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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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  • “Hillary Clinton Killed Berta!”

    “Before her murder on March 3, Berta Cáceres, a Honduran indigenous rights and environmental activist, named Hillary Clinton, holding her responsible for legitimating the 2009 coup. ‘We warned that this would be very dangerous,’ she said, referring to Clinton’s effort to impose elections that would consolidate the power of murderers.”

  • More Panama Papers and $12 Trillion Offshore

    “For the first time we have a reliable estimate of how much money thieving dictators and others have looted from 150 mostly poor nations and hidden offshore: $12.1 trillion. That huge figure equals a nickel on each dollar of global wealth and yet it excludes the wealthiest regions of the planet: America, Canada, Europe, Japan,…

  • Mother’s Day: Voices of Mothers of Incarcerated Youth

    “Many mothers will be sharing a lovely breakfast in bed this Sunday. But in a nation that incarcerated more children than any other country, over 50,000 mothers will be feeling the pain of their child being locked away, behind bars. Most for minor offenses. Some of these mothers are part of an emerging movement of…

  • “Detroit Teachers Strike: Local Education Experts”

    “The same unchecked emergency management through which Gov. Rick Snyder poisoned the drinking water of Flint’s children has run like a wrecking ball through Detroit’s educational landscape, closing down 200 schools, chasing over 100,000 students from the district, and unconscionably widening the gap between the educational experiences of Detroit’s children and those in most other…

  • Berrigan’s Death — And Work He Inspired

    “In the years to come, well into his 80s, Daniel Berrigan was arrested time and again, for greater or lesser offenses: in 1980, for taking part in the Plowshares raid on a General Electric missile plant in King of Prussia, Pa., where the Berrigan brothers and others rained hammer blows on missile warheads; in 2006,…

  • Socialism and May Day

    “[Linebaugh] notes May Day’s dual origins, one dealing with spring and nature (green) — and one dealing with global worker solidarity (red). He highlights that it originated in the U.S., but is celebrated virtually everywhere in the world except in the U.S. — the U.S. government has instead delegated May 1 “Law Day.”

  • Ukraine’s Rightists Return to Odessa — Monitors Now Arriving as Well

    “Now, as we approach the second anniversary of these tragic deaths, and the commemoration of Soviet victory in the Second World War on May 9, some of the same groups involved in the first tragedy are quite openly preparing for a second round.”

  • Could Voters Opposed to Both Clinton and Trump Team up Using VotePact?

    “But if voters who know and trust each other — relatives, coworkers, neighbors, debating partners — team up and vote for their preferred candidates (be they Green, Libertarian, Socialist, Independent, etc.), then they can begin to break out of the prison of the two party system. And if they do this in pairs (forming a…

  • Obama in U.K.: Ensuring Security?

    “If the U.K. government, the United States, and the European Union wish to truly help the Syrian people, they should immediately lift the sanctions which are causing great hardship to the Syrian people and try every nonviolent means to end the war.”

  • Tubman, Jackson and the Honor of Money

    “Tubman is deserving of great respect, veneration even. What she accomplished is unbelievable. She was a soldier and a revolutionary, a liberator. I no longer feel the need for acceptance from the larger society. Our heroes are ours and we can claim them without expectation or need that the U.S. government will give approval.”

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