Politics & Globalization
International trade agreements force the U.S. and other participting countries to "harmonize" food and envrironmental safety standards to the lowest common denominator. Often these agreements are negotiated behind closed doors, shutting out Congress and the public, while granting corporations and trade associations a seat at the table. It's no surprise that these agreements give transnational corporations "special rights", allowing companies to challenge individual countries' environmental, worker and food safety laws and regulations.
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Rose and Ronnie· Joe volunteer© 2008
New reporting out Wednesday details how some former Obama officials are taking full advantage of the revolving door between big business and government, with critics charging they are exploiting Trump's tenure at the White House by "cashing in" on lucrative opportunities.
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Even at first sight it is exhilarating. The overthrow of one of the most mainstream and senior Democrats in Congress by a 28-year-old Democratic socialist with a radical programme and one tenth of his funding is, you might think, interesting enough.
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From the workers’ struggles in the 19th and 20th centuries that won the eight-hour workday to the growth of a fighting labor movement to my own election as a millennial socialist city council member in Chicago, Midwesterners have consistently backed socialist movements and socialist candidates that reject the political status quo and fight for the working-class values of solidarity and equality.
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"Are you ready for a fight?" Sanders asked the crowd. "Are you ready to defend Roe vs. Wade? Are you ready to tell the Supreme Court that we think it's absurd that they give constitutional rights to billionaires to buy elections and then tell women they don't have the constitutional right to control their own bodies?"
Read moreDespite being one of the United States’s founding statesmen and its second president after independence from Britain, John Adams was quite skeptical of democracy. “Democracy never lasts long,” Adams reflected in an 1814 letter. “It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet, that did not commit suicide.”
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On July 1, leftist politician Andres Manuel López Obrador—often referred to with the acronymic AMLO—won the Mexican presidency in a landslide. When he takes office in December, with his party in control of both houses of the Mexican Congress, Mexico's drug policies are likely to see some radical changes.
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Regulation isn’t a dirty word to makers of organic food. So they’re pushing back against the Trump administration, which has killed off a slate of proposed regulatory changes for raising and manufacturing organic products after coming to power promising to remove “job-killing regulations.” In recent months, shelved proposals have included those covering animal welfare, the manufacture of pet food and beekeeping.
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Julia Salazar, a candidate for the New York state Senate, was standing outside a barbershop in her North Brooklyn neighborhood one recent afternoon, when a barber looked up and saw her through the window. Squinting through the glass, he pointed to a “Salazar for Senate” sign on the wall of the shop, gestured in her direction, and mouthed, “That’s you?” She smiled. “That’s me.
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The chemicals once seemed near magical, able to repel water, oil and stains. By the 1970s, DuPont and 3M had used them to develop Teflon and Scotchgard, and they slipped into an array of everyday products, from gum wrappers to sofas to frying pans to carpets.
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New reporting in Politico spotlights continued themes of the Trump administration: suppression of science, threats to public health, and carrying out the bidding of industry. The issue laid out involves alleged political interference at the EPA, and while the agency's current administrator, scandal-riddled Scott Pruitt, is now on his way out the door, the reins now head to number two Andrew Wheeler.
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