Return of the Poll Tax

| Jul 10, 2019 | Economy / Business|Editors Picks|HP Featured|Rights / DemocracyThe poll tax Florida Governor Ron DeSantis just signed into law may cost his state $365 million a year — indefinitely.  DeSantis and the GOP-led Florida legislature recently made quick work of dismantling Amendment 4, a voter-approved ballot initiative that would’ve...

Climate Change Is a Poor People’s Issue

| | Economy / Business|Editors Picks|Environment / Health|HP Subfeatured|Rights / DemocracyIf you’ve read anything about climate change over the past year, you’ve probably heard about the IPCC report that gives a 12-year deadline for limiting climate change catastrophe. But for many parts of the world, climate change already is a catastrophe.  Recently in...

Congress Loves Socialized Health Care — For Itself

| Jul 3, 2019 | Economy / Business|Environment / Health|Rights / DemocracyFor $3.5 trillion a year, shouldn’t we Americans have a world-class health care system? Yet while we spend the most of any advanced nation in the world to get care — more than $10,000 a year per person — we get the worst results. No surprise, then, that Medicare...

We Have the Money to Fix Our Food System

| | Economy / Business|Editors Picks|Food / Farming|HP SubfeaturedPoverty is expensive, but fixing it doesn’t have to be — at least not compared to the status quo. The Institute for Policy Studies and the Poor People’s Campaign recently released a Moral Budget, and it’s a veritable treasure trove of illuminating data proving that...

What Sanctions Mean for My Iranian-American Family

| | Economy / Business|HP Subfeatured|Peace / Security“What’s wrong?” I asked my mother, as I saw her broken expression. She was on the phone, speaking with my grandparents in Iran. “A terrible thing has happened,” she replied.  My grandparent’s home in Tehran had been broken into. The thieves took everything they could...

Refusing to Fund Our Own Destruction

| Jun 26, 2019 | Economy / Business|Environment / Health|Food / Farming|HP SubfeaturedI spent the summer of 2015 knocking on doors across Cincinnati. As a rising college sophomore, I’d joined a group called Ohio Citizen Action to canvass for my community and the planet.  That year, the Ohio River was the most polluted body of water in the nation. Named...