Public Citizen said in a statement today: “The ‘Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act’ (STOCK Act), would make members of Congress and their staffs subject to the same laws against insider trading that apply to the rest of America. The STOCK Act also creates an important system of real-time transparency of stock trading activity by…

“It’s time to acknowledge the foreign policy disaster that American support for the Porfirio Lobo administration in Honduras has become. Ever since the June 28, 2009, coup that deposed Honduras’s democratically elected president, José Manuel Zelaya, the country has been descending deeper into a human rights and security abyss. That abyss is in good part…

CARL CONETTA, cconetta at comw.org “The new budget plan — represented by the green trend line — stands in stark contrast to the reductions mandated by the Budget Control Act under the provisions for sequestration (represented by the red trend line). Sequestration would roll Pentagon base-budget spending back to the level of 2004, which would…

The New York Times has a piece today titled “In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad.” “We basically have a system of self-monitoring by corporations. There used to be an agency at the UN that did monitoring — The United Nations Center on Transnational Corporations — but that was basically ended in the…

“The disruption of the Indian Ocean includes the overfishing in its waters, the devastation by dumping of toxic waste, the problem of its militarization. When Vasco Da Gama came into the waters in 1498, he entered a world of demilitarized trade that linked China to Africa. The Portuguese ships inaugurated an era of violence that…

Hauter said today: “The president’s energy vision is troubling for our water resources. His speech touted the development of so-called ‘clean energy,’ but it may as well have been written by the oil and gas industry. His plan to open up more than 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources and to…

“The year 2011 in Egypt has proven to be an unprecedented year of protest and revolutionary vitality. It is tempting to hope that the struggle for revolutionary change will find a new life in the ongoing electoral process and in the institutions it will generate. Yet it is belief in this hope that is the…

iWatchNews is reporting: “The Israeli-born wife of casino mogul Sheldon Adelson is matching her husband and placing her own $5 million bet on a super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich in the upcoming Florida primary. “The gift came from Miriam Adelson, according to sources familiar with husband Sheldon’s previous $5 million donation to the super PAC…

“Open marriages are consensual, honest and based in love. Saying ‘let me have an affair or I’m going to divorce you’ is not consensual — it’s coercive. Being married and then waiting to come clean until after you’ve started an affair is is not open or honest. If Gingrich had approached his wife with his…

COSTAS PANAYOTAKIS, [in NYC] cpanayotakis at gmail.com, Panayotakis is associate professor of sociology at the New York City College of Technology at CUNY and author of the forthcoming book Remaking Scarcity: From Capitalist Inefficiency to Economic Democracy. He said today: “As global financial markets and the world are anxiously watching to see if the negotiations…