Recent reading

Thom Hartmann on fascism, then and now:

Today, as we face financial and political crises, it's useful to remember that the ravages of the Great Depression hit Germany and the United States alike. Through the 1930s, however, Hitler and Roosevelt chose very different courses to bring their nations back to power and prosperity.

Germany's response was to use government to empower corporations and reward the society's richest individuals, privatize much of the commons, stifle dissent, strip people of constitutional rights, bust up unions, and create an illusion of prosperity through government debt and continual and ever-expanding war spending.

America passed minimum wage laws to raise the middle class, enforced anti-trust laws to diminish the power of corporations, increased taxes on corporations and the wealthiest individuals, created Social Security, and became the employer of last resort through programs to build national infrastructure, promote the arts, and replant forests.

Lee Drutman & Charlie Cray:

A consequence of the hyper-commercialization of our culture is that instead of organizing collectively, we often buy into the market-based ideology of individual choice and responsibility and assume that we can change the world by changing our personal habits of consumption. ***
The personal choices we make are important. But we shouldn’t assume that’s the best we can do. We need to understand that it can’t truly be a matter of choice until we get some more say in what our choices are. True power still resides in the ability to write, enforce and judge the laws of the land, no matter what the corporations and their personal-choice, market-centered view of the world instruct us to believe.

plus: Paul Krugman on Social Security and healthcare, and the Phillip Longman article he refers to; an important supplement is Joanne Laurier's article on the drug industry -- it fills in the gaping holes in mainstream news reports about healthcare costs ("prescription drugs will be the fastest-growing sector of the health care industry, accounting for 14.5 percent of all health spending in 2014, up from 11 percent last year" -- numbers merely reported without answering the question Why?).

"America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."
--Hunter S. Thompson