It’s a paradox: The United States is supposed to be a beacon of democracy, yet Americans have one of the lowest levels of electoral participation in the world. In fact, a 2012 study found that the US ranked "120th of the 169 countries for which data exists on voter turnout, falling between the Dominican Republic and Benin.”

Our turnout rate has been consistently declining since the 1970s.

In Monday’s Washington Post, Aaron Blake highlighted a new study that suggests that trend is likely to continue in November’s midterm elections.

A new study shows that Americans are on-track to set a new low for turnout in a midterm ele ... Read more »

Developing Nations Denounce US Imperialism, Welcome Russia, China

China Joins 133 Members on 50th Anniversary to Trumpet Equality, Environmentalism

Marcela Estrada

In this April 19, 2011, file photo, a member of the National Guard checks on his colleague inside a Border Patrol Skybox near the
Hidalgo International Bridge in Hidalgo, Texas. National Guard members along the Texas-Mexico border assist Border Patrol by surveying the terrain from the tower.

Shena Gutierrez was already cuffed and in an inspection room in Nogales, Arizona, when the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent grabbed her purse, opened it and dumped its contents onto the floor right in front of her. There couldn’t be a sharper image of the ... Read more »

Tianna Gaines-Turner, a child-care worker from Philadelphia, presented these three suggestions to Congress this week during the House of Representative’s latest hearing on the War on Poverty. What makes Gaines-Turner’s testimony different is firsthand experience. Gaines-Turner and her husband have struggled for years to escape poverty while raising their children — a 10-year-old son (who, she proudly noted, was on the honor role), and two 6-year-old twins. Both parents work: Her husband is employed at a grocery store for $8.50 an hour, and ... Read more »

In this July 9, 2014 photo, Iraqi refugee children from Mosul stay at a temporary camp for refugees who fled from Mosul and other
towns outside Irbil, northern Iraq, nearly a month after Islamic militants took over the country's second largest city. (AP Photo)

Those seething with so much rage and xenophobia that they’d hurl ugly epithets in the faces of children fleeing bloody violence in Central America bring shame to the whole nation. But the response of mainstream America hasn’t been much better.

The media’s characterization of wh ... Read more »

In mid-November of 2012, hundreds of tuxedo-clad Republican lawyers gathered at a hotel ballroom in Washington, DC. They were a mix of heads hung in dejection and chests puffed out in compensatory bluster. Less than two weeks earlier, they’d seen President Obama vanquish his opponent at the polls. Their last chance to knock a hated president out of office — and their last real chance to halt that’s president’s even more hated health reforms — ended in failure. They and their allies had made their best case that liberalism was a path to ... Read more »

Last week’s Hobby Lobby ruling charted new legal territory by granting corporations the same religious rights as real people. The rationale behind the decision — that expanding constitutional rights to businesses is necessary to “protect the rights of people associated with the corporation” — is far from novel. A line of Supreme Court r ... Read more »

Right-wing “populism” is a joke: Poor-bashing, immigrant-hating and a revolting agenda

From Sarah Palin to Pat Buchanan, here's what it really means when they speak to "the American worker"

Writer John Judis presciently published an important book about American politics about a decade before its time called “The Paradox of American Democracy: Elites, Special Interests, and the Betrayal of the Public Trust” in which he accura ... Read more »

Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, speaks at a news conference, Sept. 20, 2010, in New York. (AP Photo/ Louis Lanzano)

Numerous reports have emerged that after the 9/11 attacks, various government agencies responded by treating all Muslims as suspect.

In April, the NYPD suspended what the ACLU described as a 12-year program of “suspic ... Read more »

When you consider what has been happening to the average working person since the era of Ronald Reagan, it’s amazing that the Republicans have fought the Democrats about to a draw.

The recipe of Reagan and both Bushes has been to weaken government, undermine the regulation of market excesses, attack core social insurance programs, tilt the tax system away from the wealthy and towards the middle class, gut the safeguards that protect workers on the job, make college ever more unaffordable and appoint judges who undermine democracy itself.

That stuff is not e ... Read more »