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As the New York Times has detailed, "Some of the nation's largest corporations have amassed vast profits outside the country and are pressing Congress and the Obama administration for a tax break to bring the money home." Yet, across America, thousands of teachers are being laid off, programs to help feed needy children have been eliminated, and Medicare is under attack. It's time for us to fight back and tell Congress that corporations need to pay their fair share. The first step? Understanding the complex accounting tricks and loopholes giant corporations use to evade taxes. Here's the video that explains it all:

The 'legal high' of bath salts, or mephedrone, is the new target of drug prohibitionists. Because that worked so well before

The Misconception: When your beliefs are challenged with facts, you alter your opinions and incorporate the new information into your thinking. The Truth: When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger.

Martin Luther King - A Time to Break Silence Starting in 1965, King began to express doubts about the United States' role in the Vietnam War. In an April 4, 1967, appearance at the New York City Riverside Church - exactly one year before his death - King delivered Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. In the speech he spoke strongly against the U.S.'s role in the war, insisting that the U.S. was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an American colony" and calling the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." "Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land." "At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor." Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 -- April 4, 1968), was one of the main leaders of the American civil rights movement. A Baptist minist

The Great Debate On November 6th, 2010 a panel of renowned scientists, philosophers, and public intellectuals gathered to discuss what impact evolutionary theory and advances in neuroscience might have on traditional concepts of morality. If human morality is an evolutionary adaptation and if neuroscientists can identify specific brain circuitry governing moral judgment, can scientists determine what is, in fact, right and wrong? The panelists were psychologist Steven Pinker, author Sam Harris, philosopher Patricia Churchland, physicist Lawrence Krauss, philosopher Simon Blackburn, bioethicist Peter Singer and The Science Network's Roger Bingham.  Recorded live at the Arizona State University Gammage auditorium.  "The Great Debate" was sponsored by the ASU Origins Project in collaboration with the ASU Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law Center for Law, Science and Innovation; the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge; and The Science Network. ------ Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers "The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values," "The End of Faith" and "Letter to a Christian Nation." "The End of Faith" won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. Harris has a doctorate in neuroscience from UCLA and a degree in philosophy from Stanford University. He is a co-founder and CEO of Project Reason, a nonprofit foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society.

The most important thing to understand about the Republican jobs agenda is that it's not really a jobs agenda. That sounds simplistic and harsh, but I think it's true, at least if you buy into the mainstream economic consensus.

THE BUCKMINSTER FULLER CHALLENGE 2008 -You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

It seems to me that the OWS movement is moral in nature, that occupiers want the country to change its moral focus. It is easy to find useful policies; hundreds have been suggested. It is harder to find a moral focus and stick to it. If the movement is to frame itself, it should be on the basis of its moral focus, not a particular agenda or list of policy demands. If the moral focus of America changes, new people will be elected and the policies will follow. Without a change of moral focus, the conservative worldview that has brought us to the present disastrous and dangerous moment will continue to prevail.

ScienceDaily (Oct. 21, 2011) - Global warming is real, according to a major study released Oct. 20. Despite issues raised by climate change skeptics, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study finds reliable evidence of a rise in the average world land temperature of approximately 1°C since the mid-1950s.

Between Occupy Wall Street, in New York, and the other cities it's spread to, as well as the October 2011 movement that just began here in D.C, something seems to be happening in this country. Earlier at Freedom Plaza Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author, tells us what this could lead to.

Why KBR continues to be awarded huge open-ended, cost-plus, no-compete contracts from the Pentagon is a question worthy of a criminal investigation, because their track record as a military contractor suggests that "KBR" is actually short for "Kickbacks, Bribes & Ripoffs".  According to the POGO Federal Contractor Misconduct Database, since 1995 the company has been involved in not less than 23 documented cases of misconduct including but not limited to Overcharging the Government, Violation of Anti-Kickback Act, Excessive Subcontract Costs, Fraud and Accepting Kickbacks, Exposing Troops to Hazardous Water Conditions, Bribery to Win International Government Contracts, Overpricing Fuel, Breach of Contract, Hurricane Relief Contract Overcharges, Sexual Assault, Freight Forwarding Kickbacks, Procurement Irregularities, and Conspiracy to Defraud the Government.  For this KBR has paid millions in fines, which it surely considers a small price to pay for the billions it continues to receive in new federal contracts every year:

I'm genuinely excited today to announce the release of my new book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. As of this morning, it is available in bookstores as well as for shipping online. The book focuses on what I began realizing several years ago is the crucial theme tying together most of the topics I write about: America's two-tiered justice system - specifically, the way political and financial elites are now vested with virtually absolute immunity from the rule of law even when they are caught committing egregious crimes, while ordinary Americans are subjected to the world's largest and one of its harshest and most merciless penal states even for trivial offenses. As a result, law has been completely perverted from what it was intended to be - the guarantor of an equal playing field which would legitimize outcome inequalities - into its precise antithesis: a weapon used by the most powerful to protect their ill-gotten gains, strengthen their unearned prerogatives, and ensure ever-expanding opportunity inequality. This is how I described that development in the book:

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Federal inspectors assigned to inspect oil platforms in the Gulf are poorly trained, over-stretched and powerless.

Cities are forced to turn off streetlights and slash school days while the wealthy thrive and wars drone on

"Stephen Budiansky, self-proclaimed "liberal curmudgeon," needs to be taken out to the foodshed and pummeled with his own lousy logic. "

The American Prospect continues its strange attack on "The American Taliban"