveiled key members of his energy and environment teams the day before and would add his picks for the Secretaries of Agriculture and the Interior the next day — Duncan’s selection was eagerly anticipated, and garnered mostly favorable reactions in education circles and in the media. He was described as the compromise candidate between powerful teachers’ unions and the advocates of charter schools and merit pay. He was also regularly hailed as a “reformer,” fearless when it came to challenging the educational status quo and more than willing to shake up hidebound, moribund public school systems.

Yet a closer investigation of Duncan’s record in Chicago casts doubt on that label. As he packs up for Washington, Duncan leaves behind a Windy City legacy that’s hardly cause for optimism, emphasizing as it does a business-minded, market-driven model for education. If he is a “reformer,” his style of management is distinctly top-down, corporate, and privatizing. It views teachers as expendable, unions as unnecessary, and students as customers.

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EconoWhiner.com, “To Be Young in Michigan,” 7 January 2009.

It was watching one of my favorite films, the 1979 classic Escape from Alcatraz (starring one of my favorite actors, Clint Eastwood), that got me thinking about life as a soon-to-be college graduate preparing to join the working world in these bleak economic times.

As Frank Morris, played by Eastwood, and his fellow inmates plotted their escape, I thought about young people like me, who will soon graduate from a college or university here in Michigan, and how our understanding isn’t all that different from the sentiment shared by Morris and the inmates of Alcatraz: Get out as soon as you can.

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CNN.com, “Uncertain future for auto industry children,” 2 December 2008.

ANN ARBOR, Michigan (UWIRE) — Amanda Emery, a junior at the University of Michigan-Flint, was born and raised in a General Motors family.

Her parents both logged more than 30 years on the job for the automotive giant — her mother, Cathy, as a skilled welder in a Flint, Michigan, truck plant and her father, Gary, as a company electrician and supervisor.

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CBSNews.com, “U. Mich. Alum Picked for Position in Obama Administration,” 30 November 2008

Cecilia Munoz, a University of Michigan alum and former resident policymaker at the Ford School of Public Policy, was named White House director of intergovernmental affairs by President-elect Barack Obama last week.

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The Michigan Daily, “Perks for profs on athletic department oversight board raise concerns,” 9 November 2008

As a member of the official party representing the University of Michigan at the 2007 Rose Bowl, Ross School of Business Prof. Thomas Kinnear spent the game mingling with California-based alumni, shaking hands and making introductions.

He’d traveled to the Rose Bowl as a member of the University’s Advisory Board on Intercollegiate Athletics, a group comprised of faculty, alumni, student-athletes and administrators who together advise University Athletic Director Bill Martin on major financial and policy decisions involving Michigan athletics.

As a faculty member on the ABIA, Kinnear also served on the board’s Committee on Academic Performance (APC). The committee, made up of all the faculty members on the ABIA and one University administrator, reviews the academic performances of student-athletes whose grade point average drops below the University’s required 2.0 and decides whether they are eligible to practice and compete in games.

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Pushback.org, “You Down with GOP?” (Part 1), 31 October 2008

As Republican presidential hopeful John McCain called reggaetón superstar Daddy Yankee to the stage at a Phoenix campaign stop in late August, the contrasts were striking. Looking stiff and wearing the customary suit and tie, McCain smiled awkwardly, while Yankee, whose real name is Ramón Ayala, moved coolly across the stage, greeting the swooning young high school students in the audience from behind a pair of blacked-out sunglasses. Here was a 72-year-old U.S. senator who listed ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” as his favorite all-time song alongside a 31-year-old Latin Grammy-winning musician from Puerto Rico known for such hits as “Gasolina” and “Lo Que Pasó, Pasó.” Yet what was most striking about that particular rally was the purpose of Ayala’s appearance: to endorse McCain’s run for the White House. “I believe in his ideas and proposals to lead this nation,” Ayala told the audience. “He’s been a fighter for the Hispanic community, and I know that, me personally, I choose him as the best candidate because he’s been a fighter for the immigration issue.”

Pushback.org, “Hip-Hop Republicans Try to Change Their Party’s Focus” (Part 2), 31 October 2008

Though the Hip-Hop Republicans have been buoyed by the excitement of an election year, group member Lenny McAllister stressed that the organization’s goals transcend individual elections. He singled out the GOP’s short-term focus on winning the next election as damaging to the party as a whole. Instead, Republicans need to look further into the future, he insisted, and in doing so shift their focus back to the growth and well-being of urban areas. “What we have to preach to young voters and moderate voters is Republicanism is larger than one candidate and one eight-year period,” he told me. “We’re not talking about winning elections; we’re talking about making a better America.”

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The Statement magazine, The Michigan Daily, “Country Before College Life,” 7 October 2008

Under the glow of the construction floodlights, Gunnery Sgt. Kenneth Bodisch’s shadow stretched to superhuman size along the 50-yard-line of Michigan Stadium. A thick, brick wall of a man, Bodisch stood at the bottom of the Big House’s eastward facing seating section, shouting at the students sprinting up the stairs of the stadium’s concrete bowl.

“Push it!” he barked. “Make it hurt!”

He turned to a student nearby who was hunched over, his elbows resting on his knees.

“You feel like jello yet?”

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CampusProgress.org, “Is Sports Activism Dead?” 3 October 2008

Before this summer’s Beijing Olympic Games, American superstar—andcorporate posterboy—Michael Phelps recieved praise from people ranging from Chinese President Hu Jintao to the leaders of the International Olympic Committee. The message was clear: Sports and politics do not mix. Phelps and other athletes have yet to discover the work of Dave Zirin, one of the sharpest sportswriters in the trade who has made a career out of peeling back the slick, corporate-sponsored facade of sports and exposing the political currents that flow underneath. In his characteristically forthright style, he argued in the book that “[w]e can pretend sports isn’t political just as well as we can pretend there is no such thing as gravity if we fall out of an airplane.”

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AlterNet, “Why We Can’t Afford Cheap Gas,” 29 September 2008

With the cost of crude oil again nearing the $100-a-barrel mark (even after last week’s financial meltdown) and this summer’s record gas prices in the rearview mirror, automotive executives and industry analysts are already heralding the return of gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs. Car makers are rolling out new truck models, and even Republican presidential candidate John McCain, in a new Michigan TV spot, promises to “spur truck sales.” Never mind that only months earlier, these same analysts, as well as auto executives and consumers alike, insisted that the future of the automotive industry lay in more fuel-efficient models like hybrid and electric cars. Now, however, it seems that many involved are slowly slipping back into the pre-$100-per-barrel mindset that was so popular when pump prices were under $4 a gallon and drivers of SUVs and trucks roared down the roads with clean consciences.

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AlterNet, “Country Club First: Walking Around in the RNC’s Wonderland,” 4 September 2008

Somewhere between the eight-foot metal fence surrounding the Xcel Energy Center, the armed Secret Service agents scrutinizing all credentialed entrants, the bomb-sniffing dogs, the metal detectors and the arena’s front door, the reality that normally governs our world — the one built on coherence, logic and reason — gets thrown out the window. Replacing it is an alternate reality, an insularity that is distinctly Republican, inside of which there exists a type of magical thinking seen only when large groups of Republicans gather together.

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Wiretap Magazine, “Serving the Country,” 20 August 2008

Presidential hopefuls John McCain and Barack Obama don’t agree on much. The economy, Social Security, the Iraq war and foreign policy, immigration reform, alternative energy, health care and gay rights — on every one of these contested issues the two candidates clash, frequently sparring on the campaign trail.

However, there’s one issue on which the plain-spoken McCain and the self-confident Obama do agree: The importance of national service to the future of the United States.

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The Nation.com, “Does GOP Stand for Grampa’s Old Politicians?” 6 August 2008

John McCain is, by his own admission, computer illiterate. Those boxes of motherboards, microprocessors, sound cards, video cards, disc drives and hard drives baffle him. E-mail? Barely a clue. Facebook? Don’t even bother. Nevertheless, with just over two months until Election Day, McCain, technological deficiencies and all, is eyeing the votes of the estimated 50 million Twittering, text messaging, iPod-toting young voters in this country. In doing so, McCain’s “straight talking” campaign faces a daunting challenge: selling the senior senator from Arizona, a man born before the advent of cable television, VCRs and cell phones, to a technologically dependent generation with whom he has practically nothing in common.

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The Statement magazine, The Michigan Daily, “Litter, legal ambiguity and your First Amendment rights,” 20 February 2008

When the College of Literature, Science and the Arts announced a new policy that would regulate the distribution and posting of publications, fliers and signs in LSA buildings, free speech advocates cried foul. The policy, which would only grant distribution rights during fall and winter semesters to student groups that comply with registration and content criteria, seemed to many a blatant violation of the First Amendment. It’s counter-intuitive – a public institution that limits the speech of the public.

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The Statement magazine, The Michigan Daily, “The University’s love of China,” 16 January 2008

Zhou Wenzhong, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, stood before a full-capacity crowd at Rackham Amphitheatre on Nov. 12 and, with an almost casual air about him, explained China’s plans to drastically improve the lives of its nearly 1.3 billion citizens by quadrupling per capita income by the year 2020. Zhou, speaking perfect English, went on to say that China was committed to preventing future health scares stemming from Chinese products – alluding to the recall of tens of millions of Chinese-made products from American toy manufacturers last fall. And responding to criticisms about the environmental consequences of China’s emerging industrial sector, Zhou said his country sought to build “a resource-conserving and environment-friendly society” in conjunction with its booming economy.