"David Benjamin" - The Tax-Free American Aristocracy

PARIS — The Republican vision for America’s future keeps popping up in old movies.Karlheinz Boehm and Romy Schneider in "Sissi".

My latest flash of GOP déjà vu came unexpectedly, while I feasted with friends in a tiny Italian village. As we ate, the television unspooled a 1955 German movie dubbed in Italian. The only face I recognized was Romy Schneider as the title character, “Sissi,” who was — as best I could guess — princess of Austro-Hungary. I tried to ignore the TV. But the sheer spectacle, in vibrant, tear-inducing Agfacolor, kept pulling me back into the charming, although completely incomprehensible life story of the woman I later learned was Elizabeth, Empress of Austro-Hungary from 1854-1898.

The film, “Sissi,” lacks two elements whose absence works together to attain a sort of transcendent tedium rarely seen in non-German cinema. The film, as far as I could tell, has no dramatic tension. Its shimmering characters float through velvet-draped rooms in a silken castle atop an inaccessible mountain. They are beautifully, elegantly, opulently oblivious to any events that might be going on in the outside world— which is the movie’s other absent element. The universe is a sound stage steeped in luxury.

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"Christina Luisa" -Theft is on the rise in a worsening economy

(NaturalNews) It is not strange to hear about cars, jewelry or money being stolen. These days, desperate thieves are choosing bizarre targets: copper wires, air conditioning units, storm drain covers, grapes, ambulances, pain killers and even bees. This petty thievery of agricultural goods and odd supplies is the new norm in a rapidly worsening economy where unemployment is rampant.

The downturn in the economy and record unemployment numbers have created a heightened sense of desperation, which subsequently is leading to a rapid increase in crime levels all over the country.

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"J.D Heyes" -FDA admits heart drug doubles risk of death

NaturalNews) Regulators with the Food and Drug Administration have warned that Multaq, a cardiac drug Sanofi, has been linked with fatal heart problems in a clinical trial the company recently ended.

In the study involving 3,000 patients, 32 who were taking Multaq died from cardiac-related problems compared with 14 who were taking a placebo. In all, nearly twice as many people suffered heart attacks, strokes and death than those in the placebo control group.

Multaq is prescribed to control atrial fibrillation, the most common type of irregular heartbeat which is found in about 2.2 million Americans. It is a condition in which the primary electrical impulse that causes the atria - the two upper chambers of the heart - to contract instead fires erratically, causing several other nodes, or electrical impulse points, to fire instead.

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"M. Thornley"-Guerilla gardeners sow seed bombs worldwide

(NaturalNews) Where blighted or abandoned land sits idle in vacant lots or on street meridians, under park benches or in the bare areas under trees, look for a latter day Johnny Appleseed to take aim. Under the radar of city planners and police, they may call their covert activities pavement pimping or guerilla or stealth gardening. Although their activities are peaceful, they may utilize to some extent the language of warfare. It is a war conducted against wastelands.

Guerilla gardening is not new. Activists began to turn disused lots or abandoned properties into areas of growth and rejuvenation enjoyed by an entire community in the early 70s.

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"Bloomberg Businessweek"-Indian Point Nuclear Evacuation Plan ‘Impossible' Lawmakers Say

May 10 (Bloomberg) -- Entergy Corp.'s Indian Point nuclear plant north of Manhattan would have to close if the U.S. required a plan to evacuate 20 million people within 50 miles, two U.S. lawmakers said after touring the plant with the chief nuclear regulator.

Entergy, the second-largest operator of U.S. nuclear power plants after Chicago-based Exelon Corp., is seeking 20-year extensions of licenses that expire in 2013 and 2015 for two reactors at the site. The renewals would be rejected if New Orleans-based Entergy had to submit an evacuation plan that includes residents of Manhattan, 35 miles (56 kilometers) away, said Representative Nita Lowey, a New York Democrat.

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"Andrew Bacevich" - How The Military Became Our New Civic Religion

Fenway Park, Boston, July 4, 2011.  On this warm summer day, the Red Sox will play the Toronto Blue Jays.  First come pre-game festivities, especially tailored for the occasion.  The ensuing spectacle -- a carefully scripted encounter between the armed forces and society -- expresses the distilled essence of present-day American patriotism.  A masterpiece of contrived spontaneity, the event leaves spectators feeling good about their baseball team, about their military, and not least of all about themselves -- precisely as it was meant to do.

In this theatrical production, the Red Sox provide the stage, and the Pentagon the props.  In military parlance, it is a joint operation.  In front of a gigantic American flag draped over the left-field wall, an Air Force contingent, clad in blue, stands at attention.  To carry a smaller version of the Stars and Stripes onto the playing field, the Navy provides a color guard in crisp summer whites.  The United States Marine Corps kicks in with a choral ensemble that leads the singing of the national anthem.  As the anthem’s final notes sound, four U. S. Air Force F-15C Eagles scream overhead.  The sellout crowd roars its approval.

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"George Lakoff"- How to Rescue the American Dream from the GOP's Nightmare

Democracy, in the American tradition, has been defined by a simple morality: We Americans care about our fellow citizens, we act on that care and build trust, and we do our best not just for ourselves, our families, our friends and our neighbors, but for our country, for each other, for people we have never met and never will meet.

American democracy has, over our history, called upon citizens to share an equal responsibility to work together to secure a safe and prosperous future for their families and nation. This is the central work of our democracy and it is a public enterprise. This, the American Dream, is the dream of a functioning democracy.

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"David Sirota" -The Ridiculous Third Party Rallying Cry

Bloomberg and Friedman pretend partisan fighting is ruining our country. The real problem is too much consensus

Given that we're a little more than a year away from another election circus, it's no surprise that the now-traditional festivities of the modern electoral grotesquerie have begun in earnest. It always unfolds this way: Toward the middle of an odd-numbered year, you start feeling that rumble of the distant train creaking into town. Soon after, the familiar bustle returns: the professional polling prognosticators doing their best fortune teller impressions; the carnies in the political operative class busily setting up their tent-pole campaign headquarters; the drooling campaign reporters hollering at the boisterous pack of freakshow-caliber candidates; and the wing-tipped emcees in the White House beckoning passersby with bold-but-patently-absurd promises of great things yet to come (all for the price of a campaign contribution, of course).

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"Dr. Stuart Jeanne Bramhall" - Life After Capitalism

Like many sustainability activists, I strongly believe that with advanced planning and preparation, the demise of capitalism could be an extraordinarily positive change for most of humankind. I tend to agree with Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute (see TEOFWAWKIT: The End of the World as We Know It) that global resource scarcity, aggravated by catastrophic climate change, will force the break-up of large nation-states into small self-governing regional units. As a strong proponent of participatory democracy, I maintain that it will be up to the inhabitants of each region to determine how they will govern themselves and provide for their basic needs. At the same time, I feel that some features of post-capitalist society can be predicted -- either because they are dictated by resource scarcity or because they are fundamental to true political and economic democracy:

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"David DeGraw" - This Is What A Collapsing Ponzi Scheme Looks Like: Housing Market Headed Off A Cliff As A Shocking 10.8 Million Mortgages At Risk Of Default

David DeGraw,  July 27th, 2011 

http://daviddegraw.org/2011/07/this-is-what-a-collasping-ponzi-scheme-looks-like-housing-market-headed-off-a-cliff-as-a-shocking-10-8-million-mortgages-at-risk-of-default/

You might want to sit down for this one. As bad as the housing crisis has been over the past three years, it has only been a warm up to what we have headed our way. Laurie Goodman, from Amherst Securities, has been tracking the housing market as well as anyone. She just presented her latest findings at the American Enterprise Institute and it is a horrific forecast, to say the least. As she puts it, “10.81 million homes are at risk of default over the next 6 years. Even if we try to be extremely conservative we can’t get the number below 8.7 million units.”

With defaults already piling up, the shadow inventory of homes has been growing rapidly, and given this new data the number is going to skyrocket. As this chart shows, the total has gone up from 2 million homes in 2009 to 3.35 million as of April, a 67.5% increase already.

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