“Literature is not a game for the cloistered elect. Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed.”
Source : TheGuardian
Tag: USA
The National Security Complex: Too Big to Fail?
“The Pentagon budget is, for instance, about 50 percent higher today than the Cold War average and accounts for nearly half of all military expenditures globally. And yet it has kept right on growing;”
Source : Mother Jones
US Businesses Not Being Strangled By Regulation And Taxation, World Bank Says
New Inequality Data Likely to Boost “Occupy” Movement
“Lawmakers have effectively blocked all efforts to increase taxes on the corporations and wealthiest individuals, initiatives supported by about two-thirds of the public, according to the poll.”
“The CBO findings should bolster popular support for such efforts. While the after-tax income of the poorest 20 percent of U.S. households grew by an average of less than one percent per year”
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Source : Common Dreams
Rich People Create Jobs!
“This fear is easy to understand. No one likes paying higher taxes. But do lower taxes actually spur economic growth? Bruce Bartlett,an economist in the Reagan administration, has compared tax rates in various rich countries in 1979 to each country’s growth rate since then. His conclusion? There’s virtually no correlation.”
Source : Mother Jones
Why Ideas are Unprofitable
The U.S. Patent and Trademark office issues nearly 160,000 patents a year for everything from nanotechnology to jet-powered surfboards. Yet a mere 1 percent—just 1,600—reach the marketplace, according to the patent office. The dirty little secret about American ingenuity is that we’re terrible at translating original ideas into profit-producing businesses.
Source : Business Week
Perpetual warfare
“Much has been written about the role of social networks in powering the uprisings, and new media were undoubtedly an important factor. But, to an extent that has not been appreciated, the Arab protest movements emerged as an unintended consequence of western weakness. The demand for change had a specific cause: the steep rise in food prices that was produced by the liquidity released by Ben Bernanke”
Source : New Statesmen
How lack of transparency enables police brutality
“And that rate conceals the fact that officers involved in a credible case of excessive force which resulted in a fatality are rarely charged with murder. If that were so, in every case, then the rate would more than quadruple, to 24.51 per 100,000.”
Source : The Guardian
Capitalism vs. the Climate
“A 2007 Harris poll found that 71 percent of Americans believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause the climate to change. By 2009 the figure had dropped to 51 percent. In June 2011 the number of Americans who agreed was down to 44 percent —well under half the population.”
Source : The Nation
Congress: Trading stock on inside information?
“Schweizer says he wanted to know why some congressmen and senators managed to accumulate significant wealth beyond their salaries, and proved particularly adept at buying and selling stocks. “
Source :CBSnews
Collected Reading 