Michael Parenti, Ph.D., (born 1933)
Political Scientist, Historian, Author, Lecturer, and Culture Critic
U.S. commitments are not to the ordinary people of other lands, but to the privileged reactionary factions that are most accommodating to Western investors . . . right-wing government maintains the existing privileged order of the free market, keeping the world safe for the empowered hierarchies and wealthy classes of the world.
In three decades as one of the world’s biggest rock stars, Jon Bon Jovi has eaten in some of the world’s best restaurants, savoring the best food the planet has to offer.
Yet there’s no place he’d rather have dinner than The Soul Kitchen, a “pay-what-you-can” restaurant he and his wife Dorothea established in a former auto body shop near the Red Bank train station in central New Jersey.
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Wow! Quite impressive
These men are idiots!
Any military leader can tell you that each person in their unit responds differently to various leadership styles. It’s certainly the case that individual patients will respond differently to various forms of treatment. So what’s up with the VA and DoD ignoring the possibility that medical marijuana might actually help some of their patients? Looks political to me. But the point isn’t just about medical marijuana; it’s about finding individual treatment regimens for individual patients. Read more . . .
. . . Occupy Wall Street isn’t about demands, it’s about making a statement. It’s a statement that the current system isn’t working for the average American (and based on the worldwide events this weekend, it’s not working for a lot of people in a lot of places). It’s a statement that the common people seem to have been abandoned by a government that cares more for corporations than for workers, more for the rich than the poor, more for the powerful than the weak . . . A good government controls the market so that the market serves the citizens . . . Games, and markets, are made to work through rules. Rules only work if they are enforced. If the game no longer serves the fans, or the market no longer serves the citizens, then the rules need to change. When we look back over the last half century, we see a market that increasingly veers away from its role of serving the citizenry . . . The occupy movement is a withdrawal of consent. It’s not a war on capitalism. It’s an acknowledgement that we are doing capitalism badly, and in a way that does not serve to help real people in their real lives.
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Barack Hussein Obama II, (born August 4, 1961)
The 44th President of the United States
As was true 50 years ago, as has been true throughout human history, those with power and privilege will often decry any call for change as “divisive.” They’ll say any challenge to the existing arrangements are unwise and destabilizing. Dr. King understood that peace without justice was no peace at all; that aligning our reality with our ideals often requires the speaking of uncomfortable truths and the creative tension of non-violent protest.
Always Question Authority 