Politics

“Big Government” and Bad Food: Open Season at the Table

Written by Rev. David L. Ostendorf

One can only hope that all the tea partiers who may have recently ended up with salmonella poisoning from Iowa’s bad eggs are rethinking their “big government” attack mantras and, with everyone else, wondering why and how the infamous DeCoster egg operations got away with yet another public food assault after a decade of its “habitual violator” status for environmental degradation.

The DeCoster operations in Iowa have been even more notorious for their treatment of workers—in 2001 the company settled a $1.5 million EEOC discrimination lawsuit over the rape and sexual harassment of its female employees, who suffered immensely at the hands of supervisors. When they suffered there were few national headlines.… Read more

Politics

Lady Liberty Kidnapped!

Written by Glenn Hutchinson

Glenn Hutchinson’s blog has been delayed this month for an important announcement from a guest correspondent, Lady Liberty.

Dear Imagine 2050 Reader,

This is Lady Liberty and I’ve been kidnapped: PLEASE HELP!

I’m being held in an undisclosed location against my will.  The lighting is dim.  The food is terrible.  And most importantly, hope is hard to find as we approach election day in November.

Who is responsible?  Well, do you know Senator Apathy?

That’s right, Senator Apathy is representative of the 111th Congress who has refused to pass meaningful immigration reform.  Sure, they had a full plate: the bailout of the bankers, health care, and so on.  But with that said,… Read more

Politics

Anti-Catholic Organizations Speak at Catholic College

Written by Stephen Piggott

Tomorrow night, the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota will host a public forum on immigration titled, “What Are the Legal and Ethical Boundaries for Dealing with Immigration: Is the New Arizona Law an Appropriate Response?” The forum includes a wide range of guests from Washington D.C. to Arizona and “brings together scholars and nationally known advocates for and against Arizona’s new legislation to share their views on the Arizona law and the issue of immigration in general.”

What is not said in the information bulletin is that two of the groups represented at the forum, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), have… Read more

Immigration

Labor Day in the Great Recession

Written by Jessica Acee

Despite the big dreams and even loftier promises of President Obama and his Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, little has been done to address unemployment, job safety, and job training- topics of utmost concern to American workers.

A steady decline in union membership has mirrored the decline in real wages, standard of living, job security, and social safety nets, not just for union members, but for the entire middle class. Today, only 12 percent of workers hold union cards. And if you discount union members who are public employees, barely 7 percent of private-sector workers are union members.

Companies like Wal-Mart, Coca Cola, and Swift have turned the clock back to… Read more

HAPPY LABOR DAY!

Written by Imagine 2050 Editors

Take Back Our Food System

Written by Charlotte Williams

“Somebody’s making a whole bunch of money, and somebody’s getting screwed.”

These are the bold and profound words of Mr. Bob Miller, a rancher and lifelong farmer, out of Okmulgee, Oklahoma who’s felt the intense squeeze of the pricing pyramid within the livestock industry milieu. The words he spoke are a chilling, yet pervasively accurate, analysis of indications that something is seriously wrong with the U.S. Food System.

On August 27, in the ballroom (with three overflow rooms) of the Lory Student Center at Colorado State University, over 2,000 people, directly and indirectly impacted by the complex, insidious and often incestuous livestock industry matrix, on both side of the debate gathered.  Both major players (and… Read more

Politics

David Duke Announces Presidential Candidacy and Speaks to White Supremacist Church

Written by MJ Olahafa

A few weeks ago, white supremacist, and heavily botoxed former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, David Duke proudly announced that he was a potential candidate for the 2012 U.S. presidential race.

Duke openly advocates for racial segregation and white separatism, yet he claims not to be anti-black, merely pro-white and pro-Christian.

It was probably these ‘Christian’ values that drove him into the arms of America’s Promise Ministries, a denomination that practices an obscure strand of Christianity called Christian Identity. The Christian Identity ideology teaches that salvation is solely for whites, that people of color are soulless, and that Jews are the spawns of Satan.

Politics

‘We deserve to be able to live, to love, to walk freely’

Written by Guest Blogger

The following article is one of a series of accounts from students who recently returned  from Arizona. They were part of a delegation that spent a week touring the state amid  the enactment of controversial law SB 1070. The Center for New Community, a national civil rights organization based in Chicago, sponsored the trip, which included nine students from Washington D.C., New York, Chicago and Colorado.

By Jecika Merzius

Coming here I had no idea what to expect or who I was going to encounter.

The first person from this trip that stands out to me is Ofelia, an elder from the indigenous community Tohono O’odham.  The Tohono O’odham know that they have… Read more

Immigration

Silently Complicit No More

Written by Guest Blogger

The following article is one of a series of accounts from students who recently returned  from Arizona. They were part of a delegation that spent a week touring the state amid  the enactment of controversial law SB 1070. The Center for New Community, a national civil rights organization based in Chicago, sponsored the trip, which included nine students from Washington D.C., New York, Chicago and Colorado.

By Nina Masters

I came to Arizona knowing the immorality and injustice of SB 1070. I left understanding the individual lives torn apart by this law, the children living in fear of men in uniform dragging their parents, uncles, or grandmothers away from them before their… Read more

Immigration

Amidst Hot Winds

Written by George Garza

Our neighbors to the south are caught in a whirlwind of despair while drug lords continue to set the country ablaze with gunfire. The stories coming through the pipeline depict a nation overrun by vicious animals with political agendas. It strikes me odd that this chaos has all but erased the fact that a great chunk of Mexico was recently left in ruins in the wake of Hurricane Alex.

I find it further disturbing that much of America feels it in our best interest to cage the animals and let them sort it out on their own turf. The same cult would have us go knocking door-to-door throwing every “illegal looking” soul over the… Read more