Carl Gibson Posts

Chattanooga, Tennessee, has provided a model for all American towns who want to see their economies and populations grow quickly. And that model is simple: give sub-par internet providers like Comcast some legitimate competition with publicly-owned municipal broadband networks.

The next time your right-wing family member or former high school classmate posts a status update or tweet about how taxing the rich or increasing workers' wages kills jobs and makes businesses leave the state, I want you to send them this article.

When he took office in January of 2011, Minnesota governor Mark Dayton inherited a $6.2 billion budget deficit and a 7 percent unemployment rate from his predecessor, Tim Pawlenty, the soon-forgotten Republican candidate for the presidency who called himself Minnesota's first true fiscally-conservative governor in modern history.

Who knew that a former executive at General Electric, a company widely-known for its tax dodging and outrageous lobbying expenses, would take a bold, selfless stand against income inequality as president of a public university?

Forget about the guy at the grocery store using food stamps to buy lobster. Walmart, the world's largest retail company, is even more dependent on government welfare so it can make jaw-droppingly obscene profits.

In fact, government handouts are the main reason Walmart is so profitable, and the billion-dollar corporation's business model is centered around the continued dependence on social safety net programs.

Mississippi has proved to us all that austerity, or the political ideology of "government living within its means," is a farce. All austerity means is taking money away from public services, and giving it to private business. Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant and the GOP-led legislature illustrated that perfectly in two ways.

Imagine making a bet with a hardline trickle-down believer like Paul Ryan on a state's projected economic growth. If this bet actually took place, you would walk away the winner. And the trickle-down believers of America would be speechless.

Pete Dutro, a small business owner, single father and cancer survivor in New York City, says that while the Affordable Care Act is far from perfect, it's a good thing for him and his family.

On Sunday, March 2, 398 people were arrested in front of the White House to demand President Obama reject the Keystone pipeline. And less than two weeks later, nearly a third of the U.S. Senate stayed up all night to talk about the necessity to take action on climate change. The #Up4Climate hashtag was a top nationally-trending topic on Twitter during the event. This is proof that the climate movement is making historic ground, and that climate activism works.

Wisconsin State Capitol Police Chief David Erwin's policing is working just about as well as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's job creation policies. Essentially, they're having the opposite of the intended effect. More arrests are creating more protesters, just as more austerity measures are creating more disheartening unemployment numbers.

The Corker-Hoeven amendment completely undermines the basic need for immigration reform by allowing the number of largely unaccountable border security agents to double and by building an additional 700 miles of double-layered border fence at a cost of $50 billion. And Democrats just let it happen.

Corporations aren't people. If that were so, Yahoo!'s recent acquisition of Tumblr would be a violation of the Constitution, which states that people are human beings with inherent rights, not commodities to be bought and sold.

The reason most of us Americans still plod helplessly along the same doomed course of longer hours for less wages and act like nothing is wrong is best summed up by John Steinbeck. He said, "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily-embarrassed millionaires."

If you're in a canoe that's got a hole letting in water, do you throw the other passenger overboard who is helping you row, or do you just patch the hole and keep rowing?
Chicago public schools are facing a $1 billion deficit. The corporate media would like you to believe it's due to excessive spending and that Mayor Rahm Emanuel's proposal to close more than 50 schools, most of them in

Dear Sen. McConnell,
You are not a Kentuckian. In fact, your citizenship as a Kentuckian should be revoked, and you should be ineligible to run again for reelection.
Kentuckians live by the phrase, "United We Stand, Divided We Fall." It's emblazoned on our flag, and shows two men, a frontiersman (Daniel Boone) and a statesman (Henry Clay) standing together. They may be standing on opposite sides of the seal, but their embrace symbolizes a spirit of cooperation, and caring for your fellow man even tho

My 9 year-old niece Evelyn in Maryland is already very politically-active. Like most of America, she was saddened and outraged about the kids in Connecticut who were mowed down by a killer wielding an assault rifle with 30-round clips. She was especially horrified that the victims were her own age, and in class when they were shot. The 113th Congress has already decided that while it won't protect 3rd graders from assault rifles and high-powered magazines, it will protect Monsanto from the courts. They won't listen to a third grader who took the time to

Even though he's widely viewed as the most perfect human being to have ever walked the Earth, Jesus did commit one violent act during his time here. In the "Cleansing of the Temple," story, all four of the gospels talk about Jesus making a whip out of cords and using it to drive the moneychangers out of the temple, dumping their jars of coins into the streets, kicking over their tables, and accusing them of turning a holy place into a "

In an eerie bit of foreshadowing, a 2011 skit from The Onion's Sportsdome on Comedy Central predicted the Steubenville rape story almost to a T. In the satirical sports segment, done with emotional background music, reporters document the story of a student athlete who scored a record amount of points, "overcoming" the fact that he raped someone the night before. The framing of the news segment is not about the irreparable damage to the victim, but how the young man courageously moved beyond f

Here's a pop quiz for Congress: If you cut food assistance for needy families by $333 million, and allow corporations to dodge $183 billion in federal taxes in the same year, how much did you end up reducing the deficit?

Computers are made to work for us and do things we need done, and must be constantly updated to adjust to the constant stream of new data. But if you have a blown motherboard, it doesn't matter what software or programs you try to update, because the computer won't work until you get a new motherboard. The framers of the United States envisioned its government as one to be constantly updated, and included mechanisms to do so. Our government of today is like a computer in bad need of updating whose motherboard has been blown for decades.
The last piece I wrote explained why