The push for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is reaching its final stages as the House of Representatives will soon take the key vote on fast-track trade authority which will almost certainly determine the pact’s outcome

When Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker put pen to paper to create America’s 25th right-to-work state last month, it became clear that the “labor question” is once again gnawing at the nation’s psyche. Do unions bring value to our economy or are they just obstacles to growth?

Although it has been over 60 years since the Brown v Board of Education decision, black students are still more likely to receive out-of-school suspensions for minor violations of the code of conduct. As a result, they are more likely to drop out of school or enter the juvenile justice system.

The USDA is putting $31 million behind a program that helps low-income families take home twice the veggies, and local farmers make twice the money.

We might be living longer than ever before, but the government’s plan to keep older people in the workforce may not be that easy. The predictions are that by 2055 the nation will have a population of 39.7 million people with the number of people aged 65 and over expected to double, a testament to healthier lifestyles and medical science.

“Opt Out,” a civil disobedience movement against state-mandated testing in elementary and secondary education, is growing rapidly across the United States. Last year, Opt Out protests occurred in about half the states. This year, the movement has found support across all 50 states.

On the steps of the city courthouse, a monument to equality and the rule of law, Baltimore residents have learned how dreams can be brutally deferred. There, the property of the city’s poor and working families has been, by order of the court, auctioned to the highest bidder.

President Barack Obama and his corporate allies are starting their campaign to manipulate and pressure Congress to ram through the “pull-down-on-America” Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade and foreign investment treaty between twelve nations (Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam).

Most world leaders seem to believe that economic growth is a panacea for many of society’s problems. Yet there are many links between our society’s addiction to economic growth, the disturbing ecological crisis, the rapid rise of social inequality and the decline in the quality of democracy.

Here’s a game to play over dinner. One person names a profession that they believe can’t be taken over by a machine, and another person has to make a case why it’s not so future-proof. We played this game on an upcoming episode of SBS’s Insight on the topic of the future of robots and artificial intelligence.

After working a computer job on Wall Street for three years, Mason Wartman wanted to try something new. He opened Rosa’s Fresh Pizza in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Little did he know that his pizza shop would soon help feed local homeless people and receive global attention.

Many believe that poor people deserve to be poor because they’re lazy. As Speaker John Boehner has said, the poor have a notion that “I really don’t have to work. I don’t really want to do this. I think I’d rather just sit around.”

I know a high school senior who’s so worried about whether she’ll be accepted at the college of her choice she can’t sleep. The parent of another senior tells me he stands at the mailbox for an hour every day waiting for a hoped-for acceptance letter to arrive.

On rare occasions, a book frames an issue so powerfully that it sets the terms of all future debate. Robert Putnam’s Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis may do just this for the growing gulf between America’s rich and poor.

More schooling and harder problems may be the best explanation for the dramatic rise in IQ scores—often referred to as the Flynn Effect—during the past century, a new study reports.

Crude oil prices have dropped dramatically since last summer. Strangely, over the same time period, gasoline prices have fallen much less. If a barrel of oil today costs less than half what it did last summer, why hasn’t the price people pay at the pump decreased a similar amount?

At a time when mounting student debt is dominating news, students across America are leaving nearly $3 billion in federal financial aid on the table each year. That this happens is often simply because a potential student doesn’t fill out the FAFSA, (free application for federal student aid) form, that funds aren’t dispensed.

Public banks in North Dakota, Germany and Switzerland have been shown to outperform their private counterparts. Under the TPP and TTIP, however, publicly-owned banks on both sides of the oceans might wind up getting sued for unfair competition because they have advantages not available to private banks.

Franchisees, consultants, and free lancers, construction workers, restaurant workers, truck drivers, office technicians, even workers in hair salons. What they all have in common is they’re not considered “employees” of the companies they work for. They’re “independent contractors” – which puts all of them outside the labor laws, too – contributing directly to low pay, irregular hours, and job insecurity.

If we want to see well-being and health improve, policies that promote a greener economy should be pursued. Redefining what we think of as prosperity, encouraging the consumption of green goods and services – and moving away from an emphasis on material consumption – could save governments money, as well as lead to better lives for its citizens.

Often seen in art and business, hybrid solutions are gaining increased attention in education. In the classroom, the blend of traditional and new teaching methods, and the mix of online and face-to-face learning – known as the “hybrid classroom” – is posing profound questions about the lessons of the future.

There are two million home care workers in the United States. They change diapers, administer medications, bathe and dress people and transfer the immobile from one place to another.

The economy added 257,000 jobs in January for an average gain of 336,000 over the last three months. More importantly, the report showed that real wages grew by 1.5% in 2014, the biggest gain since before the Great Recession. And job openings rose 3.7% in January, the biggest increase since 2001, signaling companies are having a hard time filling positions, which should put more upward pressure on wages.