It is never easy for interest groups with conflicting views to resolve public policy disagreements involving complex scientific issues. To successfully formulate complex treaties, such as the recent Paris Climate Change Agreement, countries must find a way to meet the interests of almost 200 national representatives, while simultaneously getting the science right. Lowest common denominator political agreements that don’t actually solve the problem are useless.
- 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.
Donald Trump’s December 7 Statement on Preventing Muslim Immigration has attracted worldwide disdain. Nearly 500,000 Britons have signed a petition asking their government to prevent Trump from entering their country. In the US, Trump’s comments have been denounced by Democrats, Republicans, the media and religious groups.
We need green visions for less carbon and poverty---but also for more fun and joy. At a time when ecological destruction is more dire than ever, the work of protecting the planet depends on dreamers just as much as of scientists, activists, public officials and business leaders.
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.
As the 2016 presidential election approaches, both Republicans and Democrats are courting minority voters – a group that is growing in numbers and electoral clout.
- By Robert Reich
On Wednesday, 14 people were killed at a social services agency in San Bernardino, California. The gunman apparently was Muslim and was influenced by ISIS.
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 today’s American politics, it might seem impossible to craft effective political messages that reach across the aisle on hot-button issues like same-sex marriage, national health insurance, and military spending.
After a hard-fought election, Canada’s Liberal party has won a decisive parliamentary majority, and Canada will soon have an unfamiliar prime minister with a familiar last name. But 43-year-old Justin Trudeau’s rise to the top of Canadian politics was far from certain, even despite his remarkable political pedigree.
The latest Republican presidential primary debate had it all: denunciations of President Obama, angry rants about America’s future, and all manner of bile. It seems like a new low – but in reality, Republican candidates have been singing this tune for years.
What’s better at creating happiness – the government or the market? Conservatives say market forces should reign in all aspects of political and personal life. They say that only completely unregulated markets can create a flourishing economy.
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.
In a record-breaking turnout, 28,000 supporters crowded into the Moda Center sports arena in Portland, Oregon on Aug. 9 to hear Bernie Sanders speak.
As we drove to our local cinema to see Inside Out, my five year-old son asked me: “So what is this film going to be about?” “Feelings,” I said, “the feelings that live inside our heads”.
Is the field of social psychology biased against political conservatives? There has been intense debate about this question since an informal poll of over 1,000 attendees at a social psychology meeting in 2011 revealed the group to be overwhelmingly liberal.
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.”
Everyone wants to be happy, and increasingly, countries around the world are looking at happiness as an indicator of national well-being and considering happiness in policy making. As this year’s World Happiness Report states, “Happiness is increasingly considered a proper measure of social progress and a goal of public policy.” But what makes people happy, and which countries have the highest levels of happiness?
Make no mistake: we’re in the midst of an evolution of consciousness. We can cocreate a planet that works for everyone. We can redirect success from profit and pollution to true sustainability. We can reactivate an Eden in which our new fertile crescents and restored ecosystems grow and grow while we give back to the Earth rather than take from it.
- By Ralph Nader
As a high school student, I came across an observation by Abraham Lincoln who said that “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.” Today “public sentiment” would be called “public opinion.”
Recent widespread attention to shocking instances of alleged police misconduct – the killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and now Walter Scott – have rallied voices across the country in defense of equal protection under the rule of law.
- 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.”
Although the term civilization has less currency today than it once did, most of us see ourselves as living in a civilization. And, as posited by John Ralston Saul, our understanding of civilization tends to be centred on a sense of shared destiny; on shared interests, collective purpose and a common future.