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Link Biscuits: 31 March 2010

Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Wed, 03/31/2010 - 10:59
  • Leo Hindery, Not 'Loyal Opposition' Within the Democratic Party?: "... it's year two and health care reform is over, over, over. Unless the administration wants to see its most loyal friends become a real loyal opposition, it must take immediate and robust actions to help American workers by: 1) giving the nation that industrial policy; 2) making our trade deals fairer and then more strictly enforcing them; 3) enacting strong and enforceable "Buy American" legislation; 4) adopting 'Roosevelt-Kennedy' style jobs programs in order to get Americans who want to work back to work immediately."
  • Darryl Lorenzo Washington, Sex, Race, and Precious: "In general, the hysterical attacks on the movie [Precious] take the same parochial stance as those that would view Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (a classic account of a provincial French girl’s exploitation) as a polemic against French rural life rather than a paean to a young girl’s fortitude and an indictment of all France. Neither incest nor familial dysfunction are racial themes; Precious shows how social illnesses—like medical illnesses—are exacerbated by ignorance and poverty. Precious also shows how the weight of whiteness—an intangible and insidious sense that society is ruled by white privilege—is a double burden upon the black poor. It was a cliché, often repeated during the Obama campaign, that his election would prove to poor black children that they could ascend to the presidency; Precious is a film that looks behind this lovely idea to examine the economic forces and psychological detriments that make it an easier said than done. Precious is, in every sense, a film that pushes the country to eschew self-congratulation. The final moments in which Precious escapes from her wrecked home to begin her life on her own—accompanied by the audience’s near certainty that she will fail—are deeply touching, and Precious is easily one of the most important American films of the last thirty years."
  • Breakthrough Institute, A New Look at Government Involvement in Technology Development: "This document therefore presents seven historic case studies of American innovation, ranging from the rise of railroads and commercial flight to more recent developments in personal computing and the Internet. It also presents three shorter case studies spotlighting recent developments in energy technology and two international examples of public-sector support for clean energy development. In each example, government support was critical at one or more stages in the development and deployment of these technologies, many of which Americans now take for granted as constant facets of their everyday lives."
  • Rockefeller Institute, A New Paradigm for Economic Development: How Higher Education Institutions Are Working to Revitalize their Regional and State Economies: "Universities and higher education systems across the country are taking leading roles in their states’ economic development efforts — and a report released today by the Rockefeller Institute of Government says this trend seems likely to strengthen as the nation moves into the era of an “innovation economy.” The study found that higher education’s increasingly important role builds on, but goes well beyond, the research strengths of universities — incorporating efforts as wide-ranging as job training, business consulting, housing rehabilitation and even securing seed money for new businesses."