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  • What We Should be Talking About: Romney’s Foreign Policy Advisers

    John Kennedy used to say, “Domestic policy can hurt us; foreign policy can kill us.”

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  • Dying to Live in Mexico

    In 2011, some 12,000 people were murdered in situations presumably related to the drug trafficking industry in Mexico. In 2010, the number was more than 15,000 killed. Between December 2006, when Felipe Calderón of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) took office and declared a “war on drug traffickers” and January 2012, depending on the…

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  • THE PAYROLL TAX CUT: Talk about a Ponzi Scheme!

    By Gwendolyn Mink Is President Obama trying to kill Social Security without explicitly saying so? He put Social Security “on the table” for consideration by his Deficit Commission — even though Social Security has not contributed to creating or sustaining the deficit/debt in the first place. He kept Social Security on the table when he…

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  • Stop the Cuts to the Social Safety Net!

    Medicaid cuts will injure communities of color disproportionately. 11 percent of Asian Americans, 14 percent of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, 27 percent of Latinos, and 27 percent of African Americans gain access to health care through Medicaid. Medicaid cuts will injure women disproportionately. Women account for 70 percent of Medicaid participants. Social Security is…

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  • Fires Near Los Alamos Nuclear Facility

    The forests surrounding Los Alamos National Laboratory have burned and are certain to burn again with some regularity, whether from lightning or human causes.  If too many trees are allowed to remain near laboratory facilities, those too will sooner or later burn, despite everyone’s best efforts. We are not as yet very concerned about radioactive…

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  • Case Against Cutting Social Security

    The case against cutting Social Security is strong. · Social Security benefits are modest by any measure and are already being cut – by raising the age of eligibility for full benefits and by deducting ever-rising Medicare premiums from benefit checks. · The cuts already in law add up to a19 percent reduction for people…

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  • Samantha Power, Libya, and Selective Memory of Genocide

    It might seem a bit surprising to see Samantha Power on the National Security Council and working with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who Power famously called a “monster” during the 2008 presidential campaign. But this was a heat-of-battle bit of name-calling, not a designation based on any difference in outlook. Both women are hardliners,…

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  • Low-Income Women Pushed to the Sidelines

    Low-income women have been invisible in budget deliberations thus far – yet they will be injured disproportionately by cuts to income programs like Social Security and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families [TANF], as well by cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and Food Stamps. Despite the prolonged recession, income assistance to low-income families has shriveled over the past decade, providing…

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  • Trumka Questioned on Wisconsin, Two-Party System, Journalism and Obama

    Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, stopped by the National Press Club this afternoon. Trumka underlined the need for economic equality in a 30 minute address before fielding questions submitted by the audience and selected by NPC President Mark Hamrick. Hamrick asked variations of three questions submitted by IPA. Here’s a transcript of those exchanges:…

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  • Herman: U.S., NATO Hypocrisy on Libya Precludes Their Action

    I’m surprised that Phyllis Bennis doesn’t recognize the problems of what we may call “clean hands” — and hypocrisy — in her call for Security Council action on Libya. Do the United States, UK, France and Germany have clean hands that would justify antiwar, anti-imperialist and humanitarians calling upon them to act against Libya? They…

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  • Bradley Manning Trial Ending: “Criminalizing Leaks to the Press”

    “During oral argument on July 15, Manning’s defense attorney, David Coombs, declared the only way this offense makes sense is if there is an ‘intent requirement.’ It has to be there to ‘avoid the very slippery slope of basically punishing people for getting information out to the press, to basically put, I guess, a hammer…

  • Economy: Picking Fed Chair; Minimum Wage Same for Four Years

    “I want my employees concentrating on our customers, not worrying how they will afford to pay rent or put food on their own table. We’ve paid our employees more than the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour from the day we opened in 2010, and have never regretted that decision. In fact, it’s helped our…

  • Administration Attacks on Free Press: Succeeding Where Nixon Failed?

    “Asking courts to treat journalists as criminals under the Espionage Act has only been asserted once before Holder started using it. President Richard M. Nixon used it against New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan, who obtained the Vietnam archives from Daniel Ellsberg. Following the Pentagon Papers case, Nixon convened a grand jury to indict Sheehan…

  • Summers for Fed Chair? “Great Gift to the Mega-Banks”

    “Barack Obama, I am told, is on the brink of making a terrible mistake by appointing Lawrence Summers as the new chairman of the Federal Reserve. That sounds improbable, since Summers is a toxic retread from the old boys’ network and a nettlesome egotist who offended just about everyone during his previous tours in government.…

  • Military Contractor Resigns in Impassioned Protest: “I Hereby Throw Down My Rifle”

    “I felt a lot of cognitive dissonance for the last two or three years. I knew what the truth was and what the consequences of our actions were. But I needed to make a living. … When [Edward Snowden] talked about how he had believed in the mission, joined after the Iraq war, and found…

  • Senate Bill’s Path to Citizenship a “Myth”

    “While the Obama administration continues to take the Spanish language airwaves and social media pushing reform and its benefits, the President and his mouthpieces, including Cecilia Munoz, continue to blatantly lie, saying that administrative relief is outside of executive purview. In the meantime, deportations and detentions, already at record highs, continue. “The only communities that…

  • 2,500 California Prisoners Remain on Hunger Strike Over Long-term Solitary Confinement — Without Even a Window

    “We are in our fourth day and our keepers have remained true to form, because on [Thursday, July 11] they came and kidnapped my [cellmate] and took him to hell row. Hell row is an even more oppressive number of cells used as further sensory deprivation and torture for those already in prolonged isolation. They,…

  • Church, Rights Groups Sue NSA Over Spying

    “The First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles has a proud history of working for justice and protecting people in jeopardy for expressing their political views. In the 1950s, we resisted the McCarthy hysteria and supported blacklisted Hollywood writers and actors, and we fought California’s ‘loyalty oaths’ all the way to the Supreme Court. And in…

  • How the Surveillance State is Becoming Permanent

    “Today, as Washington withdraws troops from the Greater Middle East, a sophisticated intelligence apparatus built for the pacification of Afghanistan and Iraq has come home to help create a twenty-first century surveillance state of unprecedented scope. But the past pattern that once checked the rise of a U.S. surveillance state seems to be breaking down.…

  • Zimmerman Acquittal: Criminalization of Black Youth; ALEC

    “There’s a widespread sense that this verdict is not justice and that it shows again that the courts are not capable of producing justice. There’s also great concern about the general criminalization of black youth — they are automatically labeled ‘suspicious.’ There’s certainly interest in remedies — if the Department of Justice can take action,…

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