Economic Update: The Declining Empire With Chris Hedges

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Money & Company

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Stock markets around the world are tumbling on fears that the global economy is falling precipitously and that U.S. and European lawmakers are unable to stop the bleeding. The market is at risk of the biggest weekly drop since the depths of the global financial crisis in 2008. As of 10:40 a.m. PST, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 425.22 points, or 3.8%, to 10,699.62. That followed a 2.5% drop on Wednesday. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index is off 39.09 points, or 3.4%, to 1,127.67. The U.S. declines followed sharp drops overnight in European and Asian markets, most of which fell about 5%. The worldwide sell-off followed the Federal Reserve's announcement Wednesday that it is rejiggering its holdings of Treasury bonds in its latest bid to spur the economy by lowering interest rates on everything from home mortgages to car loans. Many analysts doubt the Fed action will have any measurable effect, and investors were spooked by the Fed's bluntly worded a
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Florida GOP Takes Voter Suppression to a Brazen New Extreme | Ari Berman | Politics News | Rolling Stone

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Imagine this: a Republican governor in a crucial battleground state instructs his secretary of state to purge the voting rolls of hundreds of thousands of allegedly ineligible voters. The move disenfranchises thousands of legally registered voters, who happen to be overwhelmingly black and Hispanic Democrats. The number of voters prevented from casting a ballot exceeds the margin of victory in the razor-thin election, which ends up determining the next President of the United States. If this scenario sounds familiar, that’s because it happened in Florida in 2000. And twelve years later, just months before another presidential election, history is repeating itself. Back in 2000, 12,000 eligible voters – a number twenty-two times larger than George W. Bush’s 537 vote triumph over Al Gore – were wrongly identified as convicted felons and purged from the voting rolls in Florida, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. African Americans, who favored Gore over Bush by
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The 10 Worst Prisons in America: ADX | Mother Jones

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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
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