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Scott Walker and the GOP Reveal Depth of Their Voter-Exclusion Plan

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - Sep. 17 (News Report) - A new Department of Transportation memo reveals Wisconsin Republicans intend to make the newly imposed voter ID process as onerous as possible for people seeking IDs.

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America In Decline

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

In These Times - By Noam Chomsky - Aug. 12 (Opinion) - Corporate power’s ascendancy over politics and society—by now mostly financial—has reached the point that both political organizations, which at this stage barely resemble traditional parties, are far to the right of the population on the major issues under debate. “Uniquely among legislatures in the developed world, U.S. congressional parties now post prices for key slots in the lawmaking process.” The legislators who contribute the most funds to the party get the posts.

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The Finland Phenomenon -

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

In These Times - By David Sirota - Jul. 08 (Review) - though we already “test students in the United States more than any other nation,” our students “perform well below those of other industrialized countries in math and science.” Yet the Obama administration, backed by corporate foundations, is nonetheless intensifying testing at all levels, as if doing the same thing and expecting different results is innovative “reform” rather than what it’s always been: insanity. In light of this craziness, it’s no wonder we’re being out-educated by countries going in the opposite policy direction.

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As Labor Goes, So Goes the Nation

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0800

In These Times - By Melvyn Dubofsky - Mar. 02 (News Analysis) - What we know of as modern American liberalism, or what is more fashionably characterized today as progressive politics, is largely the result of the rise of organized labor. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, a still-divided labor movement represented the largest single electoral bloc in the nation, and it would remain that through the 1960s. The votes of union members and the lobbying of their representatives in Washington and in state capitals expanded the ranks of workers covered by minimum wage and hours laws, and raised that wage repeatedly. They helped bring millions of previously excluded employees into the Social Security system and improved the system’s benefits for retirees, their survivors and the disabled. However much many white union members and their leaders remained racist and misogynist, labor’s political influence proved decisive during the 1960s in the enactment of civil rights legislation.

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UAW President: Critics of Korea Treaty Don’t Represent Workers

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

In These Times - By Mike Elk - Dec. 07 (News Report) - UAW President Bob King sparked outraged among progressives and the labor movement by endorsing the Korea Free Trade Agreement. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the treaty will cost 159,000 American jobs over the next five years.

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Cracks in the American Way, as Labor Stands Strong in Europe

Sat, 02 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

In These Times - Oct. 02 - by Michelle ChenThe idea of American Exceptionalism has loomed large over the last half century, creating an air of national impunity while spreading a neoliberal capitalist model to every corner of the globe. Now the Great Recession has revealed American workers to be exceptional in the worst possible way: facing exceptional pain and exceptional weakness in the labor movement.read more

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Once Upon a Time, in America…

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

In These Times - By Michael Atkinson - Sep. 01 (Opinion) - The right has one fundamental advantage over its opponents: storytelling.

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Foreclosure Signs & Unemployment Lines Reveal Roots of Housing Crisis

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

In These Times - By Michelle Chen - Apr. 21 (News) - A typical day for a low-income American family begins and ends in uncertainty: getting up in the morning for a job that might be gone tomorrow, and returning at night to a home that might belong to the bank next week. With foreclosures and job losses engulfing millions of households, the death spiral of negative equity and negative income poses a daunting question for Washington: Can federal housing policy be reoriented away from the intoxicating myth of the “ownership society”—which pumped up the bubble leading up to the housing crash—and toward a vision for economically sustainable communities?

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Stop Feeding the Vultures

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.com - By Greg Palast - Mar. 30 (Investigative Report) - Hermann is a vulture, not the carrion-eating type, but the kind that prey on the financially wounded. “Vulture” is a hedge fund industry term for the financiers who buy up the right to collect old loans of the world’s poorest nations, and then use every trick in the book — from lawsuits to bribery to hiring Henry Kissinger’s lobby firm — to muscle destitute countries into turning over their meager foreign aid funds.

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Building on Health Reform Momentum, NYC Workers Push for Paid Sick Days

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

In These Times - By Michelle Chen - Mar. 27 (News Report) - Now that newly passed healthcare reform legislation in Washington promises to extend coverage to tens of millions nationwide, activists in New York City want to make sure sick workers aren't prevented by their bosses from taking care of their health.

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Secrets of the Tea Party: The Troubling History of Tea Party Leader Dick Armey

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

In These Times - By Beau Hodai - Mar. 26 (Investigative Report) - As chairman of FreedomWorks, the group credited with mobilizing the Tea Party movement, Dick Armey is the movement's de facto leader. Yet Armey's years spent lobbying for a group recognized by the State Department as being a terrorist organization--should give Tea Partiers pause.

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The Corporate Takeover of U.S. Democracy

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0800

In These Times - By Noam Chomsky - Mar. 07 (Opinion) - Jan. 21, 2010, will go down as a dark day in the history of U.S. democracy, and its decline. On that day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government may not ban corporations from political spending on elections—a decision that profoundly affects government policy, both domestic and international. The decision heralds even further corporate....

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Will ‘Astroturf’ Groups Block Net Neutrality Reform?

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

In These Times - By Megan Tady - Sep. 03 (Investigative Report) - Jim Hightower describes astroturf organizations as “the corporate version of grassroots…well-orchestrated PR efforts that put real folks out front, but are instigated, organized and funded by corporate interests and right-wing front groups.”

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Shilling on the Corporate Dollar

Sun, 31 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

In These Times - By Art Levine - May. 31 (Opinion) - Testifying before the Senate labor and health committee hearing in March, economist Anne Layne-Farrar of the corporate consulting firm LECG warned about the horrendous impact of the Employee Free Choice Act. Its potential to increase union membership from between five and 10 percent, she said, “would result in an increase in the unemployment of around one and a half to three percentage points. These are sizable effects for the U.S. economy.” Earnest and well-prepared, Layne-Farrar cited her study that concluded that 600,000 jobs would be lost in the first year after the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) became law. Fox “Fair and Balanced” News, naturally, in its TV report neglected to mention that her “research” was funded by the corporate-friendly, anti-union “Alliance to Save Main Street Jobs.”

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An End to the War on Weed?

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

In These Times - By Nathan Comp - Apr. 12 (Opinion) - As a medley of border violence, recessionary pressure, international criticism and popular acceptance steadily undermines America’s decades-long effort to eliminate drugs and drug use, the U.S. movement to legalize marijuana is gaining unprecedented momentum. Once derided and dismissed by lawmakers, law enforcers and the law-abiding alike, marijuana reform is sweeping the nation, although the federal government appears committed—at least for the time being—to largely maintaining the status quo.

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Key Dems Back Public Option

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

In These Times - By Editor - Apr. 01 (News Report) - If AHSA became law, it would create a federal health insurance system administered by the states. The insurance program would give patients an unlimited choice of doctors and hospitals because their insurance would cover them everywhere.

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Moving Forward Without Dogma

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

In These Times - By Ken Brociner - Jan. 25 (Opinion) - Despite the severity of the current economic crisis, the morale of the progressive movement remains sky high. Liberals, progressives and leftists worked their tails off to help elect Barack Obama—and this time we won! Hundreds of thousands of progressive activists worked directly with the Obama campaign, while similarly large numbers worked in parallel projects such as the all-out mobilization organized by the labor movement and MoveOn’s impressive grassroots campaign—to name two of the largest independent efforts. Less noticed has been the fact that over the last year most progressives approached politics in a principled and pragmatic manner. Third party-ism never threatened the progressive movement’s determination to rally behind Obama. Neither did another chronic problem on the American left—the temptation of political purists to sit on the sidelines as a presidential election hung in the balance because the Democratic nominee wasn’t progressive enough.

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How Obama Can Fix The Other Disaster in Bush's Legacy: The War on Workers

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

In These Times - By Art Levine - Jan. 05 (Comment) - On virtually every front, the Labor Department that was supposed to protect workers’ lives and paychecks did practically nothing to stop 6,000 workers from being killed on the job each year and prevent an estimated $19 billion from being stolen through corporate wage theft of overtime and minimum wage payments.

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We Arm the World

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

In These Times - By Frida Berrigan - Jan. 04 (Special Report) - In 2007, U.S. foreign military sales agreements totaled more than $32 billion — nearly triple the amount during President Bush’s first full year in office. The Pentagon routinely justifies weapons sales as “promoting regional stability,” but many of these arms end up in the world’s war zones. In 2006 and 2007, the five biggest recipients of U.S. weapons were Pakistan ($3.5 billion), Iraq ($2.2 billion), Israel ($2.2 billion), Afghanistan ($1.9 billion) and Colombia ($580 million) — all countries where conflict rages.

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It’s not easy becoming green

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

In These Times - By David Roberts - Dec. 27 (News Analysis) - Meeting the challenge of global climate change will involve an enormous amount of work — solarizing and retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency, manufacturing electric cars and parts for wind turbines, building public transit systems and smarter electrical grids, and much more. The next few decades will see the creation of millions of blue-collar jobs that serve to meliorate social and environmental ills — known as “green-collar” jobs. Jones argues that these jobs should be directed to those who have been most harmed by the “pollution-based economy” — such as ex-felons, recovering addicts, at-risk youth, the working poor, those who have seen their jobs outsourced, and people of color (who have disproportionately suffered from high rates of asthma, cancer and other ailments tied to environmental toxins).

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What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

In These Times - By Bill Ayers - Nov. 07 (Opinion) - Obama has continually been asked to defend something that ought to be at democracy’s heart: the importance of talking to as many people as possible in this complicated and wildly diverse society, of listening with the possibility of learning something new, and of speaking with the possibility of persuading or influencing others. The McCain-Palin attacks not only involved guilt by association, they also assumed that one must apply a political litmus test to begin a conversation.

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Americans Unwilling to Face Reality

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

In These Times - By John R. MacArthur - Oct. 19 (Opinion) - It’s not as though no one saw it coming. Here’s the economist Michael Hudson, writing in the May 2006 issue of Harper’s magazine: “The reality is that, although home ownership may be a wise choice for many people, this particular real-estate bubble has been carefully engineered to lure home buyers into circumstances detrimental to their own best interests… . The bubble will burst, and when it does, the people who thought they would be living the easy life of a landlord will soon find that what they really signed up for was the hard servitude of debt serfdom.” Other commentators, including Warren Buffet, said similar things about the derivatives market. It was prescient stuff for anybody who cared to listen, but hardly anybody did. Americans, perhaps even more than other people, have difficulty embracing the concept of “reality.” In part, this is religious. America remains the land of infinite redemption where any crook can suddenly go straight. In part, it stems from our turbo-charged ethos of capitalism. America has always been the land of get-rich-quick and damn the consequences. We are a nation of fantasists, and things have to get really bad before a politician has the right to trade in hard truth.

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The $700 Billion Questions

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

In These Times - By David Sirota - Sep. 22 (Opinion) - Whether the bill passes or not, the drafting of it--even the mere thinking of it--is the single most clear sign that all of the major tenets of American democracy are on the auction block these days: from constitutional checks and balances, to legislative and judicial oversight to electoral accountability itself.

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Why Soldiers Rape

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

In These Times - By Helen Benedict - Aug. 13 (Special Report) - the attention always focuses on the women: where they were when assaulted, their relations with the assailant, the effects on their mental health and careers, whether they are being adequately helped, and so on. That discussion, as valuable as it is, misses a fundamental point. To understand military sexual assault, let alone know how to stop it, we must focus on the perpetrators. We need to ask: Why do soldiers rape?

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Don't Tase Me, GOP

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

In These Times - By Jacob Wheeler - Aug. 05 (News Report) - The St. Paul Police Department is arming itself with Tasers. Local activists and media say that the department ordered 230 stun guns in late February -- adding to the 140 already in its possession -- in preparation for protests at the upcoming Republican National Convention (RNC), which St. Paul will host from Sept. 1 to Sept. 4. Police spokesman Tom Walsh denies any connection between the arrival of the Tasers and the upcoming RNC.

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