“It is always a meritorious deed to get hold of a Palestinian’s possessions.”
— The code of Jewish Law revised and updated by Benjamin Netanyahu
Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election makes him the longest serving prime minister in Israel’s history. His 20% margin of victory (30 Knesset seats to 24 for his nearest opponent) underlines the mass base of his consolidation of power.
Question One. In 1990, twenty percent of all children in the US lived in poverty. What percent of the children in the US live in poverty today?
A: Ten percent
B: Fifteen percent
C: Twenty percent
Question Two. The median wealth of black households in the US is $11,000. What is the median wealth of white households?
A: $22,000
B: $62,000
C: $141,000
British novelist Doris Lessing wrote a novel titled The Good Terrorist. The story revolves around an autonomous leftist cell in London that decides to step up their participation in the struggle against capitalism and imperialism by providing material support to the IRA. Eventually, the cell moves on to taking their own armed actions, which results in the death of one of their members. The main character in the novel, a woman named Alice, has political and moral disagreements with the course she and her comrades have taken but remains committed to the course of action.
Village Building Convergence (VBC) activists and their supporters from Cittaslow Sebastopol, Transition, the Grange, Permaculture Skills Center, and other groups recently packed the City Council meeting of small town Sebastopol in semi-rural Sonoma County, Northern California. Testimony in support of VBC came from enthusiastic advocates from 3-years-old to 70-years-old.
Despite the July 4 tributes, millions of US soldiers and veterans are in serious trouble.
Over sixty five million people in the US, perhaps a fifth of our sisters and brothers, are not enjoying the “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” promised when the Declaration of Independence was adopted on July 4, 1776. They are about twenty percent of our US population. This July 4 can be an opportunity to remember them and rededicate ourselves and our country to making these promises real for all people in the US.
This is the premiere of my new music video.
The song is entitled “Brittle Action Figures” and features Chris Barron from DeVotchKa on trumpet.
The song is about my parent’s home, which was foreclosed on by Bank of America last year. The house was built by my grandpa and is where my dad grew up as well as me.
For full album stream of Newstalgia click here.
There are more than 300 million people in the USA. 492 of them are billionaires. That represents roughly 16 millionths of 1%. In decimal form that’s 0.0000016, or as a fraction, 16 over 1 million. This is not the 1% the Occupy Movement imprinted on (some of) the national consciousness. Even an innumerate person can understand that represents a teeny, tiny, microscopic portion of our supposedly democratic, equal opportunity, propaganda spouting world’s most deadly military killing machine in history.
My neighbor Warren doesn’t understand high finance. He’s a physician, and they’re usually pretty savvy market-wise, but he’s an exception. Yesterday over the back fence he was expressing alarm over what he thought was a dangerous development in the banking sector.
“It seems that the next big thing on Wall Street,” said Warren, “is banks and other players bundling rental housing into a new product, that is a rent-backed security, similar to the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) that were at the root of the big crisis in ’09.”
The 1970s and 1980s are often disparaged by commentators and historians as years of narcissistic, cocaine-fueled times of political ennui and right wing resurgence. While there is certainly an element of truth to this perception, there are certainly other perspectives that are equally valid. Unfortunately for today, these perspectives have been mostly left out of the narrative. Even in the more complete popular histories of the period, like Bruce Shulman’s The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics, tend to accept this context.
