Agriculture and the Healthcare Debate: Inextricably Linked

President Obama’s plans to reform the healthcare system in U.S. have taken over the headlines in the past several weeks. Doctors, economists, insurance executives, public health experts—all of them are being afforded the chance add their two cents on how to fix our broken healthcare system. The voices that are strikingly absent, though, are those of the agricultural community. What, you may ask, does agriculture have to do with overhauling the healthcare system?

Taxing Wealth for the Common Good

When members of Congress proposed paying for expanded health care with a tax surcharge on America's wealthiest citizens, the attack was swift but predictable. Taxing the top was labeled "class war," an attack on the successful, and bad for business and the economy.

US Economic Myths Bite the Dust

The Great Recession is allowing some widely held beliefs about the US economy – which were the source of much evangelism over the last few decades – to run up against a reality check. This is to be expected, since the United States has been the epicentre of the storm of policy blunders that caused the world recession.

Reading Race in the Death Penalty

The power of racial bias has long loomed over the death penalty, yet has seldom been directly confronted in the courts. But in North Carolina, a race analysis of capital punishment is now being written into law.

The Internet: A Recession Lifeline

What are people turning to during these hard economic times, besides a pint of ice cream? The Internet.

A recent survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 69 percent of all Americans are using the Internet to cope with the recession, scout for jobs, take online classes, search for government benefits and learn investment tips.

Tel Aviv Murder Reflects Israeli Fears

Why is the murder of gays in Israel different from all other anti-gay violence?  That's the question I asked myself after a gunman killed two and injured fifteen at a gay youth center in Tel Aviv. As the father of a young gay man, I was horrified. As a Jew, I was appalled.

Femicides of Juárez: Violence Against Women in Mexico

Juárez is nicknamed “the capital of murdered women.” The border city of 1.5 million inhabitants draws tens of thousands of young women from small, poor towns with $55-a-week jobs in maquiladoras operated by such wealthy major corporations as General Electric, Alcoa, and DuPont. According to Amnesty International, more than 800 bodies had been found as of February 2005, and over 3,000 women are still missing. These mass murders of women have been dubbed a “femicide” by the popular media, which is defined as the systematic killing of women due to their gender.

Posted in Equality/Justice, Human Rights, inequality, women's rights

So Much for the Promised Land

LeAlan Jones, the 30-year-old Green Party candidate for Barack Obama’s old Senate seat in Illinois, is as angry at injustice as he is at the African-American intellectual and political class that accommodates it. He does not buy Obama’s “post-racial” ideology or have much patience with African-American leaders who, hungry for prestige, power and money, have, in his eyes, forgotten the people they are supposed to represent. They have confused a personal ability to be heard and earn a comfortable living with justice.