Archive
Let’s Sign the Tobacco Treaty
By 2005, the world’s first public health and corporate accountability treaty was taking effect to tackle the world’s leading preventable cause of death and disease: tobacco use. That treaty may be the least well-known tobacco milestone here in the United States, but it’s the most significant. For one, the global tobacco treaty may save 200 million lives by 2050 when it’s fully implemented. It also tackles head-on the type of corporate abuse that hooked generations on a deadly product with little or no accountability.
Sweatshops Won’t Save Haiti
The United Nations will host a Haiti donors’ conference at the end of March.
This conference will be quite different from last year’s event, of course, coming as it does on the heels of the worst earthquake to strike Haiti in two centuries. An agenda has already begun to take shape: It’s already clear that a future Haiti must be populated with environmentally sustainable, earthquake-resistant buildings, for example, and it’s also clear that the international community must do something to ease Haiti’s massive debt burden.
Health Care Is a Study in Greed
America’s No. 1 growth industry is health care. No one has yet found No. 2. This preeminent role is not due to deadly epidemics, environmental meltdown, or massive public education. It’s due to greed.
Utah v. Women
No one should be surprised by a proposed Utah law that would consider possible criminal prosecution and life imprisonment for women who suffer miscarriages in that state. Appalled maybe, but not surprised. It was just a matter of time.
Nuking Taxpayers
Imagination Crisis
Our country faces a crippling crisis of imagination. The problems we face are enormous: a rapidly deteriorating planet, a broken health care system, millions out of work, so many who’ve lost their homes, children who go to bed hungry, and two wars that grind on with no end in sight.
They Say They Want a Revolution
Anger has fueled a pervasive rage on the right–a rage reflected, as the Southern Poverty Law Center just reported, in the dramatic growth of radical groups. Hate groups last year remained at record levels, despite the collapse of a major neo-Nazi group. Anti-immigrant vigilante groups soared by nearly 80 percent. And, most dramatically, militias and the larger “Patriot” movement came roaring back, with 363 new militias and related groups appearing in 2009 for a dizzying 244 percent increase.
Free Those Corporate Slaves
Here’s a constitutional conundrum that the five Supreme corporatists undoubtedly failed to contemplate: Since the 13th Amendment prohibits slavery, which is ownership of a person, don’t we now have to shut down the stock market, which is where corporations are bought and sold? It’s a new civil rights battleground, where we can join hands and chant: “Free the Corporate Slaves Now!”
How about High-Speed Buses?
OK, so you might not be willing to bus from Philly to Denver, but you wouldn’t take a train either. You might, however, bus from Cincinnati to Cleveland rather than fly, if it were done well. In any case, the job won’t get done by high-speed rail, so let’s get working on a practical alternative.
Taxpayers Are Getting Nuked
Compulsive gamblers are perpetually looking for the big score. Always thinking that the next card will draw that inside straight or the last card will turn their garbage into gold. Casinos have a name for these people–suckers. Well, Uncle Sam has pushed more than $8 billion into the pot, gambling on big returns from the nuclear power industry. Sadly, we know where this ends.
