Healthcare, Prisons, Racism, Ageism, Politics, LGBTQ
At its worst, America’s criminal justice system represents the place where racism, greed and corruption intersect. At its best, it is inherently flawed, unjust, and unreliable, and little better than its worst. The engine that drives this injustice system is known as the prison industrial complex. It is the theater in which the nation’s foremost [...]
After months of a media war supporting and condemning it, the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) was finally introduced into Congress again last week. The bill has been debated before, but with a larger Democratic majority, its chances of passage are much greater today, and President Obama has said he’ll sign it. Employers, therefore, are [...]
Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Ari Fleischer, and other right-wing mouthpieces are trying to frame future debates while they reinvent the George W. Bush years. Their eerie falsehoods, half-truths, revisions, and lies are given added weight because they sit atop a bed of chatter and static, often called the “echo chamber,” of Fox News and right-wing [...]
As we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the inauguration of America’s first black president, and Black History Month, it’s worth pondering the question, “Who won the Civil War?” On November 20, 2002, I wrote in a Nashville [...]
The construction industry, which stands to gain the largest share of new jobs generated by the economic stimulus package — 670,000 jobs nationally — has a dismal record of insuring its workers, even in the best of times. A study released today by the Center on Policy Initiatives, Construction: Working Without a Healthcare Net, found [...]
AIG is rapidly becoming a nightmarish metaphor for the Obama Administration’s problems administering the bailout of Wall Street. One central problem is the lack of transparency. According to some news reports, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner knew weeks ago that AIG was planning to issue the bonuses to executives in its notorious credit default swap unit, [...]
AIG has finally come clean with the public about who was at the other end of its calamitous financial bets. The recipients of billions of taxpayer dollars were … well … pretty much the banks that we expected: Societe General, Goldman Sachs, and Deutsche Bank, to name a few. The full list is here . [...]
California is not doing very well. It has the largest budget deficit of any state, and its funding of schools, health care, transportation and other basic services is held hostage by far right-wing Republicans. Yet California is staunchly Democratic in presidential and U.S. Senate races, and produced the greatest number of Obama volunteers of any [...]
Recent statements by President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, admitting that they were going to use the economic crisis to get other things done, is at least surprisingly honest. But it is also hypocritical. Remember when some of these same people criticized George W. Bush [...]
After the shameful, embarrassing performance of the Bush administration in denying the most basic human rights to detainees at Guantánamo, Bagram, Afghanistan, and at CIA black sites elsewhere, the record of the Obama admininstration on this issue has been mixed at best. Initially, Obama canceled Bush executive orders that permitted torture (while denying such a [...]
THE VATICAN (Reuters) —The Catholic world is in upheaval and confusion after an announcement today by Bishop Richard Williamson and Pope Benedict that Jesus, contrary to centuries of church doctrine, did not in fact die on the cross as was previously taught. Said Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, papal spokesman: “The length and width of the [...]
Senator John McCain’s daughter, Meghan McCain, has served up a devastating critique of the direction the Republican Party has taken recently. “If figureheads like Ann Coulter are turning me off,” Ms. McCain writes, “then they are definitely turning off other members of my generation as well.” She understands that when the GOP’s dominant personalities are [...]
Irish immigration to America discrimination On this St. Patrick’s Day, with a black president in the White House, it is interesting – and maybe even somewhat inspiring – to look back on the way the Irish-American and African-American stories have coursed through our history on parallel lines, each struggling against terrific prejudices and slanders. In [...]
Dick Cheney initiated secret death squads. YAWN. Wait, what? Did I hear that right? It sounded like Seymour Hersh had some information that when he was vice chancellor, er oops, I mean vice president, Dick Cheney’s office DID NOT dispatch death squads to take care of certain undesirables around the world. Stunning. Oh wait. He [...]
The real scandal of AIG isn’t just that American taxpayers have so far committed $170 billion to the giant insurer because it is thought to be too big to fail — the most money ever funneled to a single company by a government since the dawn of capitalism — nor even that AIG‘s notoriously failing [...]
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