Blog comment in response to Sex and Fertility in the Post-Petroleum Age by Jan Lundberg,
27 July 2010
Look at Historical Evidence
Developed societies like ours, with sanitation, medical care, artificial contraception, and optional bottle feeding of infants, are a recent exception in the history of humanity. The prevailing patterns over the history of our species have involved females becoming fertile at a somewhat later age (16-18 years old), due to less adequate food supply; prolonged breast feeding of infants, which suppresses fertility and ensures a longer inter-pregnancy interval; higher infant and maternal mortality; less investment of effort and calories in infants that have a poor chance of survival or less social utility (e.g., the Greeks abandoning deformed infants at birth); a certain amount of infanticide, usually by men, who kill a woman's children by a former male partner; etc, etc.
This post was written for the Commonweal Institute Progressive Op-Ed Program. I am a Fellow with the Commonweal Institute.
Tags: Politics, Huffington Post, Government, Dave Johnson
Conservative columnist and cable news pundit Amanda Carpenter posted a telling observation on Twitter: "It's remarkable all Palin had to do is say death panels in a Facebook statement to make the President on down start talking about them."
The Daily Show has a snarkier take: "You know a sales pitch is in trouble when it starts with 'look you've got to trust me, we're not going to kill your grandparents.'"
They're both making an important point: the debate over health reform is playing out on the right's terms. The national discourse (if you can call it that) could very well have been about the benefits of a single-payer system, but aside from a sham vote to appease progressives, single-payer is considered anathema in the media and political establishment and instead Democrats are scrambling to respond to a barrage of rightwing talking points.
As the Dow Jones Industrial Average inches upward, there will be a strong temptation--especially from financial news outlets--to equate recovery by shareholders with the recovery of economic security in our country.
Tags: Thinking Big, Bail Out, economy, PIN, Progressive Ideas Network
With all of President Obama's lofty rhetoric on education, surprisingly few innovative policies have materialized.
Why are recipients of the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) – better known as the Banking Bailout – allowed to continue to lobby? Taxpayer dollars should not be used to influence our government. We, the People should be telling them what to do, not the other way around.
TARP recipients spent $114 million on lobbying last year as the financial crisis emerged. In just the last quarter of the year eighteen bailout recipients spent $14.8 million to influence the government, as the TARP funds were distributed.
The lobbying has paid off. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, “The companies' political activities have, in part, yielded them $295.2 billion from TARP, an extraordinary return of 258,449 percent.”
"We're All In This Together"
A talk by Commonweal Institute Fellow David C. Johnson to supporters of public education, presented March 7, 2007.
A couple of weeks ago I was thinking about how to start this talk, when I came across this video clip from the Sean Hannity show on Fox News:
Tags: media, Education, Dave Johnson, conservative strategy
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