Perspectives

In May, Walmart was hit with $110 million in environmental fines after pleading guilty to improperly dumping pesticides, fertilizer and other hazardous materials into public sewers and landfills. The Justice Department’s Environmental Crimes Section said that it was ...

Natalie Menten, the voice behind the uber-libertarian movement to pass Amendments 60 and 61, as well as Proposition 101, has accused the groups working to stop those measures of using overblown scare tactics and deception to win support...

Everybody knows abortion became legal for all women with the ‘Roe v. Wade’ Supreme Court decision in 1973. Fewer people know that in 1976, poor women lost that fundamental right to determine whether or when to have children. That is the year that the Hyde Amendment (...

In 1992, Rush Limbaugh ridiculed Boulder Mayor Leslie Durgin for saying, “We don’t want to become the kind of community where everyone is white, upper-middle class. ... We really want to have a diverse community...

American young people (or those aged 18 to 29) have a more positive attitude toward socialism than to capitalism, according to a recent Pew poll. We are in the middle of “an era of tumult and protest” against global capitalism in the U.S. and abroad, argues ...

Woody Allen once said that “more than any time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” Our reliance upon fossil fuels has ...

On Sept. 17 I ended up the first to address the Boulder City Council during citizen participation. Several council members were nodding their heads by the end of the first sentence ... but soon they stopped. Here’s what I said, prettied up for print...

  Parents who take their children to see the Harry Potter films enjoy a fun family night. But unless they dig deeper into the stories, parents miss a great opportunity to explore life’s biggest issues with their children...

Americans have a love/hate relationship with government, condemning those wasteful and corrupt government bureaucrats in the abstract while praising many public services in the concrete like the fire department, schools or parks...

At the beginning of Boulder City Council’s Oct. 23 study session on ethics and financial reporting, council member Tim Plass asked the most valuable question of the night...

A rebellion is breaking out in the Democratic Party, but it’s not like the 1960s when the party was torn apart over the Vietnam War and civil rights for blacks. In those days, Democrats were united in support of the New Deal/Great Society approach to economics. Today...

You can win some impressive victories against corporate power on the local level. Boulder voters declared that corporations aren’t people and money isn’t speech. Cities across Colorado (and other states) have passed fracking bans and moratoriums...