Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Truthout 3/16

In Praise of Shared Outrage
Roy J. Eidelson, Truthout: "'We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all.' These were the words of Lord Brian Griffiths, Goldman Sachs international adviser, when he spoke at London's St. Paul's Cathedral last fall. With inequality at historic levels here in the United States and around the world, it's a reassuring message we all might wish to be true."
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Pelosi Under Pressure From Progressives on Public Option
Jason Leopold, Truthout: "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insists that the public option is dead, but progressive organizations are mounting an aggressive campaign to resurrect it as Democratic lawmakers gear up to pass a final health care bill this week via a budgetary process known as reconciliation."
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Eugene Robinson | Katrina's Toxic Legacy Lives
Eugene Robinson: "The Obama administration is making a big health care mistake. I'm not talking about the final push for comprehensive reform legislation, which is righteous and necessary. I mean the sale of more than 100,000 contaminated trailers and mobile homes - a move that could make people sick."
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Senate Unveils Its Financial Crisis Fix
Kevin G. Hall, McClatchy Newspapers: "Eighteen months after Wall Street's brush with apocalypse, the Senate on Monday began to rewrite the nation's financial regulatory rules with the introduction of a sweeping bill designed to fix the causes of the deep economic crisis."
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Sweatshops Won't Save Haiti
Tope Folarin, Foreign Policy in Focus: "The United Nations will host a Haiti donors' conference at the end of March. This conference will be quite different from last year's event, of course, coming as it does on the heels of the worst earthquake to strike Haiti in two centuries. An agenda has already begun to take shape: It's already clear that a future Haiti must be populated with environmentally sustainable, earthquake-resistant buildings, for example, and it's also clear that the international community must do something to ease Haiti's massive debt burden."
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New Data Shows Loan Modification Logjam Continues
Paul Kiel, ProPublica: "New data released Friday shows that the story for the government's foreclosure prevention program remains the same: Mortgage servicers have delivered relatively few permanent modifications, and hundreds of thousands of borrowers in trial modifications have yet to receive a final answer after many months of waiting."
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Drug Cartels Don't Die; They Relocate
Andres Oppenheimer, El Pais (Translation: Ryan Croken): "Watching as the drug cartels penetrate the highest levels of government in some Central American countries, I can't help but ask myself if the United States' war against drugs has only served to push the front lines of battle first from Colombia to Mexico, and now from Mexico to Central America. Is this effort succeeding in reducing the scope and success of the drug lords, or is it merely forcing them to hopscotch about from one country to another?"
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Sarkozy Slap Down: Round One of France's Regional Elections
In Fribourg's La Liberte, Pascal Baeriswyl sees the first round results of France's regional elections as an important swing to the left, while La Tribune's Erik Izraelewicz perceives a new divorce between France and its political leadership and a disturbing trend to the extremes.
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Why Health Reform Must Protect Private Insurance Coverage of Abortion Care: A Mother Speaks Out (VIDEO)
Jodi Jacobson, RH Reality Check: "Today, Planned Parenthood Federation of America released a video featuring Tiffany Campbell, a mother of three from South Dakota, who tells the story of her personal experience with a complicated pregnancy and abortion, an experience that was both emotionally and financially challenging for Tiffany and her family. (You can read Tiffany's first person account of her story published last year on RH Reality Check.)"
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Ray McGovern | Yoo Besmirches Legacy of Jefferson
Ray McGovern, Truthout: "Initially I was shocked at the thought of the University of Virginia (UVA) welcoming former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo to the 'Academical Village' founded by Thomas Jefferson. There was something very wrong about that picture. Was it not Jefferson who condemned tyrannical acts - including ones that fell far short of waterboarding - in the Declaration of Independence?"
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Pledging Allegiance to God
Stephen Rohde, The Daily Journal: "In 1954, at the height of the Cold War, Congress amended the phrase "one Nation indivisible" in the 62-year-old Pledge of Allegiance to read "one Nation, under God, indivisible." Last week, over a blistering 160-page dissent, the Ninth Circuit held that the state-directed, teacher-led, daily recitation of the amended Pledge by children in public schools did not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment."
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Toxic Hanford: A Trip to the B Reactor
Joshua Frank, Truthout: "I spent a weekend last fall sitting inside an old nuclear reactor, gazing up at a wall that holds over 2,000 cylinder rods that once produced plutonium for our nation's atom bombs."
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The Great White Whale in San Francisco Bay or How the "Lively Arts" Became "the Media"
Lewis Lapham | TomDispatch.com: "Art as a medium of exchange is the gift in the hand of its creator, alive in the mind of its beholder, converting the private to a public good, and thereby adding it to the common store of human energy and hope. It's the embodiment of the spirit in the flesh to which Leo Tolstoy refers as 'a means of communion among people - the capacity of people to be infected by the feelings of other people,' by 'feelings, the most diverse, very strong and very weak, very significant and very worthless, very bad and very good.'"
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Froma Harrop | Jihad Jane: Terror by Reason of Insanity
Froma Harrop: "Consider the case of 'Jihad Jane.' Divorced twice (first marriage at 16), Colleen LaRose was arrested for drunkenness in Texas. She ended up living with a boyfriend in a Philadelphia suburb and taking care of his elderly father. Let's say that LaRose was not one of life's winners under conventional definitions."
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Control of Public Media as a Social Justice Issue
Scott Sanders and James Owens, Truthout: "Media justice organizers at the Center for Media Justice (CMJ) and MAG-Net have recently produced a brilliant campaign plan ('The Campaign for universal broadband') to win three policies crucial for just and democratic communication: network neutrality, universal broadband and universal service fund reform."
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Haitian Women Mourn the Dead, Recommit to the Living on International Women's Day (Part I)
Beverly Bell, Truthout: "All over Haiti on March 8, International Women's Day, women's groups met to honor their dead and raise up their living. As for how to raise up the living, Myriam Merlet, a pioneering feminist who died in the earthquake, once said this: 'This society [must] get to a different theory and application of power in all aspects. Of course, it's a utopian dream. But the more people dream, the more likely that power can change.'"
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Detained
Mary Sojourner, Truthout: "The restaurant is a delight. There are sturdy pine tables and huge windows. The pizza comes with a scattering of fresh basil. I sip my organic iced coffee and try not to dive into the pizza. My friend is late. I don't care. It is enough to be in this sunny room while softly cool air drifts in through the open doors. My friend hurries in. 'Life,' she says, 'detained me.'"
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Dr. Jane Goodall
Bill Moyers Journal: "Despite dire warnings for our endangered planet, Dr. Jane Goodall says all is not yet lost - we can change course, if we act now. And she should know. Her tough-minded optimism comes from her work as the world's foremost authority on chimpanzees."
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