Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011)
English-American, Literary Critic, Journalist, Author,
Essayist, Polemicist, and Outspoken Anti-theist
The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.
As the chart at right shows, between 1979 and 2007, the share of after-tax income going to each of the bottom four income quintiles–the bottom 80 percent–has dropped. The only quintile that has increased its share is the top 20 percent. And the top 1 percent has more than doubled its share
. . . The Occupy Wall Street movement has made inequality [emphasis added] a key focus of its protests, and has used the slogan, “We are the 99 percent.”
Read more . . .
This man, and the others in his presence, is an idiot!
Watch from time-hack 13:50 – 20:15
Purveyors of Bigotry Alert!
Sean Faircloth, Director of Strategy and Policy for the US branch of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, discusses his new book, Attack of the Theocrats: How the Religious Right Harms Us All—and What We Can Do About It, which examines the crumbling of the United States’ most cherished founding principle—the wall of separation between church and state—and offers a specific and sensible plan for rebuilding the church-state wall. The book also names The Fundamentalist Fifty, current members of Congress who have made some of the most extreme theocratic statements. If they weren’t so scary, they’d be funny.
Watch video here . . .
Michael Parenti, Ph.D., (born 1933) Political Scientist,
Political Scientist, Historian, Author, Lecturer, and Culture Critic
Wealth is pursued without moral restraint. The very rich try to crush anyone who resists their endless, heartless, unprincipled accumulation. Like any addiction, money is pursued in that obsessive, amoral, singleminded way, revealing a total disregard for what is right or wrong, just or unjust, an indifference to other considerations and other people’s interests–and even one’s own interests should they go beyond feeding the addiction.
Thus it is necessary and desirable to have laws to protect the environment, workers’ lives, and consumer health because big business has a total indifference to such things, and–to the extent that they cut into profits–an outright hostility toward regulations on behalf of the public interest. We sometimes forget how profoundly immoral is cooperate power.
Michael Parenti, Blackshirts & Redshirts, (City Light Books, 1997), 154.
