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Recommended Readings for Summer of 2007By Ralph Nader1. A Handful of Straw Blowing in the Wind by Thelma Doak (About Times Publishing, 2007). She reached her 104th birthday, remembering her life in the dust bowls of the nineteen thirties, of seeing the Wright brothers and their flying machine at the Oklahoma State Fair in 1912…
He sat there dejected and indignant—twenty years ago—in our office. His position as editor of the monthly muckraking magazine, Mother Jones, had broken up. He was looking for a job that would allow him to bring his conscience to work. We gave him a place and support to start Moore’s Weekly—a media critique. Michael Moore…
Is Hillary Clinton a political weather vane or a political compass? Consider her latest detour from the NAFTA and WTO policies of her husband. Last week she announced her opposition to the proposed trade agreement between the U.S. and South Korea. The place for her remarks was a town hall meeting in Michigan organized by…
Lucy Komisar of the Tax Justice Network—USA (taxjustice-usa.org) spoke at the Conference on Taming the Giant Corporation last week about “Closing Down the Tax Haven Racket.” Her words were so compelling that the rest of this column is devoted to excerpts from her presentation: “The tax haven racket is the biggest scam in the world.…
Anybody who played schoolboy sandlot baseball in Winsted, Connecticut with David Halberstam back in the nineteen forties would not have been very surprised to observe his spectacular journalistic career that took him to the civil rights struggles in the South, the war torn African and Asian continents, and the writing of some 20 books which…
This column heralds a pioneering conference next month in Washington, D.C. But first a little background. Back in the nineteen thirties, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt went on the national radio and declared what the basic necessities were for the American people — a wage that can support a family, decent housing, the right to health…
The current issue of the UTNE Reader (May — June ’07) carried a short but sensibly provocative article protesting the stagnation and the cul-de-sac nature of street protests that involve nonviolent civil disobedience. Joseph Hart, the author, asks why the current antiwar movement is so impotent, despite “a staggering 67 percent disapproval of President Bush’s…
T. Christian Miller works hard year after year as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He has reported on topics ranging from gross corporate profiteering in Iraq to the production and use here and overseas of older, dangerous pesticides that are either shunned or restricted for use in this country. Mr. Miller spent months…
Like a fresh wind coming down from Alaska — the state he represented as a U.S. Senator from 1969 — 1981, Mike Gravel is determined to start a debate about the fundamentals of democracy in his quest for the Democratic Party’s nomination for President. People who heard his address before the Democratic National Committee a…
Could anyone have imagined that the major commencement protest at a University graduation thus far occurred April 26 at Brigham Young University (BYU)? Probably not. But then could anyone have imagined that the Vice President with the lowest approval rating in modern American history would request and receive an invitation to be the commencement speaker?…