( Tomdispatch.com) – It was William Shakespeare who, in Troilus and Cressida, wrote, “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” And yet, in the polarized news cycle since Hurricane Helene ravaged the southeastern United States and the hurricanes have kept coming, we’ve heard a tale not of shared humanity, but of ruin, discord, […]
The Failing Battle for Healthcare in the Dis-United States
( Tomdispatch.com ) – The slang definition of “unwinding” means “to chill.” Other definitions include: to relax, disentangle, undo — all words that, on the surface, appear both passive and peaceful. And yet in Google searches involving such seemingly harmless definitions of decompressing and resting, news articles abound about the end of pandemic-era Medicaid expansion […]
Our World-Historical Turning Point – Kairos – is Now, and Everything Depends on the Youths
( Tomdispatch.com) – “All Americans owe them a debt for — if nothing else — releasing the idealism locked so long inside a nation that has not recently tasted the drama of a social upheaval. And for making us look on the young people of the country with a new respect.” That’s how Howard Zinn […]
How Turning Gaza into a Hellhole is Costing Americans Billions as Child Poverty Spikes at Home
( Tomdispatch.com ) – On September 19, 2001, eight days after 9/11, as the leaders of both parties were already pounding a frenzied drumbeat of war, a diverse group of concerned Americans released a warning about the long-term consequences of a military response. Among them were veteran civil rights activists, faith leaders, and public intellectuals, […]
How America Abandoned our Poor: Confronting the Needless Scourge of Poverty
( Tomdispatch.com ) – On the island of Manhattan, where I live, skyscrapers multiply like metal weeds, a vertical invasion of seemingly unstoppable force. For more than a century, they have risen as symbols of wealth and the promise of progress for a city and a nation. In movies and TV shows, those buildings churn […]
COVID Response opened a New Era of Social Generosity; Why Didn’t we Make it Permanent?
( Tomdispatch.com) – I doubt I ever feel older or more passé than when I’m out in my city — New York — and I still put on a mask before stepping onto a bus, going into the subway, or entering a store. Increasingly, I find myself alone in a world of the unmasked with […]
Poverty amid Plenty: A World Fragmented by Inequality
By Liz Theoharis | – ( Tomdispatch.com) – A few weeks ago, the world’s power brokers — politicians, CEOs, millionaires, billionaires — met in Davos, the mountainous Swiss resort town, for the 2023 World Economic Forum. In an annual ritual that reads ever more like Orwellian farce, the global elite gathered — their private jets […]
America’s best Christmas Present would be Real Democracy where even the Poor Vote
( Tomdispatch.com) – Last week, I was in Washington, D.C.’s Union Station. The weather had turned cold and I couldn’t help noticing what an inhospitable place it had become for the city’s homeless and dispossessed. Once upon a time, anyone was allowed to be in the train station at any hour. Now, there were signs […]
Still the Other America: The Scandal of Poverty in the Richest Nation on Earth
( Tomdispatch.com ) – Ours is an ever more unequal world, even if that subject is ever less attended to in this country. In his final book, Where Do We Go From Here?, Reverend Martin Luther King wrote tellingly, “The prescription for the cure rests with the accurate diagnosis of the disease. A people who […]