In recent days Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte announced that he would withdraw his country from the treaty governing the International Criminal Court. That move came just over a month after…
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In recent days Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte announced that he would withdraw his country from the treaty governing the International Criminal Court. That move came just over a month after the ICC’s top prosecutor announced that she had opened a preliminary investigation into atrocities carried out as part of Duterte’s “War on Drugs.”
In the 20 months since Duterte took office promising to “slaughter” drug users and drug dealers, more than 12,000 people have been slain in extrajudicial killings in the southeast Asian nation.
There’s no question that the Fight for $15 has been transformative: In the last five years, more than 19 million US workers have won a total of $62 billion in raises. In Ontario, Canada, another 1.7 million workers just saw pay boosts of up to 21 percent.
That’s great, but consider this: Trump’s December tax bill enriched the wealthiest 1 percent of US households by $1.2 trillion. In one fell swoop, Congress and Trump offset, by a multiple of 20, the income wrested from corporations by low-wage US workers through years of struggle, walkouts, civil disobedience, marches, organizing and political advocacy.
The bravery and success of Fight-for-$15 workers have inspired millions in these challenging times. But wage fights are not nearly enough. Wealth inequality is getting much worse, not better. Further, the $15 benchmark is not even a living wage in most metropolitan areas.
In his recent Sun magazine interview, former Greenfield resident Chuck Collins discusses why the growing disparity in wealth in this country is a critical issue.
“Extreme inequality of wealth, income and opportunity is warping everything we care about,” he says. “It takes away the sense that we’re all in the same boat. It screws up communities. You can see it in the housing market, where wealthy buyers bid up prices, making homes unaffordable for everyone else. … We live in a society where even people who don’t appear to be at risk can lose it all, and the fear of that happening makes them greedy and shortsighted. Inequality rips communities apart. … As we divide into affluent and poor enclaves, people’s sense that they share a common destiny withers, replaced by fear, misunderstanding, and class and racial antagonisms.”
Collins, who lived in Greenfield and Turners Falls into the 1980s when he worked for then-Greenfield-based Institute for Community Economics, will be keynote speaker at a daylong conference on “The Power of an Equitable Community,” as well as a panelist along with state Rep. Paul Mark and former director of Mass. Home Care Al Norman.
Before he was struck down by an assassin’s bullet, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had seen his image, his goals and his philosophy of non-violence attacked from all sides of the political spectrum. As the 50th anniversary of his death approaches, King County will hold a special forum to discuss the last two years of Dr. King’s life—when his work tackled issues of racial equality, economic justice and internationalism.
At the focus of the forum is exploration beyond the myth that has grown around Dr. King’s life. Who was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when James Earl Ray took his life on April 4, 1968? How did the work he was doing and the actions that came from that work transform Dr. King from one of the most acclaimed men in America to one of the most controversial?
Bill Resnick interviews Phyllis Bennis about U.S. entanglements with Saudi Arabia, Israel, Russia, and the proxy wars in the Middle East. Author of eleven books, including the recent Understanding ISIS & the New Global War on Terror, Bennis directs the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, working as a writer, activist and analyst on Middle East and UN issues.
Wall Streeters are still getting rich: The average bonus paid to securities industry employees in 2017 came to $184,220, up 17 percent from the year before, according to an estimate by the New York State Comptroller.
Bonuses were fueled by a surge in profits. Pretax profits for New York Stock Exchange member firms grew 42 percent last year, to $24.5 billion, a seven-year high.
Wall Street accounted for less than 5 percent of private-sector jobs in New York last year, but those workers — who number about 176,000 — took home more than 20 percent of all private-sector wages in the city, the report found.
The average salary — including bonuses — in New York’s securities industry came to $375,000 in 2016, the last annual data available, and was five times higher than the $74,800 average yearly pay for the rest of the city’s private-sector workers.
“When I woke up this morning, it was a bit stunning to see this 17 percent increase,” said Sarah Anderson, Global Economy Project Director at the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies. “It’s more worrisome seeing these numbers going to folks on Wall Street — it’s a sign that we didn’t learn that much from the financial crisis.”
Cardi B might be making “money moves” but she’s not happy that so much of that money goes to Uncle Sam and she’s not sure what she gets in exchange.
The Bronx-bred rapper reveals that 40 percent of her income goes to taxes in a video posted to Instagram that immediately began going viral. Yet city streets are still dirty, she points out, while subways are rat-infested and prisoners live in sordid conditions.
Taking all this into account, Cardi has one question for the government: “I want to know what you’re doing with my f——- money.”
On this episode of “By Any Means Necessary” hosts Eugene Puryear and Sean Blackmon are joined by James Early, Former Director of Cultural Heritage Policy at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage at the Smithsonian Institution, and board member of Institute for Policy Studies, to talk about the shifts in the global world order most recently articulated through the spat between Russia and the UK, the erosion of US Democracy driven by right-wing ideological movements and the perpetual default of militarism within the US government. The group also talks about Democrat Conor Lamb’s wins in the special election to fill a Pennsylvania Congressional seat, the need for an active citizenry to expose the rottenness of America’s two-party system, class divides in Latin America, and the challenges to tackling global bourgeois elitism.
La Administración para el Control de Drogas (DEA) tardó al menos una década en abordar una serie de conflictos sobre el desempeño de una de sus unidades especiales, la cual ha estado vinculada a varios casos de muertes de civiles en diversos países, según un documento obtenido en exclusiva por VICE News.
La llamada Sensitive Investigative Unit (SIU) —Unidad de Investigaciones Sensibles— de la DEA ha sido objeto de un intenso escrutinio desde el año pasado, ya que este programa permite que esta institución investigue y adiestre a personal policial y militar de otros países, para trabajar con ellos y atacar a narcotraficantes y cárteles. La DEA ha dado crédito a la SIU en algunas de sus mayores redadas, sin embargo los éxitos se han visto ensombrecidos por una serie de episodios mortales.
