GOP Holds 4, Democrats Win 2 In Wisconsin
Rick Pearson, News Report: “The recall fracas stemmed from Walker and Republican lawmakers decision to curb public employees’ collective bargaining rights and made them pay more for benefits. Anger over those moves led to the recall elections. Both sides poured millions of dollars into TV ads, automated phone calls and direct-mail. Total spending for all the recall contests, including a seat retained by a Democrat last month and the two next week, easily exceeded $30 million. A union coalition, We Are Wisconsin, used former Green Bay Packer Gilbert Brown in a last-minute phone campaign urging voters to defeat 24-year Republican state Sen. Robert Cowles.”
Jim Hightower | The Downgrading of America
Jim Hightower, Op-Ed: “By downgrading the government’s credit rating, they add to the absurd hysteria over the deficit. “It’s the cause of America’s economic stagnation,” they wail, “and the only way to fix it is to take sledgehammers and chainsaws to programs that the middle-class and the poor rely on.” Yoo-hoo, Wall Streeters — it was not workaday folks who crashed our economy, it was you! Your financial collapse wrecked the livelihoods of millions and jacked up the federal deficit you now decry. These elites are hoping that we can’t keep up with the fact that they’re using their own failure as an excuse to go after essential public programs needed by the very people they’ve knocked down.”
Britain Debating Cause of Its Worst Unrest In Years
Portia Walker, News Report: “Last Thursday night, in circumstances that remain unclear, police shot dead Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black man. The next day, a group of 200 protesters gathered outside the police station in London’s Tottenham district, demanding an explanation. In the hours that followed, the peaceful protest somehow disintegrated. Four days later, after rioting and looting spread first to other poor suburbs but then reached wealthier areas Monday in the worst civil unrest Britain has seen in years, Britons were undertaking a national debate over the pervasive poverty and unemployment that many think have fed the disturbances and what role the country’s austerity drive has played in making matters worse.”
Robert Scheer | Another Bailout Joins the Goofball Economy
Robert Scheer, Op-Ed: “The whole thing is nuts. The economy is a shambles, saved from a free fall only by the Federal Reserve’s unprecedented promise of free money for banks for at least two years. That’s how long a seven-member majority of the Fed’s Open Market Committee expects it to take for significant relief to take hold for the 25 million Americans who can’t find full-time employment.The 10-member committee’s three dissenters in Tuesday’s decision, all unelected Fed regional board presidents, are free-market ideologues who don’t believe the government has a role to play in reversing the nation’s economic disaster.”
Torture Charges Against Bush-Era Defence Secretary
Kanya D’Almeida, News Analysis: “Donald Vance, a Navy veteran from Illinois and Nathan Ertel, a U.S. government contractor hailing from Virginia, experienced a “nightmarish scene”, in which they were held incommunicado in solitary confinement and subject to physical and psychological torture for the duration of their imprisonment. This Monday, nearly five years since their ordeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago ruled that the plaintiffs could move forward with a lawsuit against the person who allegedly approved the operation – former U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.”
Amy Goodman | Japan’s Nuclear Legacy
Amy Goodman, Op-Ed: “The history of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is itself the history of U.S. military censorship and propaganda. In addition to the suppressed film footage, the military kept the blast zones off-limits to reporters. When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist George Weller managed to get in to Nagasaki, his story was personally killed by Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett managed to sneak in to Hiroshima not long after the blast and reported what he called “a warning to the world,” describing widespread illnesses as an “atomic plague.”
Cornel West | A Declaration of War on The Poor
Video Interview: The veteran broadcaster Tavis Smiley and the author and Princeton University Professor Cornel West are in the midst of a 15-city, cross-country trek they have dubbed “The Poverty Tour: A Call to Conscience.” The tour comes on the heels of last week’s deficit agreement, which has been widely criticized for excluding a tax hike on the wealthy, as well as any measures to tackle high unemployment. “Any legislation that doesn’t extend unemployment benefits, doesn’t close a single corporate loophole, doesn’t raise one cent in terms of new revenue in terms of taxes on the rich or the lucky, allows corporate America to get away scot-free again—the banks, Wall Street getting away again—and all these cuts ostensibly on the backs of everyday people,” says Smiley.
Art: No FDR
Stephen Pitt, : Stephen Pitt is NationofChange’s art director. Stephen is a southern California artist whose work focuses on matters political, social, and economic. In 2004 Stephen began drawing and painting political imagery to communicate his sincere displeasure with disturbing changes set in motion by ideologues acting in bad faith. With a background in figurative drawing and respect for color, Stephen traded the 6B pencil for a digital stylus and went to work. Published by the San Francisco Chronicle and Z Magazine, Stephen’s work has since been seen on Truthout and Firedoglake.
Marriage Equality Is Everyone’s Fight
Op-Ed: “So marriage equality is within reach, but only if its supporters make clear to their elected representatives that further delay is unacceptable. But why should straight people bother? First, because recognition of same-sex marriage is simply the right thing to do, for the same reason striking down bans on interracial marriage was the right thing to do. America has always been at its best when overcoming old prejudices and reaffirming the belief that we are all created equal. Second, as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote during the greatest civil rights movement in American history, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Political Donors Wear Multiple Fundraising Hats
Peter H. Stone, News Report: “Campaign finance lawyers and watchdog groups say that Federal Election Commission rules define coordination to allow some fundraising overlap between campaigns and independent groups, thereby creating sizable loopholes. “FEC regulations allow an enormous amount of actual coordination that’s not considered under the law to be illegal coordination,” Trevor Potter, a former chairman of the FEC and president of the independent Campaign Legal Center told iWatch News . “The regulations allow a significant amount of overlap in fundraising.”
