The website I like most:
Liberalism Resurgent
The late Steve Kangas left us a good book to read and ponder daily. Don't miss:
The Long FAQ on Liberalism
Read this, and be liberated.
For debunking many of the myths of so-called Libertarianism, check out:
The Non-Libertarian FAQ
My Letter Inspired by the Downing Street Memos
Keeping up with the world, including the imperial wars and lies of Senior Administration officials:
DavidCorn.com (And don't miss the uncensored dialog blogs following each story!)
LiberalOasis
ConsortiumNews.com
The Nation
Mother Jones
Progressive Magazine
Anti War.com
Democracy Now!
truthout
AfterDowningStreet.org
Greg Palast
Common Dreams
Z Magazine Online
Most Recommended Books:
The Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers Johnson
Hegemony or Survival by Noam Chomsky
The Common Good by Noam Chomsky
The ABCs of Political Economy by Robin Hahnel
Hillary wants a stronger empire. We want NO empire! We want democracy! Honesty and openness in government. Fair elections conducted by non-partisan officials using paper ballots. Free airtime for all candidates and issues. And no corporate influence at all. (Corporate bribery was made legal in the 1970's.)
Debunking the Self-Made Man myth (used to justify even more private tyranny):
It takes a village to make a millionaire (link to ResponsibleWealth.org)
We all seek the best of what is most important to us. Excellence in Science, Philosophy, and Art is not Elitism. Elitism is worshipping the largest accumulations of skimmed and extracted wealth.
They want you to think like a capitalist. If you work, start thinking about what's good for labor!
The vast majority of US citizens (and world citizens) earn the vast majority of their income through work. And the vast majority of that income is not saved, but spent on the stuff that makes life possible and tolerable. For most people in the US, this results in the most abominable form of double-taxation, since both wages and sales are taxed. How is it then, that so many of these workers have been convinced to increase their own taxes (including the expanding US federal deficit, since a deficit is a tax on all), while slashing taxes on capital, from which most of them earn only a tiny amount, if any? Under George W. Bush and the Republican Congress, taxes on capital gains, corporate income, and inheiritances over a million dollars have been slashed.
Worse, they'd like to see all taxes on income and wealth replaced with a tax on sales or value added. This would be the most regressive taxation of all, resulting in the poor and middle classes paying a higher far percentage of their income (or wealth) in tax. Regressive taxation produces and maintains an aristocracy.
I think I see the answer now, and it's quite simple. From birth onward, through a variety of means, including corporate radio, TV, and even the conservative US state educational establishments, US citizens have been taught to think like capitalists, and not the wage slaves (technical term) they actually are who spend nearly 100% of their net income of which nearly 100% comes from working. One can hardly consider onself a capitalist until one makes at least 50% of their income from capital ownership.
Here where I live in Texas, taxation on wealth ("property tax") is continually being cut, while the difference is being made up by increasing sales taxes. Already, people with lower incomes pay more than 10% in their income on state taxes, while the wealthy pay 5% or less. And many of my fellow wage slaves seem to have been deluded into believing this is a good thing for them. Progressive taxes on income and wealth are ultimately the fairest, and lead to the most equitable society.
In the election of 2000, George W. Bush won the Presidency by carrying Florida by just 537 votes (out of millions) according to the Republican Secretary of State who was also a Bush campaign official. A majority of Floridians had attempted to vote for Al Gore. But 91,000 Floridians were incorrectly identified as ex-Felons and were not permitted to vote. Over ten thousand Floridians were confused by a ballot that had illegally changed just before the election and deviated from the sample ballot they had received in the mail. And tens of thousands of ballots were spoiled by poorly maintained voting machines, mostly in Democratic Party strongholds. (The punched chads tend to build up in these machines so that before too long, the stylus no longer punches the chad out completely. It's not the voter's fault when the machines don't operate properly, or the legally required procedures aren't followed by election officials, though Republican party officials have tended to blame the victims: the voters.) It was later determined by a diverse team of journalists that if the same standard were used across the state to manually recount the officially spoiled ballots, George W. Bush would have lost. It didn't matter which standard was applied, so long as the same standard was applied evenly across the state, as the Florida Supreme Court had attempted to mandate. But the US Supreme Court, with a Republican majority, stopped the manual recount in Florida by a vote of 5-4, with scathing dissenting opinions. And it's interesting how it came down to this one "technical" issue, because in truth there were many ways in which the election was stolen. The will of the voters did not prevail. And stealing an election has to be regarded as the highest form of treason; it is a crime against democracy itself.
In 2004, George W. Bush won the election by carrying the state of Ohio by 136,483 votes (as "counted" on November 4; the number has been declining ever since...). But actually a majority of Ohioans attempted to vote for John Kerry. In inner cities, inadequately equipped polls forced voters to wait in line for hours past closing time, so untold numbers gave up and left. There were There were 92,672 spoiled ballots, mostly from the poorly maintained punch card voting machines in inner cities (just as happened in Florida in 2000). And there were 155,000 provisional ballots (which typically occur when voters who turn in their registration paperwork just before the deadline, but election officials just didn't work fast enough to send out their registration cards and get them on the official precinct lists in time. You can guess the precincts where this tends to happen most often...). The Republican Ohio Secretary of State demanded that provisional ballots not be counted unless they had the voter's date of birth on them, even though Ohio law does not require this. (For a clear story of what was known on November 4th, click here.)
Since November 4th, even more has come to light in Ohio and elsewhere. In nearly every state that Bush carried, more and more discrepancies and serious irregularities have been discovered; it certainly looks now like fraud on a massive scale must have occurred. The original exit polls, which usually track election results nearly exactly, consistently showed a higher percentage for Kerry than the official results; the odds that there were so consistently wrong in one direction purely by chance would be astronomical.
He should have lost both times, if the voters intent had been followed. Even if he did win as the official results show, even in 2004 he won by a tiny percentage of voters in key states, and a small percentage in the popular vote...which he actually lost in 2000.) Nevertheless, George W. Bush has acted and continues to act as if he has the largest mandate in US History, by making sweeping changes to US law and US international relations. He pulled out of international treaties and engagements and launched a illegal war of aggression in one country (Iraq) which had never attacked nor was likely to ever attack the US (calling it "pre-emptive"). He holds thousands of alleged foreign warriors in conditions violating the Geneva Conventions, claiming that those conventions do not apply because he claims they are illegal combatants not subject to the Geneva Conventions. US civil rights have been gutted by a so-called USA PATRIOT act which allows suspension of certain rights previously guaranteed by the US Bill of Rights. He signed the first national law making abortion a federal offense, and with no provision for protecting the life of the mother. Taxes for wealthy corporations, stockholders and heirs were gutted, leaving the largest federal deficit in US history. The cost of Medicare was increased dramatically, with vast new money going to US drug companies. Environmental standards were made "voluntary." Arbitrary new national educational standards were made "mandatory" with draconian new penalties but insufficient funds to provide for meeting those standards.
Now, claiming a second mandate, he really means to make sweeping changes. He is seemingly intent on a complete destruction of the social contract between rich and poor worked out in the 20th century. Taxes will be collected on spending, not on income from dividends or multimillion dollar estates. At the cost of over another trillion dollars that the US treasury does not have, the Social Security system will go from a collective system with benefits guaranteed by the full faith and credit of the US government to an individually managed system of private speculation, likely destroying the entire system, but enriching wealthy stock owners. Judges will be appointed to the Supreme Court who may end a woman's right to choose that an earlier conservative Supreme Court had found to be guaranteed by the US Constitution. And that's just for starters.
Eventually, I hope, more and more people will figure out the bill of dishonest goods sold by the tax cutters. In the short term, cutting taxes can be done merely by raising deficits, postponing the problem until later (oh joy). That has been the approach actually taken by Reagan and Bush 43 (so far), regardless of their rhetoric. But eventually government spending will have to be cut. All tax cutting zealots say that is what they really want to do. But somehow, so far, they have typically gotten away without actually having to do it. Some Democrat (like Bill Clinton) shows up before too long and raises taxes, keeping us from catastrophe.
Now, with the most irresponsible of all tax cutters achieving a second re-selection to the Presidency, we all just might see what is accomplished by cutting taxes, when spending finally has to be cut. Of course, lower spending won't mean lower profits for corrupt government contractors. It will mean lower wages and benefits for all workers, and not just government workers.
Yes, of course, first the government workers get their benefits cut. Then there are the layoffs of government workers. But layoffs and benefit cuts on a massive scale don't just happen in isolation. They ripple through the economy, resulting in layoffs and benefit cuts for others, and then still others. When a layoff happens, you now have more people competing for fewer jobs. You don't have to have aced a college economics class like me to see what happens. Wages and benefits go down for all workers. And those are the lucky ones. Some never find new jobs, and simply take "early retirement" or give up looking.
So, for workers, for people who actually make most of their income by working for a living, tax cuts are actually a terrible idea. Whatever you gain in having to pay less tax (ha) is more than offset by what you lose in wages and benefits (not to mention free government services). But there is another class of people for whom tax cuts are an unadulterated gain. Those are the people who make most of their income from dividends and so-called investments (i.e. private speculations). Interestingly, those are the same people getting the largest tax cuts too. And what are they likely to do with their increased income and wealth? Surely not build new factories in the still relatively high-wage US; already they're shuttering those as quickly as possible. Generally the pattern has been to move factories to countries with the lowest wages, a process which itself takes money. So, if they have more money, they'll be likely to do it faster. If this isn't a war on the working class, I don't know what is.
Lower taxes mean lower wages. (By a similar line of reasoning, lower prices mean lower wages. Either that, or lower profits. Guess which is more likely.) Tax cuts don't necessarily mean more money in my pocket; my money is simply the money I have left over after taxes, and if my wages drop, tax cuts don't help much. Secondly, there is nothing closer to a free lunch than higher taxes on rich people. It doesn't hurt them much...they have more than they need to spend to get by, by definition. And it doesn't hurt society. When rich people pay more, progressively more, it tends to make the economy work better, which then works to benefit of all, including the rich people themselves! One need only look at the success of how increased taxes on the wealthy by the first President Bush and Clinton led to one of the largest economic expansions in history for a demonstration of this. And this is straight out of Keynesian economics. Putting more money in the hands of the poorest people is not only social justice, it leads to the quickest economic growth. Wealth never "trickles down." It needs to be injected at the bottom all the more to rise back up up to the top. If you simply let the rich "keep it all," you end up with a stagnant, depressed economy, just like what happened during the Hoover administration.
Today it is largely Corporations that rule the world and are running amok. They have assumed all the rights that humans have, and even more, and their power is overwhelming. Meanwhile they are simply machines that have no other purpose (as now interpreted) than to make profit for themselves, even while causing irreversable damage to everything and everyone else. Corporate Capitalism as now practiced is clearly tyranny. Conservatives, liberals, libertarians, radicals, and reformers ought to unite to dislodge at least this one tyranny we can agree on. We should begin by removing corporate rights to free speech and governmental lobbying. Only humans should have these rights, not machines whose only purpose is to make profit. Corporations, and wealth generally, should be our servant, not our master.
The tyrants in our world are growing more powerful every day at our expense. Plutocrats and Oligarchs control our governments, even our so-called democracies, making them all tyrannies. They own most of our wealth, much of which is organized into Corporations, which have become tyrannical machines in their own right. And they are allied with Religions, which tyranize minds, brainwashing them to do nothing but serve tyrannical authorities, which often means procreating the maximum number of future wage slaves and soldiers so that ever greater profits can be extracted.
Only when these tyrants are unseated can we live in freedom, with free thought, and build a sustainable world for ourselves, humanity, and the other living species that is it our singular moral obligation to preserve.
Without the rule of tyrants, we can build a world with the freedom to live our lives as we choose, so long as we do so without harm to others. Some equate this as freedom to spend our money as we choose, but that is wrong. Money itself is simply power over others. If all the money in the world disappeared tomorrow, we would still have all the same true resources. Only the power of some people over others would be gone. In the small quantities that most people have, money (along with other forms of ownership) provides a means to live in the face of the tyranny we have today. But in large aggregations, money itself (along with other forms of ownership) is tyranny itself.
Another world is possible. We need to build a world where it becomes increasingly difficult to aggregate all forms of power, including ownership. Speed has a limit, and so should wealth and other forms of power. The "government" should not have any power at all, but simply be the servant of the people. The fair redistribution of wealth (to address the unfairness of all the other laws, and the very "protection" of "property" and "contracts" themselves, which tilt the balance toward the wealthy) ought to be one of the primary functions of government, and it is not a matter of the power of government, per se, but of the people themselves, who receive the money.
Only in this kind of world can science and technology be directed to make everyone's life better, not just to produce ever increasing aggregations of wealth for a few. (If 5% of the population can produce all the food we need, why are we all still working so hard? And this feverish pace of work we still do, which is only needed to keep on increasing the wealth of a few, is rapidly destroying the planet.) In a world where the accumulation of power is limited, we can work less, and live better in every way that is important. Even the most powerful will find they can work less, and live better, since they no longer need to keep on accumulating more power.
What is the maximum sustainable human population on earth? No one knows for sure. In fact, it is largely dependent on how one people live. If people were to live the ultimate "minimalist" lifestyles, eating vegetarian or vegan, using only human-powered transportation, occupying only a hundred or so square feet of living space, forgoing any form of heating or air conditioning, etc., the number could be quite high, perhaps as high or higher than what it is now. On the other hand, if people were to choose to live as maximum plunderers, say, the way a small but significant proportion of US citizens do (the US consuming more of the world's finite resources and producing more of the world's dangerous waste products than any other state), eating mostly meat and animal products, driving 3 ton SUV's tens of thousands of miles a year and racking up millions of miles of airflight miles as well, living in tens of thousands of air conditioned living (and "working") space per person, equipped with personal heated pools and saunas, not to mention fighting highly mechanized wars, building extensive space-based anti-missle systems (these things being probably less sustatinable than the most extreme luxury), etc., the number would have to be quite small. My estimate of the latter would be no more than 50 million, and perhaps much smaller (depending on just how extreme you actually get...ultimately just one person, one mega-robot wielding insane Goldfinger might be too much). I think it's possible to imagine about 1 billion people living very comfortably, but also very economically, on a sustainable basis. Above that, it becomes a lot less comfortable in the long haul.
Any way, of course, once you are at the sustainable limit, you have to either stay there, or keep becoming more and more economical, to stay sustainable. This suggests that the days of people having families with more than the replacement-level 2.1 children per parent are, or ought to be, over. Even more so because we have to get from where we are now to a sustainable level as quickly as we can to prevent a massive global human die-off of unprecidented proportions when we hit the end of the earth's capacity to sustain plundering and filter our waste products. To avoid that, what we probably need right now is for people to have no more than 0.1 or fewer children per parent, and continue that until a sustainable population is reached. (Yes, as some of my critics have speculated, I'm doing my part in this regard, and my abstinence along with that of 9 other quirky alone misfits is making it possible for someone somewhere to have 1 sustainable child.)
Particularly after the re-selection of President Bush, I no longer believe a massive human die-off is preventable. It's no longer a question of "if," it's a question of "when," and now it's beginning to look like it might even happen "within my lifetime," within the next 30 or so years (though, to be safe, I'm officially predicting it within the next two hundred).
Some have argued that's it's even better if we dash over the cliff as quickly as possible to minimize the permanent damage to the planet. If that argument is correct, perhaps we're already on the best possible course. (I don't want to encourage that kind of thinking and behavior, and as for myself I went above and beyond the call of duty in trying to prevent Bush's re-selection. What I want to encourage is people voluntarily changing their lifestyles and reproductive habits to bring about sustainability now, and I'm doing my part, in the most important way anyway... But catastrophe is far beyond me to prevent, especially now.)
So then, one other thing to think about is, what happens after the crash? Are we finally going to build a sustainable society, and, if so, what will it look like? If history is any guide, the answer is no. Although this might be the first global collapse of society, it would only be yet another in the string of localized collapses that history records. Human history is the history of one society overreaching and collapsing after another. Maybe that's all we're capable of.
One thing I strongly believe, however, is that a sustainable society worth living in would be one based on sharing, not life- threatening force. When all is shared, it doesn't matter how much there is, there is always equality, which is a key component of both liberty and justice. Ultimately, I don't believe that any sustainable society worth living in can be based on a few accumulating multiples of power (of which so-called "wealth" is one variety) over others. Capitalism might be a more friendly system of slavery than the ones which preceded it, but it is still based on life-threating force, if nothing else, the power of the capital holders to withold life support from anyone who doesn't do their bidding. And usually there is a lot more force than that, such as the force implicit in imperialism, which seems to be necessary to keep the pyramid scheme of capitalism going.