Archive
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.
Urban Food Deserts Threaten Children’s Health
Nationally, typical low-income neighborhoods have 30 percent fewer supermarkets than higher-income neighborhoods. The problem isn’t only in urban areas; food deserts are also common in many rural communities. Across the country, too many families are forced to do their food shopping in convenience stores stocked with overpriced, highly processed, fatty food with low nutritional value, often past its expiration date. In stores like these, staples such as milk can cost more than at supermarkets.
It’s Time to Rein in Agribusiness
U.S. citizens have a choice: Accept an economic future dictated by the selfish interests of corporate managers and stockholders, encouraging extreme disparities of wealth and power with our environment destroyed around the world, or demand a strong democratic government dedicated more to the common good.
Hidden Feelings
Let’s Chuck the Bottle
It’s worth $11 billion-worth a year–our bottled-water industry, dominated by such giants as Nestlé and Coca-Cola. But wait, shriek industry PR flacks, our product is pure goodness, not pollution. What are you talking about?!
Fly the Unfriendly Skies, if You Dare
Umar Farouk Abdulmatullab—the young Nigerian who got on an airliner in Amsterdam with explosive material strapped to his crotch, intending to blow up the plane over Detroit. (Detroit! As if Detroit didn’t have enough trouble.)
How About We Call It Quits On Empire?
And you thought Star Wars was just science fiction, right? Ha! Remember how the heroic insurgents were first ferreted out by a drone? Remember how the rulers of the universe were called “The Empire?” Remember their vast force of identical armor-clad soldiers? Remember Darth Vader, the Empire’s evil genius, sounding for all the world like Dick Cheney? But perhaps most of all, remember how the whole Battle Star community, pro-war and pro-peace alike, went up in flames?
Iran Sanctions are Counterproductive
Sanctions would divert the attention of the Iranian government and its people from the real problems within Iran, including the lack of freedom of speech and other rampant human and civil rights abuses. Stepping up our sanctions against Iran would offer its hardliners the propaganda they need to gain internal political support against the United States and therefore increase the regime’s power—just as support for Ahmadinejad has begun to wane.
Health-Care Reform Won’t Cure this Sick System
Good riddance to 2009: the recession, the Wall Street bailouts, the main street misery, and most of all the so-called health-care “debate.” Now that the debacle is mostly over, for better or worse, we’d best turn our attention to the one factor driving up health-care costs in this country that hasn’t even been mentioned—the lack of paid sick leave.
What If We Were Judged by Our Jails?
It looks like locking people up is a hard habit to break. The American prison population quadrupled in just the last 25 years. We’ve even surpassed China and Russia in the percentage of citizens in the clink. Meanwhile the rest of the world just scratches its head. “What are those crazy Americans up to now? Their country isn’t crime-ridden.”
