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Dr. Daniel G. Nocera - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch Personalized Energy for 1 (x 6 Billion): A Solution to the Global Challenge Dr. Daniel G. Nocera - YouTube
shared by thinkahol * on 12 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 12 Aug 11
     
    The supply of secure, clean, sustainable energy is arguably the most important scientific and technical challenge facing humanity in the 21st century. Rising living standards of a growing world population will cause global energy consumption to double by mid-century and triple by the end of the century. Even in light of unprecedented conservation, the additional energy needed is simply not attainable from long discussed sources these include nuclear, biomass, wind, geothermal and hydroelectric. The global appetite for energy is simply too much. Petroleum-based fuel sources (i.e., coal, oil and gas) could be increased. However, deleterious consequences resulting from external drivers of economy, the environment, and global security dictate that this energy need be met by renewable and sustainable sources. The dramatic increase in global energy need is driven by 3 billion low-energy users in the non-legacy world and by 3 billion people yet to inhabit the planet over the next half century. The capture and storage of solar energy at the individual level personalized solar energy drives inextricably towards the heart of this energy challenge by addressing the triumvirate of secure, carbon neutral and plentiful energy. This talk will place the scale of the global energy issue in perspective and then discuss how personalized energy (especially for the non-legacy world) can provide a path to a solution to the global energy challenge. Daniel G. Nocera is the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Director of the Solar Revolutions Project and Director of the Eni Solar Frontiers Center at MIT. His group pioneered studies of the basic mechanisms of energy conversion in biology and chemistry. He has recently accomplished a solar fuels process that captures many of the elements of photosynthesis outside of the leaf. This discovery sets the stage for a storage mechanism for the large scale, distributed, deployment of solar energy. He has b
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TAPPED Archive | The American Prospect - 0 views

www.prospect.org/...tapped_archive nativist nativism cordoba house xenophobia
shared by thinkahol * on 17 Aug 10 - Cached
  • thinkahol * on 17 Aug 10
     
    As one of the "sensible" conservatives on The New York Times' editorial page, Ross Douthat has a habit of using his column to provide a thin veneer of respectability to otherwise ugly ideas. Riffing off of the Cordoba House controversy, Douthat relies on the country's past experiences with unfamiliar immigrants to endorse nativism and xenophobia as a way of pushing immigrants toward greater assimilation. But this is bad history; the nativists of 19th-century America weren't much interested in having "new arrivals adapt to Anglo-Saxon culture," rather, the nativists of mid-19th-century America wanted to keep immigrants off of American shores. [Just like now]
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The End of History - 0 views

www.viet-studies.info/EndofHistory.htm Politics Philosophy History Economics Models
shared by Yee Sian Ng on 07 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Yee Sian Ng on 07 Mar 10
     
    "And yet, all of these people sense dimly that there is some larger process at work, a process that gives coherence and order to the daily headlines. the twentieth century saw the developed world descend into a paroxysm of ideological violence, as liberalism contended first with the remnants of absolutism, then bolshevism and fascism, and finally an updated Marxism that threatened  to lead to  the ultimate apocalypse of nuclear war.  But the century that began full of self-confidence in the ultimate triumph of Western  liberal democracy seems at its close to be returning full circle to where it started: not to an "end of ideology" or a convergence between capitalism and socialism, as earlier predicted, but to an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism."
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GRITtv » Blog Archive » Michelle Alexander: End The Drug War: Face the New Ji... - 0 views

grittv.org/?p=16432 GRITtv » Blog Archive Michelle Alexander: End Drug War: Face the New Jim Crow
shared by thinkahol * on 06 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 06 Aug 11
     
    The NAACP has just passed a historic resolution demanding an end to the War on Drugs.  The resolution comes as young Black male unemployment hovers near 50 percent and the wealth gap's become a veritable gulf. So why is the forty-year-old "War on Drugs" public enemy number one for the nation's oldest civil rights organization? Well here's why:  it's not extraneous - it's central: the war on drugs is the engine of 21st century discrimination - an engine that has brought Jim Crow into the age of Barack Obama.     Author Michelle Alexander lays out the statistics -- and the stories --  of 21st Century Jim Crow in her ought-to-blow-your-socks off book: "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness." I had a chance to sit down with Alexander earlier this summer. We'll be posting the full interview in two parts.     "We have managed decades after the civil rights movement to create something like a caste system in the United States," says Alexander in part one here  "In major urban areas, the majority of African American men are either behind bars, under correctional control or saddled with criminal record and once branded as criminal or a felon, they're trapped for life in 2nd class status."     It's not just about people having a hard time getting ahead and climbing the ladder of success. It's about a rigged system. Sound familiar?  Like the Pew Research Center report on household wealth and the Great Recession -- the NAACP resolution story was a one-day news-blip - despite the fact that it pierces the by-your-bootstraps myth that is at the heart of - you pick it - the deficit, the stimulus, the tax code - every contemporary US economic debate.     White America just maybe ought to pay attention. With more and more Americans falling out of jobs and into debt, criminal records are a whole lot easier to come by than life-sustaining employment.  Contrary to the conventional media version, the "Drug War" story is not a people with problems
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The Best Of Times | ThinkProgress - 0 views

thinkprogress.org/...the-best-of-times The Best Of Times | ThinkProgress Matthew Yglesias
shared by thinkahol * on 21 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 21 Aug 11
     
    One the oddities about the current economic doldrums afflicting the developed world is that if you look at the global average, this is almost certainly the best time to be alive in human history. Not only have we seen rapid per capita GDP growth in many poor countries, but even in countries that haven't gotten richer major development progress has occurred. Last, but by no means least, the world is getting much less violent: In fact, the last decade has seen fewer war deaths than any decade in the past 100 years, based on data compiled by researchers Bethany Lacina and Nils Petter Gleditsch of the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Worldwide, deaths caused directly by war-related violence in the new century have averaged about 55,000 per year, just over half of what they were in the 1990s (100,000 a year), a third of what they were during the Cold War (180,000 a year from 1950 to 1989), and a hundredth of what they were in World War II. If you factor in the growing global population, which has nearly quadrupled in the last century, the decrease is even sharper. Far from being an age of killer anarchy, the 20 years since the Cold War ended have been an era of rapid progress toward peace. This is major good news.
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America Is Crumbling: Hire Us to Fix It - 0 views

www.readersupportednews.org/...is-crumbling-hire-us-to-fix-it America Is Crumbling: Hire Us to Fix It
shared by thinkahol * on 19 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 19 Aug 11
     
    'By simply creating a new WPA-style jobs program we could lower the unemployment rate by several points, rebuild 20th-century infrastructure and accommodate the needs of a 21st-century society. But until we come together to elect leaders that will take that step, all we can do is pray. Maybe Rick Perry can help out with that.
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Countdown: Biden's days as VP now 'numbered' - 0 views

www.wnd.com/...bidens-days-as-vp-now-numbered countdown biden days
shared by Joe La Fleur on 15 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Joe La Fleur on 15 Aug 12
     
    JOE BIDEN THINKS IT'S THE 20TH CENTURY: FOR YOU LIBERALS, HE'S YOUR VICE PRESIDENT AND IT'S THE 21ST CENTRUY!
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Recitation of the Quran - 0 views

muslim-academy.com/recitation-of-the-quran Learn Arabic Learn Tajweed Recitation of the Quran
shared by Muslim Academy on 07 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Muslim Academy on 07 Sep 12
     
    Islam is an Abrahamic religion, monotheistic, founded in the seventh century in the Arab peninsula, the territory of modern Saudi Arabia, by the prophet Muhammad and based on religious text known as the Qur'an. Over time a large spread on a territory that stretches across Europe, Asia and North Africa. Religious center is in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Most people do not know the exact rules imposed by Islam, but have formed an opinion based on rumors heard. Unfortunately, most of them are wrong, so this is why you have to learn tajweed.
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An illustrated guide to the latest climate science « Climate Progress - 0 views

climateprogress.org/...-to-the-latest-climate-science illustrated guide to the latest climate science
shared by thinkahol * on 02 Sep 10 - Cached
  • thinkahol * on 02 Sep 10
     
    "In 2009, the scientific literature caught up with what top climate scientists have been saying privately for a few years now: * Many of the predicted impacts of human-caused climate change are occurring much faster than anybody expected - particularly ice melt, everywhere you look on the planet. * If we stay anywhere near our current emissions path, we are facing incalculable catastrophes by century's end, including rapid sea level rise, massive wildfires, widespread Dust-Bowlification, large oceanic dead zones, and 9°F warming - much of which could be all but irreversible for centuries. And that's not the worst-case scenario! * The consequences for human health and well being would be extreme. That's no surprise to anybody who has talked to leading climate scientists in recent years, read my book Hell and High Water (or a number of other books), or followed this blog. Still, it is a scientific reality that I don't think more than 2 people in 100 fully grasp, so I'm going to review here the past year in climate science. I'll focus primarily on the peer-reviewed literature, but also look at some major summary reports."
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Elections and ideology: Liberals, planning and trains | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...elections_and_ideology Elections and ideology: Liberals planning trains | The Economist
shared by thinkahol * on 01 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 01 Nov 10
     
    Fundamentally, without major government commitments to high-speed rail, America simply will not have a high-speed passenger rail network. This should probably be discomfiting, since every other economic superpower (the EU, Japan and China) does have a high-speed rail network. That makes America look a bit backward. The time horizon for building such a network is several decades, and it's interesting to think about what will happen in the middle decades of this century if air transport becomes unaffordable due to high fuel costs and America doesn't have an electric alternative for high-speed intercity transit.
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Obama, Republicans clash at heated health summit - Yahoo! News - 0 views

news.yahoo.com/...us_health_care_overhaul health care summit rancor
shared by Skeptical Debunker on 25 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Skeptical Debunker on 25 Feb 10
     
    "We have a very difficult gap to bridge here," said Rep. Eric Cantor, the No. 2 House Republican. "We just can't afford this. That's the ultimate problem." With Cantor sitting in front of a giant stack of nearly 2,400 pages representing the Democrats' Senate-passed bill, Obama said cost is a legitimate question, but he took Cantor and other Republicans to task for using political shorthand and props "that prevent us from having a conversation." And so it went, hour after hour at Blair House, just across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House - a marathon policy debate available from start to finish to a divided public. The more than six-hour back-and-forth was essentially a condensed, one-day version of the entire past year of debate over the nation's health care crisis, with all its heat, complexity and detail, and a crash course in the partisan divide, in which Democrats seek the kind of broad remake that has eluded leaders for half a century and Republicans favor much more modest changes. With Democrats in control of the White House and Congress, they were left with the critical decision about where to go next. Obama and his Democratic allies argued at Thursday's meeting that a broad overhaul is imperative for the nation's future economic vitality. The president cast health care as "one of the biggest drags on our economy," tying his top domestic priority to an issue that's even more pressing to many Americans.
  • Skeptical Debunker on 25 Feb 10
     
    Of course the "we" in "We can't afford this" is the big health care monopolies (pharma, insurance, etc.). Supposedly, the country and people can afford the continued gouging by those special interests (up to 40% in some places this year alone!). Too, if the government were to find a way to "afford it" (disregarding that Medicare and Medicaid savings might pay for it altogether!), that would probably be on the "back" of the richest 5% and by reducing corporate and business subsidies (like those to oil companies, the military industrial complex, "big finance" bailouts and sweetheart Federal funds rates and "liquidity" pumping, non-risk underwriting for things like coastal flood insurance, etc., etc., etc.). Since that is the "invisible hand" that feeds most "conservatives" and Republican politicians, that would never do.
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Rough Water - 0 views

www.earthisland.org/...roughwater Klamath River dams agreement negotiation controversy protest violence
shared by Skeptical Debunker on 03 Mar 10 - Cached
  • For most of the last 1,500 years, the river supported a sustainable salmon economy. Salmon were at the heart of all the Klamath’s tribal cultures, and Indians were careful not to over-harvest them. Each summer, the lower Klamath’s Yurok and Hoopa tribes blocked the upstream paths of spawning salmon with barriers; then, after ten days of fishing, they removed the barriers, allowing upstream tribes to take their share. As the salmon completed their lifecycle, dying in the waters where they’d been spawned, they enriched the watershed with nutrients ingested during years in the ocean. Among the beneficiaries were at least 22 species of mammals and birds that eat salmon. Even the salmon carcasses that bears left behind on the riverbanks fertilized trees that provided shade along the river’s banks, cooling its waters so that the next generation of vulnerable juvenile salmon could survive. “We tried to go to court, to go through the political process, but it didn’t work. …The big issues were still out there, and we still had to resolve them.” Salmon’s biological family may have started in the age of dinosaurs a hundred million years ago. They’ve survived through heat waves and droughts, in rivers of varying flow, temperature, and nutrient load – but they were as ill-prepared for Europeans’ arrival as the Indians themselves. Gold miners who showed up in the mid-nineteenth century washed entire hillsides into the river with high-pressure hoses and scoured the river’s bed with dredges. Loggers dragged trees down streambeds, causing massive erosion, and dumped sawdust into the river, smothering incubating salmon eggs. Cattle grazed at the river’s edge, causing soil erosion and destroying shade-giving vegetation. Farmers diverted water to feed their crops. The dams were the crowning blows. Between 1908 and 1962, six dams were built on the Klamath. The tallest, the 173-foot-high Iron Gate, is the farthest downstream, and definitively blocked salmon from the river’s upper quarter – after it was built, the river’s salmon population plummeted. In addition, the dams devastated water quality by promoting thick growths of toxic algae in the reservoirs. For Klamath basin farmers, however, the dams were deemed indispensable, as they generated hydropower that made pumping of their irrigation water possible.To the farmers, the potential loss of the dams’ hydropower was considered no less crippling than an end to Klamath-supplied irrigation.
  • For most of the last century, the farmers were oblivious to the damage that dams and water diversions caused downstream, while the tribes and commercial fishermen quietly seethed. The annual salmon run, once so abundant that people caught fish with their hands, was roughly pegged at more than a million fish at its peak; in recent years it has dropped to perhaps 200,000 in good years, and as low as 12,000 – below the minimum believed necessary to sustain the runs – in bad years. Spring Chinook, which once comprised the river’s dominant salmon run, entirely disappeared. Two fish species – the Lost River sucker and the shortnose sucker – that once supported a commercial fishery, were listed as endangered in 1988. Coho salmon were listed as threatened nine years later. All this has had a devastating impact on the tribes. Traditionally able to sustain themselves throughout the year on seasonal migrations of the river’s salmon, trout, and candlefish, tribal members suffered greatly as the runs declined or went extinct. For four decades beginning in 1933, the tribes were barred from fishing the river even as commercial fishermen went unrestricted. Members of the Karuk tribe once consumed an estimated average of 450 pounds of salmon a year; a 2004 survey found that the average had dropped to five pounds a year. The survey linked salmon’s absence to epidemics of diabetes and heart disease that now plague the Karuk. The 2001 cutoff left farmers without irrigated water for the first time in the Klamath Project’s history. Over the next four months, many farmers performed repeated acts of civil disobedience, most notably when a bucket brigade passed pails of banned water from its lake storage to an irrigation canal while thousands of onlookers cheered. The protests attracted Christian-fundamentalist, anti-government, and property rights advocates from throughout the West; former Idaho Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth-Hage likened the farmers’ struggle to the American Revolution.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • A year later, it was the tribes’ and fishermen’s turn to experience calamity. According to a Washington Post report, Vice President Dick Cheney ordered Interior Department officials to deliver Klamath water to Project farmers in 2002, even though federal law seemed to favor the fish. Interior Secretary Gale Norton herself opened the head gates launching the 2002 release of water to the Project, while approving farmers chanted, “Let the water flow!” Six months later, the carcasses of tens of thousands of Chinook and Coho salmon washed up on the riverbanks near the Klamath’s mouth, in what is considered the largest adult salmon die-off in the history of the American West. The immediate cause was a parasitic disease called ich, or “white spot disease,” commonly triggered when fish are overcrowded. Given the presence of an unusually large fall Chinook run in 2002 and a paucity of Klamath flow, the 2002 water diversion probably caused the die-off. Yurok representatives said that months earlier they begged government officials to release more water into the lower river to support the salmon, but were ignored. photo courtesy Earthjustice In 2002, low water levels on the Klamath led to the largest adult salmon die-off in the history of the American West. The die-off deprived many tribes-people of salmon and abruptly ended the river’s sport-fishing season, but its impact didn’t fully register until four years later, when the offspring of the prematurely deceased 2002 salmon would have made their spawning run. By then the Klamath stock was so depleted that the federal government placed 700 miles of Pacific Ocean coastline, from San Francisco to central Oregon, off limits to commercial salmon fishing for most of the 2006 fishing season. As a result, commercial ocean fishermen lost about $100 million in income, forcing many into bankruptcy. Even more devastating, a precipitous decline in Sacramento River salmon led to the cancellation of the entire Pacific salmon fishing season in both 2008 and 2009. The Klamath basin was in a permanent crisis. It turned out that desperation and frustration were perfect preconditions for negotiations. “Every one of us would have rolled the others if we could have,” Fletcher, the Yurok leader, says. “We all tried to go to court, to go through the political process, but it didn’t work – we might win one battle today and lose one tomorrow, so nothing was resolved. We spent millions of dollars on attorneys, plane tickets to Washington, political donations, but it didn’t make any of us sleep any better, because the big issues were still out there, and we still had to resolve them.”
  • In January 2008, the negotiators announced the first of two breakthrough Klamath pacts: the 255-page Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement. In it, most of the parties – farmers, three of the four tribes, a commercial fishermen’s group, seven federal and state agencies, and nine environmental groups – agreed to a basic plan. It includes measures to take down the four dams, divert some water from Project farmers to the river in return for guaranteeing the farmers’ right to a smaller amount, restore fisheries habitat, reintroduce salmon to the upper basin, develop renewable energy to make up for the loss of the dams, and support the Klamath Tribes of Oregon’s effort to regain some land lost when Congress “terminated” its reservation in 1962. This was a seminal moment, a genuine reconciliation among tribal and agricultural leaders who discovered that the hatred they’d nursed was unfounded. “Trust is the key,” says Kandra, the Project farmer who went from litigant to negotiator. “We took little baby steps, giving each other opportunities to build trust, and then we got to a place where we could have some really candid discussions, without screaming and yelling – it was like, ‘Here’s how I see the world.’ Pretty valuable stuff. The folks that developed those kinds of relationships got along pretty good.” Still, one crucial ingredient was missing: Unless PacifiCorp agreed to dismantle the dams, river restoration was impossible, and the pact was a well-intentioned, empty exercise. But PacifiCorp now had compelling reasons to consider dam removal. Not only was relicensing going to be expensive, but Klamath tribespeople were becoming an embarrassing irritant, in two consecutive years interrupting Berkshire Hathaway’s annual-meeting/Buffett-lovefests in Omaha with nonviolent protests that won media attention. Also, the Bush administration, customarily no friend of dam removal, signaled its support for a basin-wide agreement. Negotiations between PacifiCorp and mid-level government officials began in January 2008, but made little progress until a meeting in Shepherdstown, West Virginia four months later, when for the first time Senior Interior Department Counselor Michael Bogert presided. As Bogert recently explained, President Bush himself took an interest in the Klamath “because it was early on in his watch that the Klamath became almost a symbol” of river basin dysfunction. To Bush, the decision to support dam removal was a business decision, not an environmental one: The “game-changer,” Bogert said, was the realization that because of the high cost of relicensing, dam removal made good fiscal sense for PacifiCorp. That fact distinguished the Klamath from other dam removal controversies such as the battle over four dams on Idaho’s Snake River, whose removal the Bush administration continued to oppose.
  • In November 2008, when then-Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced a detailed agreement in principle with PacifiCorp to take down the dams, he acknowledged that he customarily opposed dam removal, but that the Klamath had taught him “to evaluate each situation on a case-by-case basis.” In September 2009, Kempthorne’s successor, Ken Salazar, announced that PacifiCorp and government officials had reached a final agreement. PacifiCorp and the many signers of the earlier Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement then ironed out inconsistencies between the two pacts in a final negotiation that ended with a final deal in January 2010.
  • Skeptical Debunker on 03 Mar 10
     
    Maybe the Klamath River basin would have turned itself around without Jeff Mitchell. Back in 2001, at the pinnacle of the conflict over the river's fate, when the Klamath earned its reputation as the most contentious river basin in the country, Mitchell planted a seed. Thanks to a drought and a resulting Interior Department decision to protect the river's endangered fish stocks, delivery of Klamath water to California and Oregon farmers was cut off mid-season, and they were livid. They blamed the Endangered Species Act, the federal government that enforced it, and the basin's salmon-centric Indians who considered irrigation a death sentence for their cultures. The basin divided up, farmers and ranchers on one side, Indians and commercial fishermen on the other. They sued one another, denounced one another in the press, and hired lobbyists to pass legislation undermining one another. Drunken goose-hunters discharged shotguns over the heads of Indians and shot up storefronts in the largely tribal town of Chiloquin, Oregon. An alcohol-fueled argument over water there prompted a white boy to kick in the head of a young Indian, killing him.
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The Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative | The White House - 0 views

www.whitehouse.gov/...ional-cybersecurity-initiative President Obama cybersecurity initiative
shared by Skeptical Debunker on 03 Mar 10 - Cached
  • The CNCI consists of a number of mutually reinforcing initiatives with the following major goals designed to help secure the United States in cyberspace: To establish a front line of defense against today’s immediate threats by creating or enhancing shared situational awareness of network vulnerabilities, threats, and events within the Federal Government—and ultimately with state, local, and tribal governments and private sector partners—and the ability to act quickly to reduce our current vulnerabilities and prevent intrusions. To defend against the full spectrum of threats by enhancing U.S. counterintelligence capabilities and increasing the security of the supply chain for key information technologies. To strengthen the future cybersecurity environment by expanding cyber education; coordinating and redirecting research and development efforts across the Federal Government; and working to define and develop strategies to deter hostile or malicious activity in cyberspace.
  • Skeptical Debunker on 03 Mar 10
     
    President Obama has identified cybersecurity as one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation, but one that we as a government or as a country are not adequately prepared to counter. Shortly after taking office, the President therefore ordered a thorough review of federal efforts to defend the U.S. information and communications infrastructure and the development of a comprehensive approach to securing America's digital infrastructure. In May 2009, the President accepted the recommendations of the resulting Cyberspace Policy Review, including the selection of an Executive Branch Cybersecurity Coordinator who will have regular access to the President. The Executive Branch was also directed to work closely with all key players in U.S. cybersecurity, including state and local governments and the private sector, to ensure an organized and unified response to future cyber incidents; strengthen public/private partnerships to find technology solutions that ensure U.S. security and prosperity; invest in the cutting-edge research and development necessary for the innovation and discovery to meet the digital challenges of our time; and begin a campaign to promote cybersecurity awareness and digital literacy from our boardrooms to our classrooms and begin to build the digital workforce of the 21st century. Finally, the President directed that these activities be conducted in a way that is consistent with ensuring the privacy rights and civil liberties guaranteed in the Constitution and cherished by all Americans.
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The Much-Delayed Response To Goldblog - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - 0 views

andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/...ayed-response-to-goldblog.html Arab-Israel Geopolitics
shared by Yee Sian Ng on 09 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Yee Sian Ng on 09 Mar 10
     
    "I regard the establishment of the Jewish state as one of the West's high-points in the 20th Century. Like America's founding, it was not immaculate, and its survival has been a brutal struggle in which Israel has not been as innocent as some want to believe, but whose enemies' anti-Semitism and hatred is tangible and omnipresent and despicable. But the Palestinians' legitimate grievances are very real and utterly human and perfectly understandable. Israel, for its part, remains, in its own proper borders, a model state for that part of the world; its openness and democracy vastly exceed any neighboring regime's; it has made more of a tiny strip of land than most of its neighbors have of their vastly greater territory and resources put together. If I were Jewish, I'd be proud. But I'm not, and I can still admire a great deal. There is a huge amount to admire."
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Senators Pryor, Kerry Propose Equal Internet Access For Disabled - 0 views

civilrightsandwrongs.wordpress.com/...l-internet-access-for-disabled disabilities disabled persons internet access kerry pryor senators
shared by Eric G. Young on 18 May 10 - Cached
  • Eric G. Young on 18 May 10
     
    On May 5, 2010, Senators Mark Pryor (AR) and John Kerry (MA) introduced the "Equal Access to 21st Century Communications Act" (S. 3304). Senators Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad, both from North Dakota, also co-sponsored the bill.
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American politics: Increasingly, only the wealthy need apply - latimes.com - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...-pols-20101212,0,6688232.story American politics: Increasingly only the wealthy need apply - latimes.com
shared by thinkahol * on 20 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 20 Dec 10
     
    Though John Adams railed against it more than two centuries ago, we now find ourselves in a new age of aristocratic despotism.
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America's not so "free market" leads to capitalistocracy « The Canadian Headl... - 0 views

lecanadian.com/...rket-leads-to-capitalistocracy America's not so "free market" leads to capitalistocracy « The Canadian Headlines Newspaper
shared by thinkahol * on 05 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 05 Jan 11
     
    Politicians and talking heads, of both the mainstream liberal and conservative persuasions, commonly refer to this as "our free market system," or maybe "free enterprise." But Americans haven't had anything even remotely resembling a free market for over 150 years.  (For that matter we didn't have one before, what with Enclosures, the Combination Law, mercantilism, slavery and colonialism.)  Since the mid-19th century, what we've had is massive collusion between big government and big business. 
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The Myth of 'American Exceptionalism' Implodes | CommonDreams.org - 0 views

www.commondreams.org/...18-2 The Myth of 'American Exceptionalism' Implodes | CommonDreams.org
shared by thinkahol * on 20 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 20 Jan 11
     
    One aspect of "American exceptionalism" was always economic. US workers, so the story went, enjoyed a rising level of real wages that afforded their families a rising standard of living. Ever harder work paid off in rising consumption. The rich got richer faster than the middle and poor, but almost no one got poorer. Nearly all citizens felt "middle class". A profitable US capitalism kept running ahead of labor supply. So, it kept raising wages to attract waves of immigration and to retain employees, across the 19th century until the 1970s.
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