One day in August 2007, Daniel Coleman, an administrator in the Maryland court system, decided he should stay home to recover from an illness, as his doctor had ordered. But the day after he requested time off, he suddenly had more to worry about than his health; he was unemployed, too.

Don Blankenship was head of Massey Energy when 29 coal miners lost their lives in a massive explosion. Forced to resign, he has been largely invisible since.

Now he’s filed papers to start another coal mine venture.

The 2012 campaign trail is already littered with silver bullets and peppy slogans about boosting America out of its unemployment slump. But for the most part, the plans that politicians have trotted out–from Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 mantra to the GOP’s latest corporate welfare formulas, to Obama’s limp blend of free-trade policies and woefully inadequate stimulus–stick faithfully to the path of neoliberalism, paving the way for more outsized corporate profits.

So does anyone have a plan to steer industry toward the needs of communities?

How has American nation-building changed the world? What can we learn from this history? How has this history been used and misused by American policy makers? And what makes nation-building work – what has undermined it?

These are just a few of the questions that Jermi Suri asks and answers in Liberty’s Surest Guardian.

Wisconsin State Senator Tim Carpenter asks Gov. Walker to resign because of what was revealed on the fake Koch call.

This morning the Democratic National Committee announced that its 2012 convention will be held in Charlotte, NC. North Carolina has another distinction: it’s the least union state in the country, with just 3.2% of its workers belonging to a union (coming behind even Arkansas, Georgia, and Mississippi). And the DNC’s host city of Charlotte has exactly 0 (zero) union hotels in which the 15,000+ visitors will stay for the convention. Finally, the host venue in Charlotte, the Time Warner Cable Arena, does not appear to have any union workers.

At a time when our government is lecturing dictators in other countries about censorship, you’d think they’d be a bit bothered by the manner in which corporations are using our own public airwaves.

On November 1, 2007 fifty-one workers at the Redco plant in my old hometown of Little Falls, New York went on strike in response to a company decision to deny new workers the kind of health and pension benefits that had made Redco, and its predecessor companies, desirable places for lifelong employment. Located on the tiny island where Christian Hansen first began to manufacture “Junket” custard in 1891, the plant was sold to Salada in 1958, then to Kellogg in 1969, and in 1988 to a German-based transnational, the Teekanne Group

The WGAE represents content creators – people who write programs for the internet and other digital distribution systems (e.g., to mobile devices). We have argued in favor of Net Neutrality because our members want the opportunity to reach audiences directly, without major studios and other large corporations deciding what to distribute. But what about the audience? The public? Why should they care about Net Neutrality? Because there is an important aspect to the Net Neutrality debate that people should keep in mind: “paid prioritization”.

The world’s biggest media companies want to define how people will get content over the Internet. Money talks; independent content creators: take a walk. A mega-deal is reportedly in the works in which Verizon will favor Internet content from Google because Google has the spare cash to pay for preferred access. And this is being touted as the model for how content providers and Internet service providers will do business. We have seen the future, and it is exactly like the past.