Government Archives - Public Seminar

Podcast

The Role of States and Localities

Episode 7

June 13, 2025 • by T. Alexander Aleinikoff, Hiroshi Motomura and Cristina M Rodríguez

This episode explores how state and local governments significantly impact immigrants through policies that either support or resist federal enforcement. Some jurisdictions implement sanctuary measures to limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities and promote inclusion, such as offering in-state tuition to undocumented students. Under the Trump administration, there has been ...

Activism

Water Belongs to the People, Not Corporations

Protecting our water is a sacred commitment to all life on earth

April 19, 2022 • by Simona Perry

Is water sacred? In the Roman Catholic tradition, it is through a rite of minor-exorcism: prayers that both breaks the influence of evil and sin in a person's life and sanctifies water as “holy.” In this ancient rite, a priest blesses the living “creature of water” to cast out devils, put sickness to flight, ...

Water Belongs to the People, Not Corporations

Politics

The Politics of Infrastructure

How the Lebanese struggle for public infrastructure is a lesson for all

November 17, 2021 • by Joanne Randa Nucho

Last month, Lebanon’s national electricity grid went dark—and this tiny Mediterranean country, known for its elite educational institutions, tourism and banking, but struggling to emerge from decades of conflict and corruption, found itself in newspaper headlines around the world again. The state’s two power plants had run out of fuel. Having ...

Politics

Democratizing Movements v. Constitutional Politics

An introduction to this week’s issue on the future of constitutionalism and democracy

October 13, 2021 • by James Miller

The idea for a symposium in Public Seminar on “Constitutional Politics” grows out of a two-day conference on Liberalism & Democracy: Past, Present, Prospects. I organized these conversations at the New School in February 2019, in collaboration with Helena Rosenblatt, a historian at City University of New York Graduate Center. One of the key participants was Aziz Rana of Cornell University, ...

Democratizing Movements v. Constitutional Politics

Columnists

We Don’t Need a Commission to Study January 6

We need a functioning government. National commissions rarely solve the problems they are formed to address–and often, they create new ones

June 2, 2021 • by Claire Potter

On Friday, May 9, the Senate failed to pass a bill establishing a bipartisan federal commission to investigate the January 6 attack on the Capitol, an insurrection intended to block Joe Biden from being inaugurated as president. The cloture vote was 54-35, six votes shy of the number needed to bring the ...

We Don’t Need a Commission to Study January 6

Past Present

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Controversies

Past Present Podcast, Episode 272

March 23, 2021 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Amid charges that he covered up Covid-related deaths among nursing home residents and sexually harassed multiple women, New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo is being asked to resign. Natalia referred to Rebecca Traister’s article at The Cut and Zephyr Teachout’s essay ...

Economy

State Secrets

Let’s ban non-disclosure agreements in government economic development deals

March 23, 2021 • by Pat Garofalo

_____ Sometime later this year, the Fort Wayne, Indiana, city council will vote on whether to give a 10-year, $16 million property tax break to the builder of a new warehouse. There is an issue, however, one that goes beyond the potential loss of public money. The city council members – ...

Economy

Location, Location, Location!

Why tax breaks are such a negligible part of corporate decision-making

March 18, 2021 • by Pat Garofalo

_____ Last month, Macy’s received a slew of job creation tax credits from the Ohio Tax Credit Authority to expand a warehouse in Jackson Township, a city located within easy reach of both Canton and Cleveland. One of the township trustees — which is akin to a city council member — had ...

Democracy

Do They Deliver for You?

Postage stamps and the paradox of democracy

September 3, 2020 • by Laura Goldblatt and Richard Handler

Those were the good old days, right? Looking at those stamps from the perspective of our present public health crisis—when Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a Trump crony who appears to be hamstringing the United States Postal Service (USPS) so that people will not be able to use the mail to ...

Politics

Are Americans Rethinking Who They Are?

“Consumers” and “taxpayers” can’t save a republic

July 28, 2020 • by John Stoehr

This is bad policy and bad politics, as my friend Marty Longman wrote last week. Two hundred bucks weekly is better than a payroll tax cut. No one would see that (especially if they’re unemployed). But people would see less money coming in amid a pandemic, recession, and housing crisis just ...

Capitalism

How Billionaires Get Away With Their Big Con

The rich have been successfully chipping away at Americans’ trust in government for decades

July 9, 2020 • by Thom Hartmann

About 75 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to “do what is right” when polled during most of the last years of the Eisenhower administration and early years of Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency. In 2019, when the Pew Research Center released its most recent poll of public trust in the government, only 17 percent ...

How Billionaires Get Away With Their Big Con

Politics

Harnessing Federal Power for Police Reform in America

What we can learn from Reconstruction and the Voting Rights Act of 1965

July 8, 2020 • by Richard Johnson and Desmond King

History suggests that the response to the current crisis of policing in the United States must be a stronger role for the federal government. Yet few activists within the Movement for Black Lives are demanding that the federal government flex its coercive muscle. Given the racism of the current occupant ...