Cut health care for Congress

In April, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted to cut Medicare and Medicaid. And this month, even Democrats on the so-called Super Committee have offered deep cuts to these vital programs. Essentially, Republicans in Congress are telling senior citizens and the poor that tax cuts for billionaires and millionaires are more important than providing a […]

Compare Venezuelan President Chavez with US President Obama

Hugo Chavez was busy handing out laptop computers to second graders at a school in Caracas. After that, the Venezuelan president rushed off to a food distribution plant which is providing $110 million in prepared meals for Venezuela’s poor. Finally, he ended his afternoon by making an appearance at one of the many construction sites […]

Attaching the Christian label

It is an unfortunate truth that various organizations may all co-opt the term “Christian,” and many use the term without, apparently, knowing what it means. It has reached a point where even serious Christians cringe when they hear the word in political commentary. It might now be worthwhile to appeal to the Bible, to see, […]

Why would anyone want to cut the U.S. military budget?

With $549 billion requested for basic military expenditures, and another $159 billion requested for U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—the record $708 billion military spending called for by the Obama administration for fiscal 2011 will be nearly equivalent to the military spending of all other nations in the world combined. And when it comes to […]

Voluntarily lowering the flag on the American Empire

An excerpt of an article by Chalmers Johnson [America finds itself in] August of 2010 with guns blazing in one war in Afghanistan, even as we try to extricate ourselves from another in Iraq. I wish I had a crystal ball to peer into and see what historians will make of August in 2060. Let […]

Campaign contribution is simply a polished term for bribery

The biggest political scandal is the one that aids and abets others — the pay-to-play system that buys up Congress, pollutes our political system with special-interest cash and deep-sixes the kind of bold reform agenda that we voted for and need. In just the first quarter of 2010, the finance, insurance and real estate sectors […]

Nine myths about the US Government’s concern for its people

When you compare the US with the rest of the 30 countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Myth #1. The US government is involved in class warfare attacking the rich to lift up the poor. The gap between the rich and everyone else is wider in the US than any of […]

US Health Insurers reaped record profits in 2009

The five largest US health insurance companies set new profit records in 2009, while the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression sent millions of Americans onto the unemployment line and into poverty. The five firms reported $12.2 billion in profits last year, an increase of $4.4 billion, or 56 percent, over 2008. At the […]

America “approaching spiritual death”

Martin Luther King observed that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” The US now has a debt of about $66 trillion, five times the GDP and double the national wealth. This debt is largely a result of […]

The Tragic State of US Health Care “Millions sentenced to a slow death”

In 2008, according to the Census Bureau, the number of U.S. citizens without health care grew to a record 46.3 million. “The new figures, however, understate the severity of the economic downturn because a large portion of the nation’s job losses and unemployment rate increases occurred after the Census survey data was collected.” Lack of […]