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Columns/Opinion

Has economic inequity really gone bananas?

Three collectors recently took home some unconventional offerings from Art Basel, a famous art show held annually in Miami Beach. Each artwork consisted of a banana duct-taped to a wall. Two sold for $120,000, one for $150,000. For a banana. And some tape. Unfortunately, this farce is just a small sign of the growing gap between the whims of the absurdly wealthy and the challenges facing everyone else. During the same week as the banana bonanza in Miami Beach, the Trump administration announced its plans to slash the rolls of the nation’s nutrition assistance program. That means ...

Trump can’t end ‘endless wars’

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has imported into the American military lexicon a new rationale for U.S. military actions in the Middle East. It’s called “mowing the lawn,” but it has nothing to do with keeping the grass trimmed. “To mow the lawn,” Esper recently remarked to reporters, “means, every now and then” giving your adversary a good, swift kick in the shins. “You have to do these things,” he explained, “so that a threat doesn’t grow, doesn’t resurge.” You mow the lawn not to eliminate a threat but to manage it. The phrase itself is of Israeli ...

Former Army captain’s mission is to make a village

SAVANNAH, Ga. Tyler Merritt has taken the saying “It takes a village to raise a child” and turned it a bit sideways. He’s building a village, literally, to allow adults to raise themselves up. His village is a stabilizing rail, or a steppingstone to a better life. Merritt, a former Army captain and special operations air mission commander, is trying to help his military brothers and sisters who have found themselves post-military service and one paycheck away from financial collapse, as well as those struggling to find their way through modern civilian life, which does not ...

Volcker believed in rules governing Wall Street

Paul Volcker administered the tough medicine when the American economy badly needed it. It was 1980, and the inflation rate had passed 14%. OPEC, a cartel of foreign oil producers, had launched an oil embargo against the United States a few years before, causing prices to soar. Older Americans remember long lines of cars snaking to gas pumps. The country felt in crisis. President Jimmy Carter appointed Volcker chairman of the Federal Reserve Board to fix inflation. Volcker knew he had to raise interest rates to beat it down. He did and succeeded, but the cost was a sharp economic ...

Ill will to men (and women) who support Trump

Apologies to Elton John, but in Washington and throughout so much of the country, can you feel the hate tonight? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked by reporter James Rosen if she hates President Trump. She responded with an “if looks could kill” fire in her eyes and denounced Rosen for his question while claiming she doesn’t hate Trump. Former Vice President Joe Biden verbally attacked and challenged an 83-year-old man in Iowa to a push-up contest at a gathering of Democrats. The man asked about Biden’s son and how he managed to get a lucrative job with a Ukraine gas ...

Universal mental health care?

Whenever there is a mass shooting, two questions are repeated in the news and social media: Did the shooter have a history of mental illness? And why weren’t warning signs identified earlier? These questions reflect the barriers to better mental health care. Questioning whether the shooter ever had mental illness reinforces the false idea that some people experience mental illness while the rest do not, which is the foundation of stigma. Questioning why the shooter didn’t have an earlier intervention highlights the lack of prevention in our current mental health system, which ...