Researchers say happiness reveals more about human welfare than standard indicators like wealth, education, health, or good government.
At a recent “Town Hall” debate Hillary Clinton announced that she would appoint a cabinet that is half female if she is elected president. When questioned by MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, Clinton pledged: “Well, I am going to have a cabinet that looks like America, and 50% of America is women, right?”
If you had the opportunity to vote for a politician you totally trusted, who you were sure had no hidden agendas and who would truly represent the electorate’s views, you would, right?
Talk of changing pensions connects with us at an emotional level – how secure do our futures look? And crucially, how much power do we have over this process? It is a tricky business for the Treasury, too, as its recent retraction of the pensions review, due to feature in the spring budget, shows.
The visit to Argentina by US president Barack Obama on the 40th anniversary of the coup in which the now-infamous military Junta seized power has opened up a lot of barely healed wounds.
The world is currently transfixed by the spectacle of American elections. From New York, London and Paris to Beijing, Moscow, and Sydney there is endless heated debate in the news media and across dinner tables about the factors fueling the remarkable success of Donald Trump
For the roughly 2.2 million people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails, daily life is often violent, degrading, and hopeless. In a 2010 study of inmates released from 30 prisons, the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics found that more than three-quarters were arrested for a new crime within five years of being freed.
Whatever slim chance Sanders had to capture the nomination ended when Hillary Clinton won convincing victories in the key March 15 primaries. Clinton finished the night with an insurmountable lead of more than
The Flint water crisis and the sad story of Freddie Gray’s lead poisoning have catalyzed a broader discussion about lead poisoning in the United States. What are the risks? Who is most vulnerable? Who is responsible?
According to recent research, it may not be. Martin Gilens at Princeton University confirms that the wishes of the American working and middle class play essentially no role in our nation’s policy making.
- By Robert Reich
What’s at stake this election year? Let me put as directly as I can. America has succumbed to a vicious cycle in which great wealth translates into political power, which generates even more wealth, and even more power.
Politicians lie. To varying degrees, they always have. But it is starting to seem that that truism is more true than it has ever been. In 2012, American political commentator Charles P. Pierce claimed that the Republican Party was setting out in search of the “event horizon of utter bullshit” at its national convention that year.
After months of expectation, US senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has at last given what might be remembered as one of the landmark speeches of the 2016 election: an explanation and defence of his position as a “democratic socialist”.
In this season of anniversaries, no two are more stark in their parallels than Ferguson a year after the shooting of Michael Brown and New Orleans 10 years after Hurricane Katrina killed 1,800 and displaced thousands.
What if a trade agreement were designed to protect and nurture labor rather than capital? On May 8th at Nike’s headquarters, President Obama denounced opponents of the hotly contested Trans-Pacific Partnership as ill informed. “(C)ritics warn that parts of this deal would undermine American regulation….They’re making this stuff up. This is just not true. No trade agreement is going to force us to change our laws.”
- By Ralph Nader
Suddenly, the mass media is writing about or televising the conditions in West Baltimore. Conditions that Washington Post columnist, Eugene Robinson, summarized as decades long “suffocating poverty, dysfunction and despair.”
When looking at large-scale international studies and comparisons of education systems worldwide, everyone’s always talking about Finland. Finland seems to set the benchmark for education worldwide. Foreign educational experts, delegations of teachers and educational politicians...
For those who seek to understand today’s social movements, and those who wish to amplify them, questions about how to evaluate a campaign’s success and when it is appropriate to declare victory remain as relevant as ever. To them, Gandhi may still have something useful and unexpected to say.
Next up on the global development agenda: the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs). The UN hopes the goals will form a framework of rules and ideals that can influence development plans and actions around the world...
Capitalism, democracy, and liberal education are the crowning achievements of the mental age of evolution in which the mind evolves. These three represent a quantum leap in ordinary people's access to what the mind does best: process deep questions of meaning...
While in the timeframe of Earth’s lifespan human events are relatively short, the imprint of even small, collective action is large. A good example in relation to food and the environment is the impact of the Neolithic revolution of farming on who we are today and the world in which we live.
- By Robert Reich
I was phoned the other night in middle of dinner by an earnest young man named Spencer, who said he was doing a survey. Rather than hang up I agreed to answer his questions.
That eating beef is environmentally costly is by now widely appreciated. But little has been done to curtail the amount of cattle farmed for meat consumption.