Randy Shaw: After President Bill Clinton signed legislation in 1996 “ending welfare as we know it,” many highlighted this “common sense” solution and criticized progressives for opposing the bill. Soon after passage, politicians and the media said it had not caused the downsides that activists had predicted, ignoring that the law had not been fully implemented. But troubling reports soon emerged.
Bill Clinton: Disorientation And ‘People Looking For Anchors’ Explain Arizona’s New Immigration Laws
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Andrea Christina Nill: Now, we have the highest percentage of Americans who have been out of work for six months or more than we’ve had in decades. This is disorientating and people are looking for anchors to make life simple and understandable and digestable again and sometimes with the idea that they need to go back to an idyllic time that never existed. That’s a big part of the explanation for this anti-immigration law that Arizona just passed or the idea that we out to bring back Confederate month in Virginia without saying anything about slavery.
Haiti Donor Conference Presents Major Challenges
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Georgianne Nienaber: What Haiti needs most of all is the encouragement and means to become a self-sufficient nation. Bill Clinton is the United Nations special envoy to Haiti and he finally seems to be saying what desperately needs to be said about Haiti.
Catch 22 with President Obama
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Lydia Howell: Ultimately, what is most important about Barack Obama may not be that he is an African-American president but, that — like Bill Clinton before him — he is a Corporate Democrat, who offers no real alternatives to Big Business As Usual and Endless Wars for Empire — (just like the Republicans
Far Worse Than a Big Zero
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Joseph Palermo: We can call the 2000s the “Worse Than Zero” decade or the “Big Zero,” or anything we wish, but what characterized it most for me was the near total control of corporations, especially over our civic institutions. All of the terrible economic and governing ideas from the Reagan era crested and then crashed in the last eighteen months leaving something far less than “zero” in their wake.
Kicking the Can Down the Street
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I am afraid to say that President Obama is even risking his presidency by this decision. From this point forward, he will lack the support of the rank and file Democratic majority and become dependent on the very Republicans whose highest priority is to defeat him in 2012.
U.S. Needs to Listen to Arias on Latin American Issues
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Tough as it may be, Americans building war machines and munitions need to start retooling themselves for peace work.
“What Can I Do?”
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Someone recently approached me at the cheese counter of a local supermarket, asking “what can I do?” At first I thought the person was seeking advice about a choice of cheese. But I soon realized the question was larger than that. It was: what can I do about the way things are going in Washington? [...]
Gay Pride Speaks to Equality
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In the Oxford English Dictionary “equality” means, “Identical in amount; neither less nor greater…having the same measure, number, value, intensity.” How did three Democratic presidents, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Lyndon Johnson, speak to equality? President Barack Obama on Monday, June 1, named June as “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month” issuing a proclamation: [...]
Anti-War Hero
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In the 1960s, most of America reviled Malcolm X as a villain. America now celebrates the May 19 birthday of this “shining prince.” History repeats itself. On April 22, 2004, an American football star named Pat Tillman was killed in action in Afghanistan. After September 11, Tillman had eschewed a $3.6 million sports contract to [...]
Rejecting Post-Raciality: An Ode to the Life of John Hope Franklin
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The death of preeminent historian and race scholar, John Hope Franklin, and his life-long contribution to helping America understand the legacies of slavery and racial vestiges that have been carried forward, is a true loss. Franklin helped those who followed his work to understand that race is still the most entrenched socio-economic-political issue of our [...]
Lani Guinier Speaks
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Famed legal scholar, civil rights attorney and author, Lani Guinier, spoke at Tavis Smiley’s State of the Black Union in 2009. The first black woman tenured professor at Harvard Law School, Ms Guinier has authored and co-authored several books including Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy and Lift Every Voice: Turning a [...]
Republicans Playing a 1993 Strategy
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In 1995, the Republicans swept into the House of Representatives winning 57 seats and running on term limits and a balanced budget amendment that they never passed. They implemented a strategy of obstructing everything that President Bill Clinton wanted to do and initiated a huge set of overlapping and expensive Congressional investigations of every aspect [...]
Obama to Ignore CIA’s War Crimes
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If President-elect Barack Obama is reassuring the intelligence community “that his complaints are with the Bush administration, not them,” as AP’s Pamela Hess reported January 10th, his campaign slogan “change we can believe in” is headed for an early grave. Obama’s remarks are a literal signal to CIA officials and other unindicted war criminals that [...]
McCain Hopes for A Win, Obama Aims for a Mandate
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Senator John McCain’s campaign should be experiencing a surge in this final week of the campaign, a narrowing of the gap between him and his opponent Senator Barack Obama. In almost every campaign since 1988, except for when Senator Bob Dole lost to President Bill Clinton in 1996, the eventual losers experienced a last minute [...]
Is National Masochism Causing The Tight Presidential Race?
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I don’t understand. As Juan Cole notes this morning, Republicans came to Washington in 2000 with a solid majority in both houses of Congress and on the Supreme Court, allowing them to steal the presidency. If you ever wanted to know what a pure Republican Party government unhindered by Democrats or anyone else might look [...]
Fiction Is No Stranger to What They Call Truth at Bush & Company
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Bush and Company lives for and thrives on lies and disaster. They have proven their fiction is a stranger to the truth. The greater the disaster, the greater the potential for Republican profit, greed, and corruption. Herr Rove learned from Joe Goebbels, that by using fiction to become GOP truth, he could find ways to [...]
Obama! Obama! Hillary! Hillary!
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Was it a split CA Dem Party convention last weekend in San Jose? Shades of what’s to come at the Dem Party convention in August? Actually, the Obama fans far outnumbered the Hillary cadre on Sunday, when both camps waved placards in front of the convention center, awaiting the arrival of Obama surrogate San Fran [...]
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