Archive
Jack-o-Lanterns Illuminate the Luxury in Our Lives
Every time I see a jack-o-lantern, I remember a conversation with my friend Kate Chumo. I met her in her home country of Kenya. We were talking about a favorite Kenyan food called uji, a fermented millet porridge. "Do you know what we do with millet in the U.S.?" I...
Spinning Failure into Gold
What amazing alchemists Wall Street bankers are! They can turn failure into gold and reform into business as usual. These sorcerers have pulled off both tricks right in front of us since their 2007 collapse. They turned that gross failure into an ongoing...
Charting a Better Path for Our Public Schools
Nearly 60 years after the Supreme Court handed down its Brown v. Board of Education decision, separate but unequal school systems still stunt our nation's potential. After the 1954 ruling, segregating racially within a town or county became much more cumbersome...
Spooky Congress
Worker Rip-Offs in the Reagan Building
How's this for irony? Ronald Reagan — worshipped as the supreme deity by small-government, anti-spending zealots — not only has a government office building in Washington named for him, but it's the biggest and costliest one built to date. The only face-saving factor...
This Week in OtherWords: October 16, 2013
This week in OtherWords, Sam Pizzigati explains why the McCutcheon Supreme Court campaign finance case has the potential to make our political system even more vulnerable to political corruption than it was during the Watergate era and Josh Levy previews an upcoming...
Taking the Fight for Electronic Privacy to the Streets
It's been four months since Edward Snowden exposed the NSA's spying regime. Since then, we've discovered that the agency tracks our phone calls, our emails, our browsing history, and our contacts. It also tracks our contacts' contacts…and their contacts. We've also...
A Radioactive Poster Child for Government Waste
Here's a lesson on how the federal government and its contractors can turn a relatively modest project into a massive boondoggle. Back in 2005, officials at the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) persuaded Congress to approve a new...
Worse than Watergate
The U.S. Supreme Court is mulling a case that could end up giving America's wealthy a perpetual green light to contribute as much as they want directly to politicians and political parties. Credit Shaun McCutcheon, an Alabama businessman who owns an electrical...
Meat So Cheap You Could Die
Thanks to the shutdown, the government is doing less to protect Americans from foodborne pathogens and deal with the aftermath of outbreaks. The timing couldn't be worse. Ten days after the shutdown began, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that 317 people...
