Voices for Change

The way our country imprisons a staggering number of our people is wrong. Instead of mass incarceration, we need to stop wasting human talent and start opening doors to opportunity.

While fossil-fuel corporations are exploring the world’s oil, protesters in Seattle are banding together to stop Shell’s plans to drill for oil in the Arctic. And they don't plan on backing down to these catastrophic effects on climate change.

The government can't stop corporate crime until it starts charging the financial felons for the crimes they oversaw. It's time the banksters themselves feel the heat.

As poor Americans continue to get blamed for being poor, it's the free-market system that pays them too little to avoid being dependent on the safety net—the vicious circle of hypocrisy.

There are an estimated 80,000-100,000 prisoners held in some form of solitary confinement in the United States. The United Nations says the practice often amounts to torture. It is cruel and unusual punishment, and must be abolished, once and for all.

More and more businesses across the country are adopting an attitude providing a buy-local, un-corporate, anti-chain alternative for customers. But beware of the corporations that are playing the profitable imitation game—don't be duped.

The world’s one-time sole surviving superpower is in decline. And what ails the U.S. can be seen through the experience of ordinary people—those who personify the existential rationale for “democracy.”

It's about time the people that run for office feel the burden of revealing payments based on their economic worth, not anticipated political clout. Have we entered a future of anticipatory bribery?

Maybe it's time we inform our soldiers of their likely roles in the killing machine, because war does not bring freedom. Instead, it invites young men and women to start on their own personal worlds of terror.

Evan Young, valedictorian of his graduating class this year, was told by his school Principal that he was not allowed to give the valedictorian speech he wrote because it included his admission of being gay. The principal even went so far as to out Evan to his father!