Molly Munger’s challenge
By Peter Schrag
You have to hand it to Molly Munger – for courage, maybe, or maybe just for Quixotic dedication.
Munger, a Los Angeles civil rights lawyer and former federal prosecutor, has devoted much of her career, and part of her considerable fortune, to expanding early childhood education and to equity for poor and minority children in our desperately underfunded schools.
Last week she formally —and audaciously -- launched a campaign to raise an additional $10 billion a year in taxes for preschools and K-12 education.
And that’s taxes not just on the rich, and not on oil companies or smokers, the legendary man behind the tree. Munger wants to pass an initiative next November calling for an across-the-board one-percent increase in income taxes on everybody except those with the very lowest incomes.
Ending the Drug War: Top Stories of 2011
By Tony Newman
Drug Policy Institute
2011 has been a watershed year for the movement working to end our county's disastrous war on drugs. Below are the top stories of the year that exemplify the momentum and give us hope that we can find alternatives to drug war madness.
#1. World Leaders Make International News by Calling for Marijuana Legalization and End to Drug War
The Greatest Hoax in the History of Money: The Fed, the Banks, the Lies
By Richard (RJ) Eskow
Campaign for America's Future
It took the journalists at Bloomberg News two years - and presumably lots of legal fees - to pry information out of the Federal Reserve that should have been made public long ago. We now know that the Fed's secret $7.7 trillion lending program wasn't just the most massive bank bailout ever seen, and it wasn't just free money for mega-bankers - though it was certainly both of those things. It was also the greatest hoax in stock market history.
No, scratch that. It was the greatest hoax in the history of money. And it was built on lies. How many? Let us count the ways.