It was offered to us to demonstrate that through cooperative efforts we can better the lot of our co-workers. We have also been given the privilege to show that where all personal gain and benefit is eliminated, greater good can be accomplished for the benefit of all. It remains too for the members of our…
The Monarch-Chesterfield levee, in suburban St. Louis, is about to get beautified by a creative, fun community project that could be a good starting point for a wider discussion. On June 4, 2011, a group of 50 students in 8th through 12th grades will lead an expected 600 to 1,000 area residents in painting a…
On May 26, Governor Peter Shumlin (D) signed the legislation passed earlier by the VT House and Senate making Vermont the first state to make health care a right and not a privilege. Hopefully, it will be a model for the rest of the country, a system designed to take care of the people of…
Colombia’s government wants to know the color of my underwear. When I went to buy underwear at a store here in Bogotá recently, surprise! The sales assistant asked me for my cédula, my Colombian national ID card number. Why? What is this? The government in interested in my underwear? Well, apparently, yes! To complete the…
The U.S. military not only accepts the notion of climate change, its leaders see climate change as a national-security priority. But Congressional climate-change-deniers continue to pretend that the military’s full-speed-ahead program isn’t happening. Looking at official policy statements reveals that the military is well on the way to spending vast sums of taxpayers’ dollars to…
Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, published in 1965 two issues on “The Negro American.” Some 56 years later, in 2011, the journal has published a kind of follow-up, a two-volume issue on race in the age of Obama. The first issue, edited by Washington University’s own Gerald Early, takes…
The Belleville News Democrat is reporting on a series of defendants whose contributions to a State Attorney’s fund allowing them to walk away from criminal charges. Matthew F. Koesterer had no history of criminal behavior, and had been charged with marijuana cultivation. Circuit Judge Richard Brown of Randolph County ordered a $22,500 contribution from Koerstner…
While Congress stalls over immigration reform, some states are making their own moves. That’s especially interesting because one more typically associates “states’ rights” with anti-progress laws, especially regarding individual rights. The worst of these, in recent memory, is Arizona’s SB 1070, which required law enforcement officers to stop anyone they suspected of being an illegal…
Coal is clean, right? That’s what the media-savvy American Coalition for Clean Coal Energy [ACCE] tried to get us to believe in an ad campaign a couple of years ago that remains relevant today. During Congressional debates over energy policy in 2008 and 2009, ACCE spent a reported $31 million on an ad campaign to…
HIV/AIDS. Removal and banning of landmines. Healthcare for children in developing nations. Clean water in sub-Saharan Africa. These are huge issues. They’re complicated. Politicians, philanthropists, and the scholarly sort ponder ways to fix them, or if they can even be fixed. That’s why I’m happy to report that the problems above have already been dealt…