Archive
Change Can Be Tougher Than Hope
On the campaign trail, On the campaign trail, Barack Obama electrified Americans with his bold call to transform despair into hope, and voters elected him in a landslide. Democratic candidates for Congress rode his broad coattails to large majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate that his party hadn’t held in a generation. The stage was set to transform hope into change, for jobs, health care, climate change, and many other fundamental challenges.
Planet Titanic
Arming Yemen against al-Qaeda
Americans got a crash course on Yemen for Christmas. That’s because we’ve wanted to know more about the little-known, dirt-poor country in southwestern Arabia where the “underwear bomber” who tried to blow up a plane—bound for Detroit from Nigeria on Christmas Day—says he was trained.
Stop the Merger Merry-Go-Round, We Need to Get Off
What may be the dumbest corporate merger of all time—the $165 billion deal that saw AOL gobble up Time Warner a decade ago—ended just before the holidays, when AOL formally spun off into a totally separate company.
Reporters Should Tell Us the Truth about Global Warming
There’s international scientific agreement that emissions generated by humans are, in fact, warming the planet. So just as a journalist has no need to quote a “scientist” claiming the Earth is flat, journalists have no professional obligation to present the views of scientists who deny that global warming gases, produced by humans, are warming the planet—unless the skeptics have new and credible evidence to back them up.
Haiti: Earthquakes and Neo-Colonialism
Our hearts go out to the Haitians. Earthquakes and hurricanes. Disaster after disaster. There’s no letup. We’ll send cash, food, meds, trucks, pumps, clothes, shovels, tarps, bulldozers, cement, computers, docs, water, clergy, plumbing, prayers, and everything else we can think of.
Shouldn’t ‘Local’ Businesses Be Local?
Giant corporations are trying to co-opt the meaning of one of our important words: “local.” It’s important because small businesses across the country have created a very positive, grassroots economic movement, based on being local producers, providers, and marketers. Over 130 cities have “local business alliances,” with 30,000 businesses enlisted.
Race and the Rapture
Race is a subject about which nothing honest or candid can be spoken (particularly by a white person) without risking being branded a racist.
The State of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Dream in 2010
Over 40 years after Dr. Over 40 years after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, his words still speak to the social conditions that so many Americans face. Our unemployment rate is hovering at 10 percent, and the wealthiest 10 percent of us control over 70 percent of the nation’s wealth. Economic inequality remains a barrier to greater racial equality. The national commemoration of King’s birthday, therefore, is more for reflection than celebration.
Eight Years of Guantanamo: What’s Changed?
The Obama administration has failed to close the facility, where—by many accounts—inmates were harshly interrogated and even tortured, by its own deadline. Now there’s talk that the prison will remain open at least through 2010. And the proposal to move detainees to a maximum security prison in Illinois superficially retires Guantánamo as a symbol, while retaining the legal problems it embodies. Equally troubling is the administration’s expansion of detention facilities in Afghanistan that are almost impenetrable for lawyers and humanitarian groups.
