Why didn't the North American Press catch Naomi's appearance?

You can bet they will catch Obama's cameo appearance.

FUCK Malthus. Read Buckminster Fuller.

We have the technology (via renewable energy) to END POVERTY TODAY! FOR EVERYONE ON THIS BIG BLUE SPINNING ROCK. But you $%#^&#s keep churning up this too-many-people, Corporate-backed fallacy, that, along with, nattering about LEFT-CENTER-RIGHT politics (how many INANE back-and-forth posts to Chris Hedges' screed, yesterday?) that keeps the REAL fight at bay! I'm talking multi-national corporations and their Bernaysian POWER against the rest of us!

Again, sadly, we have the (non-carbon burning) technology. We do not have the 'political' will to use it.

The upper TENTH has almost all the wealth = 2/3rds and rising.

The other 90% have the rest = 1/3rd and falling.

Half of this "bottom 9/10ths" delude themselves into thinking that they are in some mythical "upper half of society" because their INCOMES are above -and even well above- the median.

Two reasons this is delusion:

1. Income doesn't mean wealth until debt is factored in. Millions of above-median income households have debt-to-asset ratios proportionate to the tens of millions of below-median ones, and therefore proportiate wealth. Even this ratio is shrinking since much of the "assets" of the above-median folks is in houses, cars, and consumer goods (appliances, electronics, etc.) whose value was always socially determined and is now disappearing. When that $500,000 McMansion in the ex-urbs is reduced to its "parts-value" of 25 to 50 grand, the above-medians have less real wealth than a Taco Bell worker with an iPod and a bus pass.

2. Even "above-median" becomes meaningless when the median is $40 -$45,000 a year but "middle class tax cuts" must extend to $250,000 a year. That's one helluva range of income for the "middle class"! Why? Because $250K a year don't mean dog sh!t when Goldman Sachs execs are looking at $2.5 MILLION as a BONUS for ruining the national economy! When some few folks get extra checks for TEN times the yearly income of the top of the "middle class", which is in itself already FIVE times the income of the "median household income", concepts like an "upper half" of the society become ludicrous.

-matti.

Nixon never said that.

There's an Everest of material against the status quo.

No need to invent and "make stuff up."

BLIND ALLEY

You talk only about the misery of the problem,
which only blinds our mind by burning our emotions.

Then you lead us into a blind alley by the false hope
that paid actor politicians will yield to pressure, when
such darkness would surely destroy our will to resist.

Absolutely impossible for you to have done what you say,
and now contradict yourself completely.

For you go on and on about what a hero of a protestor you were,
even civil disobedience and blocking traffic, and then end by
saying your a gutless wonder who will never do it again.

Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."

Past generations of Americans risked being permanently maimed or killed to defeat slavery and to organize labor. It's always a relatively small but very brave and sufficiently united minority of people who pay the highest price for progress. If enough Americans aren't willing to risk losing things like a teaching or disabilities care provider job protesting the misgovernment that has led to the multiple crises now tearing away at their country (and the world), then what does that say about the courage, integrity, intelligence and mental toughness of Americans? This passivity and lack of organization isn't ALL due to the tens of millions of over-medicated depressives on valium and xanex everywhere in the U.S. (although it does have something to do with it).

I used to protest Bush & Cheney in the street when far too many grown, educated people were absolutely terrified to do so. Many of them just have a materially insular, spoiled attitude of 'protests are icky and I might get beat up.' But more of them weren't as afraid of the Bush-Cheney Junta and police crack-downs as they were terrified that someone they knew might see them and think they were being unpatriotic. Afraid of put-downs from all the jingo-fied idiots who believed the Bush Party Line so desperately that if it wasn't true they didn't want to know and to hell with anyone who didn't think the same @#&#! thing. Better to put their heads down and not think or feel. It made me sick to my stomach to see people I once respected as friends wither like pre-adolescents pissing their pants when I would try to get them to come protest with me. The fear was everywhere like city-wide diarrhea. America has had many new shocks since then and was already deep in numbed denial by 2004. Its people still are behaving like Stockholm Syndrome victims of the Military/Petrol Industrial Complex to this day. They don't want to know and they want a politically correct patriarchal Big Brother to just make everything alright for THEM like 5 and 6 year olds who've had a bad fright from a hornet that nearly stung them or fell and skinned their knees running down the sidewalk. "Obama momma, come and make it better!!" WAHHHHH! But most of them couldn't care less what their fellow Americans being smashed under the bottom side of the capitalist boot are suffering until job loss or home foreclosure kicks them personally in the teeth.

This "clearcut-climate" poster says he or she protested in Seattle and was a forest defender. But he or she sounds more to me like a fed or a cop trying to make potential protesters fearful. And this person doesn't offer any solutions to his/her posed dilemma but suggests the historically unlikely idea of a writer and public speaker ponying up lawyers and money to pay for bail and fines for arrested protesters. They need to take some pages from history. Back in the day, union marchers and their families contributed to union funds to help pay for bail and fines. They knew they were stronger in numbers together than trying to stand alone in the streets against the company thugs and pigs. They pulled together as communities of workers.

The big problem now as I see it is that the U.S. is shorn of the multiplicity of social, civic and religious organizations that used to bind authentic neighborhood communities together. There is no longer any sense of solidarity among the American working classes at ANY level--from the middle of the middle-class to the increasingly large and permanent under-class. People used to know how to throw rent parties to help each other make the rent in hard times. They actually spoke with their neighbors on a regular basis and knew them. [It did help that most of the moms prior to the 1960s Women's Lib movement stayed at home and personally cared for the children and got to know each other and each other's kids as they grew up.] They understood the original purpose of unions. They knew who their real class enemies were and didn't sneeringly condescend toward other working-class people for not wearing the most popular and expensive corporate logo on their blue jeans or basketball shoes. Malcolm X might say there are too many house niggers even among white America now. Rich white America has made now of class what it originally made of race--with people only one or two degrees apart in income and education typically relating in an idiotic fashion where the minutely wealthier "better educated" person looks down on his "inferior" neighbor with either derision or indifference. THIS utter lack of solidarity and any sense of the common good is what has destroyed the social fabric of post-1980 America.

Politicians are us and only by politicians being in control
may we ever have freedom and equal control.

For notwithstanding our self-absorbed majority having so far
destroyed it for all of us, only they have the power to save us.

Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."

I disagree. The ones who are able to get out in the streets are more needed in large numbers than ever. Only massive, obvious public resistance to the corporate criminal interests ruining this country and this planet will work because existential fear on their part is the only thing from which they will retreat. The nation and the planet no longer have decades to piss away waiting for glacial incremental change around issues for whom the time to implement meaningful solutions is almost up.

I was in the bank early yesterday with a line of working-class people and on the bank's TV monitors was cell phone footage on CNN of the student riots in Tehran. Those kids were shouting en masse and rocking this large ironwork fence back and forth. Their noise and energy caught everyone's attention who was standing in the line. One middle-aged man remarked, "You know that government's not going to last long there."

If only we could field protests at one event in terms of 2 to 3 million people at a time here in the U.S. we could shove the robber barons' agenda right back down their throats. All enough of the vigorous portion of We the People lack is honest information about who our real enemies are and solidarity.

George W. Bush, pah-leeze.

Did they tell W to act smart or spell it out with his bananas?