Keystone XL Back on Obama’s Desk
Bill McKibben, Op-Ed: “You
have patiently and firmly explained to the president for the last six
months why this pipeline is a bad idea—and by ‘you’ I mean the twenty
top scientists who sent a letter explaining the climate impacts, the
ten Nobel Peace Prize laureates, the dozens of tribal leaders who signed
the Mother Earth Accord, the 1253 people who got arrested, the 12,000
who circled the White House, the 500,000 who filed public comments on
the plan, the many many more who sent letters and emails and made phone
calls to the White House and Congress.”
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Economy
Children Face the Recession
As
her mother sat in a homeless shelter in downtown Miami, 3-year-old
Aeisha Touray blurted out what sounded like a new slogan for the Occupy
Wall Street protest movement.
Special Coverage: As
we enter Day 97 of the Occupy movements the protests have spread not
only across the country but all over the globe. Thousands of activists
have descended on Wall Street these past weeks as part of the
#OccupyWallStreet protest organized by several action groups. What
follows is a live video stream and live Twitter feed of this event.
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Richard D. Wolff, Op-Ed: “Europe’s
debts — and social tensions swirling around them — are clearly
problems. Governments collapsing in Greece, Italy, and Spain show that,
among other signs of the obvious. The rating companies’ downgrades of
European debt are rather like downgrading the likelihood of good weather
while the rest of us are already rushing to close the windows against
pouring rain. Still worse are the usual media reports and discussions of
the Fitch action.”
READ | DISCUSS | SHARETeachers Struggle to Feed Hungry Students in Order to Teach
Aisha Fukushima, Op-Ed: “When
students are hungry, they come to class agitated and unable to focus.
Often it is hard to complete even the most basic academic exercise or
follow classroom directions. Other students get extremely sleepy or
might refuse to do the work entirely. Although hunger is one of many
factors that plays into this behavior, it has become obvious to many of
my colleagues that students without proper nutrition can pose very real
challenges to our ability to create a functional learning environment.”
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Rep. Keith Ellison, Op-Ed: Last
week, Speaker Boehner described the Senate deal for extending
middle-class tax cuts and unemployment benefits as acceptable. This past
Saturday, eighty-nine senators—including the vast majority of
Republican Senators—voted for the bipartisan compromise to extend
unemployment benefits and a middle-class payroll tax cut for two months.
No sooner did the Tea Party House Republicans begin to fear that this
good faith compromise just might succeed than they stepped forward and
smashed the deal. Within a few hours, Speaker Boehner went from saying
the Senate compromise was “a good deal” and “a victory” to saying, “It’s
become clear that what the Senate did pass is going to cause job
creators all kinds of problems.”
Peter Rothberg, Video Statement: “Anyone
despairing over the immense power of the corporate sector to dominate
world affairs should watch this video documenting the power that
grassroots protest can still muster in the face of mass injustice. To
me, the successful effort to forestall the XL Keystone Pipeline was the
signal achievement in a year of significant activist efforts. Thank you
to the 1,253 nonviolent, direct action heroes who took arrests to
underscore the fervid opposition to the ecologically devastating
project.
