Skip to main content

Privatizing the Apocalypse: How Nuclear Weapons Companies Commandeer Your Tax Dollars

Richard Krushnic and Jonathan Alan King TomDispatch
Imagine for a moment a genuine absurdity: somewhere in the United States, the highly profitable operations of a set of corporations were based on the possibility that sooner or later your neighborhood would be destroyed and you and all your neighbors annihilated. And not just you and your neighbors, but others and their neighbors across the planet. What would we think of such companies, of such a project, of the mega-profits made off it?

Four Things the Government Should Defund Instead of Planned Parenthood

Sarah Mirk Bitch
The fact that a majority of representatives in Congress don’t accept abortion as an essential part of reproductive healthcare makes millions of Americans say, “Really? Is this still the conversation we’re having?” It's like we haven’t moved forward in 40 years—not since Congress passed the Hyde Amendment in 1976, banning Medicaid from covering the cost of abortions. Access to abortion and reproductive healthcare isn’t something that should be a luxury for the rich.

What Tennessee Paid to Lure Lawbreaking Volkswagen to Chattanooga

Sue Sturgis The Institute for Southern Studies
Tennessee taxpayers have financed hundreds of millions of dollars in economic incentives for VW to locate and expand a plant in Chattanooga that manufactures one of the vehicles involved in the emissions cheating scandal. What happens to that money now?

American Slavery, Reinvented

Whitney Benns The Atlantic
The Thirteenth Amendment forbade slavery and involuntary servitude, “except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

Bernie, Donald, and the Promise of Populism

William Greider The Nation
Both candidates have been mislabeled as populists. The movement of that name was a genuine people’s rebellion that reinvigorated democracy. We can do it again.

Samsung Responds to the Worker Leukemia Cluster: Why the Samsung Tragedies Matter

Ted Smith, Intl Campaign for Responsible Technology Portside
We are now at an important crossroad in the long term struggle for sustainable electronics. It is clear that Apple and Samsung are the global kingpins and both have been severely challenged by mismanagement and human tragedy in their manufacturing supply chains. The future of technology development hangs in the balance.

The Surprising Things Seattle Teachers Won for Students by Striking

Valerie Strauss The Washington Post
Seattle teachers went on strike for a week this month with a list of goals for a new contract. By the time the strike officially ended this week, teachers had won some of the usual stuff of contract negotiations — for example, the first cost-of-living raises in six years — but also less standard objectives.