Kill the poor

So it’s official.
The country is plunging headlong into a recession and not even New York City, home of Wall Street and the last bastion of prosperity in the plummeting real-estate market, is exempt.
Last week, Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced that the city would be slashing its budget for the new year as a result of the [...]

How Plastic We’ve Become: Our Bodies Carry Residues of Kitchen Plastics

In the 1967 film classic The Graduate, a businessman corners Benjamin Braddock at a cocktail party and gives him a bit of career advice. “Just one word…plastics.”
Although Benjamin didn’t heed that recommendation, plenty of other young graduates did. Today, the planet is awash in products spawned by the plastics industry. Residues of plastics have become [...]

Two Years and Waiting

This video, from mid-December, features Jamie Leigh Jones on MSNBC recounting her nightmare.  While working for KBR in Baghdad, a former subsidiary of Halliburton. Jamie was drugged and gang-raped vaginally and anally by a group of co-workers.
It’s been two years since the event happened and still no suspects have been [...]

Get Your Eyes Off My Thighs

So I live in this neighborhood that’s . . . well, not exactly like the safety bubble I had experienced in college. I recall the good old days where I could scooter over to class wearing a jumble of tye-dye sleeveless shirts and camo shorts or if it was really hot, a yellow cotton halter [...]

NYC public schools, video surveillance, and the criminalization of a generation

[Stuyvesant students walking to class under video monitoring. Photo by Ali Winston for City Limits]
What do cameras cure? System gets own scrutiny. 
Now in the fourth year of citywide operation, the New York City public school video surveillance program continues full steam ahead even as many parents, advocates, elected officials and students raise serious questions about [...]

From Luxury Comes Tragedy

[Worker safety circa 1932 - some things never change]
On Monday afternoon, two workers fell from the incomplete hulk of Donald Trump’s Soho Hotel. One man, a Ukrainian immigrant from Greenpoint, was decapitated during the fall, while his more fortunate colleague miraculously survived.
Leaving aside the fact that the men were employed by a construction firm with [...]

Bush Plan Could Axe Scientists’ Access to Sensitive Data

Another day, another sound science policy getting Buswhacked: The Bush administration is quietly pushing for the elimination of a committee that provides crucial intelligence data for scientists studying everything from climate change to hurricanes and pollution. The Civil Applications Committee, which is under the jurisdiction of the USGS, reviews civilian requests for classified information and [...]

Dolce’s Bitter Take on Sexuality

“Rarely will two boys alone engage in a cut fight. But put the same two boys in a group and they often feel compelled to insult each other or another boy in the group. A cut fight requires an audience. At center stage are the higher-status boys; around the periphery are the lower-status boys, [...]

America’s Fear of a Woman with Power

Now don’t get me wrong, when it comes to politics I don’t consider myself any sort of guru, although I know enough not to believe anything on Fox News. Overall, politics can get sticky and the lines between the bad and the ugly can begin to blur. What I have noticed for the duration of [...]

Bush Seeks to Approve 700 Percent Logging Increase in Oregon’s Old-Growth Forests

Under the cloak of bureaucracy, the Bush administration has sanctioned a back-door deal with the timber industry that would see the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) remove protection for old-growth and streamside forests in the Cascade, Siskiyou and Coastal mountains of western Oregon. The preferred alternative of its Draft Environmental Impact [...]