The Drug War has failed. Over the last 40 years, millions of Americans have been imprisoned for non-violent drug-related offenses. The incarceration of such a large portion of the American people has compromised the civil liberties and freedom of all citizens. Additionally, billions of dollars that could be put to better use have been wasted [...]
By Gardner | Blog
What happens to the American Dream in the aftermath of Immigration Reform and the Chained CPI?
Our elected representatives in Congress are at it, again. As the smoke clears from the fake fiscal crisis, Congress is poised to gut all those protection that FDR created for all our workers, their families, [...]
With no financial maneuverability, political freedom becomes an abstract idea, rather than a reality one can experience. During February, I began examining some words and catchphrases that have come to define our culture today. I suggested that we need to look more closely at the implications of some [...]
By Jim Hightower | Otherwords.org
Washington should do more than the minimum on minimum wage. “In the wealthiest nation on Earth,” President Barack Obama declared in his State of the Union speech, “no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty.”
Right! Not only does his call to raise America’s minimum [...]
By Kimberly J. Morgan | ForeignAffairs.com
How the Country Could Get More for Less The amount of resources the American public and private sectors commit to all forms of welfare is massive — the fifth highest outlay in the world. Yet the American way of distributing that money does less to reduce poverty [...]
By John Cavanagh | OtherWords.org
Obama’s State of the Union address nudged the debate in the right direction, but not far enough. In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama deftly nudged the national debate further away from the dominant austerity framework that brought us the misguided budget deal on New Year’s Day.
[...]
By Too Much/IPS | Editor: Sam Pizigati
From hiking trails in Oregon to boardrooms in Berlin, critics of our staggeringly unequal corporate order are calling for new limits that link executive compensation to worker paychecks When do societies start taking a new idea seriously? Easy. New ideas start gaining traction when starkly different [...]
By Sam Pizzigati | Otherwords.org
The richest 100 people in the world are earning much more than enough to end the world’s worst poverty. Apologists for inequality have a standard retort to anyone who calls for a more equal distribution of the world’s treasure. If you took all the wealth of the wealthy [...]
By Micah L. Sifry | YES! Magazine
Aaron Swartz took his own life at the age of 26, after years of legal trouble over academic articles he downloaded and intended to share. He leaves behind a legacy of thinking about the power of the internet to shape our political lives. This article was [...]
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Quotable Quotes
The good man understands what is right,
the bad man understands profit.
—Confucius
“The greatest country, the richest country, is not that which has the most capitalists, monopolists, immense grabbings, vast fortunes, with its sad, sad soil of extreme, degrading, damning poverty, but the land in which there are the most homesteads, freeholds — where wealth does not show such contrasts high and low, where all men have enough — a modest living— and no man is made possessor beyond the sane and beautiful necessities.”
–Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
'He leaves us a lesson, which is to never accept any injustice.'
–The French President, François Hollande, speaking of Stéphane Hessel, dead at age 95.
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered…”
–Thomas Jefferson
Around the web…
Above the law
"The laws, Cicero wrote in the days of the Roman Republic, “are silent in time of war.” But what if the war has no end, no defined enemy, no defined territory? How can markets work if the financial behemoths are too big to fail and too big to jail? If the national security state has the power of life or death above the law, and Wall Street has the power to plunder beyond the law, in what way does this remain a nation of laws? " --Katrina van HeuvelRead it on WP
Waking From My Moral Coma
"It is the killing, it is the permanent war, it is our deranged national priorities. It is the system we live under which requires the serial deaths of all those innocents to maintain our economic health that should appall us. We sup upon the blood and bonemeal that is the byproduct of the idea that is America, and we sleep. And we sleep." -William Rivers PittRead it on Truthout
Recent Comments
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- Gerry Tatham on Alan Grayson. “Aaron Swartz, R.I.P.”
- Rabbi Stanley Howard Schwartz DD on Alan Grayson. “Aaron Swartz, R.I.P.”
- j j on SOTU 2013: Not a Game-Changing Agenda
Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition
Click image to access report.
Torture: A Laughing Matter?
Elizabeth Warren : What Is Bad for Taxpayers, Bad for Our Economy, Bad for Justice?
By Senator Elizabeth Warren
Isn’t it obvious that the “too big to fail” problem still exists and is bad for small banks? Bad for taxpayers? Bad for our economy? Bad for justice? In a Senate hearing this week, Elizabeth Warren grilled a Treasury official about a major Wall Street bank (HSBC) that was [...]