NYPD Raids Activists’ Homes Before May Day Protests
America’s got this funny style of Fascism going on where so many of the actors (NYPD, FBI) are positively pathetic (in what they choose to focus on, in how they’re unable to see how obviously ridiculous and fucked up they are being), while the underlying ideas and principles (and the slow but certainly steady volume increase on these ideas) are really fucking frightening.
An other website doing its obligatory pre-review of Veep.
A submerged state, according to political scientist Suzanne Mettler, is what you get when a government refuses to distribute funds and services directly to individuals and families, and instead uses tax breaks or payments to private companies all in order to hide the hand of government and exaggerate the role of the market.
But for this, blame not the Boomer, but his overrated progenitor. It’s the generation that made capitalism work so well for so many—the Band of Brothers—who are the real culprits here. The New Deal electorate and the Great Society coalition. Sure, the ruling class reactionaries hated FDR’s reforms, but as Michael Harrington pointed out, “these same reactionaries benefited from the changes that the New Deal introduced far more than did the workers and the poor who actively struggled for them.”
“After the Great Society program in the 1960s,” says Leo Panitch, “left-wing Democrats, rather than calling for more public housing to rebuild America’s cities instead called for the banks to lend money to poor black communities…one of the effects of winning those demands was a channeling of those communities more deeply into the structures of finance, the most dynamic sector of neoliberal capitalism.”
I do so enjoy anything that reinforces the idea of “Greatest Generation my ass”
Who Is IOZ? - De la terre à la lune
We get plenty of the surreal from the Republican candidates and their loony ideas, but what’s really insane is our political reality, regardless of party.
Barack Obama on the drone program that kills 1 militant for every 10-15 civilians. (via jonathan-cunningham)
Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) states, similarly, that “noncombatant casualties” from drone strikes are “kept to an absolute minimum” … you will notice that neither Obama nor Feinstein will define for us what they seem to mean by “huge number”, “noncombatant”, or “absolute minimum” … And yet, it’s important that they try to define this for us, because it seems we’re speaking an entirely different language.
Also, you could call me pie-in-the-sky* for saying so, but I think “absolute minimum” should be defined as 0 and “huge number” should be defined as 1.
*hey, i like pie and skies and fuck you and your ideas about “just war” waged by the State
(Source: news.antiwar.com)
Who Is IOZ - Straits of the Union.
I care for the liveblogging of the SOTU about as much as I do for that of the Republican debates, which is to say, I wish we didn’t pay so much aggravated attention to so much useless nonsense. I checked the text of the speech today, though. Was anyone surprised by the speech? The usual empty promises on that which he cannot control and the usual despicable threats on that which he can and will. Can you read/hear that speech and expect the nation’s trajectory* to change one iota?
*perhaps instead of “trajectory” we should instead call it a sad but much deserved destiny…
