Wall Street blows all other political donors away: During the 2008 election cycle, when the finance sector accounted for nearly 30 percent of all US business profits, its top donors gave $328 million, outspending their closest competitors—lawyers—by more than $200 million.
Posted 14 hours ago
Posted 14 hours ago
~ The Chicago Blue Book, 1908
via Internet Archive
A female private detective in 1908? Miss Cora M. Strayer, I lift my glass to you. I’ll bet you were an interesting person to know.
Note: Apparently Mr. Geo. S. Holben, Supt. Criminal Dept., was shot by a disgruntled former employee in 1910. (Los Angeles Herald, December 06, 1910).According to the 1913 edition of the Chicago Blue Book, Miss. Strayer’s Detective Agency was still in business, although Mr. Holben’s name no longer appeared in the advertisement.
Posted 2 days ago
![fotojournalismus:
Lawmakers from the leftist Palikot’s Movement covered their faces with masks to protest the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement during a legislative session in Warsaw Thursday, Jan. 26. Poland signed an international copyright agreement Thursday, sparking demonstrations.
[Credit : Alik Keplicz/Associated Press]](http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyfeohgFNk1r44q44o1_500.jpg)
Lawmakers from the leftist Palikot’s Movement covered their faces with masks to protest the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement during a legislative session in Warsaw Thursday, Jan. 26. Poland signed an international copyright agreement Thursday, sparking demonstrations.
[Credit : Alik Keplicz/Associated Press]
Posted 3 days ago
The Caging of America; Why do we lock up so many people?
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.
- In this week’s issue, Adam Gopnik writes about mass incarceration and criminal justice in America: http://nyr.kr/A75iOm
Photograph by Steve Liss.
Posted 4 days ago
We do not accept that ours will ever be a nation of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’: we must always be a nation of ‘haves’ and ‘soon-to-haves.’
Republican governor MITCH “I really said that” DANIELS, in delivering the GOP response to the State of the Union Tuesday night.
Continuing the Republican theme of “I deny that this nation has poor people, impoverished people, and what other civilized societies might otherwise term ‘the underclass.’”
(via inothernews)
Posted 4 days ago
“You can call this ‘class warfare’ all you want. But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that ‘common sense.’”
— President BARACK OBAMA
(Source: inothernews)
Posted 4 days ago
You lit yourself on fire on December 17, 2010, exactly nine months before Occupy Wall Street began. Your death two weeks later would be the beginning of so much. You lit yourself on fire because you were voiceless, powerless, and evidently without hope. And yet you must have had one small hope left: that your death would have an impact; that you, who had so few powers, even the power to make a decent living or protect your modest possessions or be treated fairly and decently by the police, had the power to protest.
Posted 1 week ago
First week of classes went pretty well. I still can’t decide whether I want my second major to be Gender and Women Studies or American Studies; therefore, I don’t know which class I should drop.
Tuesday: I went to my first GA of the second semester. It was held on Sproul Hall and it was freezing outside. I want to be a medic but I am going to need to get street training first. It was nice to see the movement begin to shake off the winter hibernation.
Thursday (1/19/12): The Spring into Action rally was not that large but I met a few new people. The GA on Tuesday decided to occupy the Anthropology library in order to have the administration reconsider the cuts they have decided to make to the hours of the library (from 9-6pm to 12-5pm). Kiran and I went to the library at 3 and we heard Professor Cohen speak, who is an amazing source of knowledge. Then, the GA proceeded but it was very frustrating and difficult to sit through. (The BAMN people are very annoying and the Alex incident did not help measures). It was really nice that the faculty decided to stay with the protesters too and even the head of the chair of the antro department also spent the night. I just got news that the occupation ended today and the administration decided to restore the hours and hire more student and staff. The first success of occupy CAL in the second semester :)
Friday (1/20/12): Kiran and I went to Occupy Wall Street West at 5 pm in San Francisco. When we got there, the march was just about to begin. The group was the most diverse I have seen so far. We chanted all the way to an abandoned building, which the police had barricaded before the protesters got there. The police proceeded to pepper spray the protesters when they tried to get past them in order to get inside of the building. The group decided to continue marching instead of fighting with the police. While marching back, a group of anarchists (with their faces covered and wearing an entire black outfit) broke the windows of a Bentley shop, which caused some other protesters to get really angry. This is when the group heard that 10 people were able to get inside the building and everyone decided to go back. Once the group returned to the abandoned building, the anarchists got all the way to the top and they looked like ninjas. They drew their signs and even had a pirate flag. The reason that building was occupied was because the building use to be a medical clinic but the owners fired all of their employees and moved to the richer part of San Francisco so they could have richer customers. This meant that the poor people not only have to travel a lot farther but many lost their jobs. We decided to come home at 9 and were soaking wet by the time we reached our apartment. It was a great experience though.
Posted 1 week ago
Florida Republicans’ Plan to Block Out the Sunshine
In their longstanding fight to privatize the state’s prison system—and a lot of other public services—Republican lawmakers in Florida are trying a new angle: doing it in secret.
A new bill sailing through the Legislature would change the law so that taxpayers wouldn’t get to know about government work turned over to a contractor until after the contract has been signed.
Who wrote the bill? That, too, is a secret…
(Source: Mother Jones)
