Author: Common Dreams

Any American who has paid the price of a patent-protected medicine knows the core flaw in the U.S. prescription drug system: our elected leaders have handed over control to profit-hungry corporations. And for-profit corporations gonna for-profit, as the kids would say. That is especially true when the corporations are gifted with long-term monopolies on life-essential medicines, which gives them the leverage to set take-it-or-leave it prices that net billions in revenue extracted from all of us. It does not have to be this way. That is the message of an exciting new report, Medicine for All: The Case for...

“The sufferings of the many pay for the luxuries of the few.” – Greta Thunberg Sunday, September 1 marked the 80th anniversary of the start of World War II. On that day in 1939, German troops crossed the border into Poland, setting off the greatest war the world has ever known. No war—and maybe no event of any kind—has been so thoroughly chronicled, both at the time it occurred and after the fact. But, like so many of the iconic events in America’s past, the rendering that endures in the culture is a stew of fact, fiction, and fairy...

If any doubts remain about the nefarious influence of the National Rifle Association (NRA) on the political life of the United States, President Donald Trump’s decision to discuss gun control measures with that organization should dispel them. The offer to discuss these measures is like asking a criminal for his weapon of choice in order to hand it over. This obsequiousness equals that of many legislators, mainly Republican, who refuse to pass effective legislation on gun control measures out of fear of losing NRA support. Scores of people stand to lose, among them a significant number of children and...

A political battle over transit plans in other cities by Koch-funded interests offers insight into methods used by critics of Milwaukee’s streetcar, and foreshadows the methods to hinder its planned expansions. The city of Phoenix dealt a decisive blow to a Koch Brothers-backed measure on August 27 when voters rejected a proposition that would have banned any expansion of the city’s light rail system. For years, Phoenix’s public transportation plans have included a network of light rail lines connecting downtown to the suburbs, cutting air pollution and carbon emissions in a city dubbed the least sustainable in the United...

“We cannot sit by and allow corporations, billionaires, and demagogues to destroy the Fourth Estate, nor can we allow them to replace serious reporting with infotainment and propaganda.” – Senator Bernie Sanders Warning the “decimation of journalism” by big business and billionaire executives poses a major threat to democracy, Senator Bernie Sanders on Monday unveiled a plan to stop the long-running corporate consolidation of American media, take anti-trust action against tech giants like Facebook and Google, and bolster independent news. “Today, after decades of consolidation and deregulation, just a small handful of companies control almost everything you watch, read,...

Rights groups reacted with horror and outrage on August 21 after the Trump administration unveiled a rule that would allow the federal government to detain migrant families for an unlimited period of time. “This is yet another cruel attack on children, who the Trump administration has targeted again and again with its anti-immigrant policies,” Madhuri Grewal, policy counsel with the ACLU, said in a statement. “The government should not be jailing kids, and certainly shouldn’t be seeking to put more kids in jail for longer.” The new rule, announced on August 21 by Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan,...