Corporate media support war crimes?

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Dana Loesch, a CNN contributor, has come forward and admitted she’d join the troops to urinate on dead Afghans. Earlier this week a video of US Marines urinating on dead Afghans has gone viral and caused uproar around the world. Other members of the media have come forward and confessed that they don’t see anything wrong with the Marines disgraceful acts. Some American war Vets disapproved of the actions of the troops. Abby Martin, founder of MediaRoots.Org, joins us to examine the situation.

CNN: Law Enforcement Is Intimidated By Anonymous

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January 14, 2012 CNN

Inequality – why the workers’ loss of income, and the bosses’ triumph, has broken our economy

Stewart Lansley’s The Cost of Inequality: Three Decades of The Super-Rich and the Economy is full of figures to make the blood boil.

* According to Forbes, the number of American billionaires jumped 40-fold in the 25 years to 2007. In that period general US incomes stagnated in real terms, but the aggregate wealth of the top 400 soared from $169 to $1500 billion. (p. 7)

* The average pay of chief executives of Britain’s biggest 100 companies grew by 11% per annum in real terms 1999-2006; for other fulltime employees the figure was 1.4%. (p. 24) In the US chief execs’ pay ratio to workers’ from 1960 (42 to one) had leapt to 334 to one by 2007. (p. 25)

* To make it global, the combined wealth of the world’s 1000 richest people is almost twice as much as the poorest 2.5 billion. (p.27)

It makes the point that most of us have been around for long enough can feel instinctively – all of this is not some kind of inevitable way of things, but a relatively recent, and relatively sudden, development.

via Inequality – why the workers’ loss of income, and the bosses’ triumph, has broken our economy – Philobiblon.

Rich-poor conflict said No. 1 U.S. strain

Rich-poor conflict has replaced racial strain and friction due to nationality as the top U.S. tension, a national issues, attitudes and trends survey indicated.

The Pew Research Center survey was released the same day an Indiana University study said millions of Americans fell below the poverty line during the Great Recession and millions more would be forced into poverty, even as the nation emerges from the downturn.

The Pew survey found 66 percent of Americans say they believe “very strong” or “strong” conflicts exist between the rich and the poor, a 19 percent jump from 2009.

The 30 percent who say class conflicts are very strong is double the proportion who said the same thing in July 2009 and represents the largest share expressing this opinion since the question was first asked in 1987, the non-profit Pew center said.

via Rich-poor conflict said No. 1 U.S. strain – UPI.com.

Troubled by urban poverty and inequality: Edward M. Miggins

Occupy Wall Street has initiated a national debate about poverty and inequality that resembles the political turmoil of the Gilded Age of the 1890s and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Can democracy and the nation’s economic health continue to survive severe disparities of income and well-being? Central cities, like Cleveland, reflect the downward spiral of income for working-class and minority families. More than 40 percent of its households live in poverty.

Norm Krumholz, a former city planner for Cleveland, advocated “equity planning” to help poor residents. As a professor of urban studies at Cleveland State University, he found that, in the Central neighborhood, the original home for many immigrants and black migrants, the median family income was $4,280 in 1980. Seventy percent of its households were single-parent families on welfare. Only 4.3 percent of the neighborhood’s houses were owner-occupied, in contrast to 44 percent citywide. Sixty-two percent of adults over 25 had not finished high school. Violent crime was the highest in the city. Twenty percent of the area’s public housing was vacant. Conditions were worse than in the Hough neighborhood before its riot of 1966.

via Troubled by urban poverty and inequality: Edward M. Miggins | cleveland.com.

Things We’re Supposed To Be Quiet About – Krugman

You see the contrast: a doubling of family incomes in the post war generation compared with maybe 20 percent since, and family incomes growing in line with GDP before, lagging far behind since, with the difference basically being the rising share of the 1 percent.

via Things We’re Supposed To Be Quiet About – NYTimes.com.

GNN Report: CIA and Drugs

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Noam Chomsky on The Myth of the Liberal Media: The Propaganda Model of News

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Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky demolish one of the central tenets of our political culture, the idea of the “liberal media.” Instead, utilizing a systematic model based on massive empirical research, they reveal the manner in which the news media are so subordinated to corporate and conservative interests that their function can only be described as that of “elite propaganda.”

Update: Data supporting Herman & Chomsky is available at : stateofthenewsmedia.org

A Nightmare on Wall Street…

Watch and share this video presented by the National Nurses United promoting a financial transaction tax on Wall Street trading to help restore the economy. The video portrays a banker whose greed contributes to the economic meltdown of a nation, resulting in lost pensions and jobs, as well as home foreclosures, and financial ruin for many Americans. The entertaining video short is inspired by The Twilight Zone, an American television anthology series created by Rod Serling.