Rethinking the TSA: No Longer Accepting Police Repression in Exchange for Safety
William John Cox, Truthout: “Everyone who travels by air in the United States has a depressing story to tell about airport screening. Media stories of a gravely ill 95-year-old grandmother forced to remove her adult diaper before being allowed on a plane and viral videos showing terrified children being intimately touched by TSA agents are more than depressing. They are a chilling commentary on the police state increasingly accepted by the American public in the name of security.”
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As Palestinians Push to Restart Negotiations, US Quietly Supplies Israel With Bunker-Busting Bombs
Thom Shanker, The New York Times News Service: “The Obama administration has quietly supplied Israel with bombs capable of destroying buried targets, like terrorists’ arms caches or perhaps sites in Iran suspected of being part of that nation’s nuclear weapons program, American officials said Friday…. Israeli-American relations have been bruised by a variety of political and geopolitical matters, and efforts by the administration to strengthen the Israeli military may convince some voters that the president is sufficiently supportive of Israel.”
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Local Resistance to Corporate Personhood Wages Crucial, if Symbolic, Battle
Britney Schultz, Truthout: “On the one-year anniversary of the landmark decision, a survey conducted by Hart Research found that only 22 percent of American voters were even familiar with the Citizens United case…. Accordingly, numerous groups have pushed for action in response to the case – and some have met with recent success, particularly at the local level.”
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The Hidden Hands in Redistricting: Corporations and Other Powerful Interests
Olga Pierce, Jeff Larson and Lois Beckett, ProPublica: “Their names suggest selfless dedication to democracy. Fair Districts Mass. Protect Your Vote. The Center for a Better New Jersey. And their stated goals are unarguable: In the partisan fight to redraw congressional districts, states should stick to the principle of one person, one vote. But a ProPublica investigation has found that these groups and others are being quietly bankrolled by corporations, unions and other special interests. Their main interest in the once-a-decade political fight over redistricting is not to help voters in the communities they claim to represent but mainly to improve the prospects of their political allies or to harm their enemies.”
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In Arizona, Complaints That an Accent Can Hinder a Teacher’s Career
Mark Lacey, The New York Times News Service: “With Arizona’s population of Spanish-speaking students surging, state education officials have pushed a variety of policies that have attracted the attention of federal civil rights officials…. The federal review found that the state had written up teachers for pronouncing ‘the’ as ‘da,’ ‘another’ as ‘anuder’ and ‘lives here’ as ‘leeves here.'”
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Rick Perry, Pay-for-Play Jailer
William Fisher, Truthout: “Given what we know about Gov. Rick Perry’s keen predilection toward ‘crony capitalism,’ we should not be surprised to learn that he’s a big fan of private for-profit prisons. Lobbyists and executives from that industry have contributed generously to Perry’s re-election campaign, and he returned the favor by proposing policies that would benefit the prison industry.”
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Closing America’s Growth Deficit
Michael Spence, Project Syndicate: “As the American economy continues to sputter three years after the global financial crisis erupted, one thing has become clear: the United States cannot generate higher rates of growth in GDP and employment without a change in the mix of the economy’s domestic and export-oriented components. Above all, this will require structural change and greater competitiveness in an expanded tradable sector.”
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Working Class Europeans Hit the Streets
Kanya D’Almeida, Inter Press Service: “Headlines this week have been saturated with protests against unaffordable food, unfair taxes and unsustainable austerity measures, with one distinct difference setting these stories apart from countless others in recent history. The people demanding reform are no longer marginalised Asians, Africans and Latin Americans, but poor, working class Europeans.”
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Two Heads of One Political Monster
David Sirota, Creators Syndicate: “By now, probably everyone reading this is already sick of America’s quadrennial political spectacle – the one in which politicians and media outlets ask us to believe that there remain vast differences between our two political parties…. Some of this tripe can be momentarily compelling, of course…. It’s worth looking a few levels beneath the orgiastic presidential campaign for a last necessary dose of nonfiction, if only to remind us that the parties are often two heads of the same political monster.”
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Fading Faith, Rising Fury: The Fallout from the Debt Ceiling Debacle
Bo Cutter, New Deal 2.0: “The American people are completely right in their accelerating level of horror at how our political system is functioning and how our leaders are behaving. It is unimaginable that we actually had a debate in August over whether it was a good idea to default on debt the American government had issued with its full faith and credit. But, of course, we did.”
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