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After One Year: Future of “Occupy”
Laura Gottesdiener is an organizer with Occupy Wall Street and author the forthcoming book A Dream Foreclosed: The Great Eviction and the Fight to Live in America. She said today: “After one year, Occupy has become a movement that exists both as a protest in the symbolic centers of neoliberal capitalism, and as a direct…
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Chicago Strike and the Corporate Attack on Education
Author of Why Is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schools? Susan Ohanian said today: “The current corporate-driven assault on public education rises from the late 1980s when Arkansas governor Bill Clinton held hands with IBM CEO Lou Gerstner to forge America 2000 for President Bush the Elder. That policy, which came directly from a Business…
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Getting Past Protest Disinformation
Available for a limited number of interviews, Emad Mekay appeared on Al Jazeera English last night. A lecturer at Stanford University and an investigative journalism fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, Mekay returned from Egypt a week ago after three months. While virtually all media were alleging that an Israeli American Jew was behind…
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Court Rules Against Detention; Congress Doubles Down on Government Spying
Charlie Savage of the New York Times reports today: “A federal judge on Wednesday blocked the government from enforcing a controversial statute about the indefinite detention without trial of terrorism suspects. Congress enacted the measure last year as part of the National Defense Authorization Act. “The ruling came as the House voted to extend for…
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Behind the Libyan “Success”
Author of Arab Spring, Libyan Winter, Vijay Prashad is chair of South Asian history and director of international studies at Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut. He just wrote a piece on the attacks in Libya: “This is not the first such protest in Benghazi, the eastern city of Libya. Over the course of this year,…
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Roots of Record Poverty
Author of Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in Twentieth Century U.S. History, Alice O’Connor said today: “It was not too long ago in our history that news of 40-million plus in poverty spurred a call to concerted political action, and to a War on Poverty built on full employment, living wages,…
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Pro-Mubarak Media Disinformed, Driving Cairo Embassy Protests
A lecturer at Stanford University and an investigative journalism fellow at University of California, Berkeley, Emad Mekay returned from Egypt a week ago after three months. He said today: “In the U.S. media and the media in both Egypt and Libya, I do not see division lines clearly and perhaps almost deliberately so. The protests…
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How Poverty Affects a Majority of Americans
“Later this morning, when the Census Bureau releases its latest data, it is likely to show that poverty rose in 2011. Again. And while it will be tempting to explain that rise by pointing the continued effects of the Great Recession and the very slow recovery from it, poor, working-class, and middle-class Americans have all…
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First Federal Drone Trial: “Guilty”
Brian Terrell, one of the activists protesting Missouri’s Whiteman Air Force Base, was convicted in a federal court for trespassing yesterday. He said today, “I cross-examined the head of security, asking him if I would be deemed to be criminally trespassing if I saw a child being attacked on the base, which is in a…
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How the Government Could Have Prevented 9/11: Read the Documents
Coleen Rowley, a former FBI Special Agent and Division Counsel whose May 2002 memo described some of the FBI’s pre-9/11 failures, was named one of Time Magazine’s “Persons of the Year” in 2002. She said today: “In the New York Times, Kurt Eichenwald characterizes the Bush administration’s ‘Deafness Before the Storm’ ignoring of pre-9/11 warnings…