Archive
America Needs a Single Payer Health Care System
The new norm is underinsurance. About 40 percent of us go without needed care because we can’t afford it. The health care law won’t change that, even once it’s completely phased in. Our plague of medical bankruptcies will continue too.
Want to Cut Federal Spending? Go Where the Money Is.
If we are serious about cutting or redirecting our federal spending to important priorities like health care and education, we need to go where the money is, too. Roughly 59 percent of discretionary federal spending is military spending. That’s where we need to look.
Squandering Our Tax Dollars and Ocean Resources
As concerns about the nation’s widening deficit grow louder, many of the Obama administration’s 2012 budget priorities are getting short shrift. It’s not only important to understand the government’s approach to hot-button issues like Medicare, military spending, and tax cuts for the wealthy. We need to pay attention to other critical issues.
Why are we the Tea Party’s Hostages?
At issue was the federal budget, which needed to clear Congress to keep the government going. The protestors think the government is spending way too much and the national debt is too big. They want to cut both of them to the bone. And they intend to use the Republican Party as their knife.
From Democracy to Plutocracy
In American politics, the past not only sticks with us, but it often provides the best definition of what’s going on in the politics of the present, so it can be useful to revisit some powerful words from our history.
Libya: It’s All about the Oil
If the U.S.-NATO war on Libya sounds pretty fishy to you, go to the head of the class. You’re way ahead of Congress and the most influential media outlets. Lawmakers and pundits know full well why Washington is intervening in Libya. But they don’t want to risk their mainstream credentials by revealing it.
Retired Dictators
The Lineup: Week of April 18-24, 2011
Daphne Wysham parses Obama’s “dirty energy” policy, Antonia Juhasz reflects on the BP oil disaster a year after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, and columnist William A. Collins highlights the dangers of nuclear reactors and weapons.
Obama’s Dirty Energy Fixation
Just days after a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami unleashed a nuclear disaster in Fukushima, President Barack Obama signed a nuclear power cooperation agreement with Chilean President Sebastián Piñera. Like Japan, Chile is seismically active. It suffered the sixth-most powerful earthquake–8.8–ever recorded on a seismograph only last year.
Learning from the BP Oil Disaster
The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded off the coast of Louisiana one year ago, killing 11 crewmembers and causing the release of some 210 million gallons of oil that did not stop flowing until August. It became the largest oil disaster in American history. It could happen again.
