Politics
The right of consumers to know whether the foods they eat have been genetically engineered is moving closer to being law. This November the California Right to Know Act will appear on the state ballot as Proposition 37. If passed the measure would be the first U.S. law that requires GMO foods to be labeled.
Each year millions of US citizens are being prevented from voting, simply because they are incarcerated. A new report by The Sentencing Project analyzes the growing scope of voter disenfranchisement among prisoners, as well as ex-offenders. The study also found that minority populations are disproportionately impacted by this growing problem of systematic voting restrictions.
At the recent United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio+20, New Zealand teenager Brittany Trilfold told the world to stop bickering and focus on protecting the environment better for her future and for the future of the world. Twenty years previously, 12-year-old Severn Cullis-Suzuki had done the exact same thing. This insight from these youth is much-needed advice for the two largest polluting economies in the world, the US and China, but will they listen?
Ecolocalizer is a member of an interconnected blog cooperative known as Important Media, a community of websites dedicated to news that matters. Each week we highlight a list of featured articles from different sites across our diverse network, including some compelling posts from Crafting a Green World, Eat Drink Better, sustainablog, Planetsave, CleanTechnica and Blue Living Ideas. Please take a moment to read some of this week’s headlines, and you might learn something new.
Since the Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United decision, our nation’s democratic process has become so corrupted by unlimited corporate donations that it seems to be crumbling before our very eyes. Now that money is considered speech, the voices of millions of citizens are being crushed by a handful of billionaire plutocrats and narrow big business interests. The corrupting influence of unrestricted campaign donations upon our elections was evidenced in yesterday’s elections in Wisconsin.
During his first week as mayor of Ithaca, New York, Svante Myrick gave up his car so that he could walk to his job every day at City Hall. The newly elected 24-year-old official joined 15% of local residents in the city who already walk to work. And even though he does not need it, the mayor is still provided with a central downtown parking spot reserved for his official use. The progressive leader has decided to transform the private parking space into a tiny shared public park.
Ecolocalizer is a member of a blog collective known as Important Media. Each week we share a list of featured articles from across our diverse network, including compelling posts from Eat Drink Better, Blue Living Ideas, Planetsave, Crafting a Green World, Feelgood Style and CleanTechnica. Please take a moment to read some of this week’s highlighted articles, and you might learn something new.
Los Angeles is now one of 49 California cities to ban plastic bags. It took four years to convince nearly all of the local supervisors to vote (13-1) in favor of the prohibition. As the largest city to finally get rid of plastic — the region is responsible for about 2.3 billion of California’s total consumption of 12 billion plastic bags — the ban is expected to spark state-wide legislation.
An Obama-appointed federal judge, Katherine Forrest, has just ruled that the administration’s indefinite detention provisions are indeed unconstitutional, and violate our Fifth Amendment right to due process. The NDAA statute was found to be so incredibly vague that it is nearly impossible to know what specific behavior could potentially subject one to indefinite secret military detention.
Ecolocalizer belongs to an interconnected community of blogs called Important Media, which covers a wide range of topics. Here are a few articles from some of our sister blogs in our network, such as Cleantechnica, Eat Drink Better, Gas2, Feelgood Style, Crafting a Green World and Planetsave.
Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize winning economist and author of the new book, End This Depression Now!, spoke with Rachel Maddow about the direct correlation between expanding income inequality and the increasingly divisive political polarization present in the United States. The wealth disparity between the rich and poor has been historically shown to greatly increase just prior to a severe economic crisis, as it did before the Great Depression; and the wealth gap in our country has never been as extreme as it is right now.
With the increasing zealotry of religious extremists like Rick Santorum, who wants to outlaw all birth control, as well as various states across the country forcing invasive mandatory transvaginal probes upon women before the government will allow them to have an abortion, I wonder if the United States has lost its way? Are we now slowly becoming an intolerant religious theocracy?
This week Michigan Representative Hansen Clarke introduced the Student Loan Forgiveness Act, HR4170, into Congress. Hansen’s proposed bill will allow for all student loans to be forgiven if the borrower can make payments equivalent to 10% of their discretionary income for 10 years. After that point in time, the entire remaining balance of their federal student loan debt would then be expunged.
Just when you thought the government was not going to continue to crawl up inside of your genitals, Governor Bob McDonnell has now signed legislation which requires the state to do just that. Virginia has now joined seven other states which mandate a medically unnecessary ultrasound before a woman is allowed to terminate her pregnancy. Twelve other states in the nation also have similar bills making their way through their legislature.