Politics

Debt Resistance Grows, Attorney General’s Call For Loan Forgiveness

April 11, 2015 Shahien Nasiripour, www.huffingtonpost.com Resist! Capitalism, Debt, Law, Politics

Top state prosecutors from Oregon to Massachusetts, who contend they have evidence that thousands of Americans were fraudulently urged to take out federal student loans to attend dodgy for-profit schools, urged the U.S. Department of Education on Thursday to forgive the borrowers’ debts. The group of nine Democratic attorneys general demanded that Education Secretary Arne Duncan use his existing authority to cancel debts for students who attended schools currently or formerly owned by Corinthian Colleges Inc., a once-multibillion-dollar company that owned more than 100 for-profit schools with names such as Everest, Heald and Wyotech. The Thursday letter follows similar requests made by Senate Democrats and appeals from consumer groups, such as the National Consumer Law Center, that the Education Department grant debt relief to those who attended Corinthian’s schools.

The Truth About The Detroit Water Shutoffs

April 10, 2015 Matthew Kovac, www.progressmichigan.org Educate! Detroit, Human Rights, Politics, Water

Ever since the City of Detroit started shutting off water to low-income residents last summer in what United Nations investigators denounced as a human rights violation, city officials have maintained that they are simply responding to Detroiters’ failure to pay their bills. Now it’s looking like that’s not the case. The independent investigative outlet Motor City Muckraker recently revealed that the city had shut off water to residents with up-to-date bills, including a Detroit Free Presseditor. When called on it, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) toldMuckraker that a clerical error resulted in 11 such shutoffs. But that story didn’t hold up, either.

Letters To A President: Return To Sender

April 10, 2015 Ralph Nader, www.blog.nader.org Resist! Democracy, Freedom of Expression, Media, Politics

Citizen correspondence is important both for you as President and them. For the citizens, it is an opportunity to circumvent the barriers presented by the media and governmental institutions to directly access the White House. For presidents, letters help, as you have said, escape “the bubble” (e.g. the ten letters from citizens you read each evening). Letters from citizens also convey ideas and observations that alert you to conditions, issues, and urgencies at hand and occasionally provide you with an opportunity to publically discuss the point raised by an ordinary citizen who penned such a letter. Just the other day, when you were visiting Ohio, a chance question to you from a person in the audience elicited your view that mandatory voting would “be transformative” and exists in a number of other democracies, such as Australia.

Is Barcelona On The Verge Of A Feminist Revolution?

April 9, 2015 Kate Shea Baird, www.roarmag.org Create! Barcelona, Feminism, Politics, Revolution

Something special is happening in Barcelona. At the local elections in May, the citizen platform Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common) could snatch control of the city council. If it succeeds, the consequences for the women of Barcelona and, perhaps, cities all over the world, could be radical. A victory for Barcelona en Comú would catapult anti-eviction activist Ada Colauinto the mayoralty. The election of the city’s first female mayor would be a landmark event in itself, but in the case of Colau it would have special significance. After her rapid rise to national prominence in 2013, Colau turned down offers from traditional parties to stand on their tickets.

Saving The Maldives’ Drowning Democracy

April 6, 2015 Matt Mulberry, www.thedailybeast.com Resist! Democracy, Maldives, Politics

Earlier this month, on Friday the 13th, a former president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, was sentenced to 13 years in prison after a charade of a trial that produced a guilty verdict on “terrorism” charges. The verdict was highly implausible. Nasheed had won an international award in 2012 for his leadership in nonviolent resistance. It prompted Nasheed’s Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) to announce a campaign of mass civil resistance to overturn the judgment and also reform the corrupt judiciary. International watchdogs and governments otherwise friendly to the Maldives chimed in with severe doubts about the trial and the verdict.

One Cat, McCutcheon, Reverend Billy And Ted Cruz

April 4, 2015 Occupy, www.occupy.com Educate! Campaign Finance, Elections, Politics

In this week’s episode of Act Out! Eleanor asks you to focus on just one cat. Get ready to celebrate a big one year anniversary with tweets, trinkets and various online tools to #GetMoneyOut. And we get a hefty dose of the good, bad and the ugly starting off with an interview with Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir director, Savitri D. Moving on to the bad and the ugly, Eleanor dissects why Ted Cruz is the American (or Canadian) psycho and what we can do to stop him. We end on a high note with some inspiring words and music on the #QuoteOfTheDay segment!

Building A Fusion Politics-Based Movement

April 4, 2015 Harry Targ, www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com Organize! Indiana, Law, LGBTQ, Politics

All of a sudden Indiana has been thrust onto the national stage. Governor Mike Pence in a closed meeting signed the newly minted Restoration of Freedom of Religion Act (RFRA) passed by the state legislature. Despite efforts of Pence and supporters to deny that the new law allows state government support for discrimination, especially based on sexual orientation, the supporters of the law, its language, and the track record of the legislators and the governor all point to the real motivation of the law: to authorize the right to limit public accommodations to groups of Hoosiers. The outrage from well-meaning people in the state and across the country is justified and should be encouraged. The exuberance of the protests--rallies, petitions, economic boycotts--is a cause for hope for those who are concerned about deepening economic, political, racist, sexist, and environmental threats to the country and its states.

Military Strategy? Who Needs It?

April 1, 2015 William D. Hartung, www.tomdispatch.com Resist! Politics, Wars and Militarism

Using the crises in Ukraine, Iraq, and Syria as arguments for pumping up Pentagon spending is a political tactic of the moment, not a strategic necessity. The only real reason to bust the present already expansive budget caps -- besides pleasing the arms industry and its allies in Congress -- is to attempt to entrench the sort of ad hoc military-first global policy being promoted as the American way for decades to come. Every crisis, every development not pleasing to Washington anywhere on Earth is, according to this school of thought, what the Pentagon must be “capable” of dealing with. What’s needed, but completely dismissed in Washington, is of course a radical rethinking of American priorities.

Seven Lessons From Seattle City Council Vote Against Fast Track

April 1, 2015 Stan Sorscher, www.huffingtonpost.com Resist! Democracy, Politics, Seattle, TPP

Seattle City Council members started this debate as informed citizens, but not trade experts. They quickly came up the learning curve over several weeks. They heard plenty from corporate advocates, who abound in the Seattle area. They also heard (start at the 6:30 mark in the video) from workers, environmentalists, social justice groups, and the faith community. While they were studying this issue, WikiLeaks released a new draft of the notorious investment chapter of the TPP. Council members looked at dozens of letters written by members of Congress to our negotiators. A letter from Jay Inslee, Governor of the most trade dependent state in the union, opposing a key provision in TPP was so persuasive it was cited twice in the resolution.

Councilman Arrested At Occupy Donates Settlement Cash

March 31, 2015 Rose Barkan, www.observer.com Resist! New York City (NYC), Occupy Wall Street, Politics

Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez, a Manhattan Democrat who sued the city after he was roughed up by cops at the Occupy Wall Street protests, said today he’ll donate his $30,000 settlement to the Center for Constitutional Rights. Mr. Rodriguez said he was beaten, knocked to the ground and arrested at Zuccotti Park, the locus of the anti-Wall Street movement, on November 15, 2011, the night NYPD officers forcefully cleared the park. Police charged him with resisting arrest and disorderly conduct. The charges were later dismissed. “No protester, whether an elected official or not, should be treated the way I was treated during my arrest in the Occupy Wall Street movement,” Mr. Rodriguez said at a City Hall Press conference.

The Plan Behind The TPP To Destroy National Sovereignty

March 18, 2015 Curtis Ellis, www.huffingtonpost.com Educate! Democracy, Government, Nationalism, Politics, TPP

The TransPacific Partnership is labelled as a "free trade" magic elixir that will cure all ills - Jobs! Prosperity! World Peace! - but in fact it's a toxic brew that weakens the American body politic and the Constitution. And when you look at how it came about you see that those are design features, not bugs. The historical record is clear: what are misleadingly called "free trade agreements" were never really about trade. Their goal is to render independent nation states null and void, and hand power over to unaccountable, transnational corporatist authorities. This sounds like a plot lifted from a Bond supervillain, yet it is precisely what a powerful State Department official told a Congressional hearing in 1967. And much of what he laid out nearly 50 years ago has come to pass under both Democratic and Republican administrations.

The Most Dangerous Woman In America

March 17, 2015 Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com Educate! Elections, Government, Politics, Seattle, Socialism

Kshama Sawant, the socialist on the City Council, is up for re-election this year. Since joining the council in January of 2014 she has helped push through a gradual raising of the minimum wage to $15 an hour in Seattle. She has expanded funding for social services and blocked, along with housing advocates, an attempt by the Seattle Housing Authority to allow a rent increase of up to 400 percent. She has successfully lobbied for city money to support tent encampments and is fighting for an excise tax on millionaires. And for this she has become the bête noire of the Establishment, especially the Democratic Party. The corporate powers, from Seattle’s mayor to the Chamber of Commerce and the area’s Democratic Party, are determined she be defeated, and these local corporate elites have the national elites behind them.

The Illusion Of Democracy

March 12, 2015 Gilbert Mercler, www.newsjunkiepost.com Educate! Democracy, Politics

It is ironic, considering democracy’s pitiful state worldwide that, in accordance to its etymology, it literally means “common people’s rule” or, more simply, “people’s power.” The English term democracy and the 14th-century French word democratie come from the Greek demokratia via the Latin democratia. The Greek radical demos means “common people,” and kratos means “rule, or power.” How did we manage to pervert such a laudable notion of power to the people and diametrically turn it into a global system of rule at large under the principles of oligarchy and plutocracy? Everywhere we look, from east to west and north to south, plutocrats and oligarchs are firmly in charge: puppet masters of the political class. They have transformed democracy into a parody of itself and a toxic form of government. The social contract implied in a democratic form of governance is broken.

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