History
The Social Security program... represents our commitment as a society to the belief that workers should not live in dread that a disability, death, or old age could leave them or their families destitute.
-President Jimmy Carter, December 20, 1977.
[This law] assures the elderly that America will always keep the promises made in troubled times a half century ago ... [The Social Security Amendments of 1983 are] a monument to the spirit of compassion and commitment that unites us as a people.
-President Ronald Reagan, April 20, 1983.
So said Presidents Carter and Regan, but that was before 1996, when Congress voted to...
The following blog entry is by Sarah at the Healthy Home Economist. Thanks, Sarah!
The vaccine industry went home with its tail between its legs after suffering an enormous and...
One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on the land is invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise. -Aldo Leopold
Rachel Carson’s first book was titled, The Sea Around Us. In Silent Spring, published in 1962, she proclaimed that humanity now lived in a “sea of...
A few weeks ago I flew to Chicago, hopped into a rent-a-car, and navigated my way on the tangle of interstate highways to the now mostly former industrial region in the northwest corner of Indiana just off lowest Lake Michigan between the towns of Whiting and Gary. The desolation of human endeavor lay across the land like nausea made visible, but more impressive was how rapid the rise and fall of it all had been.
Not much more than 150 years ago this was a region of marshes, dunes, swales, laurel slicks, and little backwater ponds of the huge lake. The forbidding flat emptiness of the terrain made it perfect for running...
In the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, the excellent Bill Moyers hosted political activist Angela Glover Blackwell on his weekly interview show, Moyers & Company (April 13; "An Activist for Our Times") and in the course of things (12:18 in the program) Ms. Blackwell said, "America does not want to talk about race." In point of fact, we'll talk about it all the live-long day, just not very honestly.
The Trayvon Martin incident certainly provoked a broad media conversation about race all over the cable TV networks and the...
This article was orginally published at Transition Voice
Transition Voice writers Guy McPherson and Sherry Ackerman have some things in common. They both got PhDs, taught and did research at universities and then left the ivory tower, deciding, as Socrates did, to take their message to the streets. And their common concern is how to live in a way that’s not a lie in our time of climate change, peak oil and economic and cultural crisis.
McPherson’s background is in ecology and management of natural resources...
As we are about to vote in the Burlington mayoral election on Tuesday we are reminded of the Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) fiasco of 2009 and are about to face another possible fiasco due to the previous fiasco. Because of a rare statistical fluke of IRV, most analysis using various voting methods for the 2009 election concluded that Andy Montroll should have won. See: http://rangevoting.org/Burlington.html or other sites.
Backers of mayoral candidate Kurt Wright in particular felt that Bob Kiss should not have won the 2009 election and therefore successfully organized to...
After 14 years as an independent republic Vermont became the 14th U.S. state and officially entered the union on March 4, 1791.
Vermont emerged from the American Revolution in the best economic condition of any former colony. It had no state debts, and since the Continental Congress had refused to admit it as a member state, no responsibility for the national debt.
Its currency was relatively strong and a stream of settlers had begun to arrive. The estimated population jumped from around 20,000 in 1776 to 85,000 when a census was taken 15 years later. After issuing its own Declaration of Independence and...
In this collection of seven essays, Donald Livingston presents the arguments of scholars who suggest that the country is simply too big for one central government.
Coming from a wide range of backgrounds, experts explore such complex issues as government by judiciary and a reconsideration of nationalistic government. They address the sources of nationalism and the influence of early political leaders, while discussing the continuing struggle between federal and local governments. The debate culminates in an analysis paralleling the disintegration of the Soviet Union with the current situation in the United States and...
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