Politics in the Zeros

It’s quite an exercise in arrogance when the Little Union that Can’t (Industrial Workers of the World) wants to dole out advice to the most popular and dynamic social movement we’ve seen in decades. This article, written by John Reimann of the San Francisco Bay area general membership branch of the I.W.W. illustrates just how out of [...]

Read the full story

Ambrose Bierce wrote in his Devil’s Dictionarythat “Radicalism is the Conservativism of tomorrow, injected into the affairs of today.” One of the joys of aging is to have been a radical in one’s youth, to continue to be a radical, and to be proven right (or in my case, be proven left?) about past ideas [...]

Read the full story

The Bureau of Labor report for November: Job creation remained weak in the U.S. during November, with just 120,000 new positions created, though the unemployment rate slid to 8.6 percent, a government report showed Friday. The rate fell from the previous month’s 9.0 percent, a move which in part reflected a drop in those looking [...]

Read the full story

Wisconsin unions can now either give it all they’ve got, or they’re done for. Right now, after Scott Walker and the Wisconsin Senate Republicans have pushed through this step in the decades-long corporate assault on labor, the unions really have their backs against a wall.  Membership has declined, manufacturing has gone oversees, the national Democratic [...]

Read the full story

When one is attempting to explain our very anti-democratic electoral college to someone from outside the US, there is usually a strong desire to explain it away, to claim it is a safeguard on Democracy. We are told it is to protect minorities. As DJ said in an earlier comment thread: “The very premise of [...]

Read the full story

It’s a bit ironic that the purveyor of “Freedom and Democracy” around the world incarcerates more people per capita than any nation on the planet. The staggering growth of the prison industrial complex over the past thirty years is mind boggling, and yet there is still no serious movement challenging this draconian method of dealing [...]

Read the full story

If you’re trapped in the beltway echo chamber, whether in DC itself or you’ve just been watching too much CNN since you got snowed in, read this.  Maybe it will wake you up.  Read the whole thing here. The wars? I was talking to the father of a warrior the other day. I dutifully expressed [...]

Read the full story

With a record 1 in 8 Americans now receiving food stamps I couldn’t help but share this ingenious little find on Google Maps: A Food Rescue Map! I’ve seen walking tours and other touristy maps on Google but this is a real gem. This Food Rescue Map shows 18 spots in New York City where [...]

Read the full story

My first thought upon hearing about the National Tea Party Convention was, “Let’s go!” No, not to shell out $349 to $549 dollars to hear Sarah Palin do her best Tina Fey impersonation, but to see if we might able to build some serious left-right coalition based on issues we can agree about. We don’t [...]

Read the full story

It’s not hard to find criticisms of Hugo Chavez in this country. Their socialist experiment, we are told, is doomed for failure. The recent news of Venezuela’s currency devaluation and two-tiered exchange rate have some shrieking failure. Mike Shedlock, on his blog Mish’s Global Economic Analysis, had this to say, Turn out the lights. The [...]

Read the full story