Elms Progressive Media

Michael Moore says the real IRS scandal is corporations not paying taxes (via Mlive.com ) FLINT, MI -- The real IRS scandal is the agency allowing General Electric "and 50 other corporations" not to pay any taxes, Flint native and filmmaker Michael Moore said on HBO's “Real Time With Bill Maher."  According to a report in the Huffington Post, Moore said Americans are focusing on the…

How New International Food Aid Rules Could Save Millions — In Lives And Dollars : pThe Somali famine of 2011 was a massive, monstrous failure on the part of the international community at almost all levels. A new report released on Thursday indicates that the crisis took the lives of a far greater number than many experts predicted: Up to 260,000 Somalis died that year, over half of them children, [...]/p

If you can't do the time, don't do the crime." So goes the old saying. Yet conditions in some American facilities are so obscene that they amount to a form of extrajudicial punishment. Doing time is not supposed to include being raped by fellow prisoners or staff, beaten by guards for the slightest provocation, driven mad by long-term solitary confinement, or killed off by medical neglect. These, however, are the fates of thousands of prisoners every year—men, women, and children housed in lockups that give Gitmo and Abu Ghraib a run for their money. The United States boasts the world's highest incarceration rate, with close to 2.3 million people locked away in some 1,800 prisons and 3,000 jails. Most are nasty places by design, aimed at punishment and exclusion rather than rehabilitation; while reliable numbers are hard to come by, at  last count  81,622 prisoners were being held in some form of isolation in state and federal prisons. Thousands more are being held

MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell extended sympathy to who he called “honest Libertarians” on Tuesday, while picking apart the flaws in recent statements by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and retired Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) over authorities’ tactics during the search for and capture of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects. “You deserve better spokesmen than Ron and Rand,” O’Donnell said. “But until you get better Libertarian advocates, you’re going to have to continue to endure paranoid, lying politicians in the Paul family.” O’Donnell began his account by focusing on  Rand Paul’s April 23 statement  that, “If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and 50 dollars in cash I don’t care if a drone kills him or a policeman kills him.” O’Donnell tells Libertarians: You deserve better spokesmen than Ron and Rand Paul | The Raw Story