Populist #28: On the Electoral College
by Franklin
America's presidential election system is clearly the most heavily debated part of the United States Constitution, as many people and groups complain about its anti-democratic leanings. Calls have rung out from all over to change the system to a strictly popular vote method.
Although many organizations have long supported the abolition of the Electoral College, the recent protracted proceedings in Florida and Ohio, as well as the apparent disparity between the popular and the Electoral vote have added more fuel to the calls to abolish the Electoral College. However, for all of the furious invectives against the College over the last few years, there has been a scarcity of explanations for why it exists, and how it was originally designed to work..
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The Real Crimes of Ken Lay
by Greg Palast
Al Capone cut throats, machine-gunned people to build his gang and went to jail -- for not filing his taxes properly. Likewise, Ken Lay, buccaneer of the power industry, has gone down for not filing his SEC forms properly. And just as Capone went up the river leaving us a permanent legacy of organized crime, so Ken Lay, whether or not he's sent to the slammer, has left us, with the connivance of a few well-placed politicos, an electricity system which is little more than a playground for power industry predators.
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Bush-Cheney Trainwreck -- Undo
by Stephen Neitzke
Clearing away the Bush-Cheney train wreck will require that we do three very different jobs well. First, we need to morph from milquetoast, directionless consumers back to regular, rights-demanding, well-organized, American citizens. We're not there now, but we've been there before. "Liberty or death", and "live free or die" were American realities in the pre-Revolution 1770s. Liberty, freedoms, and rights -- voiced in the 1776 Declaration Of Independence (DOI) -- drove fighting American patriots throughout the War for Independence.
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America's love affair with "irrational exuberance"
by Ben Tanosborn
In less than six months we'll be taking our annual pause in remembrance of that fateful October 29, seventy-seven years ago, which brought Wall Street to its knees after the stock market excesses - call it economic exuberance - of the twenties. It seems ironic, if not befitting, that the tulip-mania that existed three centuries before in Amsterdam had to be reenacted, of all places, in New Amsterdam. One could say that before becoming the Big Apple, New York had become in 1929, the Big Tulip.
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The So-Called "War on Drugs"
by Stephen Lendman
Since the 1970s the prison-industrial complex has exploded in size and continues to grow exponentially. It now exceeds $40 billion annually and rising. On average states now spend 60 cents on prisons for every dollar spent on higher education, up from 28 cents in 1980. And several large states are so hell-bent to lock people up their annual budget for prisons exceed that for education. Also, the overall rate of prison spending growth has greatly exceeded that for education for the past 25 years. It's shocking that the annual per prisoner cost today almost equals a year's tuition at Harvard. And what's all this spending buying us. Not a damn thing except a nation growing more repressive, more racist and more likely to target anyone if they ever run short of their current favorites.
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