Rights and Democracy
Reagan’s Lasting Gift to Immigrant Families
This Mother’s Day, I can hug my mother tightly and celebrate with her. I’d like to thank our 40th president for that. Seriously: As a progressive young Latina from a working-class background, whose parents immigrated to the United States from Mexico without papers,...
A 21st Century Challenge
Eugene Lim was on his way to hitting rock bottom. After graduating from Chicago’s Shimer College in 2011, he'd spent two years trying to find a permanent job. And he was increasingly blaming himself for his plight. "I thought I was poor through some fault of my own,"...
Wall Street Banks on Buying the Democrats’ Love
Wall Street arrogance seems to be accelerating even faster than our infinite cosmos is expanding. It's not enough that the greed and illegal acts of giant financial conglomerates crashed our economy, nor that they demanded and got a full taxpayer bailout. It's not...
Sister Rice Goes After the Bomb
Last March, Sister Megan Rice stood before a federal court in Cincinnati. Along with her companions Michael Walli and Greg Boertje-Obed, the 85-year-old Catholic nun was appealing a serious conviction. Their charge? Sabotaging the "national defense." Sabotage, which...
That Whiff of Hypocrisy
Baseball has spring training, football's got its training camps. But for a political junkie like me, nothing compares with the opening of the presidential primary season. Some 19 candidates, give or take, recently swarmed a Republican forum in New Hampshire in search...
Why We Need $50,000 Traffic Tickets
All of us would like to live in a world where people always do the right thing — without anybody looking over their shoulder. But that world doesn’t exist and never will. So every society on our planet has penalties. You break the rules, you pay a price. But penalties...
Where Are the Populist Democrats?
It's futile to hope that the GOP's gaggle of corporate-hugging, right-wing presidential candidates will seriously address the issue of rising inequality in our land. How about the Democrats? Well, Hillary Clinton has warned that "extreme inequality has corrupted other...
Did Slaves Catch Your Seafood?
A few years ago, a friend promised Asorasak Thama a job in the Thai fishing industry. The job offered good pay for a few weeks of work. Instead, he wound up trapped at sea for a year, working in terrible conditions for no pay at all. Thama had become a slave....
Don’t Let This Cable Giant Stamp Out Democracy
Comcast’s gleaming tower soars over its hometown of Philadelphia. The cable giant’s presence in the city is palpable. You’d like to believe that the company would have a sense of what’s going on in its backyard — and what its neighbors need. But Comcast isn’t paying...
The Road to Ruin
That harsh whine you hear in the background — like a buzzsaw getting ready for a log to come down the chute — is the vast right-wing conspiracy revving its engines. America Rising, an opposition research Super PAC that lives to trash the Clintons, dashed off a press...
