New America in the News: 2007

When Jonathan Hu was going to high school in suburban Southern California, he rarely heard anyone speaking Chinese. But striding through campus on his way to class at the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Hu hears Mandarin all the time, in plazas, cafeterias, classrooms, study halls, dorms and fast-food outlets. It is part of the soundtrack at this iconic university, along with Cantonese, English, Spanish and, of course, the perpetual jackhammers from the perpetual construction projects spurred by the perpetual fund drives.

On a warm day in late December, two dovish Washington groups, the American Task Force on Palestine and the Foundation for Middle East Peace, hosted a panel discussion at a historic mansion on 18th Street NW. The topic on the table was "After the Iraq Study Group: Possibilities for Arab-Israeli Peace..." It was, in short, the usual Washington peace-wonk crowd, and when the time for questions came, the first man to rise said that everything everyone had said was true and good, but hadn't they all been expressing the same true and good sentiments for 25 years now?

Sacramento -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is looking to redirect billions of dollars now spent to treat people without health insurance to purchase coverage for the uninsured, according to sources who have seen a recent version of the governor's health care plan expected to be released Monday.

The governor's plan, which continues to be revised and reconsidered, would move up to $2 billion in tax money that now goes to hospitals to help cover indigent care and use it to buy insurance for part of the uninsured population.

Below the surface of all the big issues facing California -- education, prisons, transportation, immigration, political reform -- lies the disturbing reality that the grassroots of citizen political involvement are drying up. In recent years, alienation between Californians and their government leaders has burned like a wildfire across the state, melting voter turnout and heating up cynicism toward the political establishment in Sacramento...

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JONATHAN MANN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Building dreams in Dubai. A tiny synthetic city-state has transformed itself and is now literally changing the landscape around it, making its own new world out of oil money and ambition.

Hello and welcome...Joining us now to talk about it is the author of that "National Geographic" piece, former Reuters correspondent based in Dubai, Afshin Molavi, now of the New America Foundation...Let me ask you first of all, Dubai does not have all that much oil compared to its neighbors. So where's all the money coming from?

Imagine a restaurant in which the maitre d' asked each patron to show a credit card before being seated. Those with a card would be seated, served and then given a bill for the cost of their meal. Those without a credit card would be fed for free.

How long would it take for the paying customers to figure out that they were paying not just for the cost of their own food, but also indirectly for the free food served to others?...

In Connecticut, where the cost of living is high, single mother-headed households are about seventeen times more likely than two-parent households to live in poverty, and more than half of the state’s singleparent families do, according to the state Department of Social Services...

The proportion of single mother households, which vastly outnumber those headed by single fathers, to married couple households has significantly increased over the past 25 years nationwide.

What is the most pressing problem facing the economy? A good case can be made for the developing health care crisis. Soaring costs, growing ranks of uninsured and a steady erosion of corporate health benefits add up to a giant drag on the nation’s future prosperity.