Tom Morello, The Nightwatchman: Uniontown - Pop Matters

If this is your initial introduction to Tom Morello’s “Nightwatchman” saga, then you’re in much better luck than the Rage and Audioslave fanatics who purchased his first solo album on a whim figuring he’d tear up the acoustic guitar like he does the electric.

Union Town tightens up the sound Morello’s been testing with his alter-ego, blending the simple folk he always wanted out of this project, but mixing it with the electric guitar talent he’s been known for since the early ‘90s. On four of the eight songs, Morello squeals quick riffs at each bridge, though not in his signature scratchy vein, but rather in a cleaner, more rehearsed style.

It’s a smart move, though, and one that could gain more Rage and Audioslave listeners without losing the point of this project, which this time is to spark protest against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and his bill to end collective bargaining.

Morello bellows on the title track, “If they come to strip our rights away / We’ll give ‘em hell every time,” and for someone who’s made millions of dollars and never gotten screwed over by the record companies, he still comes off as legitimate.

The full article is available here

The Debt Ceiling Debacle - HuffPost

The irresponsible decision of the Tea Party Republican right to hold the economy hostage over the raising the debt ceiling has paid off big time. And Americans will pay the price.  For all the president's talk about shared sacrifice and the wealthy paying a bit more by closing loopholes, the two choices before the Congress now are all about spending cuts without revenue increases.

What is notable about the current choices is how far removed they are from the opinions of most Americans. By overwhelming majorities, Americans want Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid protected. The most popular options on deficit reduction are raising taxes on millionaires, lifting the cap on Social Security, taxing Wall Street bankers for the mess they made, closing off shore tax havens and various corporate subsidies and loopholes.

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If Corporations and the Rich Paid 1960s-Level Taxes, the Debt Would Vanish - Our Future

This “debt crisis” in no way had to happen. No natural disaster, no tsunami, has suddenly pounded the United States out of fiscal balance. We have simply suffered a colossal political failure. Our powers that be, by feeding the rich and their corporations one massive tax break after another, have thrown a monstrous monkey wrench into our national finances.

If corporations and households taking in $1 million or more in income each year were now paying taxes at the same annual rates as they did back in 1961, the IPS researchers found, the federal treasury would be collecting an additional $716 billion a year.

In other words, if the federal government started taxing the wealthy and their corporations at the same rates in effect a half-century ago, the federal debt to investors would almost totally vanish over the next decade.

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Nearly 10 Years Ago Today, U.S. Began Borrowing Billions To Pay For Bush Tax Cuts - Think Progress

As debates about deficit reduction continued to be heavily tilted toward cutting spending, which threatens to undermine a fragile recovery, rather than raising revenue from those who can afford it, it’s important to remember the budgetary impact of the Bush tax cuts.

Nearly 10 years ago today, on August 1, 2001, the Associated Press reported that the Treasury Department was tapping $51 billion of credit in order to pay for the budgetary cost of the first round of Bush tax cuts’ rebate checks. The AP reported at the time that Democratic Party opponents of the tax cuts worried that they’d return government budgets to "red ink."

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Horn of Africa Hunger Emergency: Somali Children Walk for Days or Weeks to Reach Relief Camps

Relief workers are struggling to keep up with the exodus of hungry refugees.

In some parts of drought-stricken Somalia, one child in 10 is at risk of starving to death, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). In a recent report, ICRC stated that the number is twice as high as it was in March.

Additional feeding centers are being set up by the Somali Red Crescent (an ICRC affiliate), but relief workers are struggling to keep up with the exodus of hungry refugees.

Adults who arrive in neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia, where border camps are swelling, report that children have died en route.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said there are 11 million people in the Horn of Africa affected by the worst drought in decades.

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What My Father Believed - John Guzlowski

My father believed we are here to lift logs that can’t be lifted, to hammer steel nails so bent they crack when we hit them.

In the slave labor camps in Germany, he’d seen men try the impossible and fail.

He believed life is hard, and we should help each other.

If you see someone on a cross, his weight pulling him down and breaking his muscles, you should try to lift him, even if only for a minute, even though you know lifting won’t save him.


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Being Poor Is A Lot of Work - Bart Campolo

Until very recently, I had no idea how hard it is for some of our friends just to find somewhere to lay themselves down to sleep at night.

I knew that inner-city families moved around a lot, but I didn’t realize how much heartache and humiliation goes before and after most of those moves, both for the families and for the neighborhoods they come and go from in search of better space.

Part of the problem is low incomes, of course, which leave almost everyone around here one minor setback way from missing rent.

But beyond that, there are often rats and roaches and bedbugs to contend with, along with those normal, everyday conflicts with neighbors that, in this environment, can quickly become unacceptably dangerous. There are broken pipes and broken heaters and, as often as not, broken promises from landlords who live in a very different world.

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The Republican Party - Getting to Crazy: Paul Krugman

Anyone surprised by the extremism and irresponsibility now on display by Republicans in the debt limit debate either hasn’t been paying attention, or has been deliberately turning a blind eye.

President Obama has made it clear that he’s willing to sign on to a deficit-reduction deal that includes extraordinary concessions.  Yet Republicans are saying no. Indeed, they’re threatening to force a U.S. default, and create an economic crisis, unless they get a completely one-sided deal. And this was entirely predictable.

Voodoo economics has taken over the GOP.  Those within the GOP who had misgivings about the embrace of tax-cut fanaticism might have made a stronger stand if there had been any indication that such fanaticism came with a price.  But there has been no pressure on the GOP to show any kind of responsibility, or even rationality — and sure enough, it has gone off the deep end.

The full article is available here

The Rise of the Wrecking-Ball Right - Robert Reich

Government-haters seem to be everywhere.  Congressional Republicans, now led by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, hate government so much they're ready to sacrifice the full faith and credit of the United States in order to shrink it.

Add in the relentlessly snide government-hating and baiting of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and his imitators on rage radio; include more than thirty years of Ronald Reagan's repeated refrain that government is the problem; pile on hundreds of millions of dollars from the likes of oil tycoons Charles and David Koch intent on convincing the public that government is evil, and you have all the ingredients for the emergence of a wrecking-ball right that's intent on destroying government as we know it.

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2011 Natural Disasters Cost a Record $265 Billion - Grist

Some politicians might not believe in climate change, but insurance companies do. They track disasters, and it turns out that disasters just in the first six months of this year already cost the world more than any other year of disasters on record.

The price tag for 2011 disasters reached $265 billion. Most of that cost ($210 billion) came from the tsunami in Japan.

But flooding in Australia, tornadoes in the United States, and earthquakes in New Zealand also contributed, and the Munich Re insurance giant draws a connection between some of these disasters and climate change.

The full article is available here

The Crisis Enters Year Five - Tikkun

The current capitalist global crisis began with the severe contraction in the housing markets in mid-2007; therefore welcome to year five.  Here’s the "good news": the major banks, the stock market, and corporate profits have largely or completely “recovered” from the lows they reached early in 2009.  However, the bad news is what prevails.

The most widely cited unemployment rate for workers without jobs but looking remains at 9%. If instead we use the more indicative U-6 unemployment statistic of the U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, then the rate is 15%.

At the same time, the housing market remains deeply depressed as 1.5 to 2 million home foreclosures are scheduled for 2011, separating more millions from their homes. After a short upturn, housing prices nationally have resumed their fall: one of those feared “double dips” downward is thus already underway in the economically vital housing market.

The combination of high unemployment and high home foreclosures assures a deeply depressed economy. The mass of U.S. citizens cannot work more hours — the United States already is number one in the world in the average number of hours of paid labor done per year per worker. The mass of U.S. citizens cannot borrow much more because of debt levels already teetering on the edge of unsustainability for most consumers.

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Gillian Welch: The Harrow & The Harvest - Pop Matters

Throughout its ten songs, The Harrow & The Harvest locks into oldness and Americana.  What we have are ten more examples of what make Welch & partner David Rawlings great: high lonesome harmonies, beautifully judged musicianship, exquisite songcraft, and a relationship with tradition that is both serious and playful.

The same awareness of fate that drove so many of those old ballads, and that howls like a bitter wind through the Carter Family’s repertoire, informs many of the songs on The Harrow & The Harvest. Indeed, one way to read that title (beyond the very tempting connection to a certain Neil Young album) is as a recognition of the cyclical inevitability of the seasons, of sowing and reaping, the rewards and punishments wrought by time.

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Republican's Sick Priorities - The Nation

How deceptive for politicians to stress “entitlements” when they talk about gutting Social Security and Medicare, two programs long paid for by their beneficiaries. The Republicans make it sound as if they’re doing us a favor, cutting government waste by seeking to strangle America’s two most successful domestic programs.

And now Barack Obama seems poised to join their camp in undermining the essential lifeline for most of the nation’s seniors, many of whom lost their retirement savings in the banking meltdown.

These threatened programs are not government handouts to a privileged class, like defense contractors and bailed-out bankers, who do feel eminently entitled to pig out at the federal trough.

On the contrary, Social Security and Medicare have been funded by a regressive tax that falls disproportionately on working middle-class income earners, while caps in the system leave the wealthy—most notably the hedge fund hustlers who helped cause today’s economic crisis—largely untaxed.

The full article is available here