Isn't it rather odd that the US's largest single public expenditure scheduled for the coming decades has received no attention in the 2015-2016 presidential debates? The expenditure is for a thirty-year program to "modernize" the US nuclear arsenal and production facilities. Although President Obama began his administration with a dramatic public commitment to build a nuclear weapons-free world, that commitment has long ago dwindled and died. It has been replaced by an administration plan to build a new generation of US nuclear weapons and nuclear production facilities to last the nation well into the second half of the twenty-first century. This plan, which has received almost no attention by the mass media, includes redesigned nuclear warheads, as well as new nuclear bombers, submarines, land-based missiles, weapons labs, and production plants. The estimated cost? $1,000,000,000,000.00 -- or, for those readers unfamiliar with such lofty figures, $1 trillion.

Patricia O'Hara had just finished caring for a man suffering from Parkinson's disease and was waiting for the train to take her back to Brooklyn when she explained why she got into the home care industry.

What is really happening in the 2016 race for president of the United States is a contest of consciousness within the American people. By "consciousness," I refer to the degree, higher or lower, to which an individual is free in thought and emotion to perceive the reality and equality of other beings and to decide how best to help them when help is needed. To get at the relationship of the presidential race to consciousness, today's politics need to be set against the background of the most intense political conflicts of the last two centuries. A fairly complete list fits in one long paragraph.

Six years ago, after extensive academic and historical research, Renew Democracy developed the political theorem that, in a representative democracy, politicians represent those who pay for their campaigns. Several results derive from this demonstrably true statement. The first is that in order for the voter to gain control of the electoral process and have representatives responsive to their needs and desires, they must be in control financially of campaigns and political parties.

David Brooks penned a column on February 12, 2016, in The New York Times entitled "Livin' Bernie Sanders's Danish Dream." In it, he criticized Sen. Bernie Sanders, arguing that the Danish social democratic system and similar European systems are inferior to our own. Sanders, as we know, describes himself as a social Democrat. 

Highlighted in this film are community members of El Barrio -- women, children, whole families -- as they take their struggle against Mayor Bill de Blasio’s unfair and destructive policies of displacement from community meetings to press conferences to the streets. This new film documents the struggle of East Harlem residents -- predominantly immigrant women of color, members of Movement for Justice in El Barrio -- actively opposing an unfair and destructive rezoning plan that the mayor is attempting to impose from above and which, if enacted, will cause widespread displacement of long-term low-income community members.

The right-wing Mackinac Center for Public Policy is making news after being charged $172,000 for Flint city records relating to the water crisis. They should get the records for a reasonable rate, as we have argued in our own battles for public records. But the story raises another, more pressing question: where has the Mackinac Center been on Flint for the last two months?

To everything there is a season. We know the old Pete Seeger tune, composed in the late '50s and made famous by The Byrds in the mid '60s, a time just after McCarthy's communist witch-hunting campaign. It was a time of authoritarianism and public discussion about that kind of leadership. That time has returned. And now, it's time again to discuss it.

Voters face a choice in the Democratic Primary that could be deeply significant both in terms of the odds of success in November and the long-term direction of the party.

On December 18, 1865 -- 150 years ago -- when the 13th Amendment became the law of the land (after a 250-year run), Congress banned slavery in America. But it didn't - not completely. It added an exclusion clause: Slavery would be allowed as punishment for a crime. Reaffirming this, Virginia's Supreme Court declared prisoners "slaves of the state" in 1872. And so starts a second story of extraordinary exploitation.