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Isn't it fiinally time to enact a "basic income guarantee"? The lack of individual and family income security in the midst of a highly-developed economy is a travesty under any circumstances. But the contradiction of "poverty in the midst of plenty" that has plagued the world since the start of the Industrial Revolution is becoming much more grave in the U.S. and abroad. The problem, of course, is one of distribution of earnings, and excess production capacity relative to available income... Winston Churchill gave eloquent testimony to this conundrum of the modern age when delivering the Romanes Lecture at Oxford University on June 19, 1930. This was a few months after the crash of the U.S. stock market marked the start of the Great Depression. Churchill said: "Who would have thought that it would be easier to produce by toil and skill all the most necessary or desirable commodities than it is to find consumers for them? Who would have thought that cheap and abundant supplies of all the basic commodities would find the science and civilization of the world unable to utilize them? Have all our triumphs of research and organization bequeathed us only a new punishment: the Curse of Plenty? Are we really to believe that no better adjustment can be made between supply and demand? Yet the fact remains that every attempt has failed. Many various attempts have been made, from the extremes of Communism in Russia to the extremes of Capitalism in the United States. They include every form of fiscal policy and currency policy. But all have failed, and we have advanced little further in this quest than in barbaric times. Surely it is this mysterious crack and fissure at the basis of all our arrangements and apparatus upon which the keenest minds throughout the world should be concentrated.

"We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of this great country, and rid the world of evil."- ~George W. Bush, quoted by Bob Woodward in "Bush at War"

KW writes: My goodness. In a wise, creative, and mischievous response to the nasty rhetoric of the press, the Occupy Wall Street folks have answered propaganda with poetry. What a graceful maneuver in the struggle for social change. Beautiful and heartwarming! For a discussion on the media's quest for one, clear demand from the Wall Street protesters, the group created the following consensus document: A Message From Occupied Wall Street (Day Five) Published 2011-09-22 07:51:42 UTC by OccupyWallSt at OccupyWallStreet.org This is the fifth communiqué from the 99 percent. We are occupying Wall Street. On September 21st, 2011, Troy Davis, an innocent man, was murdered by the state of Georgia. Troy Davis was one of the 99 percent. Ending capital punishment is our one demand. On September 21st, 2011, four of our members were arrested on baseless charges. Ending police intimidation is our one demand. On September 21st, 2011, the richest 400 Americans owned more than half of the country's population. Ending wealth inequality is our one demand. On September 21st, 2011, we determined that Yahoo lied about occupywallst.org being in spam filters. Ending corporate censorship is our one demand. On September 21st, 2011, roughly eighty percent of Americans thought the country was on the wrong track. Ending the modern gilded age is our one demand. On September 21st, 2011, roughly 15% of Americans approved of the job Congress was doing. Ending political corruption is our one demand. On September 21st, 2011, roughly one sixth of Americans did not have work. Ending joblessness is our one demand. On September 21st, 2011, roughly one sixth of America lived in poverty. Ending poverty is our one demand. On September 21st, 2011, roughly fifty million Americans were without health insurance. Ending health-profiteering is our one demand. On September 21st, 2011, America had military bases in around one hundred and thirty out of one hundred and sixty-five countrie

"The business of America is big business with a strategic long-term plan for co-opting world governments, waging permanent wars for profit, dominating everywhere militarily, ending social safety net protections, crushing civil liberties and freedom, tolerating no concern for human rights, controlling global markets and resources, turning workers everywhere into serfs, and extracting, unimpeded, as much public wealth as possible."

Wednesday, September 16, 2009 Goldstone Report Finds Israeli Military Guilty of War Crimes in Gaza The Independent reports that a United Nations fact-finding inquiry has found that Israel committed war crimes during its attack on Gaza last winter, as did the Palestinian Hamas. The lion's share of blame in the report, however, falls on Israeli forces, which stand accused of planning out a disproportionate use of force, the punishing of a civilian population, and reckless disregard for civilian lives-- all of which are war crimes in international law. The report suggests that some Israeli actions may have gone beyond being mere war crimes to being crimes against humanity. The report will go to the UN Human Rights Commission, which will likely accept it. The findings could in theory drag Israeli officials before the World Court in the Hague, though in practice this outcome is highly unlikely. Both the Israeli government and Hamas rejected the report as biased, which is a pretty good indication that it is even-handed.

The reason why Democrats so often ignore and betray progressives is that we haven't given them incentives not to. Money, votes, and publicity are what count, and so far progressives have not leveraged these incentives effectively. Also, Democrats really need some leaders who are functional in the worlds of bluffing, bargaining, gambling, and fighting.

Critics of capitalism often argue that any form of capitalism would eventually devolve into corporatism, due to the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. A permutation of this term is corporate globalism. John Ralston Saul argues that most Western societies are best described as corporatist states, run by a small elite of professional and interest groups, that exclude political participation from the citizenry. Corporatism has been supported from various proponents, including: absolutists, conservatives, fascists, progressives, reactionaries, socialists and theologians. In the United States, economic corporatism involving capital-labour cooperation was influential in the New Deal economic program of the United States in the 1930s as well as in Fordism and Keynesianism.[36] In the post-World War II reconstruction period in Europe, corporatism was favoured by Christian democrats, national conservatives, and social democrats in opposition to liberal capitalism.[37] This type of corporatism faded but revived again in the 1960s and 1970s as "neo-corporatism" in response to the new economic threat of stagflation.[38] Neo-corporatism favoured economic tripartism which involved strong and centralized labour unions, employers' unions, and governments that cooperated as "social partners" to negotiate and manage a national economy.[39]

For generations, Egypt and virtually all other countries in the Arab world have been ruled as if that same principle applied to every aspect of society: the people are bent on chaos and only the iron hand of a police state can impose order.

It's intellectually dishonest to have a discussion over the fairness of the tax code and welfare programs without FIRST addressing the inherent inequality of our labor markets, capital markets, access to education, access to the judicial system, access to infrastructure, and intellectual property laws. Fundamentally, if a business leader makes his profits from paying his employees minimum wage at $7.50/hour in an area where a decent livable wage is $15/hour, but where workers have little negotiating leverage and few other options, then it is RIGHT to expect government to tax the business/owner at a high percentage and the workers at a low percentage, and to use tax funds to provide the under-compensated workers with housing and food assistance, as well as other forms of aid. In that scenario, the scenario in which most of our country operates (accounting also for middle-class wage-earners that are under-paid), it is disturbingly unfair to demand that "equality" be applied only at the tax code (even moreso that it only be leveled at the income tax, specifically), as if wealth is earned solely in proportion to some fantastical Randian ideal of personal worth and NOT heavily influenced by real-world power dynamics.

10/05/09 Stockholm, Sweden Even with the US dollar's deterioration over the past six months, the G7 has decided to let it continue to fall. Forbes reports today that the G7 "abandons the dollar." This is despite problems, such as economic instability, that a weakening dollar can cause central bankers around the world. From the US perspective, there are some benefits associated with a weaker dollar, in terms of increased exports and the possibility of inflating away the massive debt the government is building up so quickly.

"Is national economic policy in the hands of unknown bankers and financial interests around the world?"

"The public bank concept is gaining ground on the state level, attracting proponents across the political spectrum. "