By Veterans For Peace
Veterans For Peace condemns the illegal U.S. attack in Syria. We call on the Trump Administration to immediately end all military actions in Syria and to begin intense U.S. diplomatic efforts to end the conflict in the region. We call on our members and all those who want an end to U.S. wars to contact the President and Congress, to meet and talk to people about peaceful means to end the war in Syria and hit the streets to make our resistance to war visible. [Read more…]
By Deidre Fulton / Common Dreams
Legislation that would expand benefits for Social Security recipients while giving millions of seniors a tax break was re-introduced in the U.S. House on Wednesday, with support from over two-thirds of the Democratic caucus—and, its backers hope, from large swaths of the grassroots resistance movement.
Rep. John Larson’s (D-Conn.) bill, the “Social Security 2100 Act” or H.R. 1902, bears more co-sponsors than any other previous proposal to expand Social Security.
It “gives lie to the myth that Social Security is going bankrupt and the only way to save it is by cutting benefits and raising the retirement age,” said National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare president Max Richtman upon its unveiling. “This legislation asks the wealthy to start paying their fair share so that current and future retirees know that Social Security is there for them well into the future—solid, strong, and uncompromised.” [Read more…]
By Peter Certo / Institute for Policy Studies
In a desolated patch of Mosul, Iraq, people are still digging through the rubble. Rescuers wear masks to cover the stench, while anxious family members grow desperate about missing loved ones.
The full story of what happened in the al-Jidideh neighborhood isn’t yet clear, but the toll is unmistakable. A New York Times journalist reported stumbling across charred human limbs, still covered in clothing, while a man stood nearby holding a sign with 27 names — extended family members either missing or dead. [Read more…]
By Alexandra Rosenmann / AlterNet
The resistance movement met Donald Trump head-on at North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU) National Legislative Conference in Washington, D.C., Thursday, as protesters serenaded the president with a cacophany of boos. Demonstrators bearing placards were escorted out shortly thereafter. [Read more…]
By Alyssa Aquino / Foreign Policy in Focus
As paranoia spreads over the Trump administration’s promised immigration crackdown, there’s a video circulating around California’s immigrant communities.
In it, two people — Lolita Lledo, an immigrants rights activist, and Steve Angeles, a reporter — are making rounds in a Los Angeles neighborhood. Lledo has of late been bombarded with rumors of immigration officers poking around local businesses. To keep the hysteria at bay, the two have been investigating the claims. [Read more…]
Robert Reich / RobertReich.org
Trump’s technique for dealing with bad news is to create enough confusion and partisanship to envelope it in dense fog.
Consider the most explosive news to come along in recent history – that the FBI has commenced an investigation of Trump aides to find out if they colluded with Russian agents to throw the election to Trump. [Read more…]
By Martha Burk / Common Dreams
Once again, Equal Pay Day is approaching. Never heard of it? If you’re a working woman or someone who cares about the working women in your life, you need to study up.
Equal Pay Day is the day in any given year when women working full-time, year-round catch up to men’s earnings from the previous year.
Let’s say the average man made $35,000 last year, from January 1 to December 31. The average woman working the same amount of time made $27,300. It will take her until April 4 of this year to amass the same earnings the guy made by the end of last year. So Equal Pay Day is April 4 this year. [Read more…]
By Abby Zimet / Common Dreams
On April 4, 1984, Winston Smith, the hero of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984, begins his rebellion against a familiarly dystopian world – one “held in a grip of fear, a world of absolute conformity, continuous surveillance, organized hatred and ceaseless war”- by starting a forbidden diary and writing in it, over and over, “Down with Big Brother.”
With a deranged loser-in-chief bringing that world ever closer and to honor Smith’s now-increasingly-vital bravery, almost 200 independent movie theaters will screen Michael Radford’s 1984 film adaptation, starring John Hurt, on Tuesday April 4, 2017 to “take a stand for our most basic values: freedom of speech, respect for our fellow human beings, and the simple truth that there are no such things as ‘alternative facts.’” [Read more…]
By Kate Bahn / Center for American Progress
This year, Equal Pay Day falls on April 4. This means that the average woman had to work from the start of 2016 through April 4, 2017 to earn as much as an average man did in 2016 alone. Put another way, women currently earn 80 cents for each dollar that men earn.
As a result of these factors and others, women can lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in earnings over the course of their careers. But it isn’t just women’s individual bottom lines that suffer: The gender wage gap is also a drag on the U.S. economy, and closing the gap should be a top priority of any economic policy agenda that seeks to strengthen and grow the economy. In fact, comparing it to the current top priority of the GOP—tax cuts for the wealthy—equal pay would put twice as much income back into our economy as their current proposed tax cuts. [Read more…]
By Mark E. Anderson / Daily Kos
On March 25, 1911, on three floors of the Asch Building in Manhattan, young immigrant women from across Europe were making clothing for the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. On that fateful day a fire broke out.
In 1906, Upton Sinclair wrote a novel titled The Jungle. It told the story of Jurgis Rudkis, an immigrant trying to find his way and support his family in his new country. This book tells a tale of food poisoning, work accidents, unsafe and unsanitary practices in the meat-packing industry
What do the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and The Jungle have in common? [Read more…]
By Abby Zimet / Common Dreams
If You Can’t Fight ‘Em Join ‘Em Dept: Now that Congress has voted to sell your Internet history to the highest bidder – be it telecom giant, marketing company, Big Brother, law enforcement, pushy bank, vengeful ex or anyone with any questionable agenda – a new crowdfunding campaign wants to raise enough money to buy the histories of those GOP leaders and lobbying racketeers who sold yours.
The website searchinternethistory.com, one of several proposed resistance efforts, is trying to raise $1 million to bid on the browsing history – financial to medical to pornographic – of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin), Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee), FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and every member of Congress who voted to gut former Obama-era regulations protecting our browser history from corporate and governmental busybodies.
Some sold their souls and your privacy rights for as little as $300 in donations. [Read more…]
By Alison Luterman / Rattle
In the beginning, we wept.
Well, some of us wept.
Some of us walked around stunned
as if pieces of sky
had fallen out of the sky and revealed themselves
to be chunks of blue plaster.
We examined the chunks.
We shook plaster dust out of our hair—there was so much dust!
We craned our necks and stared up. [Read more…]
