What was can be

Executive privilege is alive and thriving under Obama.

AG Holder and Prop 19

Stuff needing remembering

I’m happily wending my way through Tom Geoghegan’s wonderfully entertaining and maddening book “Were You Born On the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help Us Get a Life.” Filled with great stats and facts, Geoghegan shows us why Germans are richer and happier than we are.

Seems like you can’t open the web browser these days without seeing yet another story based on cherry-picked information on how nations must ditch all social spending and cut taxes on the rich in order to be “competitive”. However, the most competitive places are quite often those with the very safety nets the authors of the thumbsuckers (and the folks who sign their paychecks) seem to hate.

Historian Tony Judt died yesterday. His last book “Ill Fares the Land” described how we need a new economy where wealth concentration is ended and where the necessities of the people are met in a new economy. To achieve that new economy a vision needs to be shown through new language.

With financial reform now newly passed, politicians who supported it go into overdrive to exaggerate its likely effects. Their cultivated enthusiasms culminate in the same promises made by every president and congressperson after similar reforms were enacted in the wake of earlier capitalist crises. “This reform,” they all insist, “will prevent crises in the future.” That promise has been broken every time as our current global capitalist crisis proves yet again.

Producer Director Oliver Stone and screenwriters Mark Weisbrot and
Tariq Ali celebrate the new reality of the independence won by most of the countries of Latin America from U.S. hegemony.

a roundup of things I’ve come across that aren’t mentioned