Category: American Empire

Bernie Sanders : It’s Time for Them to Pay up and Share the Sacrifice

While hard working Americans fill out their income tax returns this tax season, General Electric and other giant profitable corporations are avoiding U.S. taxes altogether.

With Congress returning to Capitol Hill on Monday to debate steep spending cuts, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said the wealthiest Americans and most profitable corporations must do their share to help bring down our record-breaking deficit.

Over the past several weeks I watched the squabble between the Republicans, and the Republicans, and some Democrats over the debt ceiling. It seemed like a no-brainer to resolve, and so the Republicans, and the Republicans and some Democrats seemed to be the perfect folk to figure it all out.

After it all played out, the resolution would turn out the same way whenever the Republicans and the Republicans, and some Democrats try to resolve an issue; they generally end up blaming us because we think we are so entitled, and take another animal off the endangered species list so it can be slaughtered and a power plant can be built…or something like that. But this time there was something sinister in the background which seemed to be disturbing to everyone. This time our credit rating was being threatened.

I have spent most of the week poring over news stories, blogs and commentary on last week’s decision by Bay Area Rapid Transit officials to shut off cellphone service to quash planned protests on its trains and platforms.

Opinions are many and range from BART spokesman Linton Johnson, who says constitutional rights end the moment people walk through transit-authority turnstiles, to “X” of the hacker collective Anonymous, who protested BART’s action and said our freedom to connect should be absolute and universal.

With the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks only a month away, former CIA Director George Tenet and two former top aides are fighting back hard against allegations that they engaged in a massive cover-up in 2000 and 2001 to hide intelligence from the White House and the FBI that might have prevented the attacks.

Poll: Tea Party Less Popular Than Muslims, Atheists, 21 Other Groups

The debt ceiling deal has left the Tea Party more disliked than ever, as a recent New York Times poll shows. In April, 2010, 21 percent of Americans approved of the Tea Party while 18 percent disapproved of it. Now, 20 percent approve while a stunning 40 percent disapprove of it.

Republican Governors Eliminate Jobs and Raise Unemployment Rate by Firing Cops, Teachers and Firemen

by John Lawrence / Will Blog for Food / August 14, 2011

The private sector has added jobs in recent months, but government has lost jobs because Republican Governors are firing public workers.

Billionaire Warren Buffett has been making headlines in his call for the super-rich of America to be taxed more. (See below.)

Now we hear that Irwin Jacobs – one of the richest San Diegans and co-founder of Qualcomm – agrees with Buffett. Jacobs made this surprising statement during a meeting with the San Diego U-T Community Editorial Board earlier this week, where he raised questions about the assumption that higher taxes on the super-rich were bad for job creation, and completely agreed with Buffett.

In 2009, Forbes listed Jacobs as the 220th richest American, worth $1.6 Billion.

The Nickel and Dimed (2011 Version)

By Barbara Ehrenreich / TomDispatch.com / Originally published Aug. 9, 2011

I completed the manuscript for Nickel and Dimed in a time of seemingly boundless prosperity. Technology innovators and venture capitalists were acquiring sudden fortunes, buying up McMansions like the ones I had cleaned in Maine and much larger. Even secretaries in some hi-tech firms were striking it rich with their stock options. There was loose talk about a permanent conquest of the business cycle, and a sassy new spirit infecting American capitalism. In San Francisco, a billboard for an e-trading firm proclaimed, “Make love not war,” and then — down at the bottom — “Screw it, just make money.”

If you think the “Debt Deal” stinks, wait until you find out how they pulled off this heist, with the full complicity of the media!

This month, Activist San Diego brings together a panel of experts, to analyze and deconstruct how an artificial ‘crisis’ was created, just as outlined in Naomi Klein’s book ” Shock Doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism“. The panel includes:

• Congressman Bob Filner
• Lorena Gonzalez of the Labor Council,
• Floyd Morrow,
• Dr. Jeoff Gordon and

Obama is a willful player in an epic drama of faux-politics.

By James K. Galbraith / AlterNet – Deutsche Welle / August 8, 2011

Political news travels slowly, and in my casual observation progressive Europeans have held on to the myth of Barack Obama as a good man much longer than most progressive Americans did. How could a young black American from Chicago and Harvard be otherwise?

By Michael Moore / MichaelMoore.com / August 5, 2011

From time to time, someone under 30 will ask me, “When did this all begin, America’s downward slide?” They say they’ve heard of a time when working people could raise a family and send the kids to college on just one parent’s income (and that college in states like California and New York was almost free).

That anyone who wanted a decent paying job could get one. That people only worked five days a week, eight hours a day, got the whole weekend off and had a paid vacation every summer.

Editor: Here are two articles from Europe about the state of America today – since the so-called “debt crisis” was resolved. One is from Der Spiegel – one of the most well-respected German newspapers -, and the other from the Guardian in Britain. The pictures of our country that these articles paint is extremely terrible : the German believes that the U.S. is no longer part of the “West”, and the British view is that there’s been a “billionaires’ coup” in America.

Once Upon a Time in the West

by Jakob Augstein / Der Spiegel (Germany) / August 4, 2011

This week, the United States nearly allowed itself to succumb to economic disaster. Increasingly, the divided country has more in common with a failed state than a democracy.

(Come inside for the remainder of this article.)

Anger, Deceit and a Billionaires’ Coup

By George Monbiot/ Guardian UK (Britain) / August 2, 2011

Anger and deceit has led the US into a billionaires’ coup. The debt deal will hurt the poorest Americans, convinced by Fox and the Tea Party to act against their own welfare.

(Come inside for the remainder of this article.)