The Politics of Dignity – NYTimes.com

1 Feb

This message, of course, plays well in the USofA too:

Dear Sirs: You may think that the situations in Egypt and Russia have nothing in common. Think again. Yes, these two countries have starkly different histories. But having visited both in recent weeks, I can tell you that they have one very big thing in common: the political eruptions in both countries were not initially driven by any particular ideology but rather by the most human of emotions — the quest for dignity and justice. Humiliation is the single most underestimated force in politics. People will absorb hardship, hunger and pain. They will be grateful for jobs, cars and benefits. But if you force people to live indefinitely inside a rigged game that is flaunted in their face or make them feel like cattle that can be passed by one leader to his son or one politician to another, eventually they’ll explode. These are the emotions that sparked the uprisings in Cairo and Moscow. They don’t go away easily, which is why you’re in more trouble than you think.

via The Politics of Dignity – NYTimes.com.

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Newt vs. Mitt | The Nation

1 Feb

It’s astonishing that a party with nearly limitless financial resources has such paltry human resources. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently wrote a column titled, “A Good Candidate is Hard to Find,” in which he did his best to come up with excuses for this sorry state of affairs: “The problem, perhaps, is that a successful presidential campaign calls on a trio of talents that only rarely overlap. Being a master politician in a mass democracy, in this sense, is a bit like being a brilliant filmmaker who’s somehow also a great economist, or a Nobel-winning scientist who writes best-selling novels on the side.” Which is, at best, a generous metaphor to use in reference to the two candidates leading the Republican pack today. It also evades the key issue, which is that the party has lurched so far to the right that a candidate like Romney, with some moderate positions on his record, must become a shape-shifter to survive the primary, leaving him badly compromised for the general election.

via Newt vs. Mitt | The Nation.

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Can saving the Amazon save the planet? – GlobalPost – Salon.com

1 Feb

Some 20 percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions now come from deforestation, especially in the lush, green band of tropical rainforest that circles the earth.

That is more than from global transport.

So representatives from member states involved in UN climate negotiations are attempting to hammer out a way to make it more profitable to protect forests than destroy them.

By providing cash for maintaining healthy forests, they hope to undermine the economic imperative for poor countries or individuals to cut down trees for timber, to free land for agriculture, or to make way for roads, housing and other infrastructure.

The idea, known as reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation, or REDD, will be included in the successor to the Kyoto protocol, which is now the only international treaty aimed at climate change.

via Can saving the Amazon save the planet? – GlobalPost – Salon.com.

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Turning the ‘Buffett Rule’ Into Law – NYTimes.com

1 Feb

The Congressional Research Service estimates that the Buffett Rule, requiring millionaires to pay at least the same rate as most middle-income taxpayers, would affect about a quarter of all millionaires, or 94,500 taxpayers. Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal policy group, says the bill’s 30 percent rate would bring in about $50 billion a year.

via Turning the ‘Buffett Rule’ Into Law – NYTimes.com.

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The GOP hate-off continues – Mitt Romney – Salon.com

1 Feb

The Republican Party is split between its two personalities: Predatory finance capital and angry white male faux-populism. That’s trouble enough. Add to that Gingrich’s fury at Romney’s bottomless pockets full of nasty ads, and this is a party headed for a crack-up.

November’s still a long way away, but it’s hard to imagine President Obama losing Florida after the slime-fest we’ve just witnessed. Both Gingrich and Romney are seeing their negatives go up as the campaign goes on, while Obama’s approval rating continues to climb. I think the president is largely responsible for his ratings rise, because he’s brought the fight to the GOP since the debt-ceiling debacle.

via The GOP hate-off continues – Mitt Romney – Salon.com.

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Eric Schneiderman: The Right Man, the Right Moment | The Nation

1 Feb

In covering (and working as an editor with) Schneiderman over the years, I’ve grown to admire him as someone who fights for what he calls “transformational politics,” which he described in the pages of The Nation in 2008 this way: “Transformational politics is the work we do today to ensure that the deal we can get on gun control or immigration reform in a year—or five years, or twenty years—will be better than the deal we can get today. Transformational politics requires us to challenge the way people think about issues, opening their minds to better possibilities.… History teaches that the overwhelming majority of elected officials follow movement builders outside government when it comes to the new and risky.”

via Eric Schneiderman: The Right Man, the Right Moment | The Nation.

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Occupy the Super Bowl: Now More Than Just a Slogan. | The Nation

1 Feb

The Republican-led state legislature aims to pass a law this week that would make Indiana a “right-to-work” state. … In the reality-based community, “right-to-work” means smashing the state’s unions and making it harder for nonunion workplaces to get basic job protections. This has drawn peals of protest throughout the state, with the Occupy and labor movement front and center from small towns to Governor Mitch Daniels’s door at the State House. Daniels and friends timed this legislation with the Super Bowl. Whether that was simple arrogance or ill-timed idiocy, they made a reckless move. Now protests will be a part of the Super Bowl scenery in Indy.

The Super Bowl is perennially the Woodstock for the 1 percent: a Romneyesque cavalcade of private planes, private parties and private security. Combine that with this proposed legislation, and the people of Indiana will not let this orgy of excess go unoccupied. Just as the parties start a week in advance, so have the protests. More than 150 people…marched through last Saturday’s Super Bowl street fair in downtown Indianapolis with signs that read, “Occupy the Super Bowl,” “Fight the Lie” and “Workers United Will Prevail.” Occupy the Super Bowl has also become a T-shirt, posted for the world to see on the NBC Sports Blog.

via Occupy the Super Bowl: Now More Than Just a Slogan. | The Nation.

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DON’T LET EVIL DIVIDE US! – YouTube

31 Jan

George Carlin on class structure in the USofA: The upperclass has all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes and does all of the work. The lower class is there to scare the sh*t out of the middle class to keep them doing all of the work.

DON’T LET EVIL DIVIDE US! – YouTube.

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College Life, Enlistment and the ‘Real World’ – NYTimes.com

31 Jan

…whatever problems may arise in the transition from civilian to soldier — and, later, soldier to civilian — the lessons I learn in the Army, such as discipline, responsibility, and loyalty, will help me accomplish any goal. I will be able to look back and see photos of myself making a difference, meeting challenges, living my life — which is a lot better than photos of some college kid with half-closed eyes and a red plastic cup in each hand.

I’ll be 20 when I enter basic training, a middle-class independent voter who signed up for an enlisted infantry slot in the Army. I hope to deploy to fight a war I hope ends on time in 2014; perhaps in the name of a Republican president I’d rather not have in the White House. I’ll have to get up early while my civilian friends are sleeping in before their first classes.

About the author: “Jonathan Wertheim lives in Brunswick, Maine, and attended Hampshire College for one year before deciding to join the military. He enlisted in the Army as an infantryman on Dec. 7, 2011, and leaves for basic training in the spring.”

via College Life, Enlistment and the ‘Real World’ – NYTimes.com.

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Under Occupy DC’s tent of dreams – OccupyDC – Salon.com

31 Jan

There was Michael, once a African-American kid who went from Alaska to Iraq as a gung-ho warrior and came back from the war zone a happy-go-lucky leftist with a taste for confronting the right-wing media. There was Katie, graduate of a private school in northwest Washington who regularly facilitated the occupation’s General Assemblies and learned to try to trust the judgement of the group. There was Sam who came from Virginia with a political science degree in hand, yamulke on his head, and unshakable interest in non-hierarchical politics. There was Vic who had traveled the country for the sake of her political activism and found renewed inspiration from a man named Charles Jones, who desegregated a lunch counter in South Carolina long before any of them were born. And there were few dozen others just like them–and some not at all like them at all–who had claimed a patch of grass in McPherson Square on October 1 and called themselves OccupyDC. There was hardly a professional reformer among them.

via Under Occupy DC’s tent of dreams – OccupyDC – Salon.com.

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