Robert Reich on his blog skewers deadbeats like Pete Peterson as they keep gassing on about the sacrifices “we”—everyone, of course but the rich and the super-duper rich–must make.
Reich reminds us that “The richest 400 Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us put together. The 6 Walmart heirs have more wealth than bottom 33 million American families combined.”
And heaven forbid they should be taxed!
Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian finds it “remarkable, as I’ve noted before on this holiday, how completely his vehement anti-war advocacy is ignored when commemorating his life (just as his economic views are). By King’s own description, his work against US violence and militarism, not only in Vietnam but generally, was central – indispensable – to his worldview and activism, yet it has been almost completely erased from how he is remembered.”
Reader Supported News picked this up.
Truthout.com flags the way FAIR spotlights a grotesque spectacle in which “well-to-do pundits piously argue that the poor and the elderly should sacrifice retirement benefits or pay more for health care as they age.”
In The New York Times’s Opiononator blog:
“Children in other rich countries like Canada, France, Germany and Sweden have a better chance of doing better than their parents did than American kids have.”
It’s rather rare in today’s “mainstream” commercial media to read anyone who identifies connections and causalities between phenomena that don’t at first blush seem contiguous. Mostly what we get are disconnected bytes that don’t let the reader understand the larger narrative. But Stiglitz gets right to the heart of the matter:
“Politicians typically talk about rising inequality and the sluggish recovery as separate phenomena, when they are in fact intertwined. Inequality stifles, restrains and holds back our growth.”
Bravo to Stiglitz and the Opiononator’s “Great Divide” series!
Seattle teacher Jesse Hagopian in the Seattle Times, (thank you, CommonDreams.org.)
“America faces incredible challenges: endless war, climate change and worldwide economic implosion. Our kids will need both traditional academic abilities and innovative critical-thinking skills to solve these real problems. If we inundate our students with standardized testing year-round, these larger lessons are lost.”
of our useful idiot so-called journalistic class, as they they function as megaphones for Pete Peterson’s deficit boondoggle. Remapping Debate listens to the yapping of the fourth- estate lapdogs.
Co-writing Elena Tchernichova’s memoir has been a voyage into my own past as well, since I was friends with her as many of the book’s events unfolded.
In the Preface, I recall:
“November 21, 1981, in the studios of American Ballet Theatre at Nineteenth Street and Broadway in Manhattan. ABT was then in the process of reviving George Balanchine’s 1949 Bourrée Fantasque, which had been dropped by New York City Ballet over a decade earlier. I was twenty-two and just starting to write about dance. I hadn’t yet had anything published on the subject, but audaciously I decided that I wanted to write a book on Tanaquil Le Clercq, who had been one of Bourrée’s original stars. . . ”
And was the rest history?
I only know that “my adventures with her on three continents” gave me “a great education in how ballet is put together.”
Glenn Greenwalk in The Guardian reacts to the railroading of Aaron Swartz:
“The US has become a society in which political and financial elites systematically evade accountability for their bad acts, no matter how destructive. Those who torture, illegally eavesdrop, commit systemic financial fraud, even launder money for designated terrorists and drug dealers are all protected from criminal liability, while those who are powerless – or especially, as in Swartz’s case, those who challenge power – are mercilessly punished for trivial transgressions. All one has to do to see that this is true is to contrast the incredible leniency given by Ortiz’s office to large companies and executives accused of serious crimes with the indescribably excessive pursuit of Swartz.”
“Fortuny y Madrazo: An Artistic Legacy”
at the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute.
Reviewed by Laura Jacobs in The Wall Street Journal
Writing in the Guardian:
“the theory being used to prosecute Manning would convert almost every government source for newspapers into a traitor. Given that, it’s extraordinary how relatively little interest, let alone opposition, large media outlets have expressed about this prosecution.”
