Category: Human Rights
-
Marisa Egerstrom: Organizer, Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation
There was an infectious restlessness in the air as Marisa Egerstrom climbed the bandstand at Boston Common to address the 300-strong crowd at Occupy Boston’s first general assembly. Egerstrom and fellow faith activists from Boston—they called themselves the Protest Chaplains—had just come from the first days of Occupy Wall Street. A week later Occupy Boston…
-
Election Round-Up
The Midwest decides against the likes of Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. Congressman of Missouri—Akins said that women couldn’t get pregnant from a “legitimate rape” because their bodies have a way of “shutting that whole thing down”. Democrat incumbent Claire McCaskill shuts him down. Tea-party-backed Mourdock, State Treasure of Indiana, planned to fill a House…
-
Ballot Question 2: Dying With Dignity or Doctors of Death
Until he died a couple of decades ago, Princeton and Harvard-educated surgeon Dr. Frederick Phelps was an old school doc based in the central Massachusetts city, Fitchburg. Old school doc means he made house calls. He accepted firewood and handmade gifts as payment from patients without money or insurance, and, when people asked for it…
-
The Lady: Aung San Suu Kyi in the US
“I’ve always thought of myself as a politician,” Aung San Suu Kyi explained to a packed audience at the Harvard Kennedy School’s John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum on September 27. Suu Kyi is the daughter of General Aung San, who founded the modern Burmese army and is considered the father of Burma’s independence from Britain.…
-
Voter Suppression: Millions of minorities and youth may be turned away on election day
The disenfranchisement of democratic leaning constituencies (including low-income, working, welfare, African American, Latino and student populations) has become a major focal point breeding political negativity. This is along with corruption in the voting process as our national election between Republican Mitt Romney and the President Democrat Barack Obama looms approximately six weeks on the horizon.…
-
No Voto Latino
Regressive voting laws pushed by Republican controlled legislatures in 23 states across the country could keep more than 10 million Latino citizens from registering and voting this year, according to a new study to be released Monday. The new report by the Advancement Project, a multi-racial civil rights organization, is the first state-by-state analysis of…
-
Race & Liberalism
“Race” as an idea barely existed before the Enlightenment and the onset of modernity in the West. Today, many dismiss the race-concept as an illusion, arguing that “there is no such thing as race;” or in more universalist terms, “there is only one race: the human race.” Yet race continues to demarcate and stratify all…
-
Just Don’t Go
James Shearer Spare Change News Not that anybody asked me … but all this noise about the Chick-Fil-A controversy is, in a word, just noise. The owner of this fast food chain, one Mr. Dan Cathy, made some remarks several weeks ago that his company is all about “family values” and that he himself is…
-
Mass. Farms Fight Food Insecurity
Robert Sondak Spare Change News The Produce to Pantries program at the Boston Natural Area Network (BNAN) was founded two-and-a-half years ago as a way to connect community gardens and people with limited means who were also facing food insecurity. Since the summer of 2010, this program has been providing local New England-grown produce gathered…
-
Nobel Prize Winning Economist Joseph Stiglitz Discusses The Price of Inequality
Mike Reilly INSP The work of Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University in New York and former Chief Economist for the World Bank, is recognized worldwide. He has written a long string of books, numerous papers and a wide variety of essays and articles, many focusing on equilibrium in the world. In 2001, he…