August 2010
1 post
May 2010
10 posts
A government of pyromanics sets fire to the region →
Uri Avnery: “This night a crime was perpetrated in the middle of the sea, by order of the government of Israel and the IDF Command
A warlike attack against aid ships and deadly shooting at peace and humanitarian aid activists
It is a crazy thing that only a government that crossed all red lines can do.
“Only a crazy government that has lost all restraint and all connection to...
Top 1% Increased Their Share of Wealth in... →
New calculations by Edward Wolff, the New York University economist and an expert on U.S. wealth statistics, show that the top 1% actually held onto its share of national wealth in the crisis, and may have even gained a bit.
According to his analysis, the top 1% held 34.6% of all national wealth in 2007. By Dec. 31, 2009, they held 35.6%.
Meanwhile, share of national wealth held by the bottom...
“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
– Oscar Wilde
Michael Hirsch: The Fiscal Crises of the States:... →
State government shortfalls in fiscal years 2010 and 2011 are expected to reach $375 billion, says the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Among the worst hit: California, Illinois and New York, which expect to massively cut health care and education spending and lay off thousands of state workers to close respective shortfalls of $12.3 billion, $13 billion and $9.2 billion.
What these...
Mark Brenner: After a Year of Disappointment and... →
Things were supposed to be different by 2010, and not just in the mining industry. The economic crisis had everyone convinced that banks and corporate honchos had too much power; their greed-is-good bubble had popped. Our 30-year love affair with deregulation was over. The swashbuckling executives who spent the last generation fattening corporate bottom lines—and their own bank accounts—would be...
“New Day Rising” by Hüsker Dü
Kunstler: Worse Than 1789? →
It seems to me lately that the crack-up we’ve entered is liable to play out more gruesomely for our privileged elites than the orgy of bloodletting that attended the French Revolution. That historical moment was a sharp transition between old, settled social relations and the new political realities of imminent industrialization and a rising middle class. The elites in charge of things...
April 2010
42 posts
The Curse of Bigness: Or business as usual in... →
The United States, it would seem, is suffering its own kind of island gigantism. Bigness is the prejudice of American life, our cultural albatross, the axiom being that when something is big it is automatically better. Why we’ve been saddled with love of bigness as a people perhaps comes down to the matter of geography, the vastness and richness that the landscape offered for the taking from...
Bill McKibben: The Surprising Reason Why Americans... →
Community may suffer from overuse more sorely than any word in the dictionary. Politicians left and right sprinkle it through their remarks the way a bad Chinese restaurant uses MSG, to mask the lack of wholesome ingredients. But we need to rescue it; we need to make sure that community will become, on this tougher planet, one of the most prosaic terms in the lexicon, like hoe or bicycle or...
Good Riddance to New Labour →
The UK elections of May 2010 will mark a watershed in British politics. After thirteen long years, New Labour’s economic model lies in ruins, but a reckoning has been delayed until after the vote. Government measures to sustain the illusion of normality, including £950bn worth of bank bail-outs, asset guarantees and ‘quantitative easing’, have blown a gaping hole in public finances: the ...
Finding the Forgotten Man: Tea Party populism and... →
Conventional wisdom holds that Barack Obama is not a natural populist, that this cerebral former law professor doesn’t know how to push populist buttons. That may be true. But Obama understands that for decades the American public has been fed a steady diet of Sumner’s Social Darwinism. Today, fewer Americans trust government than at any point in modern history—and this is after a financial...
“The law signed today by Arizona Gov. Brewer is a social and racial sin, and...”
– Rev. Jim Wallis http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=media.display_article&mode=P&NewsID=8526
Good news: only one innocent civilian killed in the military occupation of downtown DC for the nuclear whatever meeting. Also, the conventioneers consensed that loose nukes are bad. Making the meeting totally worth it.
Inequality as policy: The United States Since 1979 →
From a peak just before the 1929 stock market crash through the early 1950s, wage and income inequality, broadly measured, were declining. From the early 1950s through the late 1970s, inequality was flat, or even falling slightly. Since the late 1970s, however, inequality has skyrocketed, climbing back to levels last seen in the 1920s. In 1979, for example, the top one percent of all U.S....
World's top firms cause $2.2tn of environmental... →
The cost of pollution and other damage to the natural environment caused by the world’s biggest companies would wipe out more than one-third of their profits if they were held financially accountable, a major unpublished study for the United Nations has found.
The report comes amid growing concern that no one is made to pay for most of the use, loss and damage of the environment, which...
Bankruptcy as Corporate Makeover →
After five long years in court, the bankruptcy of the American Smelting and Refining Company, or ASARCO, has finally been determined. Hailed as one of the earliest and largest multinational corporations and responsible for the employment of hundreds of thousands, ASARCO has a long history of polluting both the environment and the workplace. After racking up billions in environmental damages,...
The Great Melt: The Coming Transformation of the... →
Already the signs are clear. In areas where the sea ice has disappeared, summer air temperatures are five to nine degrees Fahrenheit higher than the average of the previous 20 years. As the differences in temperature between the planet’s north and equator shrink, the changing Arctic is beginning to affect weather patterns across the hemisphere. When there is little ice in the Arctic in summer,...
“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a...”
– Carl Jung (via sarahszoka)
“The destruction of Jefferson County reveals the basic battle plan of these...”
– Looting Main Street: How the nation’s biggest banks are ripping off American cities with the same predatory deals that brought down Greece (via headphonesnotrequired)
“But gradually we’re waking up to realize that our place in history is uncertain,...”
– Adbusters - The Coming Barbarism
Gen Y is the greatest threat to consumer capitalism yet. (via blackpendulum)
I’ve got a match:/Your embrace and my collapse.
“So how’s that hopey-changey stuff workin’ out for ya?”
– Sarah Palin
What Happened to the American Working Class? →
By the twenty-first century, the working class in America was different from what it had been even thirty years ago, and certainly different from what it had been 50 or 100 years before. Perhaps the most important change is that industrial zones (the most important being the Great Lakes region) lost their specific gravity in the national economy while at the same time industrial production...
A teacher openly crusades for better school... →
Heaps said one of her students was unable to use a standard-size desk in class because she was so heavy and had to be outfitted with a special table instead. That student habitually ate choco-tacos for lunch from the “grab and go”—two or three of them, according to Heaps—“and washed them down with a big Gatorade.”
Klondike brand choco-taco is an ice cream...
“Since inequalities of privilege are greater than could possibly be defended...”
– Reinhold Niebuhr
“Twee” by Tullycraft
Ruling OK's Tasering Pregnant Woman Three Times →
You are a police officer on traffic patrol and you pull over an irate driver who refuses to admit she was doing 32 mph in a 20-mph zone. She won’t sign the speeding ticket, not even when you call for backup. Also, she is pregnant. What do you do?
a) Finish writing the ticket, making note of the fact that the driver refused to sign, and send her on her way, perhaps admonishing her in the...
What’s Killing the Great Forests of the American... →
Across western North America, from Mexico to Alaska, forest die-off is occurring on an extraordinary scale, unprecedented in at least the last century-and-a-half — and perhaps much longer. All told, the Rocky Mountains in Canada and the United States have seen nearly 70,000 square miles of forest — an area the size of Washington state — die since 2000. For the most part, this massive die-off is...
You:
Me:
You:
Me:
You:
Me: