Books &amp; Liturature

How the Rich Benefited From the Recovery

Mon, 05/06/2013 - 19:08 — Dave Culver

(While Most of Us Got Nothing)
Austerity debunked

Les Leopold, AlterNet / Truthdig

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Image via Shutterstock

May 5, 2013 | The richest Americans made trillions during the so-called economic recovery from 2009 to 2011, while most everyone else’s net worth dropped, according to a recent Pew Research Social & Demographic Trends analysis of newly released Census Bureau data.

According to the study, the net worth of the nation’s wealthiest 7 percent rose 28 percent during that time period. In contrast, the net worth of the rest of Americans dropped 4 percent. The 8 million families at the top saw their aggregate wealth rise $5.6 trillion (an increase of roughly $700,000 per family), while the 111 million families that comprise the remaining 93 percent saw their total wealth decline more than $600 billion (a decrease of roughly $6,000 per family).

Related:

Austerity debunked, Aljazeera

As Europe struggles under widespread spending cuts, it seems that the theory behind austerity may, in fact, be flawed.
Earth to Washington: Repeal the Sequester

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Noam Chomsky, In These Times

Economics

Boston and Beyond

Sat, 05/04/2013 - 19:22 — Dave Culver

It's rare for privileged Westerners to see, graphically, what many others experience daily--for example, in a remote village in Yemen.
When we experience terror at home, we must remember the United States’s use of terror abroad.
Two Obamas, Two Classes Of Children
Pressure-Cooker and Cluster Bombs

Panic spread after two bombs exploded during the 117th Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013. (Photo by Alex Trautwig/Getty Images)

May 2, 2013 | April is usually a cheerful month in New England, with the first signs of spring, and the harsh winter at last receding. Not this year.

There are few in Boston who were not touched in some way by the marathon bombings on April 15 and the tense week that followed. Several friends of mine were at the finish line when the bombs went off. Others live close to where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the second suspect, was captured. The young police officer Sean Collier was murdered right outside my office building.

It's rare for privileged Westerners to see, graphically, what many others experience daily—for example, in a remote village in Yemen, the same week as the marathon bombings.

Pressure-Cooker and Cluster Bombs, RootsAction Team

Unless the American people come to realize that a president must be subject to the rule of law and our Constitution, our statutes and treaties, every succeeding president will push the deficit-financed lawlessness further until the inevitable blowback day of reckoning. That is the fate of all empires.
A Culture That Condones The Killing Of Children And Teaches Children To Kill

Both rip through human flesh causing maximum pain, injury, and death.
Both are wrong!
Here Comes AIPAC, Lobbying for War

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David Horsey | Guns for Kids / www.trbimg.com

Fri, 05/03/2013 - 19:45 — Dave Culver

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Acknowledge Class Warfare Exists

Doublethink in Wonderland

Fri, 05/03/2013 - 19:38 — Dave Culver

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Law & Justice

J’accuse: The War Criminal Rudolf Hoess Speaks

Tue, 04/30/2013 - 20:12 — Dave Culver

“Do not think you are better than me because you burn up enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done.”
To History’s Militarists, Including the CIA’s “Drone Warriors”

Gary G. Kohls, Duty to Warn / Evergreene Digest

The Duluth Reader ran out of space for an optional ending of last week’s Duty to Warn column (The Consequences of Unconditional Obedience to Authority ~ Rudolf Hoess, the Commandant of Auschwitz). My preferred ending was the powerful Thomas Merton prose poem that gave voice to the infamous international war criminal, the Commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess.

Merton has Hoess speaking from the gallows with the haunting accusation of history’s pro-war presidents, monarchs, dictators, Prime Ministers, and assorted politicians who know that wars always involve the mass murder of defenseless civilians (euphemistically known as “collateral damage”) in the universal long-range aerial bombing and now, in the case of the United States, the extra-judicial assassinations of suspected “terrorists” by drone warfare (which meets the definition of international war-crimes).

This essay will attempt to perhaps shed some light on some of the unlearned lessons of the cruelty of militarism, racism, anti-Semitism, and poverty by examining some of the realities of what the Nazis called the Final Solution and what the rest of humanity calls the Holocaust.
Our problem is civil obedience.

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America’s Locked-Down Insecurity State

Tue, 04/30/2013 - 18:36 — Dave Culver

Emerging evidence from the Boston Marathon bombings suggests the brutal attack on innocent civilians was motivated by the fury of two brothers against overseas crimes of the U.S. government. In that, the martial-law lockdown of Boston may be a glimpse at the future to come, says Phil Rockstroh.
“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” ― Søren Kierkegaard

Phil Rockstroh, Consortium News

This article is made possible with the generous contributions of all reader supported Evergreene Digest readers like you. Thank you!

A photograph released by the FBI of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, later identified as Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

April 26, 2013 | Life, as lived, moment to moment, in the corporate/consumer state, involves moving between states of tedium, stress, and swoons of mass media and consumer distraction. Therein, one spends a large portion of one’s economically beleaguered life attempting to make ends meet and not go mad from the pressure and the boredom.

Where does a nebulous concept such as freedom even enter the picture, except to be a harbinger of an unfocused sense of unease … that all too many look to authority to banish? Finding a balance between anxiety and freedom is not something that comes easy to us.

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Arts & Culture

Pat Bagley | Immigration Reform / www.truthdig.com

Mon, 04/29/2013 - 18:12 — Dave Culver

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Is War Still a Racket?

Mon, 04/29/2013 - 16:19 — Dave Culver

Is War Still a Racket? An Ex-Marine Compares Gen. Smedley Butler's 1933 with 2003
War Is a Racket ~ Major General Smedley Butler

Chris White, Counterpunch

This article is made possible with the generous contributions of all reader supported Evergreene Digest readers like you. Thank you!

January 09, 2003 | As a Marine serving on a ship in the Pacific in 1997, the ship’s commander ordered the dumping of the ship’s refuse into the ocean. I asked around to see if this was a common event, as this was my first time at sea in the military, and was told that the Navy had no other way of dumping while at sea, and that it was standard procedure. In order to make this environmental atrocity productive, the Marines used the big, filled, plastic garbage bags as target practice. For a good two hours, we fired thousands of rounds out of our .50 caliber machine guns and sniper rifles at the trail of waste that stretched for miles toward the horizon.

The above story is meant to illustrate how counterproductive the military is, and this applies to this essay’s discussion of how the military is inherently bound to the interests of the power elite, and against everything else, especially the defense of freedom. After his retirement in 1931, Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, one of only two Marines in history to have received two Medals of Honor, spoke out against the U.S. government’s use of force in world affairs. He wrote and spoke of the way in which corporations profited from war, while countless millions suffered as a result. This essay compares General Butler’s analysis of this process in 1933 with the use of war for power and profit in 2003, with the goal of establishing that not only has the racket expanded tremendously, but our national security has correlatively reduced. I am not anti-American. I am an ex-Marine sergeant and current doctoral student in history who is concerned about the consistent destruction of this planet and its people carried out by my government in the false name of the promotion and defense of freedom.

WAR is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

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Freedom Rider: What Ails the GOP

Sat, 04/27/2013 - 12:51 — Dave Culver

The Republicans have stripped down their constituency to only “the worst of the worst” Americans: “white supremacists, misogynists and other dead enders.” Obama’s Democrats have absorbed the rest of the GOP, to become the New Republican Party of austerity and war.
“The Democrats have taken positions which were once the sole property of the GOP.”
Ralph Nader explains how voting for the ‘least worst’ candidate corrupts democracy

Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report

Submitted by Evergreene Digest Contributing Editor Lydia Howell

March 27, 2013 | The plight of the Republican Party and its damaged brand are much in discussion recently. Republicans are in a state of despair over their loss in the 2012 presidential election and, as is always the case, debate among themselves about the reasons for their defeat. Despite the absence of polling or other data which might indicate a Mitt Romney victory, they had high hopes of defeating Barack Obama. They used every opportunity to undo and weaken his initiatives but they made the error of listening only to those within their bubble, and created needless enmity among enough white Americans to help Obama win convincingly.

Their meme of labeling 47% of Americans as deadbeats did not exclude white people, and sealed their doom among those voters they needed. The anti-immigrant “self deportation” plan turned Latino swing voters into a solid part of the democratic bloc. The gender gap won’t go away as long as Republican candidates outdo one another with sexist comments about birth control and abortion.

Full story…

You’re desperately supporting the least worst candidate because the other guy is worse. So you lose your bargaining power, and they don’t have to give you the time of day the minute you indicate you’re a least worst voter.”
The left has lost its nerve and its direction.
Yes, I’m Voting Third Party. No I’m Not Wasting My Vote.

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