Archive
Crashing the GDP
At 9 p.m. on June 12, there was a collision on the freeway between Baltimore and D.C. The first car, a beige Prius. The second, a gigantic 18-wheeler tearing down I-95. The truck knocked the Prius sideways, sending it spiraling down the road and into the guardrail, the only thing that stopped it from plunging over the edge into the river below. The truck kept going.
The Separate-but-Equal Sale
“Back-to-school” sales seem to start earlier every year. These days, more than binders and backpacks are on offer. Now, public schools themselves are for sale.
Shortcut to Nowhere
It seemed that Joseph Holman, a 51-year-old redhead from Brooklyn, had climbed into the middle class the old-fashioned way: by the sweat of his brow.
A Rotten Cop on the Beat
In mid-July, relatives of three U.S. citizens killed by drone strikes in Yemen filed a wrongful death lawsuit against top security officials. Their complaint charges that the lethal strikes “violated fundamental rights afforded to all U.S. citizens, including the right not to be deprived of life without due process of law.”
Grabbing Bigger Slices of Pie
What happens when nations cut taxes for their richest citizens?
Turning College Students into a Commodity
Free-market purists want us to have another ungodly religious encounter with their omnipotent deity. Looking at America’s trillion-dollar student debt crisis, these spiritualists had a burning-bush revelation.
Washington’s Democratic Double-Standard
The Western Hemisphere, from Mexico on down, traditionally served as a happy hunting ground for American business. From the Rio Grande to Cape Horn, cheap labor, cheap oil, cheap copper, cheap gold, cheap bananas, cheap beef, cheap wheat, cheap palm oil, and cheap politicians made Latin American countries attractive places to extract profits.
Privatizing Public Schools
Supreme Court, Inc.
The precedents the Roberts Court is setting are making it easier for corporations to exercise the rights of American citizens without corresponding civic responsibilities.
The Lineup: Week of July 30-August 5, 2012
This week’s OtherWords editorial package features Sam Pizzigati‘s first column, in which he explains why wealth inequality is officially holding steady while income inequality is growing increasingly skewed. Jim Hightower skewers Mitt Romney’s financial shenanigans, and William A. Collins puts the nation’s penchant for guns in perspective.
