Illusions Revolt!

REN With national policy likely to compound the income and wealth gap in the coming years, states and localities are fighting back. Across the country, local jurisdictions aren’t waiting for federal action or corporate governance reforms to close the wage gap. In December, for example, the city of Portland, Oregon, passed an ordinance to raise the business tax on companies with CEOs who earn more than 100 times the median pay of their workers. Portland officials said the ordinance is the first of its kind in the country. And now, more cities and states are poised to follow suit. Read more >

We are just beginning to understand one further dimension of toxic inequality: a devastating emotional and physiological phenomenon we might call “toxic inequality syndrome.” Thomas Piketty’s best-selling 2014 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, brought attention to a different kind of inequality with a focus on capital. Yet many popular and academic accounts of inequality, spurred by media coverage and the emerging national discourse, continued to focus on income disparities, economic class, and the mega-rich. A preoccupation with income led to an insufficient understanding of the new inequality that left wealth out of the picture. President Barack Obama provided perhaps the crowning moment in this new public attention to economic inequality when he proclaimed in a December 2014 speech that inequality “is the defining challenge of our time.” But the president’s speech referenced income inequality eleven times and wealth inequality once. Leaving wealth out of the conversatio...

The Green movement is above all about leading social change, writes Greenpeace co-founder Rex Weyler. While facts and arguments are important, the main task is to replace mainstream justifications of the status quo with new, compelling narratives of a higher moral order. And the most powerful means of achieving this is by symbolic, non-violent direct action. Read more >

Source: Waking Times In recent years, aid organizations and companies working to extract resources from the vast wilds of the Amazon rainforest have reported a number of sightings of uncontacted tribes, the last remaining holdouts of a simpler time. While fascinating to see human beings still living in such a natural state, many of these tribes simply do not wish to assimilate into Western culture, and activists are working to preserve many areas of the rainforest, preventing their lands from being turned over to oil and gas exploration. While success stories are few and far between, a recent announcement by a Canadian energy company is positive news, as they have agreed to withdraw initiatives to drill for oil in a region of Peru inhabited by uncontacted members of the Matsés tribe. The effort to convince Pacific Rubiales E&P to withdraw from Block 135 was led by Survival International, a “global movement for tribal peoples’ rights.” This particular area of rainforest in ...

Quietly and behind the scenes, a front group funded by the Koch family fortune has lobbied and advocated for the soon-to-be-operating Dakota Access pipeline, a project in which a Koch subsidiary stands to profit. A DeSmog investigation reveals that the group, the 60 Plus Association, pushed in recent months for Dakota Access both on the state…

Wonder where your retirement funds are tonight?  Are you one of the many who fear they may be hanging out with friends of the NRA and it's cretin-in-charge, Wayne LaPierre? Well now there's website with an easy way to find out. Easily check if your retirement funds are invested in the gun related industries — from manufacturers like Smith & Wesson to retailers like Walmart, the largest firearms sellers in the U.S. Just plug in the name of the fund and the site will tell you in seconds what percentage of the fund is invested in stocks tied to weapons. Then the click of a button finds other comparable funds that don’t invest in any gun stocks. OK Mr./Ms. Socially Conscious - no more excuses. Put your money where your heart is! Check it out here .

Periods for Pence: Woman invites governor to gyno appointment Women are standing up to Indiana's anti-abortion governor. One woman invited Gov. Mike Pence to her gynecologist appointment. Another provided an update on her cramps. Another tweeted that she had just changed her tampon. The social media missives directed to Indiana's governor this week have been frequent, pointed and unyielding in their descriptions of female physiology.…