Jean Chaude from Belgrade, Maine, has health insurance. As a small business entrepreneur, Jean used to sell antiques and volunteer with her church until she developed chronic arthritis and pulmonary problems. She buys private insurance, for which her premiums have risen 80 percent in the last four years and she...

You'd think some profiteering schemes are too sick even for Wall Street. But think again.

Wall Street is hoping that health care reform fails so not only will insurance company profits and salaries rise but big banks can get in on the business. Goldman Sachs and other bailed out banks...

Any remaining doubt that a for-profit, private monopoly of our nation's health care system is a dangerous idea should be removed by the recent news that Wall Street plans to reap profits from people not living to collect their life insurance policies.

False accusations of plans for government "death panels"...

My favorite outrageous lie about health care reform is the "gay conspiracy".   According to a group called "The Pray In Jesus Name Project," which sent out a lengthy fundraising mailer on the subject, health care reform will not only put our elderly out to float...

The insurance industry-planted extremists who have been trying to disrupt health care reform should talk to Jim from St. James, Missouri. Jim's not a paid activist. He's not a spin doctor. He's just a hard-working guy from middle America. And Jim is exactly the kind of person that health insurance...

Even if it's a fairly done deal that Judge Sotomayor will be confirmed to the Supreme Court, Republicans are explicitly using her nomination as a "teachable moment" about the role of race in America. Yet Sotomayor, President Obama and the Democrats are trying their best to avoid talking about...

A week after a white supremacist attacked the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, and on the day that three teenagers are being sentenced in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, for brutally beating and killing a Mexican immigrant, it's time we confront the fact that behind violently anti-immigrant and supremacist rhetoric is...

What do health care reform and drinking water have in common? Just as we spend more than any nation in the developed world on health care, Americans spend over $15 billion a year on bottled water.

Now bottled water may be expensive and plastic bottles may be bad for...

President Obama has resolutely and repeatedly stated his intention to move immigration reform this year and create a path to citizenship for 12 million hardworking, new Americans. The two major American labor federations recently agreed to a plan that will help immigrants as well as US-born workers, ending...

Members of Congress are building momentum to pass a public insurance plan for health care. Millions in our country don't have any health coverage at all and millions more have coverage that, like in this video, is getting in the way of the best medical care. If we want to...

Co-written with Sanford M. Jacoby. Original version appeared in Seattle Times, Sun March 29.

Today, President Obama announced that the United States government is effectively taking over General Motors and Chrysler and considering bankruptcy. But while Japanese automaker Toyota is also taking a hit as global auto sales...

Am I the only one frustrated that now that we finally have a President who looks out for the greater good of average Americans, his own party won't join the fight to take the country back from special interests? Yesterday, Indiana centrist Democrat Evan Bayh announced that he and...

With children going hungry and working families without health coverage, what's a few extra billion dollars to prop up the AIG executives who caused this mess in the first place? The AIG scandal is no laughing matter. But sometimes, laughter is the best medicine.

My colleagues and I scanned...

We may have elected Barack Obama president, but make no mistake about it: there is a fierce contest underway to decide who will rule the United States of America -- corporations or the people.

In a plutocracy, the wealthy rule. In a democracy, the people have the power....

Weren't you wondering? Well, I was, so a colleague and I took to the streets of New York City and asked folks we met to help us explain some of the worthwhile public spending programs in the stimulus package President Obama just signed into law.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona! Congratulations!

This week, having already done everything imaginable to turn himself into a national right-wing celebrity by terrorizing undocumented immigrants, Sheriff Joe turned to the unimaginable. For a pre-arranged media circus, he paraded -- that's right, paraded -- undocumented immigrants wearing humiliating...

The other day as I walked to work in Manhattan, I passed an elderly man standing in the street holding a Styrofoam donation cup and a paper plate on which he had written: "Please help." Only please was spelled without the "a", a reminder that the economic crisis we're in...

The staggering gulf between the rich in America and everyone else is the root cause of our financial crisis. We can only stimulate the economy if we solve inequality.

There would have been no sub-prime mortgage crisis had there not been poor families with unstable jobs to trick with bad...

Today, I sat in a room while a dozen or so everyday Americans prepared to share the stage with top leaders from the Obama transition team and the new Congress. Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) will be shoulder to shoulder with April Page, a single mom working two jobs in...

One of the central principles in community organizing is that there are no permanent friends and no permanent enemies. Barack Obama won by convincing millions of Americans that there are no permanent enemies of progressive change. In the same spirit, Obama's supporters must not become permanent friends to our new...