Category: American Empire

by John Lawrence / Will Blog For Food

The Tea Party says we are Taxed Enough Already. But who exactly is “We.” Are upper income individuals and families taxed enough already or is it just lower income individuals and families? Check out this graph of tax brackets for 2010 – inside. How many middle class families would object to adding a few higher brackets like say a Tax Rate of 40% for Married Couples and Individuals with Incomes over $500,000.

A new report released today by SIPRI, a Swedish-based think tank, reveals that U.S. military spending has almost doubled since 2001. The U.S. spent an astounding $698 billion on the military last year, an 81% increase over the last decade.

U.S. spending on the military last year far exceeded any other country. We spent six times more than China — the second largest spender.

Guns in churches, schools and bars. Immigrants expelled to solve financial problems. Morality praised as the key national issue.

American politics are getting more bizarre and in some cases, border on the nutty. Current politics include Republican legislatures in Texas, Arizona, Georgia and Minnesota fighting for their “rights” to reject energy efficiency light bulbs, while South Carolina will manufacture their own state’s rights incandescent bulbs.

Editor: As you read this, remember that your community’s underground newspaper, the original OB Rag, was part of this era. Art Kunkin, mentioned below – he was the editor of one of the West Coast’s grandparent alternatives, the LA Free Press – once called the OB Rag one of the best, community-based underground newspapers in the country.
The Sixties’ scrappy alternative newspapers were the oxygen that kept the era’s movements going.
By Richard Greenwald / In These Times

History books rarely speak as trenchantly to contemporary issues as John McMillian’s Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (Oxford University, February). As the cascading revolts in the Muslim world demonstrate, communication systems matter.

by Jim Miller

These are grim times. The worst are full of passionate intensity and the best lack all conviction. The Democrats at the state and national levels seem ready to embrace economic scarcity and budget cutting as the “new normal” while the right smells blood in the water and is going in for the kill on collective bargaining rights, women’s rights, environmental regulations, funding for education, and long untouchable social programs. While the Democrats play prevent defense, the corporate-funded right is going for it all, working to change the rules of the game permanently, short-term costs be damned.

Koch spends tens of millions trying to shape federal policies that affect their global business empire By John Aloysius Farrell…

See the full article for the video

Exxon Mobil, Bank of America, GE and other giant corporations paid no U.S. taxes despite billions in profits. In fact, they pocketed big IRS refunds. It’s a scandal, Sen. Bernie Sanders told colleagues on Wednesday. As congressional leaders and the White House haggled over how many billions of dollars to cut spending on programs for working families, Bernie tried to broaden the debate. He compiled a top-10 list of tax-dodging corporations. “Maybe we have to reduce that deficit not simply on the backs of working families, low-income people, the children, the sick, the elderly. Maybe, maybe we might want to call for shared sacrifice. Maybe Exxon-Mobil and some of the large oil companies might be asked to pay something in taxes.”

Accused Whistle-blower Now Charged With Capital Offense

By Kathleen Gilberd

Think of yourself as a soldier. Working at a desk job, you see shocking messages, reports and pictures about military activity that seems wrong and sometimes horrifying. And then, one day, you see a video recording of US soldiers laughing as they shoot unarmed civilians from a helicopter.

by Jeoffry Gordon, MD, MPH

Our country is at the edge of a precarious cliff that presents the biggest danger to the survival of our democracy than anything since the Civil War…….Or like Wiley Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons – we may have run off the precipice already – but it just has not yet sunk in. The problem is one of domestic social justice and economics.

By John Lawrence / Will Blog for Food / March 22, 2011

In an article March 18, 2011 in the San Diego Union Tribune, Qualcomm said “it would spend $975 million to build a factory in Taiwan to manufacture low-power Mirasol display screens for e-readers and smart phones.”

However, there is a caveat. Qualcomm would like to imply that, if it could repatriate the $9.8 billion in cash it is holding offshore without paying taxes or at a sufficiently reduced tax rate, it would build the factory in the US instead thus creating jobs.

“Why do you people hide in the park?” one person asked me.

“Do you think that you are going to change a damn thing?” another asked. “Obama promised to end the wars if we elected him and he lied, just like Bush” she continued.

While most residents of Southern California tried to figure out if the day was going to bring rain, three hundred San Diegans spent a few hours in Balboa Park rallying against two wars our government is waging – Iraq and Afghanistan.

Starting at noon, the protest included speakers, singers, poets, and the Puppet Insurgency, and at a little after 2 pm, the crowd formed up onto the sidewalk and marched south towards the freeway.

At Elm Street, the crowd broke up, with a group moving to each of the six overpasses on I-5 – 1st Avenue through 6th Avenue -, lining the bridges holding banners, flags, while attaching larger banners to the wires on the overpasses. Many supportive honks could be heard from the passing traffic below.