Free Republic

For Wayne Logan, a single father of two, being selected for the city's experimental cash-rewards program for the poor was like hitting the lottery. "I'm happy. I'm grateful," he declared, sounding somewhat amazed at his good fortune. "To get paid to do things I'm doing anyway is a welcome feeling." Logan, 49, was among the first enrollees in a daring $50 million pilot project launched by Mayor Bloomberg with private funds to pay poor families as much as $5,000 a year simply to do the right thing. A child getting a library card is worth $50. A student who passes...

It was the breaking-news headline last Friday that three construction workers had died in a coal-mine accident in Princeton, Ind., and maybe the markets melting down too, that congealed in my mind a thought I'd been kicking around for a while now: Our country is having an "Atlas Shrugged" moment. Trapped coal miners in Utah, smashed levees in New Orleans, busted steam pipes and flooded subways in New York City, a collapsed bridge over the Mississippi River in Minnesota, an air-traffic-control system stressed to its break point. Could this really be a description of the most prosperous country on the...

The international battle for Arctic territory may look like a Wild West brawl but the real fight for supremacy is more likely to revolve around legal arguments and seismic data than showdowns between ice-breakers or submarines.

Woo-hoo! "The Simpsons Movie" has won its name back on the Internet. A UN agency has ruled that ownership of the domain name thesimpsonsmovie.com must be handed to News Corp.'s Twentieth Century Fox, which owns the rights to the film and the popular TV series. Twentieth Century Fox complained to the World Intellectual Property Organization over the use of the film's name in the Internet address of a site registered by Keith Malley of New York. Fox lawyers claimed Malley was using the address to divert Internet users to a website that included sexually explicit depictions of several characters from...

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, July 20, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - World famous opponent of South African apartheid, Nelson Mandela, celebrated his 89th birthday last Wednesday by announcing the formation of a Global council of elders, known simply as "The Elders."So far The Elders includes Kofi Annan, Desmond Tutu, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Mary Robinson, Jimmy Carter, Li Zhaoxing, Muhammad Yunus, Ela Bhatt, Graca Machel, and, of course, Nelson Mandela.  The group of high-profile international leaders is intended to be an independent body of "wise" men and women that will use their combined experience to solve any of the host of problems currently...

Progressivism was the reform movement that ran from the late 19th century through the first decades of the 20th century, during which leading intellectuals and social reformers in the United States sought to address the economic, political, and cultural questions that had arisen in the context of the rapid changes brought with the Industrial Revolution and the growth of modern capitalism in America. The Progressives believed that these changes marked the end of the old order and required the creation of a new order appropriate for the new industrial age. There are, of course, many different representations of Progressivism: the...

Over the past decade, the expression public-private partnership has crept into our publiclexicon. What is a public-private partnership? What purposes were they supposedlycreated to serve? What, on the other hand, is free enterprise? Are the two compatible?In answering these questions we shall see that although advocates of public-privatepartnerships frequently speak of economic development, public-private partnershipsreally amount to economic control—they are just one of the key components of thecollectivist edifice being built up around the idea of sustainable development. Within theeconomic arena of sustainable development is the emergence of what we might call softfascism: a system that fits the dictionary definitions...

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), is proposing a regulatory rule affecting the manufacturing, transportation and storage of small arms ammunition, primers and smokeless propellants. As written, the proposed rule would force the closure of nearly all ammunition manufacturers and force the cost of small arms ammunition to skyrocket beyond what the market could bear—essentially collapsing our industry. This is not an exaggeration. The cost to comply with the proposed rule for the ammunition industry, including manufacturer, wholesale distributors and retailers, will be massive and easily exceed $100 million. For example, ammunition and smokeless propellant manufacturers would have to...

What is a "unipolar" world? by Mike Whitney What is a "unipolar" world? It is a world in which there is one master, one sovereign--- one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within. It has nothing in common with democracy, which is the power of the majority in respect to the interests and opinions of the minority. In Russia , we are constantly being lectured about...

FALLS CHURCH, Va.--Starting July 1, residents and drivers in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads will be taxed by regional governments in which they have little say or influence. It's all part of a tax hike the Republican-controlled Legislature enacted earlier this year. And it's a sharp break from what the state has allowed in the past.

Six years ago, when the first progressive governance summit near London brought together centre-left leaders from around the world, the political make-up of the US and Europe was very different from today. Bill Clinton was in the White House - and was one of the most enthusiastic advocates of such encounters. Eleven out of the 15 European Union countries were governed by left-of-centre parties or coalitions. The Third Way - modernised social democracy - seemed triumphant almost everywhere. Now most of this appears to have changed. The Republicans rule the roost in the US, while the EU is dominated by...

Third Way Plans to Focus On 'Moderate Majority' As Democrats continue to stagger from last week's election losses, a group of veteran political and policy operatives has started an advocacy group aimed at using moderate Senate Democrats as the front line in a campaign to give the party a more centrist profile. Third Way is the latest in a series of organizations aimed at rescuing Democrats from the perception that they have lost touch with middle-class voters, particularly in the heartland states that voted overwhelmingly for President Bush over Sen. John F. Kerry. The group, which has enlisted the support...

WorldNetDaily / Commentary The Third SectorHenry Lamb Posted: August 9, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com A new mechanism of governance is emerging. Georgetown University calls it "The Third Sector." The United Nations calls it "Civil Society." The President's Council on Sustainable Development calls it "a new, collaborative decision process." Whatever it's called, it is a process to formulate public policy by non-elected individuals, unencumbered by the legislative process. The process was developed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and the United Nations. As the IUCN developed its land-management policy proposals, a network of "civil society" organizations, called...