In his State of the Union address, many heard echoes of the Barack Obama of old, the presidential aspirant of 2007 and 2008. Among the populist pledges rolled out in the speech was tough talk against the too-big-to-fail banks that have funded his campaigns and for whom many of his key advisers have worked: "The rest of us are not bailing you out ever again," he promised.
economic inequality
Gentrification battle in the centre of Vancouver's working-class heart
Vancouver's Main Street has become a frontier for high-end real estate development.
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Harper seems determined to turn Canada into anti-union paradise
Hundreds of shivering factory workers locked out of their plant by manufacturing giant Caterpillar in London, Ont., might well draw some warm comfort from -- of all things -- the sayings of Newt Gingrich.
Of course, the conservative Republican presidential contender is no friend of labour or social justice; he recently proposed that poor children be schooled in the ways of free enterprise by being hired to clean school washrooms.
Nonetheless, Gingrich, one of the stars of the Republican freak show, is desperate to defeat front-runner Mitt Romney. With the mitts off, Gingrich is denouncing Romney's background as a Wall Street corporate raider, accusing him of practising a form of capitalism where "you basically take out all the money, leaving behind the workers."
Occupy: Why now and what's next?
Naomi Klein: One of the things that's most mysterious about this moment is "Why now?" People have been fighting austerity measures and calling out abuses by the banks for a couple of years, with basically the same analysis: "We won't pay for your crisis." But it just didn't seem to take off, at least in the U.S. There were marches and there were political projects and there were protests like Bloombergville, but they were largely ignored. There really was not anything on a mass scale, nothing that really struck a nerve. And now suddenly, this group of people in a park set off something extraordinary. So how do you account for that, having been involved in Occupy Wall Street since the beginning, but also in earlier anti-austerity actions?