What Americans Must Utter to Reclaim the Human
By Kathleen Wallace Peine / May 12th, 2011.
The quote is from a book I’m sure you were forced to read if you are older than 30. This was of course before the outrage over language that knocked it off the shelves in recent years. I’m speaking, of course, of the first truly American classic, Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain’s deceptively simple, meandering voyage through race and social custom in pre-Civil War America.
An old love was rekindled for me recently when I sadly picked up …

H/T American Everyman, originally posted at The Economic Collapse.
The rebels in Libya are in the middle of a life or death civil war and Moammar Gadhafi is still in power and yet somehow the Libyan rebels have had enough time to establish a new Central Bank of Libya and form a new national oil company. Perhaps when this conflict is over those rebels can become time management consultants. They sure do get a lot done. What a skilled bunch of rebels – they can fight a war during the day …

Wednesday, March 16, 2011 – by Staff Report (originally titled: “Desperate Cult of Technology”).
The bullying enforcement of digital viewing is enough to make me switch off, says Rowan Pelling … I’m not sure whether it’s surprising, or predictable, that I married the last man in the entire country who rents an analogue television set. My husband pays £10.80 a month for the privilege of having one of the nation’s most antiquated Panasonics, complete with hefty backside and 26-inch screen. This eccentric practice is not because he is too dim …

Thursday 03 February 2011by Solomon Hughes.
What will the coalition’s “reforms” do to the NHS?
More importantly, what are we going to do about them?
Some clues as to the consequences of the current NHS reforms were in evidence outside Southampton hospital last Monday morning.
At each exit was a picket of dozens of health workers waving Unison flags and blowing vuvuzuelas.
Bus drivers and passing cars responded with honks of support.
The strikers are cleaners, demanding what they were promised in a national deal.
They work for the Medirest company …

ADDED OCT 9, 2010, at POLITICAL DYNAMITE.
When people start throwing around figures in the billions I’d be the first to admit I switch off.
If you said to me ‘so and so’ costs £12 billion, while ‘this and that’ costs $340 million – by mixing up the denominations and the units you can completely throw people off the scent. I’m certainly not thinking, that’s a comparison between £12,000,000,000 and approx £214,000,000.
Or for even easier digestion: £12 billion compared to approx £0.2 billion.
I’m going to borrow an analogy from the superb More Or …

London Morning Star, Monday 31 January 2011.
David Cameron’s case for his government’s plans to destroy the National Health Service is based on bluster and lies.
Justifying something on the basis that leaving things as they are is not an option is not an argument.
If there are weaknesses in the NHS – and there certainly are – identify those weaknesses and engage in discussion over how to overcome them.
The Tories and their loyal satraps the Liberal Democrats have not done that.
They simply gave a blank sheet of paper …

By markaprovost.
In a January 2009 ABC interview with George Stephanopoulos, then President-elect Barack Obama said fixing the economy required shared sacrifice, “Everybody’s going to have to give. Everybody’s going to have to have some skin in the game.” (1)
For the past two years, American workers submitted to the President’s appeal—taking steep pay cuts despite hectic productivity growth. By contrast, corporate executives have extracted record profits by sabotaging the recovery on every front—eliminating employees, repressing wages, withholding investment, and shirking federal taxes.
The global recession increased unemployment in every country, but the …

Editorial, London Morning Star.
Bank of England governor Mervyn King left no room for doubt in his address to businessmen at Newcastle Civic Centre on Tuesday night.
He expects working people to pay the price of the economic crisis through job losses and lack of purchasing power because their loss is business’s gain.
It is incredible that King can posture as an authority on the economy when the banking crisis erupted on his watch and he neither foretold it nor was prepared for it.
Like Establishment politicians in all three main …

By the Editor.
It has begun. Using slashed public spending as a precursor and an excuse, the corporate whores in Whitehall are dismantling the NHS piece by piece and handing it to the private healthcare industry.
This from The UK Independent:
Under the proposals published in Health and Social Care Bill yesterday:
* GPs will become responsible for “buying” care from hospitals and will form consortiums to do so.
* Every hospital will be given independence from the Department of Health and will be allowed to fail and will be taken over by private operators …

Matthew Cassel, The Electronic Intifada, 17 December 2010.
Over the past month, journalist and activist Jody McIntyre has joined a growing number of students, workers, activists and others in the United Kingdom in protesting a government decision to cut public sector funding, especially in the field of education. Last week, as tens of thousands of students took to the streets of central London, parliament voted in favor of a plan that will raise tuition fees by 300 percent.
Jody, who spent months alongside Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip protesting …