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  • Sorry, Census. Poverty Really Did Increase in 2009.

    Between 2008 and 2009, unemployment increased from 5.8 percent to 9.3 percent, the largest one-year increase on record (which goes back to 1948). Over the same period, the number of Americans without health insurance coverage rose by more than four million — from 46.3 million in 2008 to 50.7 million in 2009 — and low-income…

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  • Bruce Reed Appointed Biden Chief of Staff Today

    In light of his prominent role in deficit reduction and the ‘end of welfare’ in the 1990s, Reed’s appointment sends a clear — and troubling — signal about the administration’s domestic policy priorities in the years ahead. Alice O’Connor is author of Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in Twentieth Century U.S.…

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  • A Statement from Former Prisoner Omar Deghayes on the 9th Anniversary of the Opening of Guantánamo

    Two years ago, President Barack Obama pledged to bring an end to the anomaly that is Guantánamo within a year, and to thereby restore America’s moral standing in the world. Yet today, on January 11, 2011, we are marking the beginning of the tenth year since the first prisoners were transferred to Camp X Ray…

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  • The Referendum in Sudan

    KHARTOUM, Sudan — Just days before the historic referendum on southern independence Khartoum is experiencing temperate weather and what may turn out to be a deceptive calm. In fact, everybody is either worried or excited, depending on their circumstances. Southerners are resolute that they will not accept second class citizenship in their own country, otherwise,…

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  • The End of New Deal Liberalism

    By William Greider We have reached a pivotal moment in government and politics, and it feels like the last, groaning spasms of New Deal liberalism. When the party of activist government, faced with an epic crisis, will not use government’s extensive powers to reverse the economic disorders and heal deepening social deterioration, then it must…

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  • Chomsky’s initial reaction to WikiLeaks’ latest

    I took a quick look at [“U.S. embassy cables: Hillary Clinton woos prickly Egyptians“].  It’s interesting that Israel does not appear, only Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon.  I found only one entry of any interest, in US Embassy to Clinton: “Soliman brokered a half-year-long truce last year, which Hamas broke in December, leading to the Israeli…

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  • The Katharine Gun Case

    Katharine Gun, a British former government employee, faced two years imprisonment in England for the “crime” of telling the truth. She was charged with leaking an embarrassing U.S. intelligence memo indicating that the U.S. had mounted a spying “surge” against U.N. delegations in early 2003 in an effort to win approval of the Iraq war…

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  • Bush and Blair: A Partnership of Deception

    British Prime Minister Tony Blair is back in Britain now facing an ever-widening scandal involving the distortion of evidence on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, but his recent trip to meet with President Bush underscores the partnership the two leaders have shared as both face growing evidence that they knowingly used faulty intelligence to…

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  • Bush in Africa: “A Cruel Hoax”?

    President Bush’s recent tour of Africa to tout his $15 billion pledge to fight the continent’s AIDS epidemic and promote trade was met with skepticism by critics who charged that his administration is attempting to mask regressive policies with staged public relations events. Bush’s trip to Africa appears to represent, more than anything else, an…

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  • Responses to Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address

    Mr. Speaker, Vice President Cheney, members of Congress, distinguished citizens and fellow citizens, every year, by law and by custom, we meet here to consider the state of the union. This year, we gather in this chamber deeply aware of decisive days that lie ahead. You and I serve our country in a time of…

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  • Blinken and Austin Trip: Are There Plans for War With China?

    “The business of China is business. The business of America is war. Will the U.S. make a business-like deal with China over Taiwan in Alaska? Or will the U.S. insist upon the Taiwan question being settled as a matter of war?”

  • Groups Oppose Rahm Emanuel for Ambassadorship, Citing Absence of “Ethics, Integrity and Diplomatic Skills”

    “He covered up the murder of Laquan McDonald, defunded public schools, and attacked benefits for poor people. It would be a slap in the face for many to see President Biden ignore the loud calls of opposition towards him.”

  • Rights Group Calls on Biden to Reverse Trump’s Treatment of Gitmo Prisoner Attempting Suicide

    “Our government knowingly tortured a man who was already suffering from schizophrenia from his teenage years, long before he was brought to Guantanamo. Eighteen years later, it serves no purpose to hold him alone in a largely-empty prison, where he is losing what little touch with reality he still has.”

  • Biden Should Halt Trump Privatization of Medicare Moves

    “In the last quarter of 2020, the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services launched an experiment, euphemistically called, ‘direct contracting,’ that could fully turn Medicare over to private health insurers. The Biden administration needs to halt this experiment before millions of older and disabled Americans lose their right to choose traditional Medicare.”

  • Is the White House Greenlighting Haiti’s Descent into Dictatorship?

    “As thousands of Haitians protest each Sunday against Jovenel Moïse, their embattled and increasingly authoritarian president, their protest signs and songs exhort the U.S. ambassador and the head of the United Nations mission in Haiti, who is also a career U.S. diplomat, ‘to stop supporting a dictatorship.'”

  • Biden’s Venezuela Policy: “Continuity Disguised as Change”

    “The Biden administration has learned nothing from the disaster of Trump’s Venezuelan policy. It has been a disaster for the Venezuelan people because the sanctions have caused them untold suffering. Ninety five percent of the deterioration in living standards in Venezuela occurred during Trump’s four years. That, in itself, puts the lie to Secretary of State…

  • Momentum Builds for Financial Transaction Tax in NY on Tuesday

    “For over 100 years, New York State law has provided for a stock transfer tax that essentially collects a tax on all stock transactions. For many years, after heavy lobbying by stock traders, tax money was actually collected — then immediately rebated to the firms that sold the stocks. In other words, it has been…

  • Twitter Blocking Labor Reporting on Amazon, a Business Partner

    “More Perfect Union, a new labor reporting organization founded by former Bernie Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir, made a viral video supporting the Amazon union workers. The video went viral and garnered over a million views before Amazon suddenly removed it for nearly a day.”

  • How Hedge Funds Are Wrecking the U.S.’s Green New Deal

    “Players on Wall Street have been torpedoing our chances of averting environmental catastrophe for years. A group of billionaire financiers has made sure the companies the government must partner with to fight climate change are focused on one thing only – making these men (they all seem to be men) even richer. Instead of leading…

  • Thirty Years of Bombing Iraq

    “Another evacuation was happening as Iraqi forces, many of them young conscripts, hungry, disheveled and unarmed, poured out of Kuwait along a major highway, later called ‘the Highway of Death.’ …”

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