IFSPP covered POLITICON, a wild and raucous SoCal event that features high-profile players in politics from across the ideological spectrum for unconventional discourse, and we’re pleased to bring you video from panel discussions, spotlight events and interviews conducted in Democracy Village.

Arizona Senator John McCain died this week. Progressives and Democrats have been issuing a series of confusing statements talking about what a Great American McCain was. In embracing his distaste for Donald Trump, they seem to have forgotten his lack of support for all American workers, his willingness to bomb any country on Earth into ...

My wife, Sally’s sister, Judith Kahrl, the founder of Grandmothers for Reproductive Rights(GRR!!) had her July 29, 2018 letter published in the Portland Press Herald which reported that over 200 million women worldwide lack access to contraception. These sisters’ father, Clarence Gamble, founded Pathfinder International in 1956, which ever since has been most effective in its efforts to reach ...

As we leave July behind and move forward into August, we approach the end of Congress’ session for the year. This means that members of Congress are more focused on preparing re-election campaigns than voting on bills, but with legislative backlog mounting in the hundreds, there may be more incentive than usual to get bills passed ...

A new report by the Brennan Center shows that millions of registered voters were purged from state registries across the nation, leading to renewed accusations of voter suppression and discrimination. The 1965 Voting Rights Act included numerous provisions to prevent voter discrimination in states that, shall we say, had a history of discriminating by race. States would ...

Almost a year after the devastating Hurricane Maria, reporters are still trying to discover the actual body count. While official counts totaled less than one hundred, it is now believed that over 4,500 Puerto Ricans died during and in the aftermath of the natural disaster. The island also remains in disarray, due to poor response from ...

It’s almost the end of June and here we are with another edition of Policy Watch! Congress lately has been once more busy with immigration, so we’re going to take a quick look at those to help keep you informed. Before that, in an update from our last edition of Policy Watch, The Project Safe Neighborhoods ...

As we acknowledge World Environment Day and World Oceans Day this week – days to recognize the human impact on our environment and discuss the best ways to help protect it – and in Pennsylvania, many are using the week to recognize the impact of fracking. A recent article in The Wall Street Journal, “Oil Is Above $70, but ...

Senator Bernie Sanders wants a bold new federal jobs program, and he’s right.

Recently Brian Olsavsky, Chief Financial Officer at Amazon, stated that effective May 11, new Amazon Prime subscribers would pay $119 for an annual membership as opposed to $99 for current members. This follows the release of Amazon’s first quarter earnings report which, according to financial reporter Shannon Liao, were “eye-popping,” with $51 billion in sales (North ...

I had the pleasure to sit down with James Howard Kunstler, author of such notable books as the geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, the fictional World Made By Hand Series, and my personal favorite, Too Much Magic, Wishful thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation. The intention was to talk specifically about Syria ...

America is in a new “gilded age”, only without the mass child labor. We are still riddled with mass wealth inequality, neglected social institutions, and a government run by tycoons and villains. The crackdown on unions and labor movements of the past decades has yielded no fruit for America’s working class, and for too long ...

President Trump’s new budget proposal, released February 12, includes measures to end federal funding for PBS and National Public Radio, as well as the elimination of vital student loan programs. It would also replace the SNAP program with “foods packages.” Trump’s plan would also demand major cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. I didn’t think I’d have ...

Those of us who live in California and oppose illegal immigration are often met with the bromide that illegal aliens plant and harvest our food, and that without them, the nation would starve. We are told illegal aliens are the backbone of California agriculture. It has been true that Mexican born labor has been at ...

Progressives have always moved society forward, for better or worse. It has always been the label of political pioneers: Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt to be politically progressive – though they were from different political parties – one for his abolition of slavery, another for granting African Americans the right to vote, ...

The is our take on Charles Hugh Smith’s (oftwominds.com) perpective on how to visualize the magnitude of a trillion vs a billion vs a million.  It is a very important thing to get our heads around given that budget deficits liabilities of our country and others are measured in trillions of dollars! Video editing by Kevin ...

The other day my wife and I had the morning off together – a rare occurrence. To celebrate we decided to go to a different Coffee Bar from our usual haunt, one located on the far more affluent side of town. The place has a new owner, and since she took it over has  a ...

For the longest time, Bitcoin, the Internet’s largest cryptocurrency, slowly puttered along as essentially a libertarian thought experiment. That is, “why rely on the American Dollar, which is backed by a federal reserve, when a community can collectively create a separate currency?” Years ago, Bitcoin users were lucky to purchase pizza with their independent coin, ...

In the dead of night, democracy died with a whimper. Withered husks of humanity, driven only by the demands of their monolithic donor base, voted to gut the middle and working class in order to transfer over a trillion dollars to the richest percentage of our society. These wolves, cloaked in the rhetoric of populism, ...

This poem was written by W.H. Auden in 1939, a little over 77 years ago.  It was time not so different than our own; rising nationalism, economic stagnation (don’t be fooled by the buoyant stock market), and the rattle of sabres across a multipolar world.  The Spanish Civil War started 3 years prior in 1936. ...