Bruce Springsteen - We Take Care Of Our Own (by BruceSpringsteenVEVO)
The vice-presidential candidates engaged on the issues that matter most, a change for voters starved for substance.
“The pundits and a majority of uncommitted voters have spoken: according to them, Mitt Romney won the wonky yet substanceless snoozefest that was the first Presidential debate of 2012. We are told that Romney seemed lively, warm and aggressive, and that the President seemed distracted and defensive. Perhaps that’s true. The President’s neoliberal policy approach and failure to adamantly defend Social Security and progressive budget priorities didn’t help. The news media certainly wants a closer horse race between the candidates for ratings, and the snap post-debate poll numbers favoring Romney will help them try to deliver that.”
Bill Clinton speaks at the 2012 DNC (C-SPAN) - Full Speech (by CSPAN)
All the world’s major religions, with their emphasis on love, compassion, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness can and do promote inner values. But the reality of the world today is that grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate. This is why I am increasingly convinced that the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics beyond religion altogether.
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| — | Dalai Lama |
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that his conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
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| — | Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail (via timmyp10) |
The Occupy Movement Stats & Figures, What Are Your Views? (by FactSpy)
Global Peace and Security Through Domestic / International Public Policy and Politics
This is a beginning of a basic thesis for my current thinking through the lens of an informal/unscientific and political personal research with the intent of working towards solving and understanding humanity’s various problems epitomized through economic/social, environmental, and peace and security problems and opportunities and how those problems can be solved through various means such as political organization through representative democracy, education, and distribution of information and knowledge through new/old (depending on how you look at it) worldviews that emphasize cooperation over competition, sustainability over short-term profit, and social/economic equality over concentration of great wealth and power in the top tiers of society. I just wanted to throw these paragraphs out there and see if anyone had any insights or synchronous ideas that might help my research and writing. If you do, please let me know. Thank you for reading!
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While it is certainly true that economic justice and inequality concerns in the United States are an extraordinarily important means of improving the total human ecological prosperity and sustainability of United States citizens as well as by extension citizens of the global economic system (by virtue of American monetary hegemony), we cannot ignore concerns of global security and peace which directly influences economic activity as well as all other aspects of human life (by virtue of universal need for safety and security). Universal human rights transcend economic concerns by themselves, yet are dependent on an adequate level of economic prosperity and equal distribution of vital limited resources such as food, clean water, air, land, etc.
U.S. foreign as well as domestic economic policy is necessarily limited by the constraints of the contemporary political and social environment in which distrust of government is amplified through (mainly conservative) reactionary media propoganda in the form of daytime talk radio ‘shock jocks,’ legions of conspiratorial and radical conservative libertarian bloggers, and the various 24 hour news networks that churn out stories and opinions suited to the cultural successors to CNN’s Crossfire in which self-described social liberals and conservatives yell at each other in one hour segments. In this context of deep division fueled by media saturation of disruptive and distorted mythological narratives that pit traditionalists against reformers, paranoids against evolutionists, reactionaries against progressives, it is something of a miracle that the 111th Congress was able to do as much as it did (which was certainly not as much as it could have done) to increase domestic as well as international peace and security both through economic as well as foreign policy decisions.
Which is to say that there are still 1-3 or more wars going on throughout the world (depending on how you want to measure the scope of international conflicts/wars) and economic as well as ecological uncertainty is a leading cause of social instability and conflict on both the national as well as the international and global scale. Now we have a Congress that is even more dysfunctional and beholden to malefactors of great wealth and ideological commitment to the old ways of producing energy and pre-progressive era distribution of resources and prosperity (e.g. the Gilded Age). Certainly there was some progress on economic and holistic health and wellbeing of United States citizens and citizens of the world as well as security and peace initiatives in the 111th Congress, expecially when considering the Bush II era incompetence and corruption of all levels and branches of federal government. But the 112th Congress does represent several steps back (at least!) to Gilded Age politics and policies that promote the myth of rugged individualism and rampant inequality as a social good, or at least an evil to be tolerated in exchange for national and international growth of the wealthiest based on the increased poverty and wage-slavery of the poor and working classes.
We’ve been at war for decades now - not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but right here at home. Domestically, it’s been a war against the poor, but if you hadn’t noticed, that’s not surprising. You wouldn’t often have found the casualty figures from this particular conflict in your local newspaper or on the nightly TV news. Devastating as it’s been, the war against the poor has gone largely unnoticed - until now. The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement has already made the concentration of wealth at the top of this society a central issue in US politics. Now, it promises to do something similar when it comes to the realities of poverty in this country. By making Wall Street its symbolic target and branding itself as a movement of the 99 per cent, OWS has redirected public attention to the issue of extreme inequality, which it has recast as, essentially, a moral problem. Only a short time ago, the “morals” issue in politics meant the propriety of sexual preferences, reproductive behaviour or the personal behaviour of presidents. Economic policy, including tax cuts for the rich, subsidies and government protection for insurance and pharmaceutical companies and financial deregulation, was shrouded in clouds of propaganda or simply considered too complex for ordinary Americans to grasp. Now, in what seems like no time at all, the fog has lifted and the topic on the table everywhere seems to be the morality of contemporary financial capitalism. The protesters have accomplished this mainly through the symbolic power of their actions: by naming Wall Street, the heartland of financial capitalism, as the enemy, and by welcoming the homeless and the down-and-out to their occupation sites. And of course, the slogan “We are the 99 per cent” reiterated the message that almost all of us are suffering from the reckless profiteering of a tiny handful. (In fact, they aren’t far off: the increase in income of the top one per cent over the past three decades about equals the losses of the bottom 80 per cent) The movement’s moral call is reminiscent of earlier historical moments when popular uprisings invoked ideas of a “moral economy” to justify demands for bread or grain or wages - for, that is, a measure of economic justice. Historians usually attribute popular ideas of a moral economy to custom and tradition, as when the British historian EP Thompson traced the idea of a “just price” for basic foodstuffs invoked by 18th century English food rioters to then already centuries-old Elizabethan statutes. But the rebellious poor have never simply been traditionalists. In the face of violations of what they considered to be their customary rights, they did not wait for the magistrates to act, but often took it upon themselves to enforce what they considered to be the foundation of a just, moral economy.
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Frances Fox Piven, The war against the poor in America - Opinion - Al Jazeera English Rampant poverty and further welfare cuts have created a need to move towards a moral economy of the many, not few.
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Roger Waters - The Tide Is Turning (Re: Occupy) (by rogerwaterschannel)
Fault Lines - Arundhati Roy, Author Activist - Al Jazeera English
via youtube.com
What an amazingly lovely woman …
http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/faultlines/
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