Politics

Movements Of 2011: From Occupation To Reconstruction

July 1, 2014 Nathan Schneider, www.america.aljazeera.com Create! Commons, Cooperatives, Mass Movement, Occupy, Organizing, Politics

Ever since I wrote a book about Occupy Wall Street, I’ve often found myself being asked, “What happened to Occupy, anyway?” Now, more than two years since the movement faded from the headlines and in the wake of French economist Thomas Piketty’s best-selling diagnosis of economic inequality, the urgency of the question is mounting, not diminishing. The answer is also becoming clearer: The networks of activists that formed in the midst of 2011’s worldwide wave of protest are developing into efforts to create durable economic and political experiments. Rather than focusing on opposing an unjust system, they’re testing ways to replace it with something new. The 2011 movements were always prefigurative in some respects. From Tahrir Square in Cairo to Zuccotti Park in New York, protesters eschewed formal leadership in order to practice direct democracy, a means of revealing just how false our societies’ claims to being democratic have become. They built little utopias that provided free food, libraries, music, religious services and classes, trying to put on display what they thought a good society should look like. The 2011 movements also reflected the emergence of a global community that spans borders as protesters in different countries borrowed strategies and slogans from one another.

ALEC Serves As A ‘Dating Service’ For Politicians And Corporations

July 1, 2014 NPR, www.npr.org Educate! ALEC, Corporatism, Money As Speech, Politics

A batch of recently leaked to The Guardian has revealed new insights into the goals and finances of the secretive group called ALEC. The American Legislative Exchange Council is a group that brings together state legislators and representatives of corporations. Together, they develop model bills that lawmakers introduce and try to pass in their state legislatures. Through these model bills, ALEC has worked to privatize public education, cut taxes, reduce public employee compensation, oppose Obamacare and resist state regulations to reduce global warming gas emissions. "ALEC is like an incubator of predominantly conservative legislation," Guardian correspondent Ed Pilkington tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "The vast majority of the model bills are conservative in their inception and those bills then spread right across America." ALEC is sort of almost a dating service between politicians at the state level, local elected politicians, and many of America's biggest companies. It brings them together much as a dating service would do. It sits them in rooms behind closed doors where three times a year they come together to think about what should be the next wave of state-based legislation and they have presentations from the companies that say what they would like to see done legislatively in states right across America.

Wikileaks Cables: Ukraine Elected “Our Ukraine Insider”

June 30, 2014 SCG News, www.readersupportednews.org Educate! coup, Politics, Ukraine, US, Wikileaks

There's not much point in staging a coup if you don't influence who is placed in power in the aftermath. Of course in order for a puppet government to be effective, they can't be perceived as such. You wouldn't want the natives to get restless would you? The evidence that the U.S. was behind the toppling of the Ukrainian government early this year is so overwhelming at this point that the subject really isn't up for debate, however initially it was unclear how the election of Petro Poroshenko fit in. The ecstatic response by Washington when he was declared the winner, and their unbending support in spite of his ongoing military assault against civilians in the east, made it clear that he was the chosen one, but the paper trail wasn't immediately obvious. As it turns out, the evidence that Poroshenko is in the pocket of the U.S. State Department has been available all this time, you just had to know where to find it. In a classified diplomatic cable from 2006 released by Wikileaks.org, U.S. officials refer to Poroshenko as "Our Ukraine (OU) insider Petro Poroshenko". A separate cable also released by Wikileaks makes it clear that the U.S. government was considered Poroshenko corrupt.

Inequality Is Not Inevitable

June 30, 2014 Joseph E. Stiglitz, www.opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com Educate! Bankers, Capitalism, Corporatism, Inequality, Money As Speech, Politics

AN insidious trend has developed over this past third of a century. A country that experienced shared growth after World War II began to tear apart, so much so that when the Great Recession hit in late 2007, one could no longer ignore the fissures that had come to define the American economic landscape. How did this “shining city on a hill” become the advanced country with the greatest level of inequality? One stream of the extraordinary discussion set in motion by Thomas Piketty’s timely, important book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” has settled on the idea that violent extremes of wealth and income are inherent to capitalism. In this scheme, we should view the decades after World War II — a period of rapidly falling inequality — as an aberration. This is actually a superficial reading of Mr. Piketty’s work, which provides an institutional context for understanding the deepening of inequality over time. Unfortunately, that part of his analysis received somewhat less attention than the more fatalistic-seeming aspects.

Nevada Students Protest Outrageous Clinton Speaking Fee

June 29, 2014 Tim Devaney, www.thehill.com Resist! Education, Hillary Clinton, Nevada, Politics

Hillary Clinton is in hot water over a $225,000 speaking fee she will reportedly receive for an upcoming appearance at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. UNLV students are demanding Clinton to return what they see as an "outrageous" speaking fee for an October event and have criticized the school for paying her so much money at a time when tuition is scheduled to spike by 17 percent over the next four years. "We really appreciate anybody who would come to raise money for the university," UNLV student body president Elias Benjelloun told a Nevada television station. "But anybody who's being paid $225,000 to come speak, we think that's a little bit outrageous. And we'd like Secretary Clinton, respectfully, to gracefully return to the university or the foundation." Benjelloun said the potential 2016 presidential contender should donate her fee to the university. But this wouldn't be Clinton's biggest speaking fee. The Wall Street Journal reports Clinton received $300,000 for speaking to students at UCLA in March.

The Political Stakes In The Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline Decision

June 11, 2014 Stephen Smart, www.cbc.ca Organize! Canada, Enbridge, Pipeline, Politics

After years of debate and political consternation, the future of Enbridge's proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline comes down to this: a go/no-go decision from the federal cabinet, which has to be made sometime over the next seven days. Ottawa's Joint Review Panel looked into the potential environmental impacts of the nearly 1,200-kilometre pipeline, which would carry diluted bitumen from Alberta's oil sands to a shipping terminal in Kitimat, B.C., and gave its stamp of approval in December. The government is now reviewing the National Energy Board's 209 recommendations for Enbridge. If it accepts them and approves the project those conditions must be met before the pipeline can be operational. But the reality is that, on top of the obvious environmental, economic and First Nations impacts, this proposal carries a tanker load of political implications as well. For the Stephen Harper government, the timing of this decision almost couldn't be worse. 2015 is a federal election year, which means that whatever Ottawa decides, Northern Gateway will be fresh in the minds of voters when the next trip to the polls rolls around.

How Supreme Court Made U.S. Government Illegitimate

June 6, 2014 Dennis Trainor Jr, www.PopularResistance.org Resistance Report 2014 Elections, 2016 Elections, Acronym TV, ATV, Christina Tobin, Daniel Lee, Dennis Trainor Jr, Free and Equal, Mid-term elections, Move To Amend, News, Politics, SCOTUS, Supreme Court

Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in McCutcheon V. FEC, the court struck down a limit on how much cash an individual could give to all federal candidates during an election cycle. In the 5-4 decision, the majority of justices on the Roberts court ruled that individuals could buy elections. Or, in the words of Chief Justice Roberts, “government regulation may not target the general gratitude a candidate may feel toward those who support him or his allies, or the political access such support may afford.” In the dissenting opinion, Justice Stephen Bryer, did not hold back in voicing the disgust felt by an overwhelming majority of Americans (if not by a majority of Supreme Court Justices) in writing that the majority’s “legal analysis is faulty: It misconstrues the nature of the competing constitutional interests at stake. It understates the importance of protecting the political integrity of our governmental institutions. It creates a loophole that will allow a single individual to contribute millions of dollars to a political party or to a candidate’s campaign.”

Reducing Inequality And A Strong Economy Go Hand-In-Hand

April 3, 2014 Joseph Stiglitz, www.nextnewdeal.net Educate! Finance and Economy, Inequality, Politics

It is a great pleasure for me to discuss with you one of the critical issues facing our country, its growing inequality, the effect it is having on our economy, and the policies that we might undertake to alleviate it. America has achieved the distinction of becoming the country with the highest level of income inequality among the advanced countries. While there is no single number that can depict all aspects of society’s inequality, matters have become worse in every dimension: more money goes to the top (more than a fifth of all income goes to the top 1%), more people are in poverty at the bottom, and the middle class—long the core strength of our society—has seen its income stagnate. Median household income, adjusted for inflation, today is lower than it was in 1989, a quarter century ago.[1] An economy in which most citizens see no progress, year after year, is an economy that is failing to perform in the way it should. Indeed, there is a vicious circle: our high inequality is one of the major contributing factors to our weak economy and our low growth.

Going To Jail For Growing Pot Where It Is Legal

March 4, 2014 Carly Schwartz and Matt Ferner, Huffington Post Live Resist! Government, Marijuana, Police Ab, Politics

Robert Duncan moved from Los Angeles to Northern California in 2010 to manage marijuana growing operations for a collective of medical marijuana dispensaries. Although California voters legalized medical cannabis more than 17 years ago, the plant remains illegal under federal law, and the Obama administrationlaunched a renewed crackdown on marijuana in California in 2011. That October, Duncan’s grow house was raided. A few months later, U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner indicted him and others involved in the dispensary business on the grounds that it had grown too large. Despite California’s struggle with prison overcrowding, and despite new federal guidelines that say...

For Politicians, Millennials Prove Hard To Pin Down

September 27, 2013 Trisha Marczak, www.mintpressnews.com Educate! Government, Politics, Youth

The emerging generation of millennials is shifting into a political power unlike those who have gone before, representing a new wave of Americans who no longer fit neatly into either major political party and are instead growing in their distrust for government and their desire for across-the-board accountability. Coming of age in the era of the NSA’s expanded surveillance operations, millennials are emerging as more distrustful of the government, presenting a difficult scenario for political parties aiming to capture the young vote. Americans under 30 have emerged as the most united in the belief in civil liberties protection. According to a Pew Research poll, 60 percent of young respondents claimed their largest government concern stemmed from its anti-terrorism policies that have infringed on civil liberties.

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