Hulu: High - The True Tale of American Marijuana

BBC: Requiem for Detroit

For the Economy, Help is Not on the Way

Common Dreams

If there's some new technological innovation--like the Internet in the early 1990s--waiting in the wings, no one has heard or seen it.

Forget about Congress. The feds wasted hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out banks, insurance companies and big automakers who used our taxpayer money to give raises to their top executives and remodel their offices. Meanwhile, the stimulus that needed to happen--bailing out distressed homeowners, small businesses and individuals who lost their jobs--never happened. Now Congress is worried about the deficit. So read my lips: no new bailouts, not even one that might actually work.

Some think the U.S. could export its way out of the depression. But a radical restructuring of trade agreements and manufacturing infrastructure would have to come first, followed by years of expansion. U.S. policymakers haven't even begun to think about the first move. Moreover, the rest of the world isn't in a position to buy our stuff. The rate of expansion of the economies of China and Japan is slowing down. Germany and other EU nations are imposing austerity measures.

Globalization is key. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, John H. Makin argues that the actions of individual G20 nations threaten to bring the whole system crashing down in a Keynesian "paradox of thrift."

22 Statistics That Prove the Middle Class is Being Systemically Wiped Out of Existence

Business Insider

The 22 statistics that you are about to read prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace.

So why are we witnessing such fundamental changes? Well, the globalism and "free trade" that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects. It turns out that they didn't tell us that the "global economy" would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations. The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough.
The reality is that no matter how smart, how strong, how educated or how hard working American workers are, they just cannot compete with people who are desperate to put in 10 to 12 hour days at less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/22-statistics-that-prove-the-middle-class-is-being-systematically-wiped-out-of-existence-in-america-2010-7#ixzz0uAVrZv7m

Against the War on Drugs and the Prison-Industrial Complex

Alternet

...it is only three and a half months left until the mid-term elections on November 2, 2010 when California voters will decide whether to end the senseless marijuana prohibition and the destructive war that the United States government wages against its own people, the infamous and tragic “drug war”. While Cannabis freedom activists and their supporters lead this new Civil Rights struggle, while the DEA and its prohibitionist allies do everything they can, often resorting to the unimaginable theatrics, to prevent the sick people from gaining access to medicinal Cannabis in State after State, while politicians engage in their usual long-winded grandstanding aimed at showing that it is “I and not the next person” who is the “toughest” on drugs, it is certainly interesting to see where exactly does scientific community stand on all these issues and how it envisions moving forward from this artificially created “dead-end”.

...in the words of Dr. Barry Zevin of Waddell Health Center in San Francisco, ... “If something does not work and we keep doing it, what can we expect” ...clearly referring to the old, rigid “abstinence-based”, disciplinarian approaches to drug treatment that were prevalent in addiction treatment until recently, and are still advocated by some authorities, but which proved ineffective in reducing drug use, despite being quite congenial to the “well-being” of what the Conference participants exposed as the “prison-industrial complex” in the United States.

...Fatima Trigueiros, Senior Adviser to the Executive Board of the Institute on Drugs and Drug Addiction in Portugal...told the participants that the proposal to decriminalize drug possession for “personal use” was being discussed in Portugal since 1976 and, as usual, the right-wing parties in Parliament were against it, while more left-leaning politicians were for it, until the personal possession of “illegal substances” in the amounts of up to ten days supply was finally decriminalized in 2001. Just like in the United States, the “right-wingers” in Portugal had predicted an “Armageddon” of an exploding drug use that would follow the decriminalization of drug possessions for “personal use”. However, as Mrs. Trigueiros pointed out, since the decriminalization of such “possessions” the drug use in Portugal actually DROPPED by 10%, and the new legislation proved so successful as to presently command the support of all political parties in Parliament, a situation “quite rare for any European Parliament”.

It's All About the Wages

Alternet

Missing from almost all discussion of America's dizzying rate of unemployment is the brute fact that hourly wages of people with jobs have been dropping, adjusted for inflation. Average weekly earnings rose a bit this spring only because the typical worker put in more hours, but June's decline in average hours pushed weekly paychecks down at an annualized rate of 4.5 percent.

In other words, Americans are keeping their jobs or finding new ones only by accepting lower wages.

Meanwhile, a much smaller group of Americans' earnings are back in the stratosphere: Wall Street traders and executives, hedge-fund and private-equity fund managers, and top corporate executives. As hiring has picked up on the Street, fat salaries are reappearing. Richard Stein, president of Global Sage, an executive search firm, tells the New York Times corporate clients have offered compensation packages of more than $1 million annually to a dozen candidates in just the last few weeks.

...America's median wage, adjusted for inflation, has barely budged for decades. Between 2000 and 2007 it actually dropped.

...Each of America's two biggest economic downturns over the last century has followed the same pattern. Consider: in 1928 the richest 1 percent of Americans received 23.9 percent of the nation's total income. After that, the share going to the richest 1 percent steadily declined. New Deal reforms, followed by World War II, the GI Bill and the Great Society expanded the circle of prosperity. By the late 1970s the top 1 percent raked in only 8 to 9 percent of America's total annual income. But after that, inequality began to widen again, and income reconcentrated at the top. By 2007 the richest 1 percent were back to where they were in 1928 -- with 23.5 percent of the total.

The Disappearing Intellectual in the Age of Economic Darwinism

Truth Out

We live at a time that might be appropriately called the age of the disappearing intellectual, a disappearance that marks with disgrace a particularly dangerous period in American history. While there are plenty of talking heads spewing lies, insults and nonsense in the various media, it would be wrong to suggest that these right-wing populist are intellectuals. They are neither knowledgeable nor self-reflective, but largely ideological hacks catering to the worst impulses in American society.

...In a media scape and public sphere that view criticism, dialog and thoughtfulness as a liability, such anti-intellectuals abound, providing commentaries that are nativist, racist, reactionary and morally repugnant. But the premium put on ignorance and the disdain for critical intellectuals is not monopolized by the dominant media, it appears to have become one of the few criteria left for largely wealthy individuals to qualify for public office. One typical example is Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who throws out inanities such as labeling the Obama administration a "gangster government."

...With the advent of neoliberalism, or what some call free-market fundamentalism, we have witnessed the production and widespread adoption throughout society of what I want to call the politics of economic Darwinism. As a theater of cruelty and a mode of public pedagogy, economic Darwinism undermines all forms of solidarity while simultaneously promoting the logic of unrestricted individual responsibility. But there is more at stake here than an unchecked ideology of privatization.[10] For example, as the welfare state is dismantled, it is being replaced by the harsh realities of the punishing state as social problems are increasingly criminalized and social protections are either eliminated or fatally weakened. The harsh values of this new social order can be seen in the increasing incarceration of young people, the modeling of public schools after prisons and state policies that bail out investment bankers, but leave the middle and working classes in a state of poverty, despair and insecurity.

Woody Guthrie

Incomes Gains for Richest Greater than Any Time Since 1928

The Center on Budget and Policy

The gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest fifths of the country more than tripled between 1979 and 2007 (the period for which these data are available), according to data the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued last week. Taken together with prior research, the new data suggest greater income concentration at the top of the income scale than at any time since 1928.

While the recession that began in December 2007 likely reduced the income of the wealthiest Americans substantially and may thereby shrink the income gap between rich and poor households, a similar development that occurred around the bursting of the dot.com bubble and the 2001 recession turned out to be just a speed bump. Incomes at the top more than made up the lost ground from 2003 to 2005.