In August 2011, the City Council of Boulder, Colorado, referred two ballot measures to voters. One authorized the city to take over (or “municipalize”) the privately owned utility that provides Boulder’s electricity. The second measure imposed a modest tax on ratepayers to finance the takeover and convert the utility from coal to natural gas. With […]

Read more

…of incomes that Americans had long taken for granted as a happy fact of modern life was reversing itself.” Nearly 30 years after this trend began, income inequality in America was as large as at any point since the Great Crash of 1929, with the wealthiest 1 percent controlling nearly a quarter of the country’s […]

Read more

Until recently. Last year, 38 states introduced laws that would impose restrictions of one form or another on the right to vote. The restrictions will take their toll. In Florida, for example, the League of Women Voters has suspended its registration drives because it fears it cannot comply with extreme measures written into the new […]

Read more

First, the fuss: Beinart, who attends an Orthodox synagogue and is at pains to stress he believes 100 percent in the Zionist project, would like to save Israel from itself. The ongoing colonization of Palestinian land seized in the 1967 war is killing any chance of a two-state solution, while Israel’s treatment of its non-Jewish […]

Read more

There has been little media coverage of the tension between the Occupy Wall Street movement and the progressive institutions—such as MoveOn.org, the AFL-CIO, the United Auto Workers, SEIU, and Rebuild the Dream—that are working together as 99% Spring. Adbusters, the Vancouver-based anti-corporate collective that incited the September 2011 Occupy protest, warns that the movement is being […]

Read more