Trumpcare would not only strip coverage from millions of poor and working people, but it would also give billions of dollars in tax cuts to health insurers, pharmaceutical companies, investors and even tanning salon operators.
For-profit water corporations see America’s crumbling infrastructure as a business opportunity. Either they buy struggling water systems or market their services to cities like Pittsburgh that need the help.
We are suffering a period of extreme weather patterns that a German insurance company says could only happen because of climate change. Last year was the hottest year ever – tracking on 14 months in a row of record-breaking temperatures.
Just before the Oroville Dam became daily front page news, during what turned out to be a brief lull in this winter’s storms, one of my neighbors asked me if I thought the drought was over. “Nope, just an interlude,” I said.
Earlier this month, the Seattle City Council voted not to renew its contract with Wells Fargo, pulling more than $3 billion in city funds from the Wall Street giant. And rightly so—Wells Fargo defrauded over two million of its own customers.
George W. Bush believed that God wanted to make him President. We can only guess what President Trump thinks about God’s role in his election.
Last Monday the Senate Republicans confirmed Wall Street predator Steve Mnuchin to oversee America’s financial industry. Across the country, bankers and hedge fund managers poured champagne while showing clips of Michael Douglas’ “greed is good” speech from the film Wall Street.
President Trump already has some congressional Republicans worried about his ability to stay on message. But the president’s federal government hiring freeze sends an age-old conservative message loud and clear.
The author Sam Keen once told me that James Donaldson was the only person he ever knew who became a social worker because he needed the money. But when Donaldson shaped this city – and changed my life – social work was still in his distant future.
How people traveled to the Women’s March in downtown Los Angeles was itself extraordinary and could make January 21 the date that transit re-established its role as central to the L.A. experience.
Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s pick to run the Department of Education, certainly has an opinion. Despite never having taught in, managed, or attended a public school, DeVos believes that public school children should be in private hands.
One phrase describes how many people feel about this next chapter of the American experiment in self-rule: We fear the worst.
Candidate Donald Trump promised to “drain the swamp,” but as President-elect Trump he’s already flooding it with more of the same.
Immigrant families feel fear. Children cry in school. Racial incidents increase across the country. Corporate stocks tumble following one man’s tweets. Every White House cabinet nomination becomes an occasion for dire speculation.
Co-published by Reuters
What does Donald Trump have in common with animal rights activists? At face value nothing, of course. Yet both have mainstreamed positions that were until recently seen as marginal.
We have a favorite place to camp at Joshua Tree where, this time, across the road from this spot, a guy drove a spiffy pickup truck and pulled a tiny trailer. Both he and his wife attend an evangelical mega-church near their Inland Empire home, He believed in human-caused climate change, she did not.
“We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks.” That’s what Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s chief strategist and cofounder of the website Breitbart, said a few weeks ago about Trump’s plan to rebuild America’s infrastructure.
The pickup truck pulled up alongside us, and the white guy inside, maybe in his 30s, waved his fist at us. Menacing. Intimidating. Gloating. Then he roared on, leaving us in the wake of his muffler. BY REV. JIM CONN
The elephant in the room at the presidential debates was climate change. According to a piece in Slate, this year the candidates spent a total of five minutes and 27 seconds on the subject. That’s better than 2012 when candidates didn’t mention it at all.
The future is coming into view. Donald Trump’s victory strengthened the decades-long attack on the role of government. But we’ve got the tools to fight back, and we’re not alone.