With new regulatory restrictions on predatory lending practices, including constraints on the freedom of banks to raise interest rates to unsustainable levels, major banks have told federal regulators that they will be hiking interest rates and slashing credit limits for millions of customers, even w… Read full post »

School taxes are soaring, but schools are losing funding. States are going bankrupt and teachers are being threatened with mass layoffs. Property taxes are high, but property values are falling, and banks won't refinance and won't make new loans. The federal government is working to foster economic r… Read full post »

The health insurance industry has released a sponsored "study" to show that if the Senate finance committee's version of healthcare reform were to pass, they would explode costs over the next few years by as much as 40%. The report is being greeted with outrage, as the insurance firms, which stand… Read full post »

Capitalism is “survival of the fittest”… capitalism is rooted in the idea of merit; everyone should be compensated according to his or her contribution (to the common good?)… capitalism is about the movement of capital; the more it moves, the richer everyone gets… cap… Read full post »

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin has adopted a brazen approach to countering Pres. Barack Obama's proposed healthcare reforms: outright fabrication and unscrupulous lying. She has begun to make the 100% false allegation that Pres. Obama's reforms would create a "death panel" tasked with promot… Read full post »

US president Barack Obama convened a G8-parallel Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, comprised of 17 nations representing over 80% of the world’s industrial and consumer greenhouse gas emissions. The goal was to push governments to move their emissions and energy strategies closer to c… Read full post »

Major new climate legislation is pending before the United States Congress. The bill has been called the most important legislation ever to be voted on by the US House of Representatives, and has been the cause of intense policy negotiations among supporters, opponents and legislators. The League of… Read full post »

Malalai Joya is a pioneer in Afghan politics, one of the female members of Parliament, as of 2005, and a voice for women’s and human rights generally in a nation increasingly beleaguered by corruption, mass violence and social disintegration. Joya was stripped of her seat in parliament in 2007,… Read full post »

What is forgotten whenever we talk about the 'legality' of torture used by the Bush administration is that in every single case, it was used arbitrarily, without any legal process, without any judicial review, against suspects. According to our laws, without judicial process, there was never, not at… Read full post »

His Excellency Ban Ki-Moon
Secretary General of United Nations
3 United Nations Plaza,
New York NY, 10017, USA
Fax: 1-212 963-7055
18 June, 2009

Dear Mr. Secretary General,

We the undersigned, Iranian academics from different universities around the world, express our deepest concerns about the situation… Read full post »

The great debate about healthcare in America invokes some of the deepest passions from people across the ideological spectrum. On the one hand, there are people who are content to treat any commentary that does not assert that the US has the most advanced, successful, ideal healthcare in the world, a… Read full post »

The Bush administration made a name for itself finding ways to obscure information about its activities by claiming the right to "state secrets" under the "sources and methods" rule, protecting active intelligence operations. The entire scope of the "enhanced interrogations" regime was justi… Read full post »

Supporters of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi allege the official results are electoral fraud, and accuse Pres. Ahmedinejad of an effective "coup d'état". Such language has led some to believe the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i has been pressured by other political heavyweights t… Read full post »

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i, who had already declared the victory of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad fair and legitimate, and most importantly, final, has agreed to investigate allegations the vote was rigged. He reportedly met yesterday with opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousav… Read full post »

There are still skeptics who say that wind power cannot generate enough power to be useful, or that the transition to renewable sources of energy is not really of urgent necessity. Here I offer some ideas to counter that argument. First of all, the US is shamefully behind in developing wind… Read full post »

Budgets are planned for 5 to 10 years into the future. They include projections about what spending on programs enacted or expanded or frozen or cut back in the next year will look like as trends out into the future. To understand where the current deficit projections come from, you have… Read full post »

David Letterman joked that Sarah Palin's "daughter" (he never said 14-year-old or her name) was "knocked up by Alex Rodriguez". The joke was in poor taste, clearly, but that might be why comedians don't carry the title "reverend" before their names. The joke was (let's all be honest here) about A-Rod… Read full post »

Rush Limbaugh has crossed the line into the worst kind of vile slander, claiming that the man who murdered a security guard at the Holocaust Museum, yesterday in Washington, DC, is "a leftist". Limbaugh vehemently professed the belief that James Von Brunn held views he had acquired as a res… Read full post »

The current debate over how to reform healthcare insurance in the United States revolves around what insurers can and can't do in order to turn a profit. One major area of concern is whether coverage can be denied for pre-existing conditions. Another is whether there should be a "public option… Read full post »