Category: Politics

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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(Khalil Bendib for OtherWords) You have to consult dictionary.com for the definition of “trillionaire.” Webster’s doesn’t yet recognize trillionaire as a word. But it will. If you’re under 60, America’s first trillionaire will likely appear in your lifetime. And the recent budget deal in Congress does nothing to alter that scenario. Unless our leaders change […]

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In a new decision in support of the NSA’s phone metadata surveillance program, U.S. district court Judge William Pauley cites an intelligence failure involving the agency in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks. But the judge’s cited source, the 9/11 Commission Report, doesn’t actually include the account he gives in the ruling. What’s more, experts […]

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Austerity is often made to seem vital, the only route out of a fiscal disaster. But a closer look at the reality of the current crises—in municipalities like Detroit and Stockton, Calif., the state of Illinois, and even the U.S. Postal Service—reveals a much more deliberate progression. In each case, the same pattern develops: beleaguered […]

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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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