The Mightiest Nation

A MUST READ!  

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Once upon a time there was a country that was very small and, on the whole, very good.

 

Its citizens were proud and independent and self-reliant and generally prosperous. They believed in freedom and justice and equality. But, above all, they had faith. They had faith in their religion, their leaders, their country and themselves.

 

And, of course, they were ambitious. Being proud of their country, they wanted to make it bigger. First they conquered the savage tribes that hemmed them in. Then they fought innumerable wars on land and sea with foreign powers to the east and west and south. They won almost all the battles they fought and conquered foreign lands.

It took many generations, but at last the good, little country was the richest, mightiest nation in the whole, wide world -- admired, respected, envied and feared by one and all.

 

"We must remain the mightiest nation," said its leaders, "so that we can insure universal peace and make everyone as prosperous and decent and civilized as we are."

 

At first, the mightiest nation was as good as its word. It constructed highways and buildings and pipelines and hygienic facilities all over the world. And for awhile, it even kept the peace.

 

But being the mightiest nation in the world, its leader was the mightiest man in the world. And, naturally, he acted like it.

 

He surrounded himself with a palace guard of men chosen solely for their personal loyalty. He usurped the powers of the Senate, signing treaties, waging wars and spending public funds as he saw fit.

 

When little countries far away rebelled, he sent troops without so much as a by-your-leave. And the mightiest nation became engaged in a series of long, costly, inconclusive campaigns in far away lands. So some disillusioned soldiers refused to obey orders and some sailors mutinied, even though the leader raised their pay. And in some places the mightiest nation hired mercenaries to do its fighting.

 

And because it was the richest nation, it worshiped wealth and the things wealth bought. But the rich grew richer and the poor grew poorer through unfair tax laws. And in the capital 1 in 5 were idle and on welfare.

 

When the poor grumbled, they were entertained by highly paid athletes and the firing of expensive rockets into the air which sometimes fizzled. But the poor often rioted and looted and burned in their frustrated rage.

 

Many citizens lost faith in their old religion and turned to Oriental mysticism. And the young, wearing long hair and sandals, became Jesus freaks. Bare-breasted dancers, lewd shows and sex orgies were increasingly common. And the currency was debased again and again to meet the mounting debts.

 

Worst of all, the citizens came to learn their leaders were corrupt -- that the respected palace guard was selling favors to the rich and sending spies among the people, creating fear and distrust.

 

So it was that the people lost faith. They lost faith in their leaders, their currency, their rockets, their postal system, their armies, their religion, their laws, their moral values, their country and, eventually, themselves.

And, thus, in 476 A.D., Rome fell to the barbarians and the Dark Ages settled over Western civilization.
 

Moral. For what is a nation profited if it shall gain the whole world and lose its own soul.

 

(This column appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle on May 27, 1973).

Americans Demonstrate Changed Attitudes Towards Poverty Since the 2008 Economic Crisis

If you are poor, chances are it is your own fault. At least that's what Americans thought in 2001. In a National Public Radio poll from that year, about half of those surveyed said the poor are not doing enough to pull themselves out of poverty.

 

Now, one would think that since the recent economic crisis predictably has led to increased poverty people would start blaming circumstances more than the poor. This has not been the case in the United Kingdom. A recently published survey shows that Brits over time have become more likely to blame poor people themselves for their financial trouble. From 1986 to 2009, the proportion of people who attribute poverty to laziness and lack of willpower has grown to a little under 30 percent, with the proportion blaming "injustice in our society" conversely falling.

 

People's attitudes towards poverty to some extent determine sentiments about health care, welfare benefits, and other collective interventions. Not surprisingly, the UK study found that more and more Brits believe government benefits are too high.

 

In the United States, the picture is, perhaps surprisingly, a bit more nuanced. The 2001 NPR poll shows that attitudes about welfare at that time were determined by the income of the person asked. Those who made more than twice the poverty level were almost twice as likely as those closer to being poor to say that welfare recipients had easy lives and could do very well without the benefits if only they tried.

 

This difference is significant. Since household income has been declining over time (and proportionally fewer individuals earn more than twice the poverty level), the silver lining of the 2008 crisis might be that more Americans start seeing poverty for what it is: not something anyone "deserves." This could even help bring about more coherent anti-poverty policies when politicians, many of whom seem to want to appeal to the "poor people are lazy" sentiment as a way to obtain votes, realize their constituents understand reality better than they do.

And poverty is, in fact, becoming reality for more and more people in the United States.

In 2010 more people were recorded as living in poverty than in any of the previous 52 years for which rates have been published: 46.9 million (representing 15 percent of the population). About 17.2 million households were registered as food insecure for that same year, meaning they didn't have consistent dependable access to enough food. This, again, is the highest number ever recorded in the United States. Even percentage-wise, poverty rates in 2010 were the highest they had been since 1993.

And poverty is not just something people "are," something that might be inconvenient and often frustrating (though it surely is both of those things in copious amounts).

Poverty is a very real obstacle to exercising human rights, bringing with it substandard housing, under-resourced schooling, lack of health care, and at times unsafe neighbourhoods, as well as many other disadvantages. Children are particularly affected, since years of poorer quality education and potentially unhealthy living has consequences that to some extent continue even after a family pulls out of poverty -- which only some ever do.

And not only is poverty an obstacle to exercising rights. It is also, in many cases, caused by rights violations. Four million more women than men live in poverty, and both African-Americans and Hispanics are over-represented amongst the poor. In 2010, women earned 77 cents to every dollar earned by men. For black women that figure is 68 cents, for Hispanic women 59. Unemployment rates fluctuate enormously according to sex, race, and marital status. Women constitute 65 percent of all part-time workers.

To be sure, everyone is ultimately responsible for how they deal with their circumstances, and some individuals pull out of poverty despite multiple odds stacked against them. But many more do not. This is not because poverty is inevitable. It is because it generally requires support for health care, education, housing, anti-discrimination initiatives, and other interventions at least partially sponsored by the government. Without addressing the growing poverty in the United States through collective action based on human rights, chances are that if you are poor you will stay poor. Through little fault of your own.

Published first at RHRealityCheck.org.

Members of Congress grew richer as most Americans became poorer

Of course they did.  They were looking out for their own interests...the Banks...Wall Street...Insurance Companies...Military Contractors...etc.  This is what America is...CORPORATISM at its worst.  

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Largely insulated from the country’s economic downturn since 2008, members of Congress — many of them among the “1 percenters” denounced by Occupy Wall Street protesters — have gotten much richer even as most of the country has become much poorer in the last six years, according to an analysis by The New York Times based on data from the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit research group. 

 

Congress has never been a place for paupers. From plantation owners in the pre-Civil War era to industrialists in the early 1900s to ex-Wall Street financiers and Internet executives today, it has long been populated with the rich, including scions of families like the Guggenheims, Hearsts, Kennedys and Rockefellers.

READ MORE...MSNBC.COM

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45793299/ns/politics-the_new_york_times/#.TvlYkBXfX2s

I'm Rich Bitch! Romney Refuses to Release Tax Returns.

I'M RICH BITCH!!!

Dec. 23 (Bloomberg) -- Mitt Romney, a multimillionaire who is by far the wealthiest of the Republican presidential candidates, said he has no plans to release his income tax returns if he wins his party’s nomination.
  

Romney, whose most recent disclosure in August estimated his personal wealth as high as $250 million, said yesterday he had already released extensive financial information and had no “current plans” to make his tax returns public.

  

If the former Massachusetts governor wins the nomination and sticks to his plan, he would be one of the only presidential nominees in the last three decades to withhold his income tax return. While income tax information is private and there is no legal obligation to disclose it, presidents and nominees for the office have done so routinely since the 1970s.

  

“We follow the tax laws, and if there’s an opportunity to save taxes, we -- like everybody else in this country -- will follow that opportunity,” Romney told reporters in Lancaster, New Hampshire, according to a partial transcript of his remarks provided by his campaign.

  

“Down the road, we’ll see what happens if I’m the nominee,” he added, saying that while he had no “immediate plans” to release tax returns, “that may change in the future.”

  

President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign swiftly criticized Romney on the issue.

 

“Why does Governor Romney feel like he can play by a different set of rules?” Ben LaBolt, Obama’s campaign spokesman, said in a statement. “What is it that he doesn’t want the American people to see?
  

Previous candidates have disclosed their returns so Americans could be aware of potential conflicts of interest and gauge whether a candidate had gamed the tax system to their advantage.”
  

Then-Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush and his running mate, Dick Cheney, were exceptions in 2000, both releasing only partial returns. In 2003, in advance of their re- election bid, they released their full returns.
  

Massachusetts Senator John F. Kerry, Bush’s Democratic opponent in 2004, also released part of his wife’s tax return after his campaign came under pressure to disclose details of her personal fortune, which was helping to fund his bid. Kerry, who had released his own full return, released portions of the tax return of Teresa Heinz Kerry -- heiress to a fortune estimated at $500 million -- three weeks before the election.
  

Romney has drawn criticism for appearing out of touch with ordinary Americans because of his affluence, particularly after a rhetorical flourish he used in a Dec. 10 televised debate in which he offered Texas Governor Rick Perry a $10,000 wager while defending his health-care record.
  

Obama’s campaign and Romney’s Republican primary opponents ridiculed him for the bet. He has also come under scrutiny for the way he earned his fortune -- as head of the private equity firm Bain Capital LLC, where he bought and sold companies to make money for investors and sometimes eliminated jobs in the process.
 
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia suggested last week that Romney might return the money he made “bankrupting companies and laying off employees over his years at Bain.”
  

Romney said on Dec. 18 that if he wins the nomination, he knows that a photo in which he appears grinning with other Bain executives posing with cash spilling out of their hands, jackets and mouths will come back to haunt him. Some Democrats refer to the 1980s-era image as the “Gordon Gekko” photo, referring to the antihero in the 1987 film “Wall Street” whose character is the personification of greed run amok.
  

Romney said on “Fox News Sunday” that if he is the nominee, he expects that free enterprise will be “on trial” in his contest with Obama.
  

The Democratic National Committee yesterday launched a website, www.whatmittpays.com, that calls attention to the 15- percent tax rate -- far lower than the 35 percent the wealthiest Americans owe on their income -- that executives at private- equity companies like Bain pay on their investment profits, known as “carried interest.” Obama has proposed closing what critics call the “carried interest loophole,” which also benefits hedge-fund managers.
  

“Want to know why Mitt Romney won’t release his tax returns?,” the Democrats’ site says. “Well, one of the reasons is that he probably pays less taxes than you do.”
  

After Romney made his latest comments, R.C. Hammond, a spokesman for Gingrich, contacted reporters unprompted to declare that if the former House speaker became the nominee, he planned to release his income tax returns.
  

--Editors: Leslie Hoffecker, Robin Meszoly

To contact the reporter on this story: Julie Hirschfeld Davis in Washington at jdavis159@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Silva at msilva@bloomberg.net

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrBfPLUm5so

THE ROAD I MUST TRAVEL

Lyrics:
Well I climbed the seven summits
And I swam the seven seas
But the road I must travel
Its end I cannot see
I fought in the jungles
And I fought in the streets
But the road I must travel
Its end I cannot see
Once I had a reason
Don't know what it could be
But the road I must travel
Its end I cannot see
Well I sang to myself
That I want to be free
But the road I must travel
Its end I cannot see

I walked the empty desert
And I was burned in the heat
But the road I must travel
Its end I cannot see
I crossed the frozen wasteland
And in the bitter cold did freeze
But the road I must travel
Its end I cannot see
And I will knock on every door
For I do not have a key
And the road I must travel
Its end I cannot see
Well I sang to myself
That I want to be free
But the road I must travel
Its end I cannot see

They shot a man in Soho
Couldn't guess his age
I found his empty journal
I filled up every page
I called up my state senator
They said he wasn't there
The secretary took my name
And man she sounded scared
So I counted my misfortunes
I added up the blame
I picked through all the garbage
I checked off all the names
I read in the newspaper
They'd questioned all my friends
They hoped that they could find me
Before I struck again
Well I sang to myself
That I want to be free
But the road I must travel
Its end I cannot see

So when thirsty I will drink
When hungry I will steal
But the road I must travel
Its end I cannot see
So tonight I walk in anger
With worn shoes on my feet
But the road I must travel
Its end I cannot see
And I will sing to myself
That I'm gonna be free
But the road I must travel
Its end I cannot see

There's a sign along the highway
But it's too dark now to read

Destroying the American Dream

Destroying the American Dream - by Stephen Lendman

Corporate greed and profits over people priorities launched nationwide Occupy Wall Street protests in hundreds of US cities for change.

Mindless of growing public rage, political Washington keeps cutting vital social benefits needing increases during hard times.

With real unemployment approaching 23%, earlier cuts affected:

• Pell Grants help for college tuitions;

• federal wages;

• the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) to help impoverished families have heat in winter;

• the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP);

• community healthcare centers;

• nonprofit health insurance cooperatives;

• HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and other disease prevention programs;

• WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) grants to states for supplemental foods, healthcare, and nutrition education for low-income families;

• Head Start, providing comprehensive education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services to low-income families with children;

• the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (targeted earlier with more coming), providing food stamps for poor households;

• community development block grants for housing, overall reducing HUD's budget by $1.1 billion;

• Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) first-responder funding;

• energy efficiency and renewable energy programs;

• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) clean/safe water and other projects;

• National Institutes of Health (NIH) medical research;

• the National Park Service;

• vital infrastructure and transportation needs; and

• other non-defense discretionary spending.

New cuts will sustain Wall Street, militarism, favoritism, waste, fraud, and other rewards for Washington's usual special interests. They'll benefit at the expense of ordinary people losing out.

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2011/12/21/18703160.php

Bootstraps and Blackface

If I were a Black kid...

I am always amazed by middle-class white people who feel that pulling oneself out of poverty is as easy as pulling up your bootstraps, studying harder, taking advantage of all the "free things" and "benefits" available to them, and succeeding in this wonderful meritocracy we supposedly live in.  Read the racism at:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2011/12/12/if-i-was-a-poor-black-kid/