Archive
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...
Merging into an Information Superhighway Bottleneck
Arizona Swims against the Tide of Growing Equality
The choice for Arizona Governor Jan Brewer was clear: “religious freedom” or the 2015 Super Bowl. Just when it looked as if social conservatives would force the state into taking a giant leap backward in the fight for LGBT equality, Brewer vetoed a blatantly anti-gay...
Military Cuts Don’t Translate into Less Spending
After Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel gave a major speech at the Pentagon, The New York Times declared that the Pentagon would shrink the Army to pre-World War II levels. While he did announce an intention to reduce a number of military programs, the Pentagon isn't...
