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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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  • Kavanaugh: “Stakes are Astronomical”

    “’The only hope the country has is that Democrats will treat Kavanaugh like a hostile witness on the witness stand under cross-examination, throw him off script and break him down,’ said Francis Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois.

  • Kavanaugh “Scorns International Law and Loves Executive Power”

    “The Constitution gives Congress the power to make laws and the president the duty to execute them. Yet in 2014, Kavanaugh wrote that the president must follow the law ‘at least unless the President deems the law unconstitutional, in which event the President can decline to follow the statute until a final court order says…

  • Labor Day Today

    Elk is the senior labor reporter at Payday Report and frequently reports on labor actions on the ground. His pieces in the last year include “Wave of Teachers’ Wildcat Strikes Spreads to Oklahoma and Kentucky” for the Guardian. He also wrote “Immigration to Be Central Focus in Arizona’s Teachers Strike.” He has examined a number…

  • NAFTA: What Should a Deal Do?

    “Any new deal must end NAFTA’s job outsourcing incentives and ISDS [Investor-state dispute settlement] tribunals where corporations can attack our laws and add strong environmental and labor terms with swift and certain enforcement to raise wages.” 

  • Top Student Loan Official Resigns

    AP reports: The government’s top official overseeing the $1.5 trillion student loan market resigned in protest on Monday, citing what he says is the White House’s open hostility toward protecting the nation’s millions of student loan borrowers.

  • McCain “Obit Omit”: In His Own Words

    Today on the program “Democracy Now,” Institute for Public Accuracy Executive Director Norman Solomon criticized coverage of the death of John McCain as taking part in an “obit omit.”

  • Democratic Convention Delegate Fasting for Superdelegate Reform

    The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is meeting in Chicago this week, 50 years after the gavel fell at the 1968 Democratic convention in that city. On the DNC’s agenda is a decisive vote on what to do about the party’s “superdelegates.”

  • Nationwide Strike to “End Prison Slavery”

    “For 19 days, inmates across at least 17 states plan to refuse to work, with some also refusing to eat, to draw attention to poor conditions and what advocates have called exploitative labor practices in the prison system.”

  • Amazon and Pentagon

    “In a larger sense, the JEDI contract represents the growing clout that technology companies are wielding in Washington — and how they are increasingly wiring the swamp for their own benefit. Amazon has spent $67 million on lobbying since 2000 — including more this year than Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo combined.”

  • Trump Overrides Minimal Protections in Yemen War

    With little public attention, President Donald Trump used his August 13 signing statement for the $716 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to override restrictions aimed at minimizing civilian deaths in the U.S.-Saudi war on Yemen. The move came just days after the Saudi-led coalition struck a school bus in Yemen’s northern Saada province with…

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