A group of folks from Occupy Boston have started a new paper, The Boston Occupier, with coverage of the local, national, and international movement and related issues. From their opening editorial:
The Boston Occupier is an independent news source furthering the political and economic discourse initiated by the Occupy movement. Staffed entirely by volunteers, it will operate in three forms: a website, a broadsheet and a daily update distributed solely at Dewey Square.
In addition to covering the Boston’s occupation and larger movement itself, the Occupier will report on unemployment, campaign finance, corporate personhood, social justice, transparency, accountability, and the other issues raised by the protesters.
We seek to facilitate respectful debate. Following the cue of other publications, the op-eds selected for publication will generally be those which offer a perspective different from those of the editorial section. All ideas are welcome, so long as the discussion surrounding them is carried out in a coherent and thoughtful manner.
If the encampment at Dewey Square comes to an end, this publication will be a way for the dialogue it has inspired to persist. Independent of the group’s physical presence in the heart of the financial district, The Boston Occupier hopes to provide a space for respectful, insightful dialogue on the political and economic troubles of our day. We have a closer vantage point than others, but that doesn’t mean that our aspirations to high journalistic standards of informed objectivity are less valid.”
Interview with Jesse LaGreca, freelance writer for the Daily Kos under the name MinistryOfTruth, at the Oct. 5th Solidarity March with Occupy Wall Street. Jesse’s interview with a FOX News Reporter has been exploding on the internet…but for some reason FOX never aired it. Hmmmmmm.
No one can watch this and not decide that either President Obama is ranked high among the worst politicians in history, or he got essentially what he wanted.
The richest 1% of US Americans earn nearly a quarter of the country’s income and control an astonishing 40% of its wealth. Inequality in the US is more extreme than it’s been in almost a century — and the gap between the super rich and the poor and middle class people has widened drastically over the last 30 years.
Meanwhile, in Washington, a bitter partisan debate over how to cut deficit spending and reduce the US’ 14.3 trillion dollar debt is underway. As low and middle class wages stagnate and unemployment remains above 9%, Republicans and Democrats are tussling over whether to slash funding for the medical and retirement programs that are the backbone of the US’s social safety net, and whether to raise taxes — or to cut them further.
The budget debate and the economy are the battleground on which the 2012 presidential election race will be fought. And the United States has never seemed so divided — both politically and economically.
How did the gap grow so wide, and so quickly? And how are the convictions, campaign contributions and charitable donations of the top 1% impacting the other 99% of Americans? Fault Lines investigates the gap between the rich and the rest.
This episode of Fault Lines first aired on Al Jazeera English on August 2, 2011 at 0930 GMT.