Scahill’s advice beginning at the 11:15 mark is awesome!

Glenn Greenwald writes:

A central premise of US media coverage of the Israeli attack on Gaza – beyond the claim that Israel is justifiably “defending itself” – is that this is some endless conflict between two foreign entitles, and Americans can simply sit by helplessly and lament the tragedy of it all. The reality is precisely the opposite: Israeli aggression is possible only because of direct, affirmative, unstinting US diplomatic, financial and military support for Israel and everything it does. This self-flattering depiction of the US as uninvolved, neutral party is the worst media fiction since TV news personalities covered the Arab Spring by pretending that the US is and long has been on the side of the heroic democratic protesters, rather than the key force that spent decades propping up the tyrannies they were fighting.

Yousef Munayyer writes:

Israel does not like to admit it doesn’t have the military might to accomplish something. But when it comes to relations with Palestinians, and with Gaza in particular, there is no military solution.

Israel has tried assassinating Palestinian leaders for decades but the resistance persists. Israel launched a devastating and brutal war on Gaza from 2008 to 2009 killing 1,400 people, mostly civilians, but the resistance persists.

Why, then, would Israel choose to revert to a failed strategy that will undoubtedly only escalate the situation? Because it is far easier for politicians to lie to voters, vilify their adversaries, and tell them ‘we will hit them hard’ than to come clean and say instead, ‘we’ve failed and there is no military solution to this problem.’

Stephen Walt concludes:

And please: The issue is not about whether Israel has the right to defend itself. Of course it does. But what it doesn’t have is the right to use disproportionate force in order to maintain an unjustified and illegal occupation and the subjugation of millions of Palestinians, which is the taproot from which these events spring.

Glenn Greenwald also suggests: Assassinating The Chance For Calm and How Israel shattered Gaza truce leading to escalating death and tragedy: a timeline

Paul Krugman writes:

Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo seems to have been the first to use the phrase “austerity bomb” for what’s scheduled to happen at the end of the year. It’s a much better term than “fiscal cliff”. The cliff stuff makes people imagine that it’s a problem of excessive deficits when it’s actually about the risk that the deficit will be too small; also and relatedly, the fiscal cliff stuff enables a bait and switch in which people say “so, this means that we need to enact Bowles-Simpson and raise the retirement age!” which have nothing at all to do with it.

And it can’t be emphasized enough that everyone who shrieks about the dangers of the austerity bomb is in effect acknowledging that the Keynesians were right all along, that slashing spending and raising taxes on ordinary workers is destructive in a depressed economy, and that we should actually be doing the opposite.

Thomas Hedges writes:

“This is a very American idea,” Arne Jungjohann, a director at the Heinrich Boll Stiftung Foundation (HBSF), said at a press conference Tuesday morning in Washington, D.C. “We got this from Jimmy Carter.”

Germany adopted and continued Carter’s push for energy conservation while the U.S. abandoned further efforts. The death of an American Energiewende solidified when President Ronald Reagan ripped down the solar panels atop the White House that Carter had installed.

Since then, Germany has created strong incentives for the public to invest in renewable energy. It pays people to generate electricity from solar panels on their houses. The effort to turn more consumers into producers is accelerated through feed-in tariffs, which are 20-year contracts that ensure a fixed price the government will pay. Germany lowers the price every year, so there’s good reason to sign one as soon as possible, before compensation falls further.

The money the government uses to pay producers comes from a monthly surcharge on utility bills that everyone pays, similar to a rebate. Ratepayers pay an additional cost for the renewable energy fund and then get that money back from the government, at a profit, if they are producing their own energy.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

Guess who won’t be paying an extra penny of the school 15 mill tax Cleveland voters approved on Nov. 6?

You are right. The same guys who haven’t been paying the school taxes for years now. Some of the richest guys in town. Doesn’t surprise you, does it? The entitled takers. Freeloaders all. Pretty disgusting.

You would only be surprised if you relied on the Plain Dealer, Crain’s Cleveland or watched TV news. The bought media.

The sweet deal was engineered for the tax dodgers by former Mayor Mike White and County Commissioner Tim Hagan. Democrats by the way.

As I’ve written before, White and Hagan took a ride on a Parker-Hannifin corporate jet to Columbus to successfully lobby for Cleveland’s sports facilities to go untaxed. FOREVER. Progressive Field, Quicken Loans Arena and Browns Stadium – all paid for primarily by the taxpayers – pay no property taxes. Even on new levies. (Pat Parker of Parker-Hannifin was named Gateway’s first board chairman.)

Nice deal, huh?

White and Hagan – who had promised voters in ads in 1990 there would be no tax abatement on Gateway – instead lobbied for the full EXEMPTION of property taxes. FOREVER. They paved the way for Continue Reading »

Robert Reich’s easy four steps, 10 years, $4 trillion:

Why not go back sixty years when Americans earning over $1 million in today’s dollars paid 55.2 percent of it in income taxes, after taking all deductions and credits? If they were taxed at that rate now, they’d pay at least $80 billion more annually — which would reduce the budget deficit by about $1 trillion over the next decade. That’s a quarter of the $4 trillion in deficit reduction right there.

A 2% surtax on the wealth of the richest one-half of 1 percent would bring in another $750 billion over the decade. A one-half of 1 percent tax on financial transactions would bring in an additional $250 billion.

Add this up and we get $2 trillion over ten years — half of the deficit-reduction goal.

Raise the capital gains rate to match the rate on ordinary income and cap the mortgage interest deduction at $12,000 a year, and that’s another $1 trillion over ten years. So now we’re up to $3 trillion in additional revenue.

Eliminate special tax preferences for oil and gas, price supports for big agriculture, tax breaks and research subsidies for Big Pharma, unnecessary weapons systems for military contractors, and indirect subsidies to the biggest banks on Wall Street, and we’re nearly there.

End the Bush tax cuts on incomes between $250,000 and $1 million, and — bingo — we made it: $4 trillion over 10 years.

And we haven’t had to raise taxes on America’s beleaguered middle class, cut Social Security or Medicare and Medicaid, reduce spending on education or infrastructure, or cut programs for the poor.

Why not indeed…

Boy Scouts of America No Longer Eligible for Grant Funding from The UPS Foundation

Previously…

Chris Hedges writes:

The presidential election exposed the liberal class as a corpse. It fights for nothing. It stands for nothing. It is a useless appendage to the corporate state. It exists not to make possible incremental or piecemeal reform, as it originally did in a functional capitalist democracy; instead it has devolved into an instrument of personal vanity, burnishing the hollow morality of its adherents. Liberals, by voting for Barack Obama, betrayed the core values they use to define themselves—the rule of law, the safeguarding of civil liberties, the protection of unions, the preservation of social welfare programs, environmental accords, financial regulation, a defiance of unjust war and torture, and the abolition of drone wars. The liberal class clung desperately during the long nightmare of this political campaign to one or two issues, such as protecting a woman’s right to choose and gender equality, to justify its complicity in a monstrous evil. This moral fragmentation—using an isolated act of justice to define one’s self while ignoring the vast corporate assault on the nation and the ecosystem along with the pre-emptive violence of the imperial state—is moral and political capitulation. It fails to confront the evil we have become.

I don’t believe in evil in the same way I don’t believe in darkness or cold: they are the absence of other, positive qualities that may each be clearly defined and measured. When I do no good I contribute to that state others perceive or chose to label as evil. They do so, I argue, as a way of excusing their inaction and laying the blame for their failure to create good on a myth that others are creating evil.

As a nation we will gather next week in a celebration of a bounty in which the vast majority of humanity does not share. Some will help to serve holiday meals in the false belief that one meal on one day somehow excuses our excesses that contribute to hunger across the 1,092 meals we don’t help serve each year.

How obscene is it that this week I will celebrate losing 80 pounds over the past year? That I’m actually proud that I didn’t eat and that each day I perceive myself as actually struggling to not eat when so many are wasting away? How feckin’ evil is that?

What have I done with the food I didn’t eat this past year? Nothing. Someone else ate that food. Or that food was tossed out. But that food did not go to feed people in my own community. I did not choose to contribute to the Cleveland Food Bank and feed people. I did not feed the hungry. Instead, I chose to celebrate my own discipline and willpower in not eating. That is perverse.

Hedges essay has helped me to rethink where I’ve come in the past year. Eight years ago I launched Have Coffee Will Write in reaction to the loss of Senator John Kerry to President George Herbert Walker Bush. I accomplished a great deal over the past 12 months in terms of myself. What I must determine now is how do I accomplish even more for others across the next 12 because Mr. Fish’s message is unacceptable.

Glenn Greenwald writes:

STEP ONE: Liberals will declare that cutting social security and Medicare benefits – including raising the eligibility age or introducing “means-testing” – are absolutely unacceptable, that they will never support any bill that does so no matter what other provisions it contains, that they will wage war on Democrats if they try.

STEP TWO: As the deal gets negotiated and takes shape, progressive pundits in Washington, with Obama officials persuasively whispering in their ear, will begin to argue that the proposed cuts are really not that bad, that they are modest and acceptable, that they are even necessary to save the programs from greater cuts or even dismantlement.

STEP THREE: Many progressives – ones who are not persuaded that these cuts are less than draconian or defensible on the merits – will nonetheless begin to view them with resignation and acquiescence on pragmatic grounds. Obama has no real choice, they will insist, because he must reach a deal with the crazy, evil GOP to save the economy from crippling harm, and the only way he can do so is by agreeing to entitlement cuts. It is a pragmatic necessity, they will insist, and anyone who refuses to support it is being a purist, unreasonably blind to political realities, recklessly willing to blow up Obama’s second term before it even begins.

STEP FOUR: The few liberal holdouts, who continue to vehemently oppose any bill that cuts social security and Medicare, will be isolated and marginalized, excluded from the key meetings where these matters are being negotiated, confined to a few MSNBC appearances where they explain their inconsequential opposition.

STEP FIVE: Once a deal is announced, and everyone from Obama to Harry Reid and the DNC are behind it, any progressives still vocally angry about it and insisting on its defeat will be castigated as ideologues and purists, compared to the Tea Party for their refusal to compromise, and scorned (by compliant progressives) as fringe Far Left malcontents.

STEP SIX: Once the deal is enacted with bipartisan support and Obama signs it in a ceremony, standing in front of his new Treasury Secretary, the supreme corporatist Erskine Bowles, where he touts the virtues of bipartisanship and making “tough choices”, any progressives still complaining will be told that it is time to move on. Any who do not will be constantly reminded that there is an Extremely Important Election coming – the 2014 midterm – where it will be Absolutely Vital that Democrats hold onto the Senate and that they take over the House. Any progressive, still infuriated by cuts to social security and Medicare, who still refuses to get meekly in line behind the Party will be told that they are jeopardizing the Party’s chances for winning that Vital Election and – as a result of their opposition – are helping Mitch McConnell take over control of the Senate and John Boehner retain control of the House.

What path will Ohio’s Democrats — Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Joyce Beatty, Rep. Marcy Kaptur, Rep. Marcia Fudge and Rep. Tim Ryan — choose to travel?

Matt Taibbi writes:

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing among conservatives of the Rush/Hannity school in the last few days, a lot of concern about this outreach question, and honestly, the tone of the discussion is beginning to sound like the last days of a failed 1950s marriage. The husband who’s gone all day at work comes home and throws his hands up in the air in mock frustration: what do you want from me, another Cadillac? Another fur coat? I just got you new shoes last week!

And the wife, who’s loved this man for 20 years despite his abject stupidity, just sighs. All she wants her husband to do is listen to her, or take a day off work sometime and take her for a drive in the country, or make some spontaneous show of affection, maybe popping home for lunch like in the old days – just some evidence that he’s even faintly aware of what’s going on in her head. But when they try to talk it out, things just get worse, because in his very manner of asking her what’s wrong, all hubby does is reveal that he thinks of his wife entirely as a nagging, financial parasite who’s always on his ass about something.

Glenn Greenwald writes:

Meanwhile, new laws to legalize both same-sex marriage and marijuana use were enacted in multiple states with little controversy, an unthinkable result even a few years ago, while Obama’s late-term embrace of same-sex marriage seems to have resulted only in political benefit with no political harm. Democrats were sent to the Senate by deeply red states such as Indiana, Missouri and North Dakota, along with genuinely progressive candidates on domestic issues, including Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, who became the first openly gay person elected to the Senate. As a cherry on the liberal cake, two of the most loathed right-wing House members – Rep Joe Walsh of Illinois and Allen West of Florida – were removed from office.

So the delirium of liberals this morning is understandable: the night could scarcely have gone better for them. By all rights, they should expect to be a more powerful force in Washington. But what are they going to get from it? Will they wield more political power? Will their political values and agenda command more respect? Unless the disempowering pattern into which they have voluntarily locked themselves changes, the answer to those questions is almost certainly “no”.

If you truly wish to honor those who fought, those who survived and those who died, then do all in your power to ensure that those who send our young men and women into harm’s way do so for only the most honorable reasons, not to protect commerce or wealth, not to preseve privellige nor enrich the coffers of those who profit, but rather that their lives and their sacrifices be given meaning because home and hearth and liberty are all that matter.

Anthem For Doomed Youth
by Wilfred Owen

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk11 a drawing-down of blinds

The Soldier
by Rupert Brooke

If I should die, think only this of me:
      That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
      In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
      Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
      Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
      A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
           Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
      And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
            In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Arms and the Boy
by Wilfred Owen

Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade
How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;
Blue with all malice, like a madman’s flash;
And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.

Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-heads
Which long to muzzle in the hearts of lads.
Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth,
Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death.

For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple.
There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple;
And God will grow no talons at his heels,
Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.

The Last Laugh
by Wilfred Owen

‘Oh! Jesus Christ! I’m hit,’ he said; and died.
Whether he vainly cursed or prayed indeed,
The Bullets chirped-In vain, vain, vain!
Machine-guns chuckled,-Tut-tut! Tut-tut!
And the Big Gun guffawed.

Another sighed,-‘O Mother, -Mother, – Dad!’
Then smiled at nothing, childlike, being dead.
And the lofty Shrapnel-cloud
Leisurely gestured,-Fool!
And the splinters spat, and tittered.

‘My Love!’ one moaned. Love-languid seemed his mood,
Till slowly lowered, his whole faced kissed the mud.
And the Bayonets’ long teeth grinned;
Rabbles of Shells hooted and groaned;
And the Gas hissed.

Remember…

And, at last…

To which his father, Rudyard Kipling, upon the news of his son’s death, could only respond:

Not this tide…

Roldo Bartimole writes:

The County Council recently caved to County Executive Ed FitzGerald’s desire to satisfy downtown interests by directing its casino revenue for the first two years to the downtown area.

It’s as if the rest of the city doesn’t exist. Though it is overflowing with poverty and problems.

County residents already provide literally tens of millions of dollars for downtown projects. This benevolence doesn’t seem even receive a discussion.

Who makes this agenda? For whose benefit?

The most obvious downtown subsidy is the unvoted sale tax increase of about $200 million paid already for the medical mart and convention center. The tax increase started in January 2008. It is a 20-year tax – $800 million expected.

The second most obvious is the “sin” tax. It has provided about $100 million for Browns stadium financing. The tax started in August 2005. There already is a push to extend it another 10 years.

I believe both facilities are in downtown Cleveland. Well Continue Reading »

Via Black Agenda Radio:

There is a popular myth which explains President Barack Obama’s reluctance to stand up to Pentagon militarists, Wall Street banksters and corporate greedheads. This myth excuses the president for ignoring massive black unemployment and not providing his promised path to citizenship for the undocumented, for not using presidential authority to halt the foreclosure epidemic, or curbing the hyper-incarceration of black and brown youth. The myth of course, is that President Barack Obama really does want to do all these things and more, but if they haven’t happened it’s because we the people have abandoned our responsibility to somehow “make him do it.”

The myth stems from the apocryphal story of a meeting between African American labor leader A. Philip Randolph and President Franklin Roosevelt back in the 1940s. Randolph laid out black America’s list of demands for economic and social justice. In response, Roosevelt said he wanted to do all of it, but that Randolph and the movement of that time would still have to “make him” do these things.

Applied to the Obama presidency however, “make me do it” is a popular myth. It’s popular because the president and his lackeys repeat it endlessly. It’s a myth because it’s not true. Longtime activist Harry Belafonte, who played a key role in the Freedom Movement of the fifties and sixties, exploded the myth in a Democracy Now interview broadcast on May 16.

Belafonte was asked by host Amy Goodman whether he’d used his occasional access to directly share his many critical and valuable public policy insights with the White House. Belafonte replied that his only access to the president has been for a few seconds at a time, not long enough for any substantive discussion. But, he said, at one such event President Obama approached him to inquire when Belafonte and Cornel West were going “to cut me some slack.”

“What makes you think we haven’t?” Belafonte replied to the president? At this point the brief encounter was over.

Via What’s Up:

WHAT: Public readings of battlefield letters from 1776 to the present
WHERE: Lakewood Public Library, 15425 Detroit Ave. and Shaker Heights Main Library, 16500 Van Aken Blvd.
WHEN: Today (Lakewood) and tomorrow (Shaker Heights) at 3 p.m.
WHO: Veterans For Peace
CONTACT: Vetrans For Peace

Members of Chapter 39, Veterans For Peace, will again commemorate Veterans Day 2012 with readings of “battlefield” letters and statements, written by U.S. service personnel fighting America’s wars from 1776 to Afghanistan.

VFP’s mission, in part, is to increase public awareness of the true costs of war, and to abolish war as an instrument of public policy.

Veterans For Peace is a national non-profit 501(c)3 educational organization comprised of men and women veterans of the U.S. military from al service organizations. Non-veterans who support the work of VFP may become Associate Members.

Should Ohio approve gay marriage?

[Update @ 0801 on 8 November: From Its All Journalism: In 2008, Twitter was still a newbie and far from mainstream. But on election night of 2012, Twitter was THE source of news. In fact, the conversation in the room was sparse; the conversation online was an avalanche.]

[Originally published on 5 November.]

Mano Singham writes:

Dana Millbank reports on what he saw during the debates. He said that the reporters were not in the auditorium but were in a separate room in which the debate was shown on a large screen. But the reporters were also glued to their laptop screens reading other people’s Tweets, especially those of media bigwigs, about what they saw. And so you would find people’s views of the debate being rapidly shaped by other people’s views, sometimes of fairly trivial things, and even before the debate ended, a consensus had emerged which was then widely broadcast.

Elect Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala…

So, I managed to read three pages of comments on Matt Taibbi’s election day piece — Election Day Is Finally Here: Tonight Is Going to Suck No Matter What — before I couldn’t any longer.

I agree with Taibbi: Tuesday night sucked for everyone, even for those dancing in the street falsely believing that somehow their world will be better (or more likely, not going to descend into some political hell).

There is more that unites me with my Tea Party neighbor than either of us has in common with the top two vote getters in this year’s presidential election. I don’t know however, what I can do to start that conversation. Reading the comments from Taibbi’s fans provides ample evidence of the divide. Taibbi wrote:

So all this freaking out and vicious invective-trading looks nuts from the outside: it looks like we’re making up reasons to hate and fear each other, summoning the language of violent civil unrest with a hedonistic zeal that only people who haven’t experienced the real thing could possibly enjoy.

What’s become clear in the last few weeks is that the last real taboo in America is admitting that the world isn’t going to end if the other guy gets elected. The corollary to that taboo is an apparent new national prohibition against having even the slightest faith in the essential patriotism of the other side.

No, the world didn’t end Wednesday morning. We’re all still here. What didn’t happen though was nothing changed. I listened to the people on the Diane Rehm Show and Talk of the Nation yesterday and I confess that my reaction was a desire to reach through my speaker and smack the lot of them with their talk of how the the next four years will not be like the last four years because of the clear message of Tuesday’s election.

What clear message?

There was no landslide. There was no mandate. A hair-fine majority of Americans voted for President Obama. Sure, it looks more impressive when viewed through the lens of the Electoral College, but that’s because of our winner-take-all system.

The Senate is still barely controlled by the Democrats which means that the filibuster will continue to stop any action deemed distasteful to the 1 Percent. The Republicans continue to control the House which means any legislation that benefits the 99 percent over the 1 percent is dead on arrival.

Nothing changed people.

Absolutely fecking nothing.

I called this at the end of 2011. Nothing has happened since then to make me have any doubt about Tuesday’s results.

There was a glimmer of hope in the Occupy Wall Street movement, but we all see where that went.

I do feel better today knowing that by casting my vote for the Green Party ticket I voted my conscience and my principles and not my fears.

My future votes will be along the same lines.

The work continues.