PAT GARAFALO – Income inequality in the U.S. is currently the highest its been since the 1920s, with the 400 richest Americans (who are all billionaires) having as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent of Americans combined. And as it turns out, just one wealthy family has managed to amass a fortune equal to that of the combined net worth of the bottom 30 percent of Americans — the Waltons, heirs to the Walmart fortune
ALEC Assists Right Wing Corporations in Suppressing the Colored Vote
COLOR OF CHANGE.ORG – For years, the right wing has been trying to stop Black people, other people of color, young people, and the elderly from voting for partisan gain — and now some of America’s biggest companies are helping them do it.
LA and Occupy LA Agree: It’s Time to End Corporate Personhood
BROOKE JARVIS – On December 3, just two days before Occupy L.A. was evicted by police, the General Assembly of the occupation passed a unanimous resolution calling for a constitutional amendment to end corporate personhood.
Occupy Our Homes
J.A. MYERSON – Yesterday, no one had lived in 702 Vermont Street for three years. Vermont Street sits in East New York, the Brooklyn neighborhood where foreclosures are five times more frequent than in the rest of the state. Today, Alfredo and Tasha and their son and daughter moved in, with the help of a number of friends whom they’d never met. Some were from the advocacy groups Picture the Homeless and Vocal New York, others were clergy or members of the city council.
Is Your Cell Phone Spying on You?
JIM COOK – Many people have cell phones. Many of those love their phones, and some are so attached to them that they should seriously consider a surgical implant. I am not one of this crowd and, when I was working, only carried a cell phone under protest and rarely turned it on. I figured “why make myself available day and night to any fool who can dial a phone?”
Where Were You When They Crucified My Movement?
CHRIS HEDGES – The Occupy movement is the force that will revitalize traditional Christianity in the United States or signal its moral, social and political irrelevance. The mainstream church, battered by declining numbers and a failure to defiantly condemn the crimes and cruelty of the corporate state, as well as a refusal to vigorously attack the charlatans of the Christian right, whose misuse of the Gospel to champion unfettered capitalism, bigotry and imperialism is heretical, has become a marginal force in the life of most Americans, especially the young.