NewsTrust - Politics - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Independent)

Justice search warrant relied on "probable cause" of criminal conduct by Fox News journalist | Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

Thu, 23 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

rcfp.org - By Rob Tricchinelli - May. 23 () - anonymous Justice Department spokesperson: Michael Clemente, Fox News’ executive vice president of news, in a statement Monday. “In fact, it is downright chilling. We will unequivocally defend his right to operate as a member of what up until now has always been a free press.”

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Editor of The Progressive Calls For Eric Holder to Resign Over Spying on Press, Occupy Protesters

Wed, 22 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - May. 22 (Opinion) - As the Obama administration faces criticism for the Justice Department's spying on journalists and the IRS targeting of right-wing organizations, newly released documents show how the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and local police forces partnered with corporations to spy on Occupy protesters in 2011 and 2012. Detailed in thousands of pages of records from counter terrorism and law enforcement agencies, the spying monitored the activists' online usage and led to infiltration of their meetings. One document shows an undercover officer was dispatched in Arizona to infiltrate activists organizing protests around the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the secretive group that helps corporate America propose and draft legislation for states across the country. We're joined by Matt Rothschild of The Progressive, who tackles the surveillance in his latest article, "Spying on Occupy Activists: How Cops and Homeland Security Help Wall Street."

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You Need Phosphorous to Live—and We're Running Out

Wed, 22 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Tom Philpott - May. 22 (Comment) - Western Sahara , a sparsely populated slice of desert on Africa's northwestern coast, doesn't get much ink as a potential crisis point in the global food system. You've probably never heard of the long-standing independence movement in the Morocco-controlled territory—or that the area harbors vast stores of an element critical to contemporary agriculture. Morocco, it is thought, holds up to 85 percent (PDF) of the globe's known phosphate rock reserve—and a lot of it lies in Western Sahara. Morocco's royal family thus controls what Jeremy Grantham, cofounder of the prominent Boston-based global investment firm Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo & Co., called the " most important quasi-monopoly in economic history ." Who cares about phosphorus? For starters, every living thing on Earth—including humans—since all the crops we eat depend on it to produce healthy cells. Until the mid-20th century, farmers maintained phosphorus levels in soil by composting plant waste or ...

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Society of Professional Journalists: SPJ Code of Ethics

Wed, 22 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

spj.org - By SPJ ethics committee - May. 22 (Statement) - Seek Truth and Report It - Minimize Harm - Act Independently - Be Accountable -

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Rise Up or Die

Tue, 21 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

billmoyers.com - By Chris Hedges - May. 21 (Opinion) - What has taken place in these sacrifice zones — in postindustrial cities such as Camden, N.J., and Detroit, in coalfields of southern West Virginia where mining companies blast off mountaintops, in Indian reservations where the demented project of limitless economic expansion and exploitation worked some of its earliest evil, and in produce fields where laborers often endure conditions that replicate slavery — is now happening to much of the rest of the country. These sacrifice zones succumbed first. You and I are next. Corporations write our legislation. They control our systems of information. They manage the political theater of electoral politics and impose our educational curriculum. They have turned the judiciary into one of their wholly owned subsidiaries. They have decimated labor unions and other independent mass organizations, as well as having bought off the Democratic Party, which once defended the rights of workers. With the evisceration of piecemeal and incremental reform — the primary role of liberal, democratic institutions — we are left defenseless against corporate power.

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GOPer Who Got Millions in Farm Subsidies Thinks the Poor Should Starve Rather Than Get Food Stamps

Tue, 21 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Justin Doolittle - May. 21 (Opinion) - He fulminates about people who are allegedly "unwilling to work" sucking off the government teat with impunity. This is a patently dishonest representation of the SNAP program. Most people who receive food stamps cannot be dismissed as losers who are "unwilling to work." Nearly half (47%) of all food stamp recipients are children. Another 8% are 60 years of age or older. The "working poor" - people who live in a household with income from work - represent another 41%. Between children, the elderly, the working poor, and people who want a job but cannot find one - someone should tell Fincher that there are still more than 3 unemployed job seekers for every 1 opening

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60 Minutes and the Billionaire Agenda: Part 1, “Counterinsurgency Cops”

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

nationofchange.org - By Richard Eskow - May. 20 (Opinion) - This Sunday’s episode of 60 Minutes was a brilliant case study in the media’s ability to manipulate the public mind. The entire hour is worth studying, if only as one of the most illuminating and sophisticated examples of media manipulation in recent memory.

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Corporations Are Stealing Billions in Tax Breaks, While the Confused, Screwed Citizenry Turn On Each Other

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Robert Reich - May. 20 (Opinion) - As global capital becomes ever more powerful, giant corporations are holding governments and citizens up for ransom — eliciting subsidies and tax breaks from countries concerned about their nation’s “competitiveness” — while sheltering their profits in the lowest-tax jurisdictions they can find. Major advanced countries — and their citizens — need a comprehensive tax agreement that won’t allow global corporations to get away with this.

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Being a Democracy Hating, Corporate Power-Defending Newspaper Owner Runs Deep in the Koch Family

Sun, 19 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Yasha Levine - May. 19 (Opinion) - There’s a rumor going around that the Koch brothers are interested in buying up the Tribune Company, which includes the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun… And there’s a lot of speculation about what would happen if they did. Some worry, and rightly so, that the Kochs—whose combined wealth makes them the biggest billionaires on the planet—would integrate the Tribune Co. with the rest of their free-market thinktank-industrial complex, and turn its newly acquired news media property into a gigantic business propaganda machine. Half the reporters at the Los Angeles Times even took a vote saying they’d quit if the Kochs bought the paper

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The IRS and the Real Scandal

Sat, 18 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

nationofchange.org - By Robert Reich - May. 18 (Opinion) - Despite a growing number of billionaires and multi-millionaires using every tax dodge imaginable – laundering their money through phantom corporations and tax havens — the IRS’s budget has been cut by 17 percent since 2002, adjusted for inflation. To manage the $594.5 million in additional cuts required by the sequester, the agency will furlough each of its more than 89,000 employees for at least five days this year.

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The Lost ‘Trifecta of Scandals’

Thu, 16 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Consortium News - By Beverly Bandler - May. 16 (Opinion) - the mainstream news media is abuzz about “the trifecta of scandals” besetting the Obama administration, a narrative that fails to assess the actual significance of the three “scandals.” They don’t measure up to the many important scandals that the media neglects

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Dick Cheney, Benghazi, and White House Lies

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By David Corn - May. 15 (Opinion) - Dick Cheney has never been short on chutzpah. Jumping aboard the GOP scandal-mongering machine, the former vice president appeared on Fox News (where else?) and declared to Sean Hannity (who else?) that President Barack Obama and his aides "lied" about the attack in Benghazi last September that left four Americans dead. "I think it's one of the worst incidents frankly that I can recall in my career," Cheney huffed—as if 9/11 had never happened. The former veep went the full Monty and echoed (discredited) right-wing charges that the Obama administration refused to deploy military forces to help Ambassador Chris Stevens and other Americans when they were assaulted in Benghazi.

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IRS Fallout: The Real Scandal is Secret Money Influencing US Elections

Tue, 14 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By Ari Berman - May. 14 (Opinion) - The IRS is under siege for investigating conservative political groups applying for tax-exempt status. But the real problem wasn’t that the IRS was too aggressive. It was that the agency focused on the wrong people - “none of those groups were big spendes on political advertising; most were local Tea Party organizations with shoestring budgets,” writes The New York Times—and wasn’t aggressive enough.

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Nuclear Weapons Will be Used -- If We Don't Do Something to Get Rid of the Damn Things

Mon, 13 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Tom Engelhardt - May. 13 (Opinion) - Has a weapon ever been invented, no matter how terrible, and not used? The crossbow, the dreadnought, poison gas, the tank, the landmine, chemical weapons, napalm, the B-29, the drone: all had their day and for some that day remains now. Even the most terrible weapon of all, the atomic bomb, that city-buster, that potential civilization-destroyer, was used as soon as it was available. Depending on your historical interpretation, it was either responsible for ending World War II in the Pacific or rushed into action before that war could end. In either case, it launched the atomic age.

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Austerity Kills: How Harsh Budget Cuts Increase Suicide, Infant Mortality, HIV Infections

Mon, 13 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Alex Kane - May. 13 (Review) - Austerity doesn’t just hurt economies--it contributes to rising suicide rates, infant mortality and H.I.V. infections. That’s the message of a New York Times Op-Ed written by David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, authors of a new book titled The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills.

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Anna Jarvis, the Radical Behind Mother's Day

Sun, 12 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Steve Brodner - May. 12 (Comment) - This cartoon was originally published in the Los Angeles Times.

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The Most Controversial Chart in History, Explained

Thu, 09 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Chris Mooney - May. 09 (Opinion) - Back in 1998, a little known climate scientist named Michael Mann and two colleagues published a paper that sought to reconstruct the planet's past temperatures going back half a millennium before the era of thermometers—thereby showing just how out of whack recent warming has been. The finding: Recent northern hemisphere temperatures had been "warmer than any other year since (at least) AD 1400." The graph depicting this result looked rather like a hockey stick: After a long period of relatively minor temperature variations (the "shaft"), it showed a sharp mercury upswing during the last century or so ("the blade"). The report moved quickly through climate science circles. Mann and a colleague soon lengthened the shaft of the hockey stick back to the year 1000 AD—and then, in 2001, the UN's ...

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Colbert Mocks Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory That Government Is Buying Up Bullets (VIDEO)

Tue, 07 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Stephen Colbert - May. 07 (Comedy News) - Have you heard that the government is buying up billions of bullets in bulk so that when the feds inevitably go to war with the American citizenry, we'll be totally unarmed?

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The Cancer-Stage Of Capitalism

Mon, 06 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

talkradionews.com - By Thom Hartmann - May. 06 (Opinion) - Unregulated capitalism is cancer on our nation. Like tumors, greed has metastasized, strangling once-healthy parts of our economy, and our social safety net. A new piece on Alternet lists several ways this cancer capitalism has taken hold. For starters, the hoarding of wealth by the banksters and the 1% has diverted resources away from nutritional aid programs. Twenty people in our country collected a whopping $73 billion in investment income – all taxed at a lower rate than working Americans. Compare that with the fact that President Obama couldn’t even get $1 billion to improve childhood nutrition in our schools.

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The Hollowing Out of Government

Sun, 05 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

nationofchange.org - By Robert Reich - May. 05 (Opinion) - OSHA and its state partners have a total of 2,200 inspectors charged with ensuring the safety of over more than 8 million workplaces employing 130 million workers. That comes to about one inspector for every 59,000 American workers. There’s no way it can do its job with so few resources, but OSHA has been systematically hollowed out for the years under Republican administrations and congresses that have despised the agency since its inception. In effect, much of our nation’s worker safety laws and rules have been quietly repealed because there aren’t enough inspectors to enforce them.

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5 Ways That Raw, Unregulated Capitalism Is Acting Like a Cancer on American Society

Sun, 05 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Paul Buchheit - May. 05 (Opinion) - The uncontrolled growth of investment wealth is diverting resources away from vital programs, effectively smothering them.

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NRA Leader Warns of Rising Cost of Senators

Sun, 05 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Andy Borowitz - May. 05 (Comedy News) - "Over the past few years, we've seen the price of purchasing a Senator surge astronomically," he told the N.R.A. faithful. "Unless something is done to make Senators more affordable, the ability of a tiny lobbying group to overrule the wishes of ninety per cent of the American people will be in jeopardy." The days are over, he said, when "you could buy a Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) for little more than pocket change."

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Let's Do It, Let's Repeal The Sequester!

Sat, 04 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Jason Linkins - May. 04 (Opinion) - the happiest thing going on in the political discourse is how the whole fiscal discussion seems to be changing from hack-dominance to, potentially, something more sensible. The catalyzing event seems to have been the work of America's greatest graduate student, Thomas Herndon, who was afforded the opportunity to analyze the data set of economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff -- whose very famous study, which contends that there are debt/growth tipping points, had become the urtext of the global austerity movement -- and very quickly determined that it was riddled with errata and LOLs.

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We Decide How to Share Gains

Thu, 02 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Stan Sorscher - May. 02 (Opinion) - Multinational employers steadily move work offshore, and lay off thousands of workers. We've cut funding for education; student debt is over a trillion dollars. We've terminated pensions, weakened unions, made work more contingent and more precarious. Wal-Mart cuts hours to avoid paying for health care. Some elected officials demonize teachers, and public employees, and turn public opinion against any regular worker daring to hope for a higher standard of living. Globally, workplace insecurity and inequality are at historic levels.

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George W Bush's $250 Million Can of Whitewash

Thu, 02 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

creators.com - By Jim Hightower - May. 02 (Opinion) - What a piece of work it is: a $250 million, 226,000-square-foot edifice on 23 acres in Dallas. His brick-and-limestone structure is certainly imposing, but once inside, you quickly see that it's a $250 million can of whitewash.

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