Goldilocks Zone

2012-01-24T09:37:00.002-05:00

It's Probably Time to get Money out of Politics

2012-01-20T16:32:00.002-05:00

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2012-01-17T13:12:00.001-05:00

Hedge Funds, Goldman Sachs Lurk Beneath Greek Crisis -

Should Art really be for its own Sake Alone? - Alain de Botton

Stopping the Corporate Takeover of Democracy - Bernie Sanders -
"The corporate barbarians are through the gate of American democracy. Not satisfied with their all-pervasive influence on our culture, economy and legislative processes, they want more. They want it all."

Obama's Presidency, Three Year's On - J. Freedland

Big Oil comin to get you

2012-01-12T11:21:00.002-05:00

New analysis of oil industry contributions tomembers of Congress has revealed the level of the oil lobby's financialfirepower that Barack Obama can expect to face in the November elections if herefuses to approve the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

Obama has until 21 February to make a decision on whether to approve the pipeline,under a compromise tax measure approved late last year. America's top oillobbyist warned last week that the president would face "huge politicalconsequences" if he did not sign off on the project to pump tar sandscrude across the American heartland to refineries on the Texas coast.

The Canadian government is also on the offensive, with an attack this week on "jet-setting celebrities" opposedto tar sands pipelines. At the same time, TransCanada executives have embarkedon a letter-writing campaign.
Now Maplight, an independent research group in Berkeley, California, thattracks the influence of money in politics, has conducted an analysis of oil industrycontributions to members of Congress supporting the pipeline. - more -

***Environment World Review of the Year: '2011 Rewrote the Books'

The year 2011 was another ecologically tumultuous year with greenhouse gases rise to record levels, Arctic sea ice nearly equalling 2007's record melt, and temperatures the 11th highest ever recorded.

It was marked on the ground by unparalleled extremes of heat and cold in the US, droughts and heatwaves in Europe and Africa and record numbers of weather-related natural disasters.

In addition, 2011 saw the world population reach 7 billion, the second worst nuclear disaster and record investments in renewable energy.

The 41 sea, land and air indicators used by the US government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to measure sea and land temperatures showed unequivocally that the world continued to warm throughout 2011. In July, NOAA reported that the last 300 months had all been above average temperature and that the 13 warmest years had all occurred in the 15 years since 1997. 2011 was additionally remarkable, it said, because a "La Niña" event was taking place, a naturally occurring oceanic cooling phenomenon that would normally bring temperatures down. - more -

Today's Word: Cryto-fascism

2012-01-10T09:11:00.003-05:00

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.

***Start with a dominant Corporate State= from the NY Times

The more Mitt Romney pretends to empathize with the millions of Americans who are struggling in this economy, the less he seems to understand their despair. And the rest of the Republican field seems to have no more insight into the concerns of most voters than he does.

Mr. Romney claims his background as a businessman provides him with an understanding of the economy and the ability to fix it. His opponents — particularly Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul and Rick Perry — say their political experience provides the same advantage. In truth, none have offered anything but tired or extremist economic prescriptions, providing little evidence that they can relate to those at the middle or bottom of the ladder. - more from "The Corporate Candidates"

**** Now add all the Scapegoating you can find -from The Nation

Concord, NH—The Republican Party, founded by militant abolitionists and the political home through much of its history for committed foes of segregation and discrimination, has since the late 1960s been degenerating toward the crude politics of Southern strategies and what former Republican National Committee chairman Lee Atwater referred to as the “coded” language of complaints about “forced busing,” legal-services programs, welfare and food stamps. But the 2012 campaign has seen this degeneration accelerate, as the candidates have repeatedly played on stereotypes about race, class and “entitlements.”

On the eve of the Iowa caucuses, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum told a crowd of supporters: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.”
Around the same time, Texas Congressman Ron Paul was scrambling to explain away old newsletters that went out under his name with sections suggesting that “95 percent of the black males in that city [Washington] are semi-criminal or entirely criminal” and describing the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday as “Hate Whitey Day.” Order was restored in riot-torn Los Angeles, the newsletters suggested, only when welfare checks arrived.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who spent the fall talking about eliminating child-labor laws so that school janitors could be replaced with poor kids, and who regularly refers to Barack Obama as the “best food stamp president in American history,” arrived in the first-primary state of New Hampshire and announced that: “I’m prepared if the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.”

All these remarks and revelations drew consternation. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People leaders rebuked Gingrich and Santorum, with NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous saying of Gngrich: “It is a shame that the former Speaker feels that these types of inaccurate, divisive statements are in any way helpful to our country. The majority of people using food stamps are not African-American, and most people using food stamps have a job. - more from "No Longer the Party of Lincoln" - John Nichols

2012-01-04T10:14:00.001-05:00

Iraq's Body Count:
Over 162,000 people, about 80% of them civilians, were killed in Iraq since the U.S. invasion in 2003, according to new data published by Iraq Body Count to mark the withdrawal of US combat forces. Many more grim details and numbers, including the fact that civilian deaths have not noticeably declined since 2009. - more -

Climate Change Kicks the Door in 2011: The Top Ten Events -

2011-12-21T08:58:00.001-05:00

Sistine Chapel -

The US is blind to the price of war that is still being borne by the Iraqi people

2011-12-19T09:50:00.002-05:00

On 19 November 2005 a US marine squad was struck by a roadside bomb in Haditha, in Iraq's Anbar province, killing one soldier and seriously injuring two others. According to civilians they then went on the rampage, slaughtering 24 people. They included a 76-year-old man in a wheelchair and a three-year-old child. It was a massacre. "I think they were just blinded by hate … and they just lost control," said James Crossan, one of the injured marines.

When he heard the news, Major General Steve Johnson, the American commander in Anbar province at the time, saw no cause for further examination. "It happened all the time … throughout the whole country. So you know, maybe, if I was sitting here [in Virginia] and heard that 15 civilians were killed I would have been surprised and shocked and done more to look into it. But at that point in time I felt that it was just a cost of doing business on that particular engagement."
Eight soldiers were originally charged with the atrocity. Charges against six were dropped, one was acquitted and the other is awaiting trial. We know this because a New York Times reporter found documents from the US military's internal investigation in a rubbish dump near Baghdad. An attendant was using them to make a fire to cook smoked carp for dinner.

The article ran on the same day that Barack Obama announced the withdrawal of American troops last week, hailing the almost nine-year war a "success", resulting in "an extraordinary achievement" that the troops can look on "with their heads held high". And so it is that America moves on, casting evidence of its war crimes in the trash, holding nobody accountable and choosing to understand defeat as victory and failure as success.

While the departure of American troops should be greeted with guarded relief (guarded because the US will maintain its largest embassy in the world there along with thousands of armed private contractors), every effort must be made to thwart those who seek to embellish and distort their lamentable legacy. You'd think that would be easy. The case against this war has been prosecuted extensively both in this column and elsewhere. (The argument that the removal of Saddam Hussein somehow compensates for the lies, torture, displacement, carnage, instability and humans rights abuses is perverse. They used a daisy cutter to crack a walnut.)

This war started out with many parents but has ended its days an orphan, tarnishing the reputations of those who launched it and the useful idiots who gave them intellectual cover. Nobody has been held accountable; few accept responsibility.

In any case, they could not have done it alone. It was only possible thanks to the systemic collusion of a supine political class and a jingoistic political culture, not to mention a blank cheque from the British government. When the war started, almost three-quarters of Americans supported it. Only politicians of principle opposed it – and there were precious few of those. When Nancy Pelosi was asked why she had not pushed for impeachment of Bush when she became speaker in 2006 she said: "What about these other people who voted for that war with no evidence … Where are these Democrats going to be? Are they going to be voting for us to impeach a president who took us to war on information that they had also?"

Today, withdrawing the troops is about the only truly popular thing Obama has done in the last two years. Polls show more than 70% support withdrawal, roughly two-thirds oppose the war, and more than half believe it was a mistake. But there is a difference between regretting something and learning from it. And while there is ample evidence of the former, there is little to suggest the latter.

According to Christopher Gelpi, a political science professor at Duke University who specialises in public attitudes to foreign policy, the most important single factor shaping Americans' opinions about any war is whether they think America will win. This solipsistic worldview is hardly conducive to the kind of introspection that might translate remorse into redemption.

It's a mindset that understands the war in Vietnam as being wrong not because an independent country was invaded, flattened, millions murdered and thousands tortured. It was wrong because the US lost.
And it pervades the political spectrum. Even when the war's critics slam the blood and treasure squandered, they usually refer only to American lives and American money. This is also the way pollsters frame it. A recent CBS poll asked: "Do you think removing Saddam Hussein from power was worth the loss of American life and other costs of attacking Iraq, or not?" (50% no, 41% yes), and "Do you think the result of the war with Iraq was worth the loss of American lives and other costs of attacking Iraq, or not?" (67% no, 24% yes). The cost to Iraqis simply does not feature.

"It is the end for the Americans only," wrote Emad Risn, argued an Iraqi columnist in a government-funded newspaper. "Nobody knows if the war will end for Iraqis too." And few Americans seem to care. It's been some time since Iraq featured at all on the nation's priorities, let alone high. Rightly Americans fret about the fate of veterans returning to a depressed economy with a range of both physical and mental disabilities. But Iraqi civilians barely get a look-in.

According to the New York Times report, among the discarded testimony was an interview with Sergeant Major Edward Sax. "I had marines shoot children in cars, and deal with the marines individually, one on one, about it because they have a hard time dealing with that." When they told him they didn't know there were children on board he told them they were not to blame, claiming killing would impose a lifelong burden on them.

Progressives, seeking to link the economic collapse to military misadventure, often argue that nation building should begin at home, not in Iraq, thereby – wittingly or not – transforming Iraqis in the public imagination from victims of illegal warfare to recipients of illicit welfare. Without any apparent irony, Obama marked the end of the occupation by calling on others not to meddle in Iraq's internal affairs.

The combined effect of all of this is like breaking someone's jaw with your fist only to bemoan the excruciating pain that has been visited on your hand.

America is not alone in this. Amnesia and indifference are the privileges of the powerful. It is for the Kenyans and Algerians to recall the atrocities committed by the British and French under colonialism while the colonisers remain in flight from their history. "The essential characteristic of a nation is that all its individuals must have many things in common," wrote the 19th-century French philosopher Ernest Renan, "and must have forgotten many things as well."

No wonder then that a recent Pew poll found that despite all the evidence to the contrary 56% of Americans said they thought the invasion had succeeded in its goals while the number of those who think the invasion was the right decision stands at its highest in five years. The cost of doing business always seems more reasonable when someone else is paying the price. - Gary Younge -

The Costs of the Lied-Up Iraq War -

Don't Forget: The Iraq War was a Lie:

Someone to look up to: Vaclav Havel: 1936-2011: Writer and Revolutionary -

2011-12-15T09:35:00.001-05:00

The Bill of Rights was adopted 220 years ago on this date, in 1791. The bill is made up of the first 10 amendments to the United States Constitution, and it was adopted as one unit. It follows the precedent set by the Magna Carta (1215) and the English Bill of Rights (1689), both of which were early attempts at ensuring the rights of citizens against the power of the crown. Much of the credit for the United States Bill of Rights is due to George Mason, who was an admirer of the philosopher John Locke. Locke, in his Two Treatises of Government (1689), argued that government should exist for the protection of individual property, and that all people were equal in the state of nature. Mason had crafted a "Declaration of Rights" for Virginia's constitution in 1776, while serving in that state's legislature. The document impressed James Madison, who showed it to Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, in turn, adopted some of its ideas when he wrote the Declaration of Independence.
In the summer of 1787, the Constitutional Convention met to craft the United States Constitution. The Anti-Federalists didn't approve of the document as written because it offered no protection to individual rights, and they refused to sign it. George Mason said, "I would sooner chop off [my] right hand than put it to the Constitution as it now stands." Jefferson wrote to Madison, "A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth." Eventually, the Federalists persuaded the Anti-Federalists to sign by promising them they would address the individual rights matter once the Constitution was ratified. James Madison's feelings were mixed, but he took up the task of writing a bill of rights, which he called "a nauseous project," and he introduced it into the first session of Congress in 1789. After some haggling, the 10 amendments were ratified as one unit, which guarantees, among other things, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, and the right to a fair trial. - Writer's Almanac

There Goes the Republic

Once again the gods of war have united our Congress like nothing else. Unable to agree on the minimal spending necessary to save our economy, schools, medical system or infrastructure, the cowards who mislead us have retreated to the irrationalities of what George Washington in his farewell address condemned as “pretended patriotism.”

The defense authorization bill that Congress passed and President Obama had threatened to veto will soon become law, a fact that should be met with public outrage. Human Rights Watch President Kenneth Roth, responding to Obama’s craven collapse on the bill’s most controversial provision, said, “By signing this defense spending bill, President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law.” On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney claimed “the most recent changes give the president additional discretion in determining how the law will be implemented, consistent with our values and the rule of law, which are at the heart of our country’s strength.”

What rubbish, coming from a president who taught constitutional law. The point is not to hock our civil liberty to the discretion of the president, but rather to guarantee our freedoms even if a Dick Cheney or Newt Gingrich should attain the highest office.

Sadly this flagrant subversion of the constitutionally guaranteed right to due process of law was opposed in the Senate by only seven senators, including libertarian Republican Rand Paul and progressive Independent Bernie Sanders. - more from Robert Scheer

See also Congressional Tyranny, White House Surrender - by Ralph Nader

2011-12-14T13:53:00.001-05:00

Rapid rise in Arctic methane shocks scientists

2011-12-14T11:20:00.002-05:00

Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane - a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide - have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region. -more-

2011-12-01T09:52:00.001-05:00

The most important piece of news yesterday, this week, this month, and this year was a new set of statistics released yesterday by the Global Carbon Project. It showed that carbon emissions from our planet had increased 5.9 percent between 2009 and 2010. In fact, it was arguably among the most important pieces of data in the last, oh, three centuries, since according to the New York Times it represented “almost certainly the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution.”
What it means, in climate terms, is that we’ve all but lost the battle to reduce the damage from global warming. The planet has already warmed about a degree Celsius; it’s clearly going to go well past two degrees. It means, in political terms, that the fossil fuel industry has delayed effective action for the 12 years since the Kyoto treaty was signed. It means, in diplomatic terms, that the endless talks underway in Durban should be more important than ever--they should be the focus of a planetary population desperate to figure out how it’s going to survive the century. - more from The Most Important News Story of the Day/Millennium -by Bill McKibben

Saatchi: The Hideousness of the Artworld-

2011-12-01T09:51:00.003-05:00

2011-12-01T09:51:00.001-05:00

U.S. gets Imbecile edition; World gets something to Think About

2011-11-28T09:23:00.001-05:00

The Corporate Media Machine at work: censoring the popular uprising.

The Latest from the Plundering Classes: Roll Back Child-Labor Laws

2011-11-23T09:55:00.001-05:00

In the last week and a half, Newt Gingrich called one thing“dumb” and another thing “stupid.” The “dumb” thing, he said, was the very ideaof having a super committee, and he may have had a point—although forcing theUnited States government into default would have been a good deal dumber.

And the “stupid” thing? That would be child-labor laws.Gingrich, in a speech at the Kennedy School, called such restrictions “tragic,”and rhapsodized about the beneficial effects of taking a paid job, with regularhours, beginning at the age of nine. He also had an idea of what sort of jobsmight be suited for children:

"Yousay to somebody, you shouldn’t go to work before you’re what, fourteen, sixteenyears of age, fine. You’re totally poor. You’re in a school that is failingwith a teacher that is failing. I’ve tried for years to have a very simplemodel…. Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, haveone master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kidswould actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in theschools, they’d begin the process of rising."

In a way, these sentiments are not really surprising. Intheir estrangement from objective reality and subjective sympathy, they fit thepatterns of this election season’s Republican rhetoric in general andGingrich’s world view in particular. Indeed, looking at his own undisciplinedhabits, one wonders if he’s clear about where childhood begins and where itends. He also calls things dumb at a rate that would cause the averagekindergarten teacher to take action: after “socialist,” “stupid” may be hisfavorite term of contempt. (He also likes “smart,” to describe his own ideas,along with “frankly” and “fundamentally.”) It also fits with hisfaux-futurologist outlandishness, as when he suggested that “brain science” wouldsolve the health-care crisis. So perhaps the proper response, rather thanrushing to quote Jacob Riis or conjure up images of barefoot children in theLowell mills, is amused exasperation. Does even Newt take Newt seriously?

Someone does. The punch line of this story is that thelatest polls show Gingrich in front in the Republican field. That may explainthe most jarring aspect of the bring-back-child-labor episode: Gingrich’scomplacent pride in his words. The transcript alone doesn’t quite convey how pleasedwith himself Newt clearly is for having thought the thought. (“This issomething that no liberal wants to deal with.”) Is it because he thinks he iswise—that he’s figured this poverty thing out—or that he thinks he is brave?More than that, does he think that a country that solves the problem of incomeinequality by using child labor to increase the number of wage earners perfamily would be both wise and brave?

If you follow Gingrich’s model, you might get the grosshousehold income number up, but you will have created a more yawning divide:between people who have a childhood, and those who don’t. Gingrich likes tocall himself a historian, because he likes dinosaurs and battlefields. Thoseare the obsessions of a child with time and space to be a child, not one whohas to earn his keep. Just because the toilets you scrub are in a schooldoesn’t make the work educational.

That is the moral argument: children are children, anddeserve to be treated that way. There are also practical and ethical argumentsagainst child labor—it feels ludicrous to even have to write that—having to dowith children’s health, their different vulnerability to danger in a workplace,their inability to meaningfully consent to a contract, their possibleexploitation by adults, the opportunity costs to them and to society in termsof education and social development. There are, of course, certain kinds ofwork that can be managed, as with child actors. (Between takes, a tutor waitsin the trailer.) But Gingrich was talking about nine-year-old janitors. (OnMonday, he told the Washington Postthat he didn’t mean they’d work full time.) This is not just about arcaneregulations keeping a seventeen-year-old from helping out his mother, orhelping the teacher erase the blackboard. Child labor, unregulated, is a badthing, and laws that limit it are helpful. Haven’t we known that since Roosevelt—Theodore,the Republican, not Franklin, the Democrat—was President?

Maybe we’ve forgotten. When, in debates, the Republicancandidates talk about how government should be kept as far away from theworkplace as possible, they are drawing a circle that excludes burdensome lawsof this kind. And the impulse is not abstract: as the Washington Post’s Rachel Weinernoted in a follow-up to the Gingrich piece, there actually has beenan effort to roll back child-labor laws at a state level, even if “Gingrich’ssuggestion that children start working as early as age nine goes far beyondwhat most other Republicans are proposing.” There are other areas, too, such ascriminal justice, in which there has been a rejection of the idea that childrendeserve special protection. If the Republican electorate doesn’t recoil atGingrich for suggesting that American children be put to work, what influenceare we left with in persuading American companies, or our trading partners, notto use child labor in cotton fields or chocolate plantations?

Interestingly, Weiner notes that Ron Paul, who approves ofalmost nothing the federal government does, doesn’t like putting children towork, either. Paul counts it as one of the wonders of capitalism that we havedone away with such things in this country; Gingrich looks at a landscape inwhich children aren’t earners, and sees socialism. That is a tellingdistinction and, again, why Gingrich’s comments speak to something trulytroubling. When did the consensus we have on the progress our country has made,step by hard-earned step since its beginning, break down so thoroughly?

Gingrich’s comments made less news this weekend than thesuper committee’s predestined failure to come up with a budget plan. For allthe talk of poor children not working, it turned out that the super-senatorsand super-congressmen had barely even met. We have come to the point, somehow,when grown men and women can’t do the jobs they were sent to Washington to do,yet our candidates dream of sending children—other people’s children,naturally—to school only to keep the halls clean.- Amy Davidson

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What they mean when they say "Less Government"

2011-11-10T10:17:00.001-05:00

Current calls for “less government” actuallymean less power for elected leaders and for the bureaucracies that serve themand more power for the “oligarchy” of millionaires and corporations. Suchcalls also imply less power for the people (the democratic element), since,while elected leaders are directly responsible to those who vote, those whosepower is based on wealth are not. - More -

2011-11-09T16:26:00.001-05:00

World headed for irreversible climate change in five years

2011-11-09T14:43:00.000-05:00

The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be "lost for ever", according to the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure.
Anything built from now on that produces carbon will do so for decades, and this "lock-in" effect will be the single factor most likely to produce irreversible climate change, the world's foremost authority on energy economics has found. If this is not rapidly changed within the next five years, the results are likely to be disastrous.
"The door is closing," Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said. "I am very worried – if we don't change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever." - More -

The Latest Anti-Democracy Campaign

2011-11-08T14:16:00.002-05:00

The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen

2011-11-08T13:00:00.004-05:00

What has happened over the past 30 years is the capture of the world's common treasury by a handful of people, assisted by neoliberal policies which were first imposed on rich nations by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. I am now going to bombard you with figures. I'm sorry about that, but these numbers need to be tattooed on our minds. Between 1947 and 1979, productivity in the US rose by 119%, while the income of the bottom fifth of the population rose by 122%. But from 1979 to 2009, productivity rose by 80%, while the income of the bottom fifth fell by 4%. In roughly the same period, the income of the top 1% rose by 270%. - More -

Greenhouse Gas Emission Exceed Worst-Case Scenario

2011-11-04T11:32:00.000-04:00

The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide has jumped by a recordamount, according to the US department of energy, a sign of how feeble theworld's efforts are at slowing man-made global warming.
The figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher thanthe worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.
"The more we talk about the need to control emissions, the more theyare growing," said John Reilly, the co-director of MIT's Joint Program onthe Science and Policy of Global Change. - More -

Big Time Climate Skeptic No Longer Skeptical

Did you see on Fox News where Richard Muller, perhaps the most convincing of the climate skeptics, has changed his position on global climate change? No?

The change of course comes as a result of his own two year research project. Amazingly enough, the project was partially financed by petro pimps the Koch Brothers. Muller, a prominent physicist and faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, originally set out to investigate the errors of the so called ClimateGate fake scandal. To his credit, he concluded that the evidence for rapidly heating climate is undeniable and that the data is essentially the same of that produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.

So here’s a big CatMap shout out to Prof Muller for having the integrity and fearlessness to call the science as he sees it. The trait is sadly lacking among the plundering class.- More -

Romney Estate Tax would save the Cock Brothers up to $8.7m Each
Tomorrow, 2012 GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney is slated to give a “major spending policy speech” at Americans For Prosperity’s Defending the American Dream Summit. Both the conference and AFP itself are funded by money from the billionaire Koch Brothers. - More -

Oligarchy, American Style

2011-11-04T11:27:00.003-04:00

Inequality is back in the news, largely thanks to OccupyWall Street, but with an assist from the Congressional Budget Office. And youknow what that means: It’s time to roll out the obfuscators!

Anyone who has tracked this issue over time knows what Imean. Whenever growing income disparities threaten to come into focus, areliable set of defenders tries to bring back the blur. Think tanks put outreports claiming that inequality isn’t really rising, or that it doesn’tmatter. Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming thatit’s not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it’s the educated versus theless educated.

So what you need to know is that all of these claims arebasically attempts to obscure the stark reality: We have a society in whichmoney is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in whichthat concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy inname only. -More-

Bill Moyers

2011-10-31T13:29:00.001-04:00

Keystone tarsands pipeline to wreak environmental havoc.

2011-10-20T16:14:00.002-04:00

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The Austerity Death Trap - R. Reich
The Austerity Class is Killing the Economy - Ari Berman

from Mr. Fish

2011-10-20T09:39:00.002-04:00

William Black, former Reagan administrator, talks about the Banks

2011-10-20T09:18:00.001-04:00

Checking the Corporate State

2011-10-18T15:59:00.001-04:00

Cornel West among those Arrested Protesting Corrupt Supreme Court

2011-10-17T10:00:00.000-04:00

Robert Reich Tells It

2011-10-12T14:30:00.002-04:00

Robert Reich Tells It II

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2011-08-31T08:54:00.001-04:00

Republicans Fight to Raise Taxes on the Working Classes while Cutting Taxes for the Rich: Nice Job if You Can Get It

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Plan B from the Servants of Capital: Austerity

Standard and Poor's and the Bilderbergers: Just What are the Rich up To Timmy?

Did Tenet Hide Info on 911: Looks Like It, Tim.

Warnings of Africa Drought Came Early From Climate Scientists: Tim, Why Didn't You Listen?

The Mystery of Building 7: Architects and Engineers: Narrated by Ed Asner

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2011-06-03T14:44:00.002-04:00

The fact of the matter is that those now shrieking about big government debts and deficits have spent the last decade maximizing government spending with unaffordable wars, financial deregulation, and tax cuts for the wealthy, which they knew would cost trillions of dollars. Today, the consequences of their actions, which they were warned about, are the ploy these very same people are using to justify the accelerated demise of welfare programs, and the incremental destruction of the meager social safety net that guarantees Americans won't starve in their old age.- Rania Khalek

2011-05-31T11:31:00.000-04:00

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