A simple “letter” can cement a tradition, forge alliances, defend the voiceless. Indeed, Catholic Social Teaching began with one. James Gibbons, the Archbishop of Baltimore, hand-delivered a letter to Pope Leo XIII in 1887, protesting the Archbishop of Quebec’s earlier condemnation of the newly formed Knights of Labor. In it, Gibbons positions himself and the […]

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Economic inequality, we suspect, may have crept into more conversations in 2013 than ever before. But people aren’t just talking about how unequal we’ve become. They’re talking about antidotes to the avarice all around us. We’ve assembled out of those discussions a list that samples 2013′s most promising and provocative inequality-busting ideas, proposals, and campaigns. […]

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  “We’re not blocking traffic, we are traffic.” The refrain, of the bicycle activist movement Critical Mass, comes from a (potentially apocryphal) story about one of their eponymous monthly street rides. As the story goes, the flotilla of dozens of bicycles—a “Critical Mass”—careen down a main thoroughfare of a major American city. They are confronted […]

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The headlines haven’t been particularly kind to America’s most relentlessly greedy over the past year. In just the last month alone, the world’s two most visible religious leaders—Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama—have once again dramatically denounced our global concentration of income and wealth. And the world’s most powerful political leader, Barack Obama, has chimed […]

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(Source: @FixTheDebt) Austerity has always been a political choice, not a practical one. That point was underscored yet again when the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) released a report on the pensions enjoyed by backers of Fix The Debt, a corporate-funded austerity advocacy. The tax that funds Social Security stops at $113,700 of annual income. […]

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