See also Wall Street: The Dead Face of Domination.
On why the protests won’t stop, see The Banker’s Don’t Get It.
Truth and Traditions Top Five
1 May1. Declaration of Independence
219 years ago our originators “brought forth upon this continent a new nation: conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Today we have less liberty. Inequality has reached obscene proportions as millions die of preventable diseases and starvation each year, and over a billion children suffer sociogenic brain damage worldwide, as the rich get ever richer.
…
2. Parable of the Unforgiving Servant
David Graeber recounts the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant (Matthew 18:21-35). As an exercise you might want to read the story as one about the recent mortgage mess in the United States.
3. David Brooks, Fooled by Inequality
He’s at it again, being reasonable out of one side of his mouth while makin’ it up out of the other. I’m talking about David Brooks, Mr. Reasonable, the Mr. Blizzard of plausible risibility. His column, The Wrong Inequality, is a masterpiece of rhetorical legerdemain and misdirection.
4. Truth and Traditions Defined
The inconvenient truths of peak oil now, peak drinkable water now, peak everything on the horizon, as far as the eye can see. The many, many ugly truths of war and waste have been systematically unexamined by our corporate owned mass media who stand to profit by ignoring news unfit for them to print or speak. . . . Those thousands of animistic traditions that peoples all over the world lived by for 99.8% of human existence: feeling the “spirit” in all life forms, honoring reciprocities and gift circulation, maintaining hospitality and generosity, sharing tools and talents in daily life, replanting three trees for every tree cut down, minimizing division of labor, maximizing individuation and Self-expression.
5. Wall Street: The Dead Face of Domination
Those buildings are in New York City’s financial district (aka Wall Street). That’s where the captains of finance manipulate our world while playing ‘King of the Hill’ against one another. Those buildings are machines. They are the Borg. We ARE living in The Matrix. We are nothing but feedstock for the adolescent games those machines play with one another.
Tags: David Brooks, green, peace, politics, Truth and Traditions, war
The NATO-industrial complex – NATO – Salon.com
24 May“The Pentagon and defense industry should be thankful,” wrote the magazine, “that politicians don’t make military-spending decisions based on public opinion.”
Missile-defense is one of the oldest boondoggles in defense spending. Now the goodies are being palmed off on NATO, to be paid for by US taxpayers. It’s like shoveling our tax dollars into a high-tech rabbit hole.
Uncertain defense budgets help fill in the context of industry’s push to expand missile defense under the NATO umbrella. In 2012, it is a lonely major transatlantic project on the defense-spending horizon. The new issue of NDIA’s magazine National Defense features an article lamenting the diminishing prospects of “shiny objects” in Allied budgets. “Some contractors might decide to wait for the good times to return,” editorializes the magazine, “but most others are going to be following the money to what is increasingly becoming industry’s more reliable cash cows: Maintenance, repairs and logistics support.”
The “cash cow” of maintenance may help pass the lean times, but it doesn’t launch research labs and production lines that can stay active indefinitely as can a sophisticated and essentially open-ended missile defense system. …
With NATO missile defense, it is the U.S. taxpayer picking up the tab. “A significant European role in financing [NATO missile defense] is unlikely in present circumstances,” says Ian Anthony, research coordinator for nuclear weapons and arms control at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. “I doubt if European countries could find the domestic political support for funding it.” Continue reading
Tags: missile defense, NATO
Occupy the PGA
23 MayDo you have any idea how important golf is in the upper reaches of the corporate world?
Tomorrow, Wednesday the 23rd, is the first day of Occupy the PGA in Benton Harbor, Michigan.
If you need camping or hotel accomodations, do not hesitate to call Rev. Pinkney at 269-925-0001.
Occupy The PGA – Finalized Plans
Death March everyday: May 23-27 (big day: Sat. May 26)
We encourage protesters to wear all black if possible, everyday.
Arrive between 10 – 10:30am, Benton Harbor City Hall, 200 E. Wall St.
Sat. & Sun: Bring kites if possible.
Demonstrate in protest of land stolen by Whirlpool Corporation.
http://OccupyThePGA.wordpress.com Twitter HashTag #OccupyThePGA
An outline to fully understand the gravity of the Benton Harbor situation:
via Occupy the PGA.
Tags: golf, PGA, Professional Golf Association
It’s time for a Corporate Spring – AlterNet – Salon.com
23 MayOur economy is dominated by a monoculture business model, Kelly says, driven largely by publicly traded corporations that have built in pressure from Wall Street for maximum short-term earnings. But a healthy, living economy needs biodiversity. We can find this if we begin to look around — across the U.S. and the world — where there are businesses designed not for maximum profit, but with a mission-driven social and economic architecture. One of these models is the “social enterprise.”
The Social Enterprise Alliance defines these organizations as “businesses whose primary purpose is the common good. They use the methods and disciplines of business and the power of the marketplace to advance their social, environmental and human justice agendas.” And one of the defining characteristics is that “The common good is its primary purpose, literally ‘baked into’ the organization’s DNA, and trumping all others.”
Here’s an example. Remember Working Assets? Starting out as a progressive-minded credit card company in the ’80s, it added phone service — first long-distance in the ’90s, then cellular in 2000 — and now it has created the subsidiary CREDO Mobile. The company operates as a for-profit business, which is privately owned, with most of the employees owning the stock, so it doesn’t have to bow to Wall Street pressures. They use their profits to help support causes they believe in — so far the amount of money donated is $70 million and counting.
via It’s time for a Corporate Spring – AlterNet – Salon.com.
Tags: CREDO Mobile, socially responsible business, working assets
After Paul Falters, Backers Push Agenda in Party and Other Races – NYTimes.com
23 MayWith their favorite having lost the nomination for president, Mr. Paul’s dedicated band of youthful supporters are setting their sights down-ballot and swarming lightly guarded Republican redoubts like state party conventions in an attempt to infiltrate the top echelons of the party.
“Karl Rove’s fear-and-smear-style Republicans are going to wake up at the end of the year and realize we are now in control of the Republican Party,” said Preston Bates, a Democrat-turned-Paulite who is running Liberty for All for Mr. Ramsey.
via After Paul Falters, Backers Push Agenda in Party and Other Races – NYTimes.com.
The War in Afghanistan Is No Longer Tenable in Congress | The Nation
21 MayCount this as the most under-covered story of the week: late Thursday, Republicans in the House of Representatives forbade a vote on a resolution that would end the war in Afghanistan next year—because they knew it would pass. This means that, though we don’t have the roll call vote to prove it, Obama’s current strategy for Afghanistan is no longer sustainable in Congress.
via The War in Afghanistan Is No Longer Tenable in Congress | The Nation.
10,000 March at Frankfurt Occupy Protest Rally – NYTimes.com
19 MayOccupy is alive and well in Frankfurt, Germany:
German police say some 10,000 activists are participating in a major rally of the local Occupy movement in Frankfurt.
Police spokesman Ruediger Regis said Saturday more protesters are still flowing into the city center of continental Europe’s biggest financial hub.
Organizers have said they expect some 20,000 protesters.
The protest group calling itself Blockupy denounces the power of the banks and what they perceive to be untamed capitalism. It has called for barring access to the European Central Bank, which is located in Frankfurt’s downtown business district.
via 10,000 March at Frankfurt Occupy Protest Rally – NYTimes.com.
Tags: germany
The Third Party Fantasy – NYTimes.com
16 MayTnT’s not a Douthat fan, but he has some interesting remarks about the failure of Americans Elect to gain traction:
Successful third parties need dynamic, high profile leaders, and ideally deep-pocketed ones as well. But instead of a Bloomberg, the Americans Elect ballot had ex-Louisiana governor Buddy Roemer; instead of a Bayh or a Snowe, they had Laurence Kotlikoff, an economist at Boston University. Kotlikoff has impressive policy proposals and Roemer has an entertaining Twitter feed, but neither is exactly the potential general election spoiler who could keep David Axelrod awake at night.
But the fault also lay with the project’s essential theory of what kind of third party contender disillusioned voters are pining to elect. From the (inarguable) premise that the public is wearied by the failures of the political and economic establishment, it leaped to the (preposterous) conclusion that the country is crying out for a presidential candidate who mostly represents the interests and values of exactly that same establishment.
Like the afore mentioned New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, a wealthy centrist technocrat. To the contrary
the most successful third party surges, from the William Jennings Bryan-era Populists down to Ross Perot’s 19 percent, usually arise from precisely the opposite impulse – a “plague on both your houses” populism that highlights issues and anxieties that the leaders of the two major parties have decided to ignore.
Such a populism has flowered over the last two years, but it’s mostly appeared on the right and left-wing fringes of the two parties rather than in the space between them — in the Tea Party’s backlash against bailouts and spending and in the Occupy Wall Street revolt against Wall Street’s political influence.
It’s possible to imagine a gifted political figure emerging to fuse elements from the Tea Party and O.W.S. critiques into a plausible third party challenge to politics as usual. But such a candidate would look nothing like Michael Bloomberg or any other high-minded Davos/Brookings type of technocrat. Instead, he or she would be more disreputable, more eccentric, and probably more demagogic as well. Such a candidacy (Pat Buchanan meets Ralph Nader) wouldn’t have to actually govern the country; instead, its purpose would be to jolt the two parties out of their usual habits and arguments and to persuade one or both of them to adopt some of its ideas.
via The Third Party Fantasy – NYTimes.com.
Tags: 2012 elections, Americans Elect, Douthat, third party
