June 28, 2010 - My city feels like a crime scene, and the criminals are all melting into the night, fleeing the scene. No, I'm not talking about the kids in black who smashed windows and burned cop cars on Saturday. I'm talking about the heads of state who, on Sunday night, smashed social safety nets and burned good jobs in the middle of a recession. Faced with the effects of a crisis created by the world's wealthiest and most privileged strata, they decided to stick the poorest and most vulnerable people in their countries with the bill.
June 28, 2010 - Established in 1999, G20 finance ministers, central bank governors, and, at times, heads of state meet semi-annually to "discuss key issues in the global economy," the initial 1999 meeting in Berlin, hosted by German and Canadian finance ministers. G20.org calls its itself "the premier forum for our international economic development that promotes open and constructive discussion between industrial and emerging-market countries on key issues related to global economic stability," saying it "support(s) growth and development across the globe," or does it?
June 25, 2010 - As I wake each morning here in Detroit at the US Social Forum, I glance just a few hundred yards across the way, and I know people have healthcare without regard to financial or other barriers. And it hurts like hell to see the cars "over there" winding along the river inside Canada and know that as I sit here in my own nation, I am without the basic human right to healthcare just because I am an American.
June 24, 2010 - The first time I saw New Orleans, it was an empty city, save for the National Guard troops and Blackwater mercenaries patrolling the storm-ravaged streets. It was September 16, 2005, a little more than two weeks after the winds of Hurricane Katrina pushed the waters of the Gulf of Mexico up into the heart of the city via the Mississippi Gulf River Outlet, where they met the contents of the Industrial Canal in a fatal mix, overtopping the levees that were all that stood between the waterway and the death by drowning of the city's storied Ninth Ward.
May 20, 2010 - In setting up his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, Barack Obama is again playing coy in public, but his intentions are widely understood among Washington insiders. The president intends to offer Social Security as a sacrificial lamb to entice conservative deficit hawks into a grand bipartisan compromise in which Democrats agree to cut Social Security benefits for future retirees while Republicans accede to significant tax increases to reduce government red ink.
May 24, 2010 - When a billion gallons of coal ash broke loose from a holding pond at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston power plant near Harriman, Tenn. in December 2008, registered nurse Penny Dodson was living nearby with her 18-month-old grandson, Evyn. Like most of her neighbors, Dodson never gave much thought to the impoundment until it collapsed, destroying three homes, damaging 42 others and inundating the nearby Clinch and Emory rivers with the sludgy coal waste.
May 24, 2010 - The war between the giant hotel corporations and hotel workers is heating up again. The recent three-day strike at the San Francisco Hilton Union Square by UNITE HERE Local 2 workers was just one battle in this fight. But the story in the corporate media is not about economic justice for low-income and hard working room cleaners, housemen, bellmen, cooks, servers and dishwashers. Instead, the corporate media focuses on hotel room rates and occupancy levels, beating the drum for the allegedly suffering hotel companies. The corporate media, as usual, ignores the real story: the hotel industry today is much more about bankers, hedge funds, real estate speculators and financial profiteering than it is about selling rooms.
