News & Views

Will President Obama be the main holdout when world leaders, under growing pressure from the occupy Wall Street protests across the world and demand building for a tax on international financial transactions, meet early next month at the G-20 summit in France?

I just got an email from Huffington Post telling me that Obama was keeping his campaign promise to get U.S. troops out of Iraq.  Not quite.  Here's a video of Obama's promise.

Wall Street’s audacity to corrupt knows no bounds and the cooptation of government by the 1 per cent knows no limits.  How else to explain $50 million of taxpayer money going to equip a government facility in lower Manhattan where Wall Street firms, serially charged with corruption, get to sit alongside the New York Police Department and spy on law abiding citizens.

On Saturday night, 175 members of Occupy Chicago were arrested after refusing to comply with a curfew the city had imposed on Grant Park. In These Times' Joe Macaré reported that the arrests took place “one by one, and by all accounts as peacefully as possible.”

Months before the first occupiers descended on Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, before the news trucks arrived and the unions endorsed, before Michael Bloomberg and Michael Moore and Kanye West made appearances, a group of artists, activists, writers, students, and organizers gathered on the fourth floor of 16 Beaver Street, an artists' space near Wall Street, to talk about changing the world. There were New Yorkers in the room, but also Egyptians, Spaniards, Japanese, Greeks. Some had played a part in the Arab Spring uprising; others had been involved in the protests catching fire across Europe. But no one at 16 Beaver knew they were about light the fuse on a protest movement that would sweep the United States and fuel similar uprisings around the world.

Washington, D.C. – The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) today sent policy proposals to Senator Patty Murray and Congressman Jeb Hensarling, Co-Chairs of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, recommending that the work of the committee focus on creating jobs, raising revenues through fair taxation and protecting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. The CPC identified more than $4 trillion in savings, which would increase to more than $7 trillion if the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire on schedule. The recommendations direct the savings toward job creation, the single most important means to reduce the deficit.

National Priorities Project, with support from Citizens for Tax Justice, has launched www.costoftaxcuts.com.

A rolling counter depicts the amount of money lost to the U.S. Treasury as a result of tax cuts for the top 5% of U.S. wage earners – $3.2 per millisecond. The site also features rolling counters for the top 1% and next 4% of households.

National Priorities Project, with support from Citizens for Tax Justice, has launched www.costoftaxcuts.com.

A rolling counter depicts the amount of money lost to the U.S. Treasury as a result of tax cuts for the top 5% of U.S. wage earners – $3.2 per millisecond. The site also features rolling counters for the top 1% and next 4% of households.