In 1999, Anthony, a 13-year-old boy who weighed 350 pounds, told his four-year-old cousin to expose herself. Anthony, now 24, swears he did not touch her. Nonetheless, her father pressed charges and Anthony was found delinquent for assault with intent to commit sexual abuse, sentenced to sex offender treatment, and assigned a lifetime spot on Iowa's public sex offender registry. Ten years after beginning treatment at Woodward Academy in Woodward, Iowa, Anthony, who asked that his last name not be published, finds it impossible to lead a normal life. Permanently associated with dangerous pedophiles and pathological rapists, his childhood mistake has hindered his ability to find work, housing and societal acceptance. Although he left Woodward when he was 18, Iowa's residency restriction at that time--which barred sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school--forced him to leave his family's home in Des Moines for a trailer with no electricity on land owned by his father in rural Osceola, Iowa. Anthony's plight could soon become common among all of America's juvenile sex offenders, who in 2009 were responsible for one-third of all sex offenses against minors in the United States. Following the 2006 passage of the Sex Offender Registration…

Amid all the alleged threats to the world's reigning superpower, one rival is quietly, forcefully emerging: China. And the U.S. is closely scrutinizing China's intentions. On August 13, a Pentagon study expressed concern that China is expanding its military forces in ways that "could deny the ability of American warships to operate in international waters off the coast," Thom Shanker reports in The New York Times. Washington is alarmed that "China's lack of openness about the growth, capabilities and intentions of its military injects instability to a vital region of the globe." The U.S., on the other hand, is quite open about its intention to operate freely throughout the "vital region of the globe" surrounding China (as elsewhere). The U.S. advertises its vast capacity to do so: with a growing military budget that roughly matches the rest of the world combined, hundreds of military bases across the globe, and a huge lead in the technology of destruction and domination. China's lack of understanding of the rules of international civility was illustrated by its objections to the plan for the advanced nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington to take part in the U.S.-South Korea military exercises near China's coast in July,…

SINGAPORE – This city's most famous expatriate writer, W. Somerset Maugham, once wrote of Southeast Asia's peasant workers: These patient, industrious folk carry on the same yokes, the same burdens as their ancestors carried so many generations back. The centuries have passed leaving no trace upon them. ... [I]n these countries of the East the most impressive, the most awe-inspiring monument of antiquity is neither temple, nor citadel, nor great wall, but man. The peasant with his immemorial usages belongs to an age far more ancient than Angkor Wat, the Great Wall of China, or the Pyramids of Egypt. In many ways, those words are just as true today as they were in 1930. This crossroads of Chinese, Malay, Indian and western cultures was recently ranked the most competitive economy in the world. Fueling that economy are the descendants of those "patient, industrious folk." Nearly two out of every five residents in this city of 5 million is foreign-born. More than a half-million migrant workers from Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and China do the backbreaking work that helped Singapore emerge from its worst recession in history with 15.5 percent growth in the first quarter of this year. One…

Not so long ago, in a typical conniption fit, Glenn Beck blubbered to his TV audience about the loss of America's greatness. No one faklempts like Beck, and on this October evening he was very moist. He was mourning the America best represented, he thought, by several 1970s network TV ads, including one for Kodak (children, butterflies) and one for Coke (game-losing Mean Joe Green accepting a conciliatory cola from a grade-school boy). Beck whined and moaned and waxed reactionary, choking back saline, pleading with us to remember "what life used to be like!" and "how it felt!" It was not an unusual performance. Watching the clip is like watching a clinical video of a beleaguered schizophrenic. Beck seems aware that his constituency has lost the capacity to discern TV fantasy from what's real. And we can overlook, for now, the fact that if America "used to be united!" as he cried, it was united over unchallenged racism, women's subjugation and the presumption of a white president. The substance of Beck & Co.'s discourse is odious trash, of course. But the question remains why it has gained such audience share. Theories abound, most of them unkind to a big chunk…

THE TRIUMPH OF PURIST IDEOLOGY over compassion and science means suffering and death for organic farm animals across America. The week-old dairy calf, gangly and still, lay on a barn floor, her long-lashed eyes rolled back to expose the blue-white rim. The next morning, when I went to help my neighbor with his newborns, the calf was dead. Department of Agriculture (USDA) regulations defining organic standards mandate that if this calf had gotten one dose of antibiotics, even to save her life, she could never give organic milk--even after the two years it takes for her to become a milker, and even though neither she nor her milk would retain any trace of antibiotics. Farmers are not generally callous or cruel, but neither are they sentimental. Organic standards mandate that they take all measures to save the life of an animal, but treatment strategies can be subjective, and loss of organic status factors into a farmer's decision. After all, antibiotics don't always work, and sometimes animals recover without them. So decent farmers wait while an animal suffers, and crosses that line past which no intervention can reverse the slide to death. "Yes, I have seen examples of when producers had…

Drive across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, and you'll enter the most dangerous city in the world: Ciudad Juárez, where more than 6,000 people have been murdered since 2008, including more than 1,700 this year. Once a fast-growing laboratory for free-trade initiatives, Juárez now produces drugs and dead bodies, as thousands of Mexican soldiers and increasingly brazen gang members roam the city of just over 1 million. As the killings become more grisly and frequent, questioning their cause has become almost suicidal. At least 30 journalists have been killed or disappeared in Mexico since 2006, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. That makes Charles Bowden's new book Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields--whose most chilling subject is an experienced sicario, or hitman--all the more remarkable, and important. For while authorities on both sides of the border explain the violence engulfing Juárez with familiar "war on drugs" rhetoric, Bowden argues it is the predictable result of NAFTA's failure, endemic poverty and America's appetite for drugs. "I kept trying to never go back," says the 65-year-old Tuscon, Ariz., resident. "And then I would realize that I couldn't walk away." Beyond the violence, what surprised…

"Will you join me in lowering our impact?" That was the subject line on a recent e-mail I sent out to family, friends, column readers and radio listeners asking them to join me for a week in trying to reduce our individual environmental footprint. Inspired by Colin Beaven's prophetic book "No Impact Man," I proposed four pollution- and waste-reducing steps many people could try for a few days: Stop consuming meat, devote one meal a day to eating only locally grown products, avoid producing non-recyclable garbage and refrain from riding in a fossil-fuel burning vehicle with fewer than three people. Having now completed this Low-Impact Week, I can report that it was not easy and that I did not achieve perfection--not even close. However, I can also say I learned a few things beyond how to manage bicycle-seat discomfort. For one, I discovered that you can find affordable food that isn't flown in at great energy expense--but it takes initiative. You have to check food labels at the grocery or hunt down a farmers market. I was also reminded that we waste an obscene amount of paper and plastic. Coffee cups, disposable utensils, food wrappers -- this offal is everywhere…

For the millions of Americans who do not read In These Times, labor unions have probably been relegated to the realm of the anachronistic, if not downright unpatriotic. For the much smaller number of Americans who do read In These Times, writing about the virtues of labor unions probably falls into the realm of preaching to the congregation. But in his new (and at 784 pages, massive) book There Is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America (Doubleday, September), Philip Dray provides plenty of information about the virtues of unions for labor evangelists to draw upon. Dray offers a grand context for thinking about labor-management relations in a society beset by ill will in millions of workplaces. He notes that the saga of organized labor in the United States is "much more than a catalog of strikes, picket lines and flailing police batons. The debate about work and industry and the struggle for workers' rights and dignity have been consuming subjects since the birth of our nation; they have shaped laws and customs, acted as a crucible for social change, and ultimately helped define what it means to be an American." Taken as a whole, the…

"The money from drugs permeates many facets of economic life in Mexico—most estimates put the drug business at $50 billion per year," says Molly Molloy, who maintains an influential listserv dedicated to tracking violence in Juarez. "What will replace it? What can replace the human desire to seek escape from the pain of poverty and hopelessness? I do not have an answer."

My brother is a high school teacher. He is not famous, and certainly not rich. After he leaves this earth, autographed photos of him will not hang in bars or restaurants; there will be no beautifully lit, high contrast black-and-white posters of him á la James Dean. But because so many of his students have recognized him as an exceptionally good teacher--a mentor who changed their lives--he will live on through them, in crucially long-lasting and embedded ways, for years to come. He's not alone. That's what it means to be a teacher, becoming entwined in others' lives, and influencing their attitudes, behaviors, ideas and contributions to the world. It is a particular kind of immortality, yet one that we as a culture typically fail to appreciate and honor. Of course there are bad teachers; we've all had them. When I was in high school, we had a guy who routinely came to work plastered, several who couldn't teach at all, and a few who became--or tried to become--sexually involved with students. But the good ones were amazing, powerfully shaping our interests--what we decided to study in college, what we chose to do with our lives, how we made sense…

With America's public schools struggling to survive slashed budgets and unequal funding, school reform is back on the national agenda--but will the new model of market-based "reform" promote greater educational quality? Already, schools in low-income areas see abysmally low achievement levels. In many cities, less than half of students graduate from high school. To combat the crisis of low achievement, the Obama administration, led by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, cobbled together a group of political and corporate powerbrokers, including Bill Gates, to spearhead education reform. Their efforts have been vigorously applauded by major media from the New York Times to the Washington Post to Newsweek. In her recent book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Undermine Education, Diane Ravitch, education historian and former assistant secretary of education under George H.W. Bush, takes the education reform establishment to task. Ravitch blasts what she calls the "Billionaire Boys Club" vision of public education. "Three foundations--Gates, Broad and Walton--are now committed to charter schools and to evaluating teachers by test scores," she told Democracy Now in March. And that's now the policy of the Department of Education. "We have never seen anything like this,…

Teachers today feel ever more under the gun, as state fiscal crises and resentment of public servants dominate the debate over educational reform. In the world of No Child Left Behind, where "accountability" has become the new rallying cry for reformers, we are witnessing a real moment of crisis for education. At the center of the storm is a lightning rod: teacher tenure. To critics it represents all that is wrong with the system--protecting ineffective and unprofessional teachers. But tenure was never meant to protect bad teachers and, for the most part, it does not. Rather, tenure was designed to protect professionals from undue political interference in the work of education. It was meant to protect the classroom as a place of inquiry. Principals, until recently, ruled their schools like czars who could hire and fire at will. The fight for tenure came out of a fight for First Amendment protections, as well as a sense that teachers as professionals deserved some freedom in how they ran their classrooms. Tenure freed teachers from the tyranny of administrators, who were often political appointees or friends of the superintendent. In other words, tenure in public education recognizes that teachers are professionals, as…

When President Barack Obama announced that his choice for Secretary of Education was Arne Duncan, chief executive of the Chicago Public Schools, he extolled his basketball buddy as a pragmatic, successful school reformer. "He's not beholden to any one ideology," Obama said, adding that Duncan would speak with authority based on "the lessons he's learned during his years changing our schools from the bottom up." As a critic on the campaign trail of President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, Obama implicitly offered Duncan's efforts in Chicago as an alternative model of how his administration would improve American schools, particularly the most troubled. But so far Duncan and Obama have only modified Bush's education plans, retaining many problematic elements. The administration's hallmark program, Race to the Top (RTTT), encourages states to adopt specified changes in a competition for money they desperately need. But it offers only $4.35 billion in the first two rounds for school systems that spend roughly $580 billion a year, $47 billion of which is federal aid. Yet by emphasizing this program, Duncan is pursuing dubious reforms that are not only likely to fail, but do real harm. Obama claims that Duncan's reform agenda is…

Out of all the famous quotations, few better describe this eerily familiar time than those attributed to George Santayana and Yogi Berra. The former, a philosopher, warned that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The latter, a baseball player, stumbled into prophecy by declaring, "It's deja vu all over again." As movies give us bad remakes of already bad productions (hello, Predators), television resuscitates ancient clowns (howdy, Dee Snider) and music revives pure schlock (I'm looking at you, Devo), we are now surrounded by the obvious mistakes of yesteryear. And it might be funny--it might be downright hilarious--if only this cycle didn't infect the deadly serious stuff. Vietnam showed us the perils of occupation, then the Iraq War showed us the same thing--and yet now, we are somehow doing it all over again in Afghanistan. The Great Depression underscored the downsides of laissez-faire economics, the Great Recession highlighted the same danger--and yet the new financial "reform" bill leaves that laissez-faire attitude largely intact. Ronald Reagan proved the failure of trickle-down tax cuts to spread prosperity before George W. Bush proved the same thing--and yet now, in a recession, Congress is considering more tax cuts all…

Celebrity chef Alice Waters is the world's most famous advocate of growing and eating local, organic food. In February 2010, Waters' Chez Panisse Foundation chose as its new executive director "green socialite" and liberal political activist Francesca Vietor. But Vietor's hiring created a conflict of interest that has married Waters and her foundation to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) and its scam of disposing of toxic sewage as free "organic biosolids compost" for gardens. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom appointed Vietor as one of the five SFPUC commissioners in 2008, just a year after the commission began giving away sewage from San Francisco and eight other counties as "organic biosolids compost." In early 2010, John Mayer, then with the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), began organizing environmental, gardening and food safety groups to endorse a letter to Newsom opposing the sludge-to-gardens giveaway. In February, Mayer sent Vietor an e-mail at the Chez Panisse Foundation, including the sign-on letter calling for a permanent ban on the sludge-to-gardens giveaway. Mayer did not know that Vietor was on the SFPUC board and that she was and is its vice president. Nor did Vietor mention this to him when she declined to add…

Right-wing media catapulted the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) into national infamy this summer with an exaggerated emphasis on a 2008 incident in which two members of the group, one with a nightstick, were videotaped standing by the door of a poll site in a predominantly black precinct in Philadelphia. The footage has been viewed 1.5 million times on YouTube. Attuned to publicity, NBPP chief Malik Zulu Shabazz is exploiting this visibility to threaten violence at Glenn Beck's August 28 rally, "Restoring Honor," which takes place at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I have A Dream" speech. Shabazz told the online magazine Mediaite.com that Beck's demonstration is "going to meet direct opposition from the New Black Panther Party. ... He can bring his Tea Party, and we'll bring our party, and we'll see Glenn Beck." Both men are practiced provocateurs, and the stage is set for a showdown. Many of Beck's supporters are big on Second Amendment freedoms and are likely to be armed, as are members of the NBPP. Beck is one of the prime movers of the right-wing narrative that the Obama administration harbors pro-black biases and is practicing a racial double standard.…

In July of last year, Shon Meckfessel was debating whether or not to join his three friends on a hike in the mountains of Kurdistan in northern Iraq. In the hopes of fighting off a cold, Meckfessel ultimately decided to stay in a hotel, with plans to join them the next day. That seemingly inconsequential decision saved Meckfessel from ending up in an Iranian prison, where his friends have spent the last year. Sarah Shourd, Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal have become known as "the hikers" since their arrest on July 31, 2009, by Iranian Revolutionary Guards, who claimed the three illegally crossed the Iraq-Iran border. And Bauer, Fattal and Shourd were indeed hikers at the moment of their arrest, taking a break from journalistic, academic and solidarity work they were doing in the Middle East. The four, who met while studying in the San Francisco Bay Area, considered themselves on a mission to--in Shourd's words--"build a bridge between East and West." Meckfessel, 37 and author of a 2009 book on post-conflict life in the Balkans, is currently on a 30-city, no-frills European tour spreading the word about the plight of his friends. He also recently launched a website, www.freeourfriends.eu,…

Since the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) went to work on the state social studies curriculum in January of 2009, media coverage has zeroed in on some of the more inflammatory amendments proposed by the Board: emphasizing the conservative resurgence of the '80s and '90s, placing Barry Goldwater instead of Ed Kennedy on a list of "significant political leaders," and including Jefferson Davis' inaugural address alongside Abraham Lincoln's. But for many educators, the problem isn't what is included in the curriculum, but how history is taught and how the curriculum was developed in the first place. Joyce Appleby, professor emerita of history at UCLA and co-author of the widely used American Republic to 1877 textbook, says she expected to be horrified by the new standards. But after reading through them, she says, "Aside from a few changes, I didn't see what was so wrong with them." A self-described "left-leaning liberal," Appleby has no qualm with teaching students about Phyllis Schlafly and the National Rifle Association. "Objection to this puzzles me. People should learn about this moment in history," she says. Appleby does, however, take issue with Board's influence over standards. "What's offensive is the idea that history doesn't require…

The sacking of Shirley Sherrod is emblematic of the mess the Democrats and President Barack Obama have gotten themselves into. Yes, this is a sad story about race in America, and about a race-baiting charlatan named Andrew Breitbart. But the Sherrod affair also exposes how the White House operates internally, and which voices it really responds to. Guess what? They're not the voices of those Americans who elected Obama. This fearful administration consistently ignores progressive concerns, while reacting to every right-wing talking point and cowering before the howling of Fox News banshees. It's no surprise that the Democrats' most reliable constituencies are wavering. On August 3, at the AFL-CIO executive council meeting, President Richard Trumka lamely exhorted America's labor leaders to support Democrats in November. Trumka told his union brothers and sisters, "We know you're angry. We know you're frustrated. We know we haven't achieved everything that we worked for. But we've made progress, and we have to keep it going." Does that sound like a message that can fire up the base for Election Day? Not likely. The lack of enthusiasm among progressive Democrats is rooted in White House policy decisions. Consider Obama's current reluctance to appoint Elizabeth Warren,…

At their annual convention in July, National Education Association (NEA) members narrowly approved a vote of "no confidence" in Race to the Top, a cornerstone of Obama's education reform plan. For each of the last three years, the NEA has hosted either Obama or his education secretary, Arne Duncan, at its annual convention. But this year, amid calls for Duncan's resignation, neither was invited. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), another national teachers' union, has also distanced itself from the administration in the months since the Race was announced in July 2009. Of the $100 billion earmarked for education in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (aka the "stimulus bill" passed in January 2009), $4.35 billion was repackaged as incentive for states to reform their education policies along new federal guidelines. States that show the most commitment to significant reform are rewarded with millions of federal dollars. But the direction of these reforms has many teachers and union leaders concerned. Required changes include expanding charter schools; linking teacher pay to student test scores; enabling districts to dismiss entire staffs of failing schools; and weakening teacher tenure--policies that have long been opposed by teachers' unions. While Obama has emphasized his commitment…