politics
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How Billionaire "Philanthropy" Is Fueling Inequality And Helping To Destroy The Country
Peter Buffett, the second son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, worries that the state of philanthropy in America “just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place.” At meetings of charitable foundations, he says “you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left.” [...] Read More »
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How Industrial Agriculture Has Thwarted Factory Farm Reforms
In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Robert Martin, co-author of a recent study on industrial farm animal production, explains how a powerful and intransigent agriculture lobby has successfully fought off attempts to reduce the harmful environmental and health impacts of mass livestock production. Read More »
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How Jock Culture Supports Rape Culture, From Maryville To Steubenville
Your 14-year-old daughter is dumped on your freezing front lawn in a state of chemically induced incoherence with her shoes off and frost stuck in her hair. She tells you she was raped. [...] You wait for the indictments and some semblance of justice, but they dissipate, as one of the accused is a football star from one of the area’s most prominent and politically connected families. [...] Then it gets worse. Read More »
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How Much Does It Cost To Win Election To Congress?
A year ago, we wrote about a fantastic episode of the radio program This American Life, which was all about lobbying. One part of it revealed just how much time our elected officials in Congress spend fundraising, and the numbers were somewhat astounding... Read More »
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How the Shutdown Is Devastating Biomedical Scientists And Killing Their Research
The federal shutdown’s effects on science and medicine are many. There’s halted food safety inspections, kids with cancer who won’t be able to join clinical drug trials, and suspension of disease outbreak monitoring. Conservation studies have been thrown into disarray and at least one NASA Mars mission is at risk of being delayed for years. Read More »
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In The News
Mobile technology is now being used for everything from paying bus fares to eye tests, donating money for disaster relief to distance learning. ICT for development remains a big issue in Africa and here’s a sweep of some of the latest developments that we’ve been following at Indigo. Read More »
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Ingle: Officials Have Botched U.S. Response To Ebola
Because of the Ebola virus, mistrust of politicians and government agencies is growing, and they have nobody to blame but themselves. They blew it...
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Is Lobbying Closer To Bribery... Or Extortion?
We've certainly talked quite a bit about the institutional-level corruption of the way Congress and lobbying works, but a recent This American Life episode, done in partnership with the Planet Money team takes a much deeper dive into how lobbying works... Read More »
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Judgment Day: Dr. Margaret Flowers on What Follows the Supreme Court Ruling on Healthcare
Margaret Flowers, MD, is a pediatrician whose exasperation with the American healthcare system turned her into a single-payer activist. In 2009 she was arrested at the Senate Round Table on Health Insurance for attempting to speak on behalf of a single-payer plan when single-payer had been cut out of the conversation. Read More »
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Lapse In Chemical Security Effort Cited As Another Reason To End Shutdown
The Obama administration is adding the closure of the Homeland Security Department's chemical security program to its list of reasons why Congress should end the partial government shutdown that began last week. Read More »
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Larry Lessig: The Corruption of the American Political System
Two years ago, I interviewed law professor, author, and Creative Commons co-founder Larry Lessig to discuss his work on institutional corruption and what he describes as the "economy of influence" in American politics. This week he was back in Durham, NC to discuss his new book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It.
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Marco Rubio: No Bailouts For ObamaCare
With every passing day, ObamaCare's flaws are being exposed in painful ways for the American people. What started as a broken website—and nonexistent Spanish one—is now snowballing into a full-scale disaster that makes it increasingly clear this law can't be fixed. Read More »
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Obamacare's Slush Fund Fuels A Broader Lobbying Controversy
A little-noticed part of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act channels some $12.5 billion into a vaguely defined “Prevention and Public Health Fund” over the next decade–and some of that money is going for everything from massage therapists who offer “calming techniques,” to groups advocating higher state and local taxes on tobacco and soda, and stricter zoning restrictions on fast-food restaurants. Read More »
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Obama’s Pick For Ebola Czar Comes Under Fire
...Obama’s appointment Friday of Ebola czar Ron Klain, a career lawyer and political loyalist with limited federal project management skills and no experience managing a public health crisis, invokes images of the Bush-era response to Hurricane Katrina led by former Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown, another career lawyer whose only significant management experience up until Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast was as a commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association...
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Political Implications of the Supreme Court Decision on Health Reform
Regardless of the facts about the benefits or costs of health reform, a majority of Americans still favor repeal of the legislation. Those numbers rose in the run up to the 2010 elections and helped provide the shellacking the President received in the mid-term elections.
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