Archive
Big Chocolate’s Child Slavery Addiction
Sorry to scare you, but on Halloween much of the chocolate Americans will hand out to trick-or-treaters will be tainted by the labor of enslaved children.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio: A Modern-Day Bull Connor
In April 1963, while confined to jail in Birmingham, Alabama for leading peaceful civil rights demonstrations in what was then considered to be the most segregated city in America, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote an open letter challenging a group of local ministers and the nation to speak out against the brutal, segregationist tactics of the infamous Birmingham police commissioner, Bull Connor. Forty-seven years later, in Maricopa County, Arizona, there’s another police official who seems bent on defying the Constitutional rights of non-white, law-abiding citizens.
Big Food’s Blame Game
Corporations spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year marketing a dangerous product to America’s children.
Tied to the Tracks
If life were an old-fashioned movie serial we’d be at the scene where Barack Obama is tied to railroad tracks while an oncoming train sounds in the distance.
Pop Goes Our Anti-Poppy Policy in Afghanistan
Recently, I found myself humming the Old Beatles song: “Poppy Fields Forever.”
Whitman’s House
It’s Still Not Easy to Die Peacefully
It’s been 25 years now since an AP poll revealed that a majority of Americans thought terminally ill patients should have the right to die. Assuming, of course, that they wanted to. Fat lot of good that poll did. Not one state legislature has followed it.
The Lineup: Week of October 11-17, 2010
Here’s what you’ll find in the latest OtherWords editorial package.
Washington at Work–for the Wealthy
Most federal asset-building programs, the study explains, deliver their benefits through the tax code, an approach that almost guarantees that the wealthy will score, by far, the biggest benefits.
Four Hundred Thousand Reasons to Vote
Alan Simpson, the co-chair of President Obama’s task force on deficit reduction, insulted those who depend on Social Security–many of them older women, children, and people with disabilities–by referring to the program as “a milk cow with 310 million tits.” Earlier, Simpson described the millions who depend on Social Security benefits as “lesser people.”
