Archive
The Lineup: Week of Aug. 8-14, 2011
In this week’s OtherWords editorial package, Jim Hightower calls for a “national, FDR-style jobs program” while Sam Pizzigati relays how President Franklin D. Roosevelt deftly handled his debt-ceiling standoff with conservative Republicans. Get all this and more in your inbox by subscribing to our weekly newsletter. If you haven’t signed up yet, please do.
What would FDR Do?
How much can a U.S. president committed to greater equality hope to accomplish when lawmakers devoted to helping the rich hold the upper hand?
The Ugly Business of Lethal Injection
The pretense of lethal injection as a peaceful and painless way to execute prisoners is unraveling, and this may change the face of the death penalty in the United States.
Watching Out for Our Water
Water is at risk in the United States and around the world. Its quality and availability is in peril. Today, nearly one in eight people lack access to adequate supplies of safe drinking water. Globally, water-borne diseases kill more people than tuberculosis or malaria, and five times as many children die of diarrhea than of HIV/AIDS.
Waiter, There’s a Newfangled Technology in My Soup
The U.S. food system has a new bedfellow, and it may already be on your plate.
Playing Chicken in the Capitol
The problem with the game of chicken — two people racing toward each other, each daring the other to turn aside — is that the crazy one always wins. The one who doesn’t care about head-on collisions has a stunted imagination and can’t conceive of the consequences a crash would produce.
America’s Real Job Creators are Broke
Our policymakers in Washington have totally lost sight of what’s happening at the ranch. John Boehner’s GOP-controlled House and Barack Obama’s White House have agreed to slash trillions of dollars from the federal budget, as though that’s America’s most important need. Bovine excrement! If they’d lift their vision to the countryside, even they could figure out that our great economic urgency is for the creation of good, middle-class jobs to get America moving again — moving upward and moving together.
Raised Ceiling
The Defense Industry Threatens America’s Economy
India has the military-industrial complex all figured out. So does Saudi Arabia. Neither of them has one. Who needs to build weapons when you can simply buy them at a discount elsewhere? Not that anyone really needs so many weapons anyway, but it’s still a lot cheaper to tap the competitive arms market for a few specific items than to build a massive infrastructure to keep churning out whole arsenals for yourself.
Budgeting for the Great American Train Wreck
It’s Aug. 1, 2011. Does President Barack Obama know where House votes for that last-minute budget deal are?
