Listen Up! America’s Families Demand Action

By Luz A. Vega-Marquis

In McAllen, Texas, Martha Sanchez doesn't dare drink the water that runs out of the tap, for fear of getting sick. In Augusta, Georgia, Sunny Johnson, a single mother of two, thinks that working full-time as a certified nursing assistant should earn her a wage that puts her above the poverty line. (It doesn't.) In San Francisco, California, Cathleen Muhammad wants justice and good health for her children, who appear to have been made seriously ill by exposure to asbestos from a nearby construction site.

These three stories exemplify the different struggles families are facing in America today; meanwhile we have 37 million people -- 7.7 million families -- living in poverty.

READ MORE

E-Verify: A Flawed Approach to Immigration Reform

By Suzanne Brown

The federal government has continually failed to address fundamental, structural problems with the country’s broken immigration system. Missouri’s leadership hasn’t done us any favors either by approving the Illegal Aliens and Immigration Status Verification law. This law does not adequately deal with Congress’ failures to provide options for employers to hire legal workers or to keep families together because an “enforcement-only” approach is not a viable solution.

There are three main problems with the new law.

READ MORE

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Tehran

By Rev. Amanda Hendler-Voss

This week the words of Wendell Berry come to mind: “We concluded in 1945, after our atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that we had made war ‘unthinkable’ -- and we have gone on thinking of it, preparing for it, fighting it, suffering and profiting from it ever since.” Who could have imagined, in the midst of a disastrous war in Iraq, that we would be in such desperate need of remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki? After all, war is utterly destructive and incredibly costly -- win, lose or draw.

And yet, according to former chief UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, “the war between the United States and Iran is on.” More than 230 members of Congress are co-sponsoring a proposal, which includes language that sounds an awful lot like a unilateral naval blockade of Iran -- deemed by the UN to constitute an act of war unless sanctioned by a Security Council resolution. And in case you missed it, Congress already approved $400 million to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran (which may include a major air attack and a nuclear option).

READ MORE