The failure of UK Prime Minister David Cameron to fulfill his pledge to curtail widescale tax avoidance has been thrust into the spotlight by the trove of leaked legal documents known as the Panama Papers, which includes revelations concerning his father’s offshore financial dealings. The documents show how Ian Cameron employed dozens of people in the Bahamas to sign off […]
Colette Pichon Battle gave up a great job working as a corporate immigration lawyer in Washington DC to live in a tent in front of her flooded family home 50 miles from downtown New Orleans. She is now a much honored director of a small but powerful non-profit climate justice human rights firm advocating all along the Gulf Coast. Why the big change in her life? Katrina, climate justice and fish dinners.
Bayou Vincent
Did you know that 85 percent of Americans say that it’s harder to maintain a middle class standard of living today than it was 10 years ago? (Pew Research Center) Or that “77 percent of all Americans live paycheck to paycheck at least some of the time”, or that “one of every four workers in the US brings home wages that are at or below the federal poverty level”, or that “47 million Americans are on food stamps, or that “40.4% of the U.S. workforce is now made up of contingent workers,” mainly temps, contract workers and part-time labor?
Before 2011, Libya had achieved economic independence, with its own water, its own food, its own oil, its own money, and its own state-owned bank. It had arisen under Qaddafi from one of the poorest of countries to the richest in Africa. Education and medical treatment were free; having a home was considered a human right; and Libyans participated in an original system of local democracy.
Thanks largely to whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013, most Americans now realize that the intelligence community monitors and archives all sorts of online behaviors of both foreign nationals and US citizens. But did you know that the very fact that you know this could have subliminally stopped you from speaking out online on issues you care about? Now research […]
I’ve never given a lecture before, so let me apologise in advance. I’ll be talking about things which some of you will know more about than me, I’ll touch on struggles that are not my own, and I’ll definitely get some of this wrong. I had second thoughts about doing this: guys with beards telling everybody how it is is […]
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A gathering of journalists, hackers and whistleblowers in Berlin this weekend heard former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, Edward Snowden, issue a call for citizens to find ways to take direct control over the information technologies we use everyday. The Logan Symposium, organized by the Center for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) based in Goldsmiths University, London, also heard from Wikileaks publisher […]
Is a mother who has just given birth and is sitting in her hospital bed, by definition, work-shy? Is a father who raises three young kids full time while his partner works by definition work-shy? If you answered no to those questions, congratulations! You have managed to understand employment statistics in a more nuanced way than Dr Adam Perkins, the new […]
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Luz Herrera, social justice lawyer and UCLA law professor, was born in Tijuana to Mexican parents and grew up in the Latino neighborhoods of Los Angeles. After graduating from Harvard Law, she ran a solo law practice in working class Compton for years. She was the only full-time Spanish speaking lawyer in a city of over 50,000 Latino residents. She says she learned to think like a lawyer at Harvard but learned how to be a lawyer in Compton.
Power elites, blinded by hubris, intoxicated by absolute power, unable to set limits on their exploitation of the underclass, propelled to expand empire beyond its capacity to sustain itself, addicted to hedonism, spectacle and wealth, surrounded by half-witted courtiers—Alan Greenspan, Thomas Friedman, David Brooks and others—who tell them what they want to hear, and enveloped by a false sense of […]
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