The State of the Union
Deficit Reduction and Common Sense:
Invest in the Economy, Reduce the Military Budget & Tax the Rich
with
Joseph Stiglitz, University Professor Columbia University,
Recipient Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics

The ink was hardly dry on the massive compromise federal tax bill
when Republican leaders restarted their call for spending cuts in
the new Congress to close the deficit. But Nobel Prize winning
economist Joseph Stiglitz sets the record straight in his speech
before the Roosevelt Institute. He says that the main cause of the
deficits is the recession which premature deficit reduction would
cause to deteriorate further. He also offers us a way to rebuild our
economy which would also fight the increasing mal-distribution of
wealth in this country by taxing the rich, reducing the military
budget and investing in our cities, our infrastructure and new
technologies to increase our productive capacities to increase
economic growth.

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Bloomberg’s Snow Job and
The NYC Council Inquiry Into The Blizzard Fiasco
with
NYC Councilmember Jumaane Williams, Chairman, Oversight and Investigations Committee

The NYC Council held hearings into how the mayor's administration took nearly a week to clear city streets after a holiday weekend snow storm and we’ll go inside the hearings with Jumaane Williams. Specifically on the agenda, was determining what made the mayor say that streets were plowed while everybody was telling him they weren’t. While, the media blamed the sanitation workers, we know the buck stops with the mayor and the managers he appointed and we dig out their negligence and incompetence and find out why.
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Stop the Layoffs: City Workers Protest Bloomberg’s Budget Madness

DC 37 Locals 1113 and 375 held an angry demonstration at City Hall Park recently protesting the layoff of 129 Dept. of Finance workers which is partof the 889 layoffs announced by Bloomberg for this year. Recent forecasts by the NYC Independent Budget Office and the City Comptroller say that NYC will have a budget surplus in excess of $1 billion this fiscal year. Bloomberg’s credibility has been further eroded by the $80 million fraud in the overbudget $800 million CityTime payroll contract which many speakers mentioned as the tip of an iceberg of waste in the City’s $9 billion budget for outside contracts and high paid consultants. They also called for higher taxes on the rich to prevent layoffs and increase NYC services.

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The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
with
Michelle Alexander, civil rights advocate and litigator, author

Alexander offers a bold and innovative argument that mass incarceration amounts to a devastating system of racial control. “Jarvious Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.” In this incisive critique, former litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander argues that we have not ended racial caste in America, we have simply redesigned it. Alexander shows that, by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness.

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Israel’s Building Boom Threatens Palestinian State
with
Richard Falk, prof. of international law emeritus, Princeton University and Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestinian Territories for the United Nations Human Rights Council.

We’ll explore the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. And, we’ll examine the implications for Palestinian statehood of the Israeli settlement-building boom in the West Bank, in the months since the Palestinians were forced to withdraw from peace talks, and the construction of predominantly Jewish housing in East Jerusalem, where the Palestinians hope to make their future capital.
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Tell Israeli Diamond Merchant Lev Leviev, Financing Israeli Settlements Has Got To Go!
with
Adalah-NY

The heck with “chocolate” diamonds, there’s blood on Lev Leviev’s diamonds, the profits from which go to financing the expansion of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. Leviev also continues to support human rights abuses in the diamond industry in Angola. So international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement activists against Israel led a protest against this international merchant of death, at Leviev’s diamond flagship store on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
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