Archive
Before and After a War
Obama’s Budget Asks What’s Valuable
Obama's new budget, is it DOA? Can tax breaks for the poor really see light of day? Well, Paul Ryan's budget will cut taxes too. Granted, not for the many...just for the few. A budget expresses what a nation finds valuable: A good wage in Harlem? Or a new yacht in...
Messing with Our Beer Supply
OK, climate change deniers. This has gone too far. You've gone from just being annoying know-nothings to now posing a serious threat to an essential good that embodies humankind's finest collaboration with nature: beer. It's one thing for the science denial cult to...
This Week in OtherWords: February 26, 2014
This week in OtherWords, Maude Barlow explains why we need to save the world's water before it's too late, Pamela Powers Hannley sizes up Arizona's latest legislative embarrassment from a local perspective, and Jill Richardson points out that many popular brands of...
Without any Grassroots, This Austerity Group Withered
The austerity mania that plagued our political system for four years is finally subsiding. The latest sign is President Barack Obama’s decision to nix the Social Security cuts he had previously included in his budget proposal. This was a body blow to the most powerful...
Saving Our Blue Future
Have you heard? The world is running out of accessible clean water. Humanity is polluting, mismanaging, and displacing our finite freshwater sources at an alarming rate. Since 1990, half the rivers in China have disappeared. The Ogallala Aquifer that supplies the U.S....
Lobbying for Tollbooths and Speed Bumps on Our Information Superhighway
Back in the infancy of the Internet Age, our hippest policy wonks orated endlessly about the emerging “information superhighway.” But that mouthful of a moniker would soon fall out of fashion. Anyone today who talks about the “information superhighway” comes across as...
Corporate America Needs to Change Our Diapers
As you probably know, disposable diapers sit in a landfill, undecayed, for generations. They're convenient for parents and caregivers but deadly for Mother Earth. Maybe you didn't know about another big problem. There's evidence that most popular brands of disposable...
Can Someone Please Cancel this Pity Party for the Rich?
The über rich are full of ideas. Not ideas to help humanity, unfortunately. They've thought up new ways to help themselves grab more money and power at our expense. Take Tom Perkins. He's one of a growing number of the put-upon rich — billionaires who grabbed a...
The Way Forward: Tax and Spend
Have you heard? Our economic policy debate is getting some spring cleaning. President Barack Obama has signaled that he's had it with all that talk about America being broke and the belt-tightening austerity measures that went along with that chatter. His proposed...
