Opinions
Too high a price for courage: The Honduran government should stop repressing indigenous leaders like Berta Cáceres
Berta Cáceres, an internationally respected leader of the movement for indigenous rights, is now living as a fugitive. The Honduran government ordered this soft-spoken dynamo imprisoned on September 20....
The end of poverty, soon
Appealing for peace 50 years ago, President John F. Kennedy told the Irish Parliament, “The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics, whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were and ask, why not?”...
Growth or safety net? Eradicating extreme poverty is no longer a pipe dream. But first governments must agree on their approach
“I AM not aware of any maternal deaths in the community in the past two or three years,” says the medic on duty at a remote rural clinic in the Terai, Nepal’s lowlands. ...
How to bring farmers markets to the urban poor
For almost 20 years, I’ve sold tomatoes, basil, lettuce, kale and other vegetables at the Takoma Park Farmers Market on Sundays during the summer season. It’s one of several markets my wife helped start at the dawn of the farmers market movement....
America’s sinking middle class
In some respects, 1988 has the feel of an alien, distant era. There was no such thing as the World Wide Web then. The Soviet Union was still around; the Berlin Wall still standing....
The mismeasure of poverty
THE Census Bureau reported yesterday that the poverty rate in America held stable between 2011 and 2012, at about 15 percent. According to the official measure, poverty today is higher than it was in 1973, when it reached a historical low of 11.1 percent....
A new bracero program wiil hurt farmworkers
Most media coverage of immigration today accepts as fact claims by growers that they can't get enough workers to harvest crops. Agribusiness wants a new guest worker program, and complaints of a labor shortage are their justification for it....
Mindlessly gutting food stamps
Among the many scars of the recession, the most intolerable should be the pangs of chronic hunger that still assail a stunning 14.5 percent of the nation’s households, according to the Department of Agriculture’s latest survey. A decade ago, the figure was 11 percent — a group defined as regul...
Dishonor among African election thieves
Zimbabwe had its presidential elections on 31 July 2013. Elections as in rigged. Robert Mugabe, the senile octogenarian and the only president since Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980, ‘won’ for the seventh time by 61 percent of the vote. His Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front...
Love for labor lost
It wasn’t always about the hot dogs. Originally, believe it or not, Labor Day actually had something to do with showing respect for labor....





