The world famous cellist is noted for his genial personality and his untiring efforts to use music to promote understanding between the peoples of the world. He has not been overtly political but he just brought his Bach Project to the sister cities of Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, playing at the border. There were also performances on the Mexican side. He also spoke decrying the building of a border wall.
Bernie Sanders spoke at a town hall sponsored by Fox News. More than 2.5 million viewers watched the event, the largest audience for any of the town halls held so far. You would think that the audience at an event sponsored by the cable news channel that is a fervent supporter of Trump and held in an area that voted strongly for Trump would be unsympathetic to Sanders’s message but it turns out that they responded well.
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I would have thought that child marriage was illegal in the US, but apparently not. Based on a survey, it was estimated that between 2000 and 2010, about 248,000 children, some as young as 12, were married in the US, 77% of them young girls married to adult men. The highest rate of child marriage was in the state of Idaho and a bill to stop it was recently defeated in the Republican-controlled state legislature.
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I have written repeatedly about the abuse of the so-called ‘civil asset forfeiture’ provisions in the law that many government authorities use to seize the assets of people simply because of the suspicion that they may have been involved in a crime. The government holds on to these assets even if the person is not even charged with the crime. It should not be surprising that it is mostly low-income people who are at the receiving end. The people whose assets are seized have to sue the government to get them back, a complicated and expensive process, and many of the affected people simply do not have the resources to do so, so they end up losing their homes and their cars, which are often the only assets they have.
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So says faux journalist Jonathan Pie, in response to the attempts of defenders of the status quo to marginalize anyone who challenges the dominance of the oligarchy and constantly urge political leaders to move to the so-called ‘center’. Although he was speaking in the context of the Brexit debacle where there were defections from both the Conservative and Labour parties, his message applies to the US too. (Language advisory)
The exposure of the Sackler family as the owners of the company Purdue Pharma that is responsible for creating much of the opioid epidemic by aggressively marketing those drugs has resulted in many of the institutions wondering what to do with the gifts that the Sacklers gave to them. Professor of law Terri Lynn Hegee looks at the legal issues faced by these institutions involved in distancing themselves from disgraced donors.
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The US does not adopt two simple practices that are standard in many countries: the first is to provide free tax filing software to all people and the second is that the government could calculate the first draft of your taxes for you and let you know and you sign off if you agree. Right now in the US, you have to use commercial tax preparation software that offers it free only to people who have income below a certain threshold but do not advertise that service so few take advantage of it.
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We live in an age when there are calls to boycott businesses and nations that indulge in practices that are deemed to be unjust or discriminatory or otherwise unsavory. The radio program Reveal produced by the Center for Investigative Reporting had two interesting reports, one on the boycotts targeting Israel and the other on the origin of the word ‘boycott’. The word comes from Capt. Charles Cunningham Boycott, an Englishman working as a landlord in Ireland enforcing high rents at a time when the country was suffering from a famine, and evicting people from their homes if they could not pay. This was in the late 19th century when that entire island was being ruled by the English and the fight for Irish independence was going on.
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Following the series of articles from ProPublica that I discussed earlier, members of Congress have questioned the IRS commissioner Charles Rettig as to why its audits are increasingly being directed away from the very wealthy and more towards the poor.
“How can the Congress stand by a tax-enforcement system that punishes working people and gives the wealthy a green light to cheat?” asked Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, during his opening statement on Wednesday.
…Wyden demanded that Rettig produce a plan within 30 days on how his agency will change a system that is “stacked in favor of the wealthy” and “against the most vulnerable.” Rettig promised to do so.
Sex work has long been legal in countries like the Netherlands. But now a petition has been launched to change the law and adopt the so-called ‘Nordic model’ of Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Northern Ireland and France that makes it an offense for people to buy the services of sex workers. The petitioners claim that legal sex work leads to exploitation and human trafficking. What is surprising is that the 42,000 young people have signed the petition. What is not surprising is that many of these young people are religious.
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