For its 25th anniversary, Wired Magazine asked numerous luminaries to pick a figure from the digital world to celebrate; Edward Snowden chose EFF Pioneer Award Winner Malkia Cyril, executive director of the Center for Media Justice and cofounder of the Media Action Grassroots Network, who is one of the leaders in teaching grassroots activists to resist government surveillance.
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Even before the election of Donald Trump, America's pearl-clutching class has been invoking James Madison and his fear of "impetuous majorities" and his desire for "majority rule based on reason rather than passion," worried that the "adults" in the political halls were losing their grip and being forced into "extremism" by mob rule.
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After a poll revealed at 54% of her eligible viewers were not registered voters, with weeks to go before the crucial 2018 midterm elections, Samantha Bee set out to do something to get out the vote.
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California's Democratic Governor Jerry Brown repeatedly vetoed universal
healthcare after the state legislature voted it through; Democratic state majorities in NY, CT and NJ refused to enact legislation to close the "carried interest" tax loophole that makes billions for hedge-fund managers; Rhode Island Democrats went on a slashing spree, taking down pensions for teachers, firefighters and other public servants while the finance-affiliated state treasurer funneled the pension funds into her pals' underperforming hedge funds; Democrats in NJ gutted the tax bill to give millionaires an easy ride; New York Democrat Governor Andrew Cuomo shut down the state anti-corruption commission, only to have his top aide busted for being horrifically corrupt.
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I've been fighting with voting machine vendors since Bush v Gore, when companies like Diebold brazenly sought to subvert the Supreme Court's order to standardize a secure design for US voting machines, going so far as to send out thousands of fraudulent copyright notices in a failed attempt to silence whistleblowers who'd reported defects in their systems.
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Lyft has teamed up with the Urban League, Voto Latino, the Urban League and the National Federation of the Blind to offer free and half-price rides to the polls for voters on November 6. "Transportation issues" were cited as reasons for not voting by 28% of Americans earning less than $20,000 who did not vote in the 2012 presidential election.
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Austin Kleon, explaining why artists and people who love them should be single-issue voters and why that issue should be Medicare for All: "Bad health care has killed more American artists than I could list here without my fingers falling off."
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California voting officials have certified an open source vote-counting package for use in the upcoming LA elections, in the first of a series of planned improvements to the County's voting system (other plans include improved absentee voting ballots).
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Many of today's "red" states have historically had strong trade union movements -- think of Michigan, Missouri and Wisconsin -- but after Citizens United opened the floodgates to dark money from the super-rich in state politics, the states saw their legislatures fill up with ideologue Republicans who passed anti-union laws designed to weaken labor and allow employers to pay their workers less, cut their benefits, fire them more easily, and subject them to less safe, less dignified working conditions.
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Millennial doctors are killing predatory health-care capitalism!
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Jeff Gates writes, "Back in 2010, when I started to take old propaganda posters and remix them with new text and imagery about the sad state of American political discourse, Boing Boing was the first to publicize the work.
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The official story of the Trump administration's family separation policy is that it came about as a result of "zero tolerance" in which every person who could be charged with a crime would be, and that meant that parents were arrested too, and since the parents were going to jail, their kids had to be held somewhere.
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For generations, American mainstream politicians have smeared socialist movements by equating them with Stalinism and other forms of authoritarianism, but today, "socialism" is a label more and more people are embracing.
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Two competing (or, possibly, complementary?) proposals for resolving income inequality and the hole that four decades of demand-side Reaganomics has dug us into are Universal Basic Income and a federal jobs guarantee (the former being a kind of "venture capital for everyone" that provides enough money to live without having to work for an employer; and the latter being a guarantee of a good, meaningful job of social value in sectors like infrastructure, education and caring professions).
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (previously) stunned the Democratic establishment when she comprehensively kicked the ass of finance-friendly, seemingly untouchable Democrat-in-name-only incumbent Joe Crowley in a New York City primary race that she won on a Democratic Socialist platform of abolishing ICE, Medicare for all, a jobs guarantee, a housing guarantee, gun control, relief for Puerto Rico, and gun control.
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