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"Arundhati Roy is probably the most ‘do something’ public intellectual of our time. In her interview with New Internationalist she offers her take on market-friendly democracy, people power and the wealth that is fed by people’s lives. "
"Big businesses have long had the same economic rights as citizens, yet few of the moral responsibilities."
In just the last few years, the Corporate Police State has reared its head at every level of government.
As America's joblessness and poverty remain at a peak, RT's Anastasia Churkina delves deep into the sorrows of the country's middle class to find out if its future is doomed.
In large numbers, and with few rules, retiring generals are taking lucrative defense-firm jobs
The power of concentrated corporate capital was on display in Washington last week, as it has been all year. The incoming Chair of the Congressional committee responsible for banking regulation, Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) says “my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.” And President Obama sat down with the CEOs of 20 large corporations to talk about how he could help Big Business increase their already record profits.
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These actions echo a year where Sen. Durbin complained the banks “own” the Congress and where President Obama worked with the health insurance industry to keep them in control of health care while claiming it was “reform,” and where the Supreme Court in Citizens United vastly increased corporate power in elections by allowing unlimited spending.
"Campaigning in Colorado just days before the election (see video below), Obama clearly stated his opposition to Bush-era economic policies and ridiculed the idea that "we should give more and more to millionaires and billionaires and hope that it trickles down on everybody else. It’s a philosophy that gives tax breaks to wealthy CEOs and to corporations that ship jobs overseas while hundreds of thousands of jobs are disappearing here at home.""
"There is a war underway. I'm not talking about Washington’s bloody misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, but a war within our own borders."
"Well, they got him at last. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the target of several of the world’s most powerful governments, turned himself into British authorities today and is now at the mercy of state authorities who have already shown their wolfish – and lawless – desire to destroy him and his organization. "
" Republicans control neither the House nor the Senate - and certainly not the White House. But they largely dictated the terms of President Barack Obama's proposed tax-cut compromise, which disgruntled congressional Democrats want to discuss in closed meetings that are likely to be rowdy."
"The Supreme Court announced Monday it would hear two major appeals from corporate America that seek to block mass lawsuits, one involving a huge sex bias claim against Wal-Mart and the other a massive environmental suit that aims to hold coal-fired power plants responsible for contributing to global warming."
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In both cases, the justices agreed to consider stopping the suits before they could move toward a trial.
"Senior lawmakers said on Sunday they were optimistic about striking a deal to extend Bush-era tax cuts for all taxpayers and continue emergency jobless aid for millions of long-term unemployed Americans."
"The US Congress resumes its lame-duck session Monday with only one day remaining to take action before unemployment benefits begin expiring for two million jobless workers. It is more and more likely that nothing will be done, while congressmen and senators focus instead on negotiations about extending tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans."
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Federal extended unemployment benefits are set to expire November 30, when the latest temporary extension adopted by Congress earlier this year runs out. More than 800,000 workers currently receiving extended benefits will lose them immediately because their states automatically cut off extended benefits when full federal funding expires. Another 400,000 workers will exhaust their regular 26-week state benefits in December and will not have access to the federal plan. And a further 815,000 workers will lose extended federal benefits in the course of the month, based on other provisions in their state plans.
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Extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy would put another $70 billion a year into the pockets of the super-rich and the most privileged layers of the middle class. Extended unemployment benefits would cost the federal government an equivalent amount, divided among a much larger group, the long-term unemployed.
"The wealthy now see victory within reach, through regressive taxation and the slashing of public spending on anything except more bailouts for the financial oligarchy. "
Before the election, President Obama met with a number of liberal bloggers, and said some remarkably foolish things. Perhaps the most foolish was highlighted in The Big Hurt's winning Chatty Cathy entry for October 30
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President Obama sat down with some progressive bloggers yesterday for a Q&A, and this was one of his more puzzling responses.
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This notion that somehow I could have gone and made the case around the country for a far bigger stimulus because of the magnitude of the crisis, well, we understood the magnitude of the crisis. We didn't actually, I think, do what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, which was basically wait for six months until the thing had gotten so bad that it became an easier sell politically because we thought that was irresponsible. We had to act quickly.
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"It doesn't seem as if the big industrial nations are serious about trying to halt global warming. "
"So many warnings, so many solutions, and so many people who couldn’t care less."
"Obama is a facilitator of the corporate enterprise that has spawned the Mother of all Pollutions."
Southeast Michigan, comprising Detroit, its suburbs, and surrounding counties, has been the metropolitan area hardest hit by the economic crisis. Regional unemployment was 15.7 percent in December 2009. In real terms, about one in four workers is unemployed or underemployed. In Detroit proper, the figure is likely one in two.
Writing in the March 11 Wall Street Journal, Steven J. Law, a bigwig lawyer for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, turns reality on its head by claiming working people and their unions were the BIG winners in the 5-4 Supreme Court "Citizens United" decision.
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The big business group is calling for draconian, and probably unconstitutional, limits on workers' ability to collectively have an impact on politics, to elect people that they feel will represent their interests. The Chamber of Commerce proposed anti-worker, anti-union restrictions include: require secret ballot elections to approve political spending; prohibit public sector unions from participating in elections of politicians who "will oversee their labor contracts" and prohibit the government from allowing automatic union dues payments from employee paychecks.
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The LA Times reports that the Chamber of Commerce is getting "record-setting amounts of money raised from corporations and wealth individuals."
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