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From the Boston Globe:

A key lawmaker warned yesterday that the House budget released next month “may go deeper” in cutting local aid than the 7 percent reduction that Governor Deval Patrick proposed in January. In a speech on the House floor, Brian Dempsey, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, urged local officials to begin planning for more than the $65 million cut that Patrick had proposed in his spending plan. House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo cautioned, however, that the House’s spending plan is still being written. Local aid pays for trash collectors, police officers, firefighters, and other basic services.

Best to keep in mind Nat Fortune’s quote from his campaign for State Auditor:

When they say there’s no money, what they really mean is there’s no money for you!

Continue reading No money for you!
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According to the latest update from the Earth Policy Institute, Why World Food Prices May Keep Climbing, author Lester Brown points out:

In February, world food prices reached the highest level on record. Soaring food prices are already a source of spreading hunger and political unrest, and it appears likely that they will climb further in the months ahead.

As a result of an extraordinarily tight grain situation, this year’s harvest will be one of the most closely watched in years. Last year, the world produced 2,180 million tons of grain. It consumed 2,240 million tons, a consumption excess that was made possible by drawing down stocks by 60 million tons. (See data.) To avoid repeating last year’s shortfall and to cover this year’s estimated 40-million-ton growth in demand, this year’s world grain harvest needs to increase by at least 100 million tons. Yet that would only maintain the current precarious balance between supply and demand.

World Monthly Food Price Index

Of course, this graph explains part of the democracy revolt in the Middle East.

Read the full update here.

Continue reading World food prices to continue to climb?
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As anti-democratic, anti-union action flows from Wisconsin to Michigan, filmmaker Michael Moore called what’s going on “a class war on the people of this country by those in power and the tools that they have bought and paid for, who now serve in these legislatures.”

He went on to say “This is our moment. This truly is our moment. Everybody, up off the couch right now.”

Watch the incredible interview below:

Continue reading “We need a pro-democracy movement in this country, badly, right now”
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From Abby Zimet of CommonDreams.org:

Protester Tom Spellman, “Scott Walker is going to go down in history as one of the greatest union organizers there ever was.”

In a bold, idiotic move, Governor Scott Walker and the Wisconsin Republican State Senators (minus one), have flaunted Wisconsin law and passed “non-economic portions” of the original budget bill that would have needed a quorum to pass. Acting with impunity like dictators before them, and billionaires at their back, just might have been Walker’s third Mubarak moment. The people of Wisconsin are now moving swiftly to both recall the Republican Senators who went along with a such a mess, and to re-occupy the Capitol building like it were there Liberation Square.

Watch this report from Democracy Now!, and live streaming of what’s happening at the Capitol building below the fold:

Continue reading Walker’s Mubarak Moment #3
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By Lucinda Marshall, Feminist Peace Network.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day.  It is a time to celebrate the lives of women and to renew our commitment to women’s human rights throughout the world.

Million Women Rise March in London

That it is even necessary to have such a day should give us pause.  There is not, after all, an International Men’s Day.  But the truth is that while women may be half of the world’s population, they most assuredly are not equal stakeholders when it comes to human rights and empowerment.

Continue reading The Imperative Of Women’s Human Rights–Reflections On The 100th Anniversary Of International Women
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Bradley Manning

The Pentagon is out to make an example of Bradley Manning. In the “age of Wikileaks”, the most dangerous threat to American world dominance is our own people, with insider access, deciding to blow the whistle of the abuses they witness. Now being charged with “aiding the enemy”, 23 year old Manning is facing the death penalty for allegedly “knowingly giving intelligence information to the enemy”. For exposing US military murder of innocent civilians, Bradley Manning is now himself facing murder at the same hands. In this supposedly Christian nation, the killers are us. The killing — with our munitions, our aircraft, our hands, our tax dollars — continues:

Continue reading The Enemy Is Us
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