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Monday 23 April 2012

Shareholders Say No to Citigroup CEO Pay: A Model for Fighting Crony Capitalism
Dean Baker, Truthout: "Last week, the country saw one of the fruits of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. The bill requires that major corporations offer their shareholders the opportunity to vote on the pay package for their chief executive. The shareholders of Citigroup voted down the $14.9 million pay package for CEO Vikram Pandit by a margin of 55-45 percent. The vote was nonbinding (a very serious problem), but it was nonetheless a huge slap in the face for Pandit and Citigroup's top management and directors."
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Supreme Court to Hear Arizona Immigration Case This Week
Michael Doyle, McClatchy Newspapers: "Immigration politics will hit the Supreme Court this week as justices weigh how much border-control clout the states can deploy. In their latest highly charged faceoff, the justices must decide whether Arizona went too far with a crackdown that includes ordering police to routinely check the legal residency status of people they stop. The court's final answer this election year could ignite Capitol Hill, other states and, not least, Hispanic voters."
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BP Covered Up Blowout Two Years Prior to Deadly Deepwater Horizon Spill
Greg Palast, EcoWatch: "This week, EcoWatch.org located an eyewitness with devastating new information about the Caspian Sea oil-rig blow-out which BP had concealed from government and the industry. The witness, whose story is backed up by rig workers who were evacuated from BP's Caspian platform, said that had BP revealed the full story as required by industry practice, the eleven Gulf of Mexico workers 'could have had a chance' of survival. But BP's insistence on using methods proven faulty sealed their fate."
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Bill Moyers | Keep Political Ads Off Public TV
Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company: "Sesame Street - brought to you by the letter C, for creeping campaign cash corruption.... [A] startling decision from the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently struck down the federal ban against political and issue advertising on public TV and radio. This means potentially, that super PACs, special interests, and the rich who want to influence elections could buy ad time on your favorite public television or radio station."
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On the News With Thom Hartmann: Open-Government Group Files IRS Complaint Against ALEC, and More
In today's On the News segment: Open-government organization Common Cause filed an IRS complaint against ALEC today, world economy needs to add 200 million jobs to come out of global recession and into full employment, Dutch electronic company releases light bulb with 20-year lifetime, and more.
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The Present and Future of the University: An Interview With David Theo Goldberg
Grace Pollock, Truthout: "In a wide-ranging conversation at McMaster University on March 15, 2012, Grace Pollock, the director of the Public Intellectuals, interviewed the internationally renowned race theorist David Theo Goldberg on the changing nature of the university ... Both Goldberg and Pollock are deeply involved in rethinking ... what it means to provide a new language and set of understandings in order to meet existing and future challenges to making the university a relevant democratic public sphere in a world of shifting power, economics, technologies and possibilities."
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Public Outcry in New York Over Fracking Breaks State Record
Lisa Song, InsideClimate News: "A four-year-old hydraulic fracturing study by New York's Department of Environmental Conservation has broken a state record: It has drawn more public reaction than any other issue in the agency's history.... Some environmentalists believe the DEC will continue to ban fracking in New York. Others expect the ban to be lifted and are counting on the new regulations to provide effective protections."
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Ten Reasons the JOBS Act Is an Insane Race to the Bottom
William K. Black, New Economic Perspectives: "The primary rationale for the JOBS Act is the claim that we must win a regulatory race to the bottom with the City of London by adopting even weaker protections for investors from securities fraud than does the United Kingdom (UK). The second form of insanity is that the JOBS Act is being adopted without any consideration of the findings of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), the national commission to investigate the causes of the current crisis."
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E.J. Dionne Jr. | How to Beat Citizens United
E.J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post Writers Group: "We are about to have the worst presidential campaign money can buy. The Supreme Court's dreadful Citizens United decision and a somnolent Federal Election Commission will allow hundreds of millions of dollars from a small number of very wealthy people and interests to inundate our airwaves with often vicious advertisements for which no candidate will be accountable."
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Chris Hedges | The Globalization of Hollow Politics
Chris Hedges, Truthdig: "The emptying of content in political discourse in an age as precarious and volatile as ours will have very dangerous consequences. The longer the political elite - whether in Washington or Paris, whether socialist or right-wing, whether Democrat or Republican - ignore the breakdown of globalization, refuse to respond rationally to the climate crisis and continue to serve the iron tyranny of global finance, the more it will shred the possibility of political consensus, erode the effectiveness of our political institutions and empower right-wing extremists."
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Labor Unions' Fight for the 99 Percent Goes Beyond Raising Campaign Dollars
Sarah Jaffe, AlterNet: "... Democrats and progressives who see labor as just another special interest to be tapped for funds during election season and then negotiated with (or more often, forgotten about) when it comes time to govern have forgotten those vital images from last year - or the last century. They've forgotten that unions represent millions of working Americans, struggling under the weight of austerity policies and a stagnant economy, who are getting increasingly fed up with their treatment by politicians."
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Paul Ryan's Religion of Convenience
Alesa Mackool, RH Reality Check: "On Thursday, Rep. Paul Ryan strayed from the current Republican mantra when he said he 'respectfully disagrees' with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). What Ryan disagrees with is the Bishops' stance that it's not very Jesus-like to let poor people starve. Food stamps were one of the many safety-net programs that got the axe in the Ryan budget, in favor of tax breaks for large corporations."
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Word Order: The Internet as the Toy With a Tin Ear
Lews H. Lapham, TomDispatch: "The making of countless connections in the course of a morning's googling, an afternoon's shopping, an evening's tweeting constitutes the guarantee of being in the know. Among people who worship the objects of their own invention - money, cloud computing, the Super Bowl - the technology can be understood, in Swiss playwright Max Frisch's phrase, as 'the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.'"
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Afghanistan War Is Turning GIs Into Junkies as Afghan Opium Production Soars Under US Occupation
Mark Karlin, BuzzFlash at Truthout: "What's more deplorable is that under US occupation, the cultivation of poppies has grown - some might even say surged in Afghanistan.... Opium cultivation in Afghanistan basically has risen from 70 percent of the world's supply in 2000 to 92 percent now - and it is continuing to rise according to a CBS News report.... Meanwhile, we send soldiers to Afghanistan and some of them come home junkies."
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Florida Police Chief Who Went Easy on Zimmerman to Quit
Read the Article at the Guardian UK

The Top Ten Facts About the Wage Gap: Women Are Still Earning Less Than Men Across the Board
Read the Article at The Center for American Progress

Betrayal of Trust? Allegations of Rape at West Point
Read the Article at CNN

Walmart Scandal in Mexico Points to US Hypocrisy on Bribery
Read the Article at The Daily Beast

Mitt Romney: Professional Liar
Read the Article at Consortium News

Pentagon Creates New Espionage Unit
Read the Article at The Washington Post

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