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Consider This....
Finland Is Rallying Around a Six-Hour Workday — And So Should We
Annina Claesson: Finland’s social-democratic prime minister, Sanna Marin, has called for a six-hour workday without loss of pay, allowing Finns more free time and a fairer distribution of employment. As the pandemic forces us to reassess how working life is organized, we should take up labor’s historic call for a shorter workday. ... A looming economic crisis combined with the complete overhaul of working habits — along with a general reprioritization of health concerns — has revitalized the discussion on reduced working hours in Finland. With Marin’s initiative, there is a clear signal that galvanizing political will around a six-hour day is possible not only in the far-off future, but here and now...
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Sep 1, 2020, 12:09pm
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A message from the most bombed nation on earth
Ian Zabarte: More than 900 nuclear tests were conducted on Shoshone territory in the US. Residents still live with the consequences. ... In 1951, in violation of the treaty, the US established the Nevada Proving Grounds (what would later become known as the Nevada Test Site and is now known as the Nevada National Security Site) on Shoshone territory and began testing nuclear weapons - without our consent or knowledge. ... Over the next 40 years, it became the premier testing location for American nuclear weapons. Approximately 928 nuclear tests took place on the Shoshone territory - 100 in the atmosphere and more than 800 underground. ... The fallout from these tests covered a wide area, but it was Native American communities living downwind from the site who were most exposed ... For more than 50 years, we have been suffering from this silent killer and the US government's culture of secrecy keeps it silent...
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Aug 30, 2020, 2:26pm
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The Basic Case for a Wealth Tax
Bob Lord – Lee Price: Changes in tax policy since 1980 have been driving U.S. inequality to levels not seen since the original Gilded Age. Reversing that trajectory — and restoring a more egalitarian society — will require a complete overhaul of the changes in tax policy we’ve seen over the past four decades. ... A tax on wealth would be the most direct and rational way to address America’s obscene level of wealth concentration. ... Senator Elizabeth Warren last year proposed a 2 percent tax on wealth above $50 million and a 3 percent tax above $1 billion. ... Let’s add a third tier to Senator Warren’s proposal. On wealth in excess of $5 billion, let’s now impose a 10 percent tax...
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Aug 18, 2020, 11:36am
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How Billionaires Took Over Liberalism and Destroyed It
Eric Zuesse: They’ve done it via the ‘news’-media — their propaganda-operations. So, this is about how billionaires do that; how they’ve done it. ... Ever since at least the time of Thucydides in the 5th century BC, the wealthiest have ruled, and did it by conquest and plunder. ... The acquisition of exceptional wealth was by theft: it was coercion, which could be either physical against the body (violence), or mental against the mind (deception). ... Just as for at least the past 2,500 years, conquest is the aristocracy’s chief goal. All aristocrats support imperialism. ... This journalistic transformation at the Guardian, from anti-imperialist, to becoming a champion of the Military-Industrial Complex (which is owned and controlled by the billionaires), is typical...
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Aug 15, 2020, 3:40pm
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Unsung heroes of Los Alamos: Rethinking Manhattan Project Spies and the Cold War...
Dave LIndorff: At the end of WWII, the US was the world’s unchallenged superpower. It had emerged from war with its industrial base undamaged ... The US also had a monopoly on a new super weapon — the atom bomb ... it had no moral compunction about using its terrible new weapon of mass destruction ... Washington balked at the idea of sharing the bombs’ secrets ... the US was planning to launch a devastating nuclear first strike blitz on the Soviet Union ... ??? ... we have to thank the spies who, for whatever their individual motives, successfully obtained and delivered the secrets of the atomic bomb and its construction to the scientists in the Soviet Union ... they forced the US to have to consider the unacceptable risk of retaliation...
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Aug 4, 2020, 2:06pm
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Paying Attention to Nature—Urgently
Eric Holthaus: There’s the octopus in the parking garage, and 26,500 other signs that climate change is here. ... The simultaneous disturbance of nearly every ecosystem on Earth is helping opportunistic, weedy species flourish while specialized plants and animals race to adapt. There’s no better example of this than the worldwide boom in jellyfish, which have become a danger to swimming and power plants, and are newly dominating ecosystems all over the planet. ... A new era of urgently paying attention to nature has arrived. Lately, the behavior scientists are seeing is so unusual that it’s starting to seem more like tipping points are here...
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Jul 28, 2020, 3:11pm
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The case for unschooling
Tyshia Ingram: Why the hands off alternative to homeschooling might get parents through the Covid-19 pandemic. ... the challenge — for children to explore their own interests rather than adhere to the criteria and curricula predetermined by school boards or other entities. Unlike the traditional homeschool model which often seeks to mimic the classroom or follow a defined curriculum usually with parents acting as teachers, with unschooling, children take the lead. ... Adults, sometimes parents, but not always, typically offer support, assistance, and guidance when needed. ... The term emerged in the ’70s, popularized by author and educator John Holt ... (who) realized the motivating factor for many of his students wasn’t a love of learning, but a fear of failure and criticism...
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Jul 17, 2020, 5:00pm
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Your White Neighbor’s “Black Lives Matter” Yard Sign Is Not Enough
Shayla Lawson: Being anti-racist means making places safe for Black people to inhabit. Without that, BLM yard signs are just performative allyship. ... We’ve migrated into a time in which it is more important for people to feel not-racist than it is for them to act not-racist. ... “We’re clearly not in a post-racial America” ... Cities across America are carving liberal, predominantly white, enclaves out of what used to be socially and culturally mixed, or predominantly black, neighborhoods. ... In the summer of 2017, the FBI marked Black Lives Matter as a terrorist organization, a “Black Identity Extremist” group...
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Jul 6, 2020, 2:58pm
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Freedom Rider: Russia, Afghanistan, and the Big Lie
Margaret Kimberley: Far from being an enemy, Russia assisted the U.S. and its coalition in their fight against the Taliban. ... In the late 1990s and early 2000s, jihadists nearly tore Russia apart. Separatists from the Chechnya region terrorized the entire country which was weakened and divided after the collapse of the Soviet Union. ... “The charge is ludicrous on its face but the story is quite useful to people who want to hide their own criminality.” ... “The imperialist newspapers play an important role in creating propaganda tropes for public consumption.”...
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Jul 1, 2020, 4:45pm
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The FBI has a history of targeting black activists. That's still true today
Mike German: Throughout its history, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has viewed Black activism as a potential national security threat. It has used its ample investigative powers not to suppress violence, but to inhibit the speech and association rights of Black activists. ... 1919, a young J Edgar Hoover, director of the Bureau of Investigation’s general intelligence division, targeted “Black Moses” Marcus Garvey for investigation and harassment ... The FBI’s Cointelpro program targeting civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael ... By 2017, the FBI had invented a new domestic terrorism program category it called the “Black Identity Extremism movement..
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Jun 26, 2020, 3:17pm
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Reparations and Juneteenth - The Debate Over Slavery Reparations Takes on a New Tenor
Jordan Wren: A truly unprecedented development this Juneteenth — a celebration of the day the last freed slaves learned they had been emancipated — is the emergence of a sustained, collaborative, and consistently visible social movement in regard to the mistreatment of Black Americans. ... Reparations for crimes against Black Americans have been implemented only in very specific cases. ... Robert Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Network (BET), recently called for $14 trillion in reparation for slavery. ... A $14 trillion dollar reparations bill would provide every Black American less than $300,000 ... Economic and community development has long been considered the most viable option...
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Jun 22, 2020, 2:43pm
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Beware of Police “Reforms” That Reinforce the Very System Killing Us
Janaé Bonsu: We can’t fix the problem by investing more resources in police. We must defund and disband. ... There is a broad consensus that there is a problem with police in the United States, but divergence on whether the problem lies with individual officers and their respective departments, or with the institution itself. ... Abolition is the theory and practice of chipping away at a vast system of formal social control, imposed through punishment and surveillance, while also building new practices and systems that affirm people’s humanity. ... Ultimately, abolition is about striving for a world where police, and the prison-industrial complex in which they operate, is obsolete because we can build communities that are equipped to rely on each other for safety and create alternatives to punishment...
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Jun 13, 2020, 3:29pm
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Movement to Defund US Police Departments is a Beautiful and Doable Idea
Dave LIndorff: “The police are a 19th-century creation that is inappropriate for a 21st-century society.” ... Their role expanded over time to include pursuing criminals, but also to putting down political demonstrations, busting unions and strikes and to basically protecting the wealthy from the great unwashed — the workers, the unemployed and the hungry. ... While we’re at it let’s defund police intelligence units, which don’t belong in a free and democratic society. ... Police should be limited to dealing with violent criminals. ... In that regard, we should take a lesson from police in enlightened places like Scotland and Norway, Finland, Germany and many other European countries, where de-escalation is taught, and police often normally work unarmed, only signing out weapons when needed...
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Jun 9, 2020, 12:05pm
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Tear Gas Is Banned in International Warfare––Why Are Police Using It On U.S. Civilians?
Janea Wilson: Police say they’re using tear gas to clear crowds, but the chemical agent’s effects can cause long-term physical damage. ... While U.S. officials have a history of using tear gas as a “riot control agent” (defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as “chemical compounds that temporarily make people unable to function by causing irritation to the eyes, mouth, throat, lungs and skin”), tear gas was banned in international warfare through the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997. ... Tear gas irritates the respiratory system, skin and eyes, which can lead to loss of eyesight and breathing problems, classifying it as a chemical weapon if used to intentionally cause harm or death (such as when it was used during World War I)...
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Jun 5, 2020, 3:29pm
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What a World Without Cops Would Look Like
Madison Pauley: “Can we come up with a situation where there are fewer killings, and fewer collateral consequences?” .... Five years ago, in the wake of the murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, we were told, “Don’t worry, we’re going to fix it. .... But things did not get better. ... We have [millions of] low-level arrests in the United States every year and most of them are completely pointless. ... Reducing policing goes hand in hand with widespread decriminalization ... sex work, drugs, homelessness, mental illness. ... We don’t need school police, we need counselors and restorative justice programs. We don’t need police homeless outreach units, we need supportive housing, community based drop-in centers, social workers...
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Jun 3, 2020, 3:20pm
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