"We Need a New Culture on the Left, Pluralist and Tolerant"

Marta Harnecker/translation by Federico Fuentes Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal
In a wide ranging acceptance speech for the 2013 Liberator's Prize for Critical Thought, sociologist and author Marta Harnecker discusses the essential role of genuine popular participation in the revolutionary transition to "21st Century Socialism" in Latin America, exercising power in the "inherited (capitalist) state" to build the foundations of a new political system, and the fundamental need for a new pluralist and tolerant culture on the left.

Heavy Metal Songs: Contaminated Songbirds Sing Wrong Tunes

Helen Fields and Alanna Mitchell Environmental Health News
After extensive research in Virginia, scientists have shown that mercury alters the very thing that many birds are known for – their songs. Emitted by the burning of coal, mercury in the atmosphere has quadrupled since the days before industrialization. Understanding why mercury-contaminated songbirds can’t sing their songs could help scientists learn more about how human brains are damaged by mercury, too.

Documentary: The One Percent

This 80-minute documentary focuses on the growing "wealth gap" in America, as seen through the eyes of filmmaker Jamie Johnson, a 27-year-old heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical fortune. Johnson, who cut his film teeth at NYU and made the Emmy®-nominated 2003 HBO documentary Born Rich, here sets his sights on exploring the political, moral and emotional rationale that enables a tiny percentage of Americans - the one percent - to control nearly half the wealth of the entire United States. The film Includes interviews with Nicole Buffett, Bill Gates Sr., Adnan Khashoggi, Milton Friedman, Robert Reich, Ralph Nader and other luminaries.
 

'Moral Week Of Action' Takes Off

Terrance Heath Campaign for America's Future
A “Moral Week of Action” demands that Republicans “repent and repeal” their public policy attacks on the human and civil rights of North Carolinians

Inequality and the USA: A Nation in Denial?

Sam Pizzigati Inequality
America’s top central bankers didn’t make time for inequality at their annual hobnob last week. Over in Germany, Nobel Prize winners in economics did. But few Americans noticed.