Not for publication, quotation or distribution. For the use of the membership only. “This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s. And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.” — Sir Thomas More challenging…

by T. Norman Van Cott Among economics data watchers, a country’s exports enjoy a hallowed status. The ability of producers in country A to sell goods and services to people in other countries is taken as a sign of A’s economic strength, although the underlying metric for economic strength goes unmentioned. In addition, job counters across the spectrum constantly count the number of jobs associated with exports. The more export-related jobs, the better. In a…

by Richard McGowan, Ph.D. I recently received an e-mail from Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., the publisher of the New York Times, to which I subscribe. He knows that the media are under attack from President Trump and he wrote to ‘defend’ the media and “assert the value of quality journalism,” since, after all, “the truth matters, now more than ever.” As well, “the truth…is also incredibly hard to get to.” Nonetheless, Sulzberger states, “we remain…

by Jason Arp Government-run economic development entities are having a difficult time replicating the real thing. News stories from around Indiana point to problems related to creating what I call synthetic economies: The Muncie building commissioner is charged with wire fraud, theft and money-laundering; a Marion tax district lost $2.5 million on a failed hotel project; Crawfordsville and Montgomery County defunded their economic development corporations; the Angola Herald-Republican filed a public access complaint against the Steuben…

IF YOU ARE AMONG THOSE struggling with a definition of “fake” news, we have an illustration (below). It is from page 4A of the Monday issue of the Gannett corporate national publication known locally as the Indianapolis Star. You can see that the page has three items on it: a news article and two advertisements. One of the advertisements, with only a small-print disclaimer, is laid out to look like a news article, complete with a…

Barack Obama: America’s Anti-American President — Governance and Security Implications John F. Gaski, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Mendoza College of Business University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN 46556 574-631-5266 jgaski@nd.edu The author is a long-time registered Democrat―and a long-time registered Republican― intermittently, not sequentially, which should dispatch any possible impression of partisanship. Dr. Gaski’s primary research field is the study of social and political power and conflict. Abstract This analytical item revisits some public matters…

John McCain, the anti-Trump, tells us he knows how to spot a dictator. He will be the one trying to suppress a free press. But Senator McCain was wrong about the effective range of North Vietnamese AAA fire and he is wrong about this. For starters let us assume that, by “suppressing,” McCain does not mean challenging the factual content of news reports. That would be ridiculous. Let us assume he is referring to journalism…

by Maryann O. Keating, Ph.D. In the civics section of the 2014 National Assessment of Educational Progress, eighth graders were tested on this question: “Which of the following is a belief shared by most people of the United States?” The country should have a single political party. The country should have an official religion. The government should be a democracy. The government should guarantee everybody a job. Thirty-two percent correctly chose “3”; however, 51 percent…

Not for publication. For the use of the membership only. by Eric Schansberg, Ph.D. The downtown of Louisville across the river is now a food “desert” in that it has few significant grocery stores. Last year, four prominent groceries closed there and a proposed WalMart was sacked by legal hurdles and social hassles. Grocery stores in urban centers throughout the nation face difficult economic challenges. Ironically, these include efforts to help the poor — e.g.,…

by Fred McCartney The people in this city who decided on the Palladium-to-Stadium bus route (otherwise known as the Red Line) are determined to go ahead with that plan, even though it obviously means further delay in the needed expansion of city-wide bus service to those who would use it and truly need it. While print media publishes articles and letters about how dire the city’s needs are for general public transportation — many with…