Commentary

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<p>&nbsp;&nbsp; The US Chamber of Commerce has every reason to be proud of its many successes in forcing the Obama administration to focus primarily on corporations and their desire for more tax breaks and special incentives often denied small businesses.</p>

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<p>&nbsp;&nbsp; It’s not a happy birthday for Elizabeth Cady Stanton.</p>
<p>&nbsp;&nbsp; The leading suffragist was born on Nov. 12, 1815, but her 195th birthday comes amid a concerted attack on the nation’s highest elected woman.</p>
<p>&nbsp;&nbsp; The despicable attempt to demean Nancy Pelosi’s achievements as the House Democratic leader and to belittle her determination to keep her leadership role shows how precarious a woman’s place in U.S. politics remains.</p>

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<p>&nbsp;&nbsp; A certain Harvard professor years ago predicted that solar energy would be made readily available the day that Exxon owned the sun.</p>
<p>&nbsp;&nbsp; In this election in which polluters and their lackeys see themselves as the owners of Washington again, the professor’s prediction sounds more like a curse.</p>

<p><strong>Pew</strong><strong> Hispanic Center</strong><strong> </strong></p>

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<p>&nbsp;&nbsp; When you make police into immigration agents, it destroys trust in immigrant communities and makes everyone less safe.</p>
<p>&nbsp;&nbsp; The controversial Secure Communities program, which seeks to require all local police departments to share fingerprints with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, makes the lives of some domestic violence victims, in particular, anything but secure.</p>

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<p>&nbsp;&nbsp; The Nobel committee was right to award Mario Vargas Llosa the prize for literature this year.</p>
<p>&nbsp;&nbsp; Vargas Llosa is one of the pre-eminent writers in the Spanish-speaking world, and also one of its most contentious intellectual figures. Revered for his mastery of literary form and his groundbreaking techniques, he belongs in the company of Octavio Paz and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, both of whom have also won the Nobel Prize in literature.</p>

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<p>&nbsp;&nbsp; Before Wall Street drove our economy off a cliff, bullish Citigroup strategists dubbed the United States a “plutonomy.” They said, “There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the ‘non-rich,’ the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.”</p>

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<p>&nbsp;&nbsp; Unemployment is a mental health issue, and we must address it.</p>
<p>&nbsp;&nbsp; Clinical depression affects nearly one in 10 Americans, according to a recent survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). And unemployment is the biggest risk factor causing depression. While 6 percent of people with jobs exhibit signs of depression, 21 percent of unemployed people have symptoms, the survey revealed.</p>