The features
Inequality: Bad for Your Health
How do you stay healthy? That's a no brainer, right? Eat the right foods, exercise, quit smoking, get regular medical checkups. Social epidemiologist Ichiro Kawachi wants to add a new item to the list: live in a relatively egalitarian society. Kawachi has carried out a wide range of research studies on the social and economic factors that account for average health outcomes in different societies. Among his most novel conclusions is that people in societies with high levels of economic inequality are less healthy than those living in more equal societies, regardless of their absolute levels of income. | | Read more »
From NAFTA to the SPP
While left activists and researchers in Canada and Mexico have been spreading the word about the Security and Prosperity Partnership for several years, so far in the United States the SPP has mainly caught the attention of the right wing, which sees it as a stealth plan to impose a European Union-style government on the continent. The SPP is not a North American version of the European Union. But it is a stealth plan—one aimed at bypassing the kind of international solidarity that halted the FTAA and the MAI. | | Read more »
For the Right of Return
Encampments of the homeless continue to thrive under the overpasses and inside abandoned courtyards of New Orleans, while the city, state, and federal governments are planning to destroy four large public housing projects that could be sheltering people today. The New Orleans City Council unanimously voted on Dec. 20, 2007 to demolish the low-income housing, at the end of a tumultuous public hearing from which hundreds of residents were barred, leading to a police riot with tasers, pepper spray, and mace outside the Council Chambers. | | Read more »
Available only in the print edition:
Stormier Weather
- By John Miller
- January/February 2008
- Issue 274
Hard times have been the hallmark of the U.S. economy during this decade, even as the economy expanded. We will be in for more of the same, but worse, as the economy slows and the inevitable downturn in the business cycle exacerbates the economic injuries many people have already sustained thanks to long-term shifts in the U.S. economic system. |
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