( Steven Rosenfeld, Alternet, April 25, 2103)
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Let’s look at 50 reasons, some large and some small, why W. inspired so much anger.

1. He stole the presidency in 2000.

3. He covered up his past.

4. He loved the death penalty.

8. He ignored warnings about Osama bin Laden.

12. Bush turned to Iraq not Afghanistan.

14. He flat-out lied about Iraq’s weapons.

19. Bush pardoned the Plame affair leaker.

22. The war did not make the U.S. safer.

23. U.S. troops were given unsafe gear.

31. He cut veterans’ healthcare funding.

44. Bush let black New Orleans drown.

48. Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld.

49. He’s escaped accountability for his actions.

[COMMENT by Lorenzo: Little Bush is certainly the most simple-minded man to sit in the White House during my lifetime, and most definitely, IMO, one of the worst and most evil of our presidents. But then there was Nixon, who was obviously insane and who had an "enemies list", which was very un-presidential. And now there is Obama with a "KILL LIST", which is very un-American. . . . The Empire is in obvious decline.]

(JOHN STAUBER, Counterpunch, March 15-17, 2013)
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The self-labeled Progressive Movement that has arisen over the past decade is primarily one big propaganda campaign serving the political interests of the the Democratic Party’s richest one-percent who created it. The funders and owners of the Progressive Movement get richer and richer off Wall Street and the corporate system. But they happen to be Democrats, cultural and social liberals who can’t stomach Republican policies, and so after bruising electoral defeats a decade ago they decided to buy a movement, one just like the Republicans, a copy. . . . The liberal elite own the Progressive Movement. Organizing for Action, the “non-partisan” slush fund to train the new leaders of the Progressive Movement is just the latest big money ploy to consolidate their control and keep the feed flowing into the trough. . . . The professional Progressive Movement that we see reflected in the pages of The Nation magazine, in the online marketing and campaigning of MoveOn and in the speeches of Van Jones, is primarily a political public relations creation of America’s richest corporate elite, the so-called 1%, who happen to bleed Blue because they have some degree of social and environmental consciousness, and don’t bleed Red. But they are just as committed as the right to the overall corporate status quo, the maintenance of the American Empire, and the monopoly of the rich over the political process that serves their economic interests. . . . The Progressive Movement we see today was created by a small group including Democratic political operatives and foundations including TIDES (formed in 1976), the millionaires and billionaires of the Democracy Alliance, (formed in 2005) and eventually the Obama machine. » Continue reading “Beware of the “Progressive Movement” & the Billionaires Funding It”

( Adam Serwer, MotherJones, Mar. 5, 2013)
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Yes, the president does have the authority to use military force against American citizens on US soil—but only in “an extraordinary circumstance,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a letter to Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) Tuesday. . . . “The U.S. Attorney General’s refusal to rule out the possibility of drone strikes on American citizens and on American soil is more than frightening,” Paul said Tuesday. “It is an affront the constitutional due process rights of all Americans.” . . . The letter concludes, “were such an emergency to arise, I would examine the particular facts and circumstances before advising the president of the scope of his authority.” . . . In a Google+ Hangout last month, President Obama refused to say directly if he had the authority to use lethal force against US citizens. As Mother Jones reported at the time, the reason the president was being so coy is that the answer was likely yes. Now we know that’s exactly what was happening. “Any use of drone strikes or other pre-meditated lethal force inside the United States would raise grave legal and ethical concerns,” says Raha Wala, an attorney with Human Rights First. “There should be equal concern about using force overseas.”

(Bruce E Levine, Counterpunch, 20 October 2012)
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“If the Bush administration didn’t like somebody, they’d kidnap them and send them to torture chambers. If the Obama administration decides they don’t like somebody, they murder them.” — Noam Chomsky

“I don’t vote. On Election Day, I stay home. I firmly believe that if you vote, you have no right to complain. Now, some people like to twist that around. They say, ‘If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain,’ but where’s the logic in that? . . . You voted them in. You caused the problem. You have no right to complain.” —George Carlin

When the Republicans win, Americans get senseless wars and corporate control. When the Democrats win, Americans get senseless wars and corporate control. Learned helplessness means a belief that no matter what one does or does not do, one cannot decrease one’s level of pain, and so one gives up trying. If a society’s electoral process promotes learned helplessness, it is not a democratic society. . . . Military spending under Obama, as a percentage of GDP, has been higher than it was during any year of the George W. Bush administration. And under Obama, there has not been a single prosecution of a high ranking Wall Street executive or any major financial firms for their criminal practices that helped produce a worldwide financial meltdown. There are differences between Romney and Obama, but not when it comes to democracy activists’ helplessness around stopping senseless wars and corporate control. . . . The bottom line is that regardless of what we do or don’t do in the election booth, we continue to get senseless wars and corporate control. . . . There are other democracy battlefields not as easily controlled by big money as is the U.S. electoral process. . . . Real power in the workplace is being fought every day by worker cooperatives, labor unions, and the self-employed. Battles for power over housing are being fought by housing activists such as City Life and the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America. Battles for power over who controls the food supply are being fought by family farmers and others. And other battles for power are being fought in health care, education, and in nearly every other arena where the corporatocracy reigns. These real battles for power and democracy are being fought—and sometimes won—and unpublicized by the corporate media. . . .  So, instead of voter and nonvoter democracy activists arrogance over their position, and instead of them flailing out at one another, let the ruling class tremble at unified voter and nonvoter democracy activists who, instead of overfocusing on electoral politics, join together on winnable battlefields.

(Amy B Dean, Truthout, 3 October 2012 )
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   The Betrayal of the America Dream

The outsourcing of good jobs, the elimination of pensions, rampant home foreclosures; skyrocketing higher education costs and mounting debt: Given these stark realities, the American middle class seems to be sinking fast.  . . . A study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics a couple of years ago estimated that basically 25 percent of the entire service workforce, or roughly 30 million jobs, [are] in danger of being off-shored and outsourced. That’s a huge number. And, if anything, the Labor Department has underestimated the impact of globalization on the American workforce over the years.” . . . “One of the myths out there is that high wages paid to union workers are driving these jobs offshore. We make the point that in a whole series of key manufacturing sectors – like the auto industry – workers in places like Germany and Japan make more money through wages and benefits than autoworkers in this country. The idea that just high wages are the reason that companies are going offshore is complete malarkey. The main reason is the incentives provided by foreign governments; and then, when companies bring their product back to this country, there’s essentially no tariff on it. So there’s a tremendous incentive for big corporations to go abroad and not pay any penalty for it.” . . . “An integral part of this is the success that the elite have had in focusing attention on the budget deficit,” he said. “While it’s important in the scheme of things, it should be at the bottom of the list, the absolute bottom. At the top should be … and you never hear these two words uttered together … the trade deficit, because it is the trade deficit that results in lost jobs. In the decade of the 90s, the trade deficit was close to 8 trillion dollars. Each year it gets bigger and bigger. We haven’t had a trade surplus since the mid-1970s. Since then, it’s been annual trade deficits. Every one of those annual deficits translates into lost jobs. Yet no one talks about ending the trade deficit.” . . .  ”The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. After 37 consecutive years of trade deficits, all accompanied by lost jobs, I don’t care what anybody says about throwing up walls. You don’t have to throw up walls, but you do need to do something different. If something isn’t done, this country is going to go down the tubes.”

(Countercurrents.org, 14 September, 2012)
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Hunger is the number one reason behind riot. There are other reasons also. These include poverty, oppression, disenfranchisement. Trampled down humanity fights back. It’s, plain and simple. But, if there’s a single factor that reliably sparks social unrest, it’s food becoming too scarce or too expensive. So argues a group of complex systems theorists in Cambridge , and it makes sense. . . . In a 2011 paper , researchers at the Complex Systems Institute unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for global food prices that, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest. . . . The MIT Technology Review explains how CSI’s model works: “The evidence comes from two sources. The first is data gathered by the United Nations that plots the price of food against time, the so-called food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organisation. The second is the date of riots around the world, whatever their cause.” Plot the data, and it looks like this: [CLICK the above link for the graph.] . . . Pretty simple. Black dots are the food prices, red lines are the riots. In other words, whenever the UN’s food price index, which measures the monthly change in the price of a basket of food commodities, climbs above 210, the conditions ripen for social unrest around the world. . . . CSI doesn’t claim that any breach of 210 immediately leads to riots, obviously; just that the probability that riots will erupt grows much greater. . . . For billions of people around the world, food comprises up to 80% of routine expenses (for rich-world people like you and I, it’s like 15%). When prices jump, people can’t afford anything else; or even food itself. And if a person can’t eat — or worse, a person’s family can’t eat — the person fights. . . . » Continue reading “One Year Away From Global Food Riots”

(MORRIS BERMAN, Counterpunch, September 20, 2012)
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An important derivative of the Annales research is the work of the World Systems Analysis school, including Immanuel Wallerstein and Christopher Chase-Dunn, which similarly focuses on long-term structures: capitalism, in particular. . . . The “arc” of capitalism, according to this school, is about 600 years long, from 1500 to 2100. It is our particular (mis)fortune to be living through the beginning of the end, the disintegration of capitalism as a world system. It was mostly commercial capital in the sixteenth century, evolving into industrial capital in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and then moving on to financial capital—money created by money itself, and by speculation in currency—in the twentieth and twenty-first. In dialectical fashion, it will be the very success of the system that eventually does it in. . . . The last time a change of this magnitude occurred was during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, during which time the medieval world began to come apart and be replaced by the modern one. . . . the whole climate change debate is a serious threat to capitalism. » Continue reading “Is The “Arc” of Capitalism Coming To Its End””

(CounterPunch, VIJAY PRASHAD, September 17, 2012)
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A mid-September sunny day in New York City draws those with the day off to go to the parks and laze along the avenues, walking by the workers on call, cleaning up after tourists, holding together a city that always seems held together by the sweat of its massive workforce and a dose of city pride. Beneath the massive Washington Arch, a woman in a wheelchair, beside other men and women in wheelchairs and other prosthetic devices, holds a sign that says, “Occupy Wheelchairs.” The Occupy Wall Street Disability Caucus is holding an assembly to proclaim its presence at Occupy, Year 2. . . . Behind their wheelchairs, on the Arch, is a sculpture of Wisdom (made by Stirling Calder, the father of Alexander Calder), whose hand holds a book with Ovid’s quip, Exitus Acta Probat, which can be loosely translated as “all’s well that ends well.” It is a good hopeful slogan for the Occupy festival in anticipation of S17 (September 17), the day OWS returns to the canyons of Wall Street to shut down Money. . . . A man tells his three-year-old child, “let’s go occupy the playground.” It is the spirit of the moment. . . . The Occupy Catholics have a homemade sign: “We aren’t protesting. We’re advertising Love.” . . . A man in a police uniform holds a sign, “To understand us watch Inside Job. A film about Corporate Greed, not 9-11.” . . . » Continue reading “Occupy’s Not Dead, It Was on Vacation . . . Year 2 Begins”

(RawStory, Eric W. Dolan, September 17, 2012 )
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Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter thinks the decline of civic education is putting the United States in danger. . . . During a question and answer session last week at University of New Hampshire School of Law, Souter described “pervasive civic ignorance” as one of the biggest problems in the United States. He warned that Americans’ ignorance about their own government could lead to a dictatorship. . . . “I don’t worry about our losing a republican government in the United States because I’m afraid of a foreign invasion, he said. “I don’t worry about it because of a coup by the military, as has happened in some other places. What I worry about is that when problems are not addressed people will not know who is responsible, and when the problems get bad enough — as they might do for example with another serious terrorist attack, as they might do with another financial meltdown — some one person will come forward and say ‘Give me total power and I will solve this problem.’” . . .
» Continue reading “Former Justice Souter: ‘Pervasive civic ignorance’ in U.S. could bring dictatorship”