America! Land of the free, home of the brave, and the greatest country on the face of the planet, right? A country with seemingly limitless natural resources, and according to many politicians, anointed by God herself to lead the world out of the wilderness and into a bright new age of liberty and justice for all. Too bad the road …
Poor Diets Are Lowering Children’s IQ By Amanda Froelich
With an estimated 70 percent of the American diet made up of processed foods [3], we — as a collective — are facing a serious conundrum in which if greater effort is not given to make wholesome, more nutritious fare a priority (with many countries following the lead of the United States), incoming generations will not only not live as long as their …
The Casual, Idiotic Racism of Modern American Conservatism By Tim Wise
Sometimes racism isn’t about vicious bigotry and hatred towards those with different skin color than your own, let alone a willingness to walk into a church and massacre nine of those others because you think they’re “taking over your country.” Sometimes, racism is manifested in the subtle way a person can dismiss the lived experiences of those racial others as …
Pentagon Admits to Race-Based Human Experiments During WWII By Claire Bernish
The U.S. Army has finally admitted to conducting experiments on human subjects with chemical weapons throughout World War II—simply because they were African-American, Japanese-American, or Puerto Rican. With America’s dysfunctional inability to discuss the country’s underlying systemic racism once again diverted thanks to a flag, a troubling investigation by NPR proves such conversation is nothing less than an imperative. Roughly one million …
New Study Finds ‘Staggering’ Suicide Rates Among Female Veterans – Nadia Prupis
Female veterans commit suicide at nearly six times the rate of civilian women and at rates nearly equal to that of male veterans, according to new government statistics which expose disturbing questions about the experiences of women who serve in the armed forces. A cross-sectional study published in Psychiatric Services, which compiled 11 years’ worth of data from the U.S. Department of Veterans …
Capitalism Could Kill All Life on Earth
Are we going to let capitalism destroy life on Earth? According to 99 percent of climate scientists – we’ll know by the end of the century. Scientists have agreed for three decades about what is causing atmospheric temperatures to rise – humans are burning Earth’s carbon resources to fuel economic activity. But even before we knew what was causing the …
American History: The Forgotten Origins of Wall Street in Slave Auctions – Alan Gilbert
One might think New York was a bastion of abolitionist sentiment before the Civil War. Hamilton’s Federalists had led a move for gradual emancipation in 1799; the last black person was freed in 1842. They, too, needed John Brown and mass abolitionism from below. Wall Street had founded the slave trade in 1711. Fernando Wood, mayor in 1860, proposed joining the …
School segregation still impacts African-Americans’ minds decades later
As the nation observes the May 17 anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that ended racial segregation in public schools, a new study has found that desegregated schooling is tied to better performance for certain cognitive abilities in older African American Adults. This research is published in an article titled “Education Desegregation and Cognitive Change in African American Older Adults,” …
The Empire’s Final Frontier: Re-Colonize the Homeland – Robert S. Becker
As democratic embers of our republic fizzle, the big question remains: what term best fits our situation, if not our degraded system? If unconscionable wealth and overbearing billionaires stratify income and wealth, funneling the best educations, life-styles, and jobs to managers of the status quo, so much for our fabled land of opportunity. Opportunity can’t knock when there’s neither front …
Michael Moore for President
This article is part of The Nation’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue. Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Toni Morrison, Howard Zinn and many more, here. If my grandfather were alive today, he’d be about 150 years old. I know what you’re thinking: with my youthful looks, neither the math nor the biology …