Income Inequality: From IMF To World Bank, It's Landing On The Agenda Of Elite Policy Meetings

WASHINGTON - From the Occupy movement, to the corridors of power: the rallying cry against inequality could be heard the last few days in a setting far removed from the street demonstrations that sprouted in 2011.

The past week's global financial meetings heard repeated warnings about inequality and its deleterious effect on economic growth.

Over the past century, the federal government has pumped more than $470 billion into the oil and gas industry in the form of generous, never-expiring tax breaks. Once intended to jump-start struggling domestic drillers, these incentives have become a tidy bonus for some of the world's most profitable companies.

Enbridge loses the Kitimat plebiscite on Northern Gateway

With a hushed crowd of about one hundred, the unofficial result of the Kitimat plebiscite was read aloud Saturday evening.  Instantly, those gathered at the downtown park erupted into screams of joy.

Enbridge has lost the vote.

Yinka Dene pipeline communities ban Northern Gateway

Two hundred people from four Yinka Dene communities packed a gymnasium in north central B.C. on Friday to give an emotional presentation to the federal government and Enbridge that their alliance formally opposes the Northern Gateway oil pipeline.

"It was amazing to finally tell the feds - this is our decision," Nak'azdli Hereditary Chief Pete Erickson, told the Vancouver Observer Saturday.

Death From Above: How American Drone Strikes Are Devastating Yemen

The people of Yemen can hear destruction before it arrives. In cities, towns and villages across this country, which hangs off the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula, the air buzzes with the sound of American drones flying overhead. The sound is a constant and terrible reminder: a robot plane, acting on secret intelligence, may calculate that the man across from you at the coffee shop, or the acquaintance with whom you've shared a passing word on the street, is an Al Qaeda operative. This intelligence may be accurate or it may not, but it doesn't matter. If you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, the chaotic buzzing above sharpens into the death-herald of an incoming missile.

Don't airbrush Jim Flaherty's record because of sympathy for his family

Decent people naturally feel sympathy with the loved ones of any person taken unexpectedly from life, as just-retired federal Conservative Finance MinisterJim Flaherty was last week.

We are naturally more inclined to experience such feelings of vicarious loss when the person who has died is charming and engaging -- as Flaherty was said by those who knew him to be. This is especially so if we worked closely with that person, as all members of all parties in Parliament did with Flaherty in the course of their work. This presumably accounts for the tears shed by NDP Opposition Leader Thomas Mulcair on learning of Flaherty's death.

But this should not lead us into the temptation to paper over the faults of the departed one, as a great many progressive Canadians have been doing these past few days with the memory of Flaherty. This temptation is particularly great given our Western cultural superstition about "speaking ill of the dead."

Harper government pressured to reject Northern Gateway after Kitimat defeat

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his new Natural Resources Minister, Greg Rickford, are facing growing calls to reject the Northern Gateway oil sands pipeline, after the project was defeated in a critical Kitimat plebiscite vote Saturday.

Nathan Cullen, NDP MP for Skeena—Bulkley Valley, said the $6.5 billion project no longer has social license.

"Enbridge should listen, the Conservatives should listen," said Cullen Saturday night in Kitimat, shortly after announcing the vote's outcome to an ecstatic crowd in the street.  

Ironclad Rule Of Governor In Peru State Called 'Mini-Dictatorship'

CHIMBOTE, Peru (AP) — One by one, the senior officials from the capital took the microphone and apologized to an auditorium packed with angry people who had long been living in fear. The officials admitted they had failed to prevent a political murder foretold by its victim. Their integrity was in doubt.

Peru's chief prosecutor, comptroller and the head of Congress' investigations committee, which was now holding a public hearing, had all ignored evidence that Ezequiel Nolasco, now murdered, had thrust in their faces for months.

36 People Were Shot In 36 Hours In Chicago

A 17-year-old girl killed Friday afternoon was among at least 36 people wounded in gun violence over the weekend in Chicago.

Gakirah Barnes, 17, was shot multiple times in the upper body Friday afternoon in the city's Woodlawn neighborhood. She died about two hours later at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, in what was the first of four gunshot fatalities citywide over the weekend, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.

U.S. Press Once Again Declines to Call White Terrorism in Kansas, Nevada, White Terrorism

My Top Ten differences between White Terrorists and Others,  judging by the Facebook shares, must be among the more popular pieces I have ever written.  It keeps being proven correct by American journalism every day.

I get hot under the collar thinking about all the effort the US government is expending to monitor who we call and where we are when we do it–in the hundreds of millions!– and about all the surveillance of innocent American citizens of Muslim faith and of mosques, when the American fascists receive much less focus.  If a group is armed and announces its purpose is to spread hate of another group, wouldn’t that warrant some surveillance?  By surveiling us all, precious person power is being wasted.