Rights and Democracy
It’s Time to Cut the Contractors Loose
How much of your paycheck do you plan to hand over to corporate Pentagon contractors this year? The average American taxpayer will have paid $14,520 in federal income taxes in 2017. And that’s not even including the taxes that every working person pays to take care of...
Teacher Strikes Are About a Lot More Than Paychecks
Teachers across the United States are having a moment. Educators are building on the momentum from West Virginia, where striking teachers won a 5 percent pay raise for state employees. Now the protests have spread to Arizona, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and the nation’s...
Police Killed More People Last Year Than Mass Shooters
This spring, an estimated 800,000 Americans gathered in Washington, DC to participate in the "March for Our Lives" organized by the teenage survivors of the school massacre in Parkland, Florida. Thousands more attended 800 sister marches across the nation and around...
‘Modernization’ Is Media Code for Military Build-Up
One of the most effective rhetorical tools in normalizing massive military budgets is to treat spending billions — and sometimes trillions — of dollars as something one has to do in order to be "modern." "Modernization" is, after all, an attractive label. Who doesn’t...
It’s Up to Grown-ups to Stop Bullying, Not Kids
Bullying's been in the news a bit lately, in part because of the Parkland shooting. In response, some people suggested that school children themselves should befriend kids who get bullied to prevent school shootings. Others say this is victim-blaming. I'm not thinking...
Betsy DeVos Needs an Education on Ethics
Question: What do you get when you combine ignorance, imperiousness, and incompetence? Answer: Betsy DeVos. She's Donald Trump's multi-billionaire education secretary, who hates public education and loves the plutocratic idea of corporate rule over democracy. DeVos is...
King’s Dream Included Economic Equality, Too
April 4 marks the 50th anniversary of the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Just after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, King was fatally shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. American history...
If You Want to Kill Drug Dealers, Start with Big Pharma
At a recent rally in New Hampshire, Donald Trump called for the death penalty for drug traffickers as part of a plan to combat the opioid epidemic in the United States. At a Pennsylvania rally a few weeks earlier, he called for the same. Now his administration is...
Just a Small Bug
One No-Brainer Way to Bring Gun Deaths Down
It's now been over a month since 17 teenagers were gunned down at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, culminating in a march that brought nearly a million people to the capital. Yet Congress is still dragging its feet on guns. While Republicans and Democrats...
