Randy Shaw: Now that cities offer walkable, bicycle-friendly, public transit-available neighborhoods with desirable restaurants and a high quality of life, the poor are being shunted to car-dependent suburban areas in economic decline.
Urban Farming — An Idea Whose Time Has Come
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Urban farming is taking root because it makes sense. It conserves dwindling water supplies, makes little plots of land productive, reduces food bills, provides healthy produce free of salmonella and chemicals and gets people off the couch and in motion.
Annual TCM Classic Film Festival Features Vintage Films and Stars Galore From Movies of Yore
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Ed Rampell: Thousands of fans attended screenings of vintage films, discussions with and personal appearances by movie talents, dressed in period garb, partied like it was 1929 and witnessed an Academy Award winner’s footprints and handprints immortalized in cement at the fabled Chinese Theatre.
Rosa Parks at 100: “The Only Tired I Was, Was Tired of Giving In”
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Robert Illes: “I thought of Emmett Till, and I knew I could not move. I had had enough. The empowerment I felt covered me like a warm quilt on a winter’s day.”
Testing the New Pope’s Commitment to Poverty
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Walter Moss: Since the new pope seems to have a good sense of humor, he might appreciate the following irony: Although the Catholic Church he now heads bars women from the priesthood and his church is often accused of gender bias, the twentieth-century person who most forcefully embraced the ideals of St. Francis was a woman — Dorothy Day.
Don’t Cut Social Security: Double It
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Steven Hill: An expansion of the Social Security retirement system — one of the most successful and popular social programs in American history — that converts it into a more robust retirement system would build upon the most stable component of the current system.
Why Some Americans Want Big Guns
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Steve Hochstadt: Imaginary patriotism of right-wing extremists has been translated into a surge in demand for assault weapons, not for hunting or for protection against criminals, but to make war against our government.
The Other NRA
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JP Sottile: Unlike the NRA, the Military-Idustrial Complex isn’t limited to just spending money on lobbyists and advertisements and voting guides.
Why Obama’s Silence on the New Congo War?
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Shamus Cooke: Instead of Obama denouncing the invasion and the approaching overthrow of a democratically elected government, silence becomes a very powerful action of intentional complicity on the side of the invaders.
Ignore George McGovern’s Message at Your Peril
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Stanley Kutler: The New York Times downplays his impact, but we’re desperate for McGovern-like critics of reckless foreign policy
Even I Knew Romney Was Lying
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Charley James: “Romney Was Lying”, said Ginger a woman who considers herself a low information voter who pays no attention to politics until there’s an election.
Who’s the Real Wimp?
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Berry Craig: Romney is hardly the only chest-thumping Republican who seems to have never met a war he didn’t like so long as others did the actual fighting.
Iran and the Bomb: A Real Solution
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John Peeler: By beginning a process of unilateral nuclear disarmament, the United States could initiate a constructive international dynamic of reciprocal reductions leading to an end of this scourge.
Basic Facts about Taxes
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Steve Hochstadt: One obvious conclusion is that high, even very high tax rates on the wealthiest taxpayers do not impede economic growth.
August 9, 1945
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Berry Craig: Controversy, mostly stirred by academics, still surrounds the famous, some say infamous, missions of “Bockscar” and the “Enola Gay.”
Men Can’t Compete in Synchronized Swimming? Really?
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Rev. Irene Monroe: First known as “water ballet,” synchronized swimming was thought of as a delicate, feminine and frivolous sport seen primarily as part of Hollywood musicals and Las Vegas acts that no real strong men would deign to engage in.
Whatever Happened to “Peace on Earth, Goodwill toward Men”?
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Robert Fuller: It seems to me then that religion’s most serious shortcoming was not that it harbored “deniers” of well-established science models, but that it had not found a way to realize its own aspirational goals.
Sixtyish Saber-Rattlers
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Berry Craig: You might think anybody as gung-ho for the draft as Romney evidently was would have welcomed a draft notice or maybe even have volunteered. Romney did neither.
What the Indianapolis 500 Says About America
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Tom Hall: The Tea Party Republican candidate is now beloved because he lies, rather than despite his lies. The concept that a political leader can lie with impunity has become a badge of success.
Memorial Day 2012: A Lesson Not Yet Learned
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Walter Brasch: Going into the Memorial Day weekend, the war in Afghanistan cost 3,011 American and allied lives. The American wounded, some of whom will have permanent disabilities or may die lingering deaths from those wounds, is now at 15,322.
The Hunting Knife Dad Sent Me
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Dick Price: If I did it right, the patients — some still wearing old jungle boots or ragged fatigue jackets 20 years down the road — could see that I knew at least some of what they knew about Vietnam. And about drinking, too.
Fantasies of Male Chivalry Ignore the History of Women in Wartime
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Heather Marie Stur: The debate over women in combat is about gender roles — what is appropriate for men and women to do in wartime. It is also about symbolism — what the American soldier symbolizes about U.S. power and military strength.
Beware the Education–Industrial Complex
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Alan Singer: The Gates-Broad-Walton triumvirate support a range of what they champion as educational “reform,” but their primary interest in each case is to undermine the system of public education by promoting market-based initiatives based on competition, privatization, high-stakes testing, and anti-union activities such as campaigns for “merit pay.”
Fair Economy Essential to Growth
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Robert Reich: Wealth percolates upward from working people who are adequately educated, healthy, sufficiently rewarded, and who feel they have a fair chance to make it in America.
Intellectual Incest: Teaching Mexican-American Students
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Rodolfo F. Acuña: Mexican American Studies (AKA Chicano Studies) came about because of the failure of the educational establishment to deal with systemic problems such as high school drop outs.
Defusing Haiti’s Time Bomb Now
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Ezili Dantò: There’s a reason to recall the efforts responsible Haitians make to survive the Western rabid rage hidden behind the do-gooders’ benevolence.
Trayvon Martin: White Picket Fences, White Innocence
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Sikivu Hutchinson: Fifty-seven years after Emmett Till was lynched in the name of white womanhood, the murder of Trayvon Martin—a beautiful son, friend, and prospective college student—is yet another testament to the terror of white picket fence innocence.
This Does Not End Well: Escaping Afghanistan
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John Peeler: An agonizing series of missteps by U.S. troops in Afghanistan show us how precarious is our hold there, reinforcing the idea that we just don’t belong there, that we don’t respect the Afghani people.
Where’s the Sacrifice?
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Madeline Janis: Imagine if our government sponsored ads now likening riding alone in a car to taking a big old diesel engine, and dropping it onto the Alaskan wilderness, or a child’s face?
Why Leftists Should Support Obama’s Reelection
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An Open Letter to Fellow Leftists: Please Support President Obama’s Reelection On LA Progressive’s pages, I have read many articles and commentaries which threaten not to support President Obama’s reelection. Although I distrust political labels, I consider myself a liberal and progressive, and thus a leftist, but I differ from some of you in several [...]
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