Four Ways ALEC Tried to Ruin Your State This Year

By Jessica Mason

In a year with unprecedented rightwing dominance in state legislative chambers, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has continued to wreak havoc in states across the country--despite an ongoing exodus of high-profile corporate members, including BP, Google, and several high-tech firms.

ALEC's legislative playbook for 2015 focused on blocking action on climate change, thwarting local democracy, attacking labor unions, and further privatizing public education in the U.S., as CMD reported last year in covering its legislative agenda for the year.

The Mess that Nuland Made

Exclusive: Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland engineered Ukraine’s “regime change” in early 2014 without weighing the likely chaos and consequences. Now, as neo-Nazis turn their guns on the government, it’s hard to see how anyone can clean up the mess that Nuland made, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

As the Ukrainian army squares off against ultra-right and neo-Nazi militias in the west and violence against ethnic Russians continues in the east, the obvious folly of the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy has come into focus even for many who tried to ignore the facts, or what you might call “the mess that Victoria Nuland made.”

Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs “Toria” Nuland was the “mastermind” behind the Feb. 22, 2014 “regime change” in Ukraine, plotting the overthrow of the democratically elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych while convincing the ever-gullible U.S. mainstream media that the coup wasn’t really a coup but a victory for “democracy.”

The thing Bernie Sanders says about inequality that no other candidate will touch

By Jim Tankersley

There are very few unspoken rules among major-party candidates for president, and Bernie Sanders is breaking one of them. He’s saying that America’s leaders shouldn’t worry so much about economic growth if that growth serves to enrich only the wealthiest Americans.

“Our economic goals have to be redistributing a significant amount of [wealth] back from the top 1 percent,” Sanders said in a recent interview, even if that redistribution slows the economy overall.

Paul Krugman: The Laziness Dogma

Americans work longer hours than their counterparts in just about every other wealthy country; we are known, among those who study such things, as the “novacation nation.” According to a 2009 study, full-time U.S. workers put in almost 30 percent more hours over the course of a year than their German counterparts, largely because they had only half as many weeks of paid leave. Not surprisingly, work-life balance is a big problem for many people.

But Jeb Bush — who is still attempting to justify his ludicrous claim that he can double our rate of economic growth — says that Americans “need to work longer hours and through their productivity gain more income for their families.”

Here's Why All the Bees Are Dying

Bees are essential for life as we know it, but we're wiping them out.

—By Tim McDonnell | Thu Jul. 9, 2015 2:00 PM EDT

Bees are having a really hard time right now. For about a decade, they've been dying off at an unprecedented rate—up to 30 percent per year, with a total loss of domesticated honeybee hives in the United States worth an estimated $2 billion.

At first, no one knew why. But as my colleague Tom Philpott has reported extensively, in the last few years scientists have accumulated a compelling pile of evidence pointing to a class of insecticides called neonicotinoids. These chemicals are widely used in commercial agriculture but can have lethal effects on bees. Other pesticides are also adding to the toll. So are invasive parasites and a general decline in the quality of bees' diets. br />

Why Is Everyone Angry? I'll Tell You Why

Rep. Alan Grayson

This is a short essay on voter anger -- its origin, its attributes, its meaning and its cure. Hint: Most Americans are worse off than they were a long time ago.

I started noticing voter anger around 2009. Initially, its locus was the Tea Party. They're the ones who would form a circle around a political event, holding hands, and start chanting expletives. I attributed this to the Tea Party's deep dissatisfaction with living in the 21st century. To them, basically, everything went south when Jane Wyatt stopped playing Robert Young's Stepford wife on Father Knows Best, and started playing Spock's mother, Amanda ... Grayson, on Star Trek. (Does that mean that Spock and I are future relatives? I don't know.) For them, things have never been the same since.

Greece is the latest battleground in the financial elite’s war on democracy

From laissez-faire economics in 18th-century India to neoliberalism in today’s Europe the subordination of human welfare to power is a brutal tradition

George Monbiot

Greece may be financially bankrupt, but the troika is politically bankrupt. Those who persecute this nation wield illegitimate, undemocratic powers, powers of the kind now afflicting us all. Consider the International Monetary Fund. The distribution of power here was perfectly stitched up: IMF decisions require an 85% majority, and the US holds 17% of the votes.

The IMF is controlled by the rich, and governs the poor on their behalf. It’s now doing to Greece what it has done to one poor nation after another, from Argentina to Zambia. Its structural adjustment programmes have forced scores of elected governments to dismantle public spending, destroying health, education and all the means by which the wretched of the earth might improve their lives.

Latest TPP Draft Benefits Big Pharma By Slashing Access to Generics

In secret talks, the Obama administration is seeking to foist corporate-friendly policies on other countries that he has opposed in the United States, new reporting reveals

by Sarah Lazare, staff writer

With another round of Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations slated for the end of this month, the administration of President Barack Obama is aiming to force developing nations to adopt Big Pharma-friendly policies that are so bad for public health Obama himself has opposed them in the United States.

Citing leaked drafts of the agreement, as well as officials "familiar with the latest May 11 version," Bloomberg journalist Peter Gosselin reported Friday that the deal is likely to include provisions that are almost certain to hike medicine costs while slashing access to generic drugs around the world: "At stake: hundreds of billions of dollars or more in extra costs that consumers may have to pay if the proposals make it harder for cheaper generics to win approval."

Activists in Ferguson Broaden Scope, Unveil 'Power Behind the Police'

The St. Louis-area campaign highlights the networks of powerful individuals who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo

By Sarah Jaffe } July 9, 2015

It's been 11 months since Michael Brown was shot and killed by Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson. In that time, a broad-based movement has grown in the area, one that goes beyond protesting police violence, and calls for deeper change to address the racial and economic inequalities rampant in the St. Louis region. The movement has garnered national attention and has won some important victories: the resignation of several local officials and a police chief, the passage of a state bill, currently awaiting Gov. Jay Nixon's signature, that would reduce the amount of revenue municipalities can derive from tickets and fines, and the prospect of raising the minimum wage in St. Louis to $15 an hour.

But activists think there's much more that needs to change in the area. Many of the reforms that protesters called for have not come to fruition. The state legislature this session considered more than 100 bills designed to address the discrimination, poverty and violence faced by the area's black residents, but only one passed. The reason, the activists say, is that – as is the case across the country – powerful interests like things the way they are.