STWR - Share The World's Resources

We cannot wait any longer for the impeachment of George W. Bush. Far more efficient to have Bush certified. There is no need for further debate on his mental state. The US President is bonkers.

Having turned the White House into a madhouse, having taken more lunatic positions on more issues than any head of state since GeorgeIII (are they, perchance, related?). GWB needs a long rest and a change of medication. And it shouldn't be too hard to guide him into a padded cell. Just tell him it's the presidential bomb shelter.

Let's examine the symptoms of his mental decline. First, Bush convinced Americans that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. This is something the poor fool might have believed, given a tenuous grasp of geography, history and political reality. He then began to hallucinate about weapons of mass destruction, despite the evidence of Hans Blix and a multitude of others that there weren't any. And he finally organised a tatty little alliance to join him in the silliest war since Vietnam, one guaranteed to recruit terrorists in unprecedented numbers.

It’s no secret that the Bush administration has showered high-income groups with federal tax benefits. Nor is it news that income and wealth is highly concentrated at the top. What have gone largely unnoticed, however, are new signs that outside of Washington, state by state, the public is quietly beginning to challenge the privileged position of those at the top.

The United States is the most inequitable advanced nation in the world. Every year since 1996 the top 1 percent has garnered more income than bottom 100 million Americans taken together. Wealth ownership is even more concentrated than income. Indeed, it is literally feudal: The top one percent of wealth holders owns roughly half of all financial and business wealth. The top 5 percent owns almost 70 percent of such wealth. In 2003 the top 1 percent alone received 57.5 percent of all capital gains, rent, interest and dividend income—up from 37.6 percent two decades earlier. A recent analysis by The New York Times and Citizens for Tax Justice found that 43 percent of the Bush dividend tax cuts went to taxpayers with incomes greater than $1 million, who make up a mere 1/10th of 1 percent of all taxpayers.

This extraordinary situation is bad not only for those at the bottom of the economic pyramid, but for the nation as a whole. You don’t have to be a radical to recognize that, historically, huge political power regularly follows huge wealth, with disastrous implications for democracy.

New Poll Shows 57% Prefer Keeping or Reforming the Estate Tax packages.

As the Senate prepares for a May vote on estate tax repeal, increased budget deficits and a more educated public are spurring greater numbers to join a movement begun by some of America's millionaires in 2001 to keep the federal estate tax. A new national poll shows that 57% prefer keeping the tax as is or reforming it. Only 23% favor repealing the tax. The number favoring preservation or reform rises to 68% when respondents learn more information about the estate tax, with 23% again favoring repeal.

"For several years now, I have publicly stated my conviction that we must preserve the estate tax," said Agnes Gund, former president of New York's Museum of Modern Art and a leading philanthropist. "It's a fair tax on those who can best afford it, it contributes greatly to our nation's treasury, and it encourages Americans to give to charitable institutions. I am glad to see more people now agree the tax should be kept."

"The estate tax has been with us for 90 years, brings in fairly large amounts of revenue at fairly low cost, and affects less than one-third of one percent of the population," said Sheldon Cohen, tax attorney and former Commissioner of the IRS. "Why would we change this?"

While it's hard to see it here in the U.S., "trickle-down" economics is beginning to be confronted by popular democratic movements, which are bubbling up in communities across the country as well as all over the world in countries like Ghana and Bolivia, where fierce resistance to the privatization of water not only pushed big water multinationals like Bechtel out of the country , but led the government of Bolivia to begin pushing the world's international financial institutions to exempt water from trade liberalization (i.e. corporate predation) agreements and bolster effots to reverse now widely-discredited structural adjustment programs that have forced debtor nations to privatize essential services like water in exchange for usurious loan packages.

Activists who went to the World Water Forum held in Mexico City last month say that Bolivia's experience is beginning to show signs of rippling out to the rest of the world, becoming a significant model that the struggle for democracy can use to challenge the cold logic of "trickle-down" economics -- i.e. the bogus arguments for efficiency etc. by which privatization is sold.

Instead, the principles of community self-determination and social and environmental rights are beginning to bubble up and challenge the right of multinational corporations, unaccountable investors who benefit from the corporate system, and their shills in the development-financial institutions.

Prepare for the first U.S. Social Justice Forum in the summer of 2007 in Atlanta

In 2001, the World Social Forum burst on to theworld stage with its ambitious rallying call, “AnotherWorld is Possible.” This now-familiar mantra has come to symbolize the dynamism of movements for social and economic justice around the world. If attendance is any measure of success, it is worth noting that the World Social Forum has grown from 20,000 participants at its first gathering (5,000 were expected) to 150,000-plus at the 2005 gathering in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

The Forum responded to a hunger for a different kind of possibilities-oriented dialogue that embraces principles of pluralism, deep debate, respect, justice, and an internationalist perspective.

The Forum responded to a hunger for a different kind of possibilities-oriented dialogue that embraces principles of pluralism, deep debate, respect, justice, and an internationalist perspective.

A broad-based network of U.S.-based activists, grassroots organizations, and their allies are betting that a similar hunger exists in the U.S. and that this is a time when a U.S. Social Forum could be a vehicle for moving a social, environmental and economic justice agenda to center stage.

"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore." Once that was true, but no longer.

Emma Lazarus' beautiful and memorable words we've all heard many times and know well are fading into memory. If we're honest, they should be removed from "Lady Liberty" and be replaced with something like: We'll take your Anglos, especially well-off ones, and the ones we choose with needed skills; you keep the rest, especially your poor, dark-skinned and desperate. We needed 'em once for our homegrown sweatshops. No longer. We've got plenty all around the world. It now looks like we'll make an exception though for the menial or toughest low pay, no benefits, no security jobs no one else wants. We're still debating it and will let you know.

Think they'll ever affix anything like that to the Lady's pedestal? Fat chance. Whatever may emerge from the Congress, how would they ever explain the hypocrisy of our once warm welcome and now cold shoulder and callous rejection of immigrants. The fact is there are now fewer decent jobs to go around for a growing population. We thus need to curb the foreign inflow, and most wanting to come here don't have the right skills or connections and aren't the "right" color. We don't say that publicly, but honesty isn't a trait this country is noted for. Neither is honor, integrity or practicing the high principles we espouse. Strip off the mask, look hard at the cold, ugly face beneath and uncaring eyes and see a heart of stone and not a sign of a soul.

Nothing in the world is as powerful as an idea whose time has come’
~ Victor Hugo

Humanity must per force prey on itself, like monsters of the deep,’ said Albany in King Lear. For Emmanuel Levinas, ‘The inheritance of Abraham is not biological, but, above all, ethical.’ These two statements represent the two extremes, the good and the bad, of human experience. Some individuals, groups, and even nation-states, are close to the good end of the ‘stick’; others, far more numerous, are nearer to the bad end of it. That we need a better world is generally acknowledged.

In a recent conference on globalisation (in favour of it), one of the papers presented was entitled ‘Business for a Better World’. I thought that that was an indisputable sign that our present world needs mending. The awareness, or consciousness, of that reality is widespread: millions of people – in nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), in UN agencies, in church and charity groups, in international cooperation departments, and so on -- are presently involved in activities whose alleged purpose is to build a better world.

The selection of issues that should rank high on the agenda of concern for human welfare and rights is, naturally, a subjective matter. But there are a few choices that seem unavoidable, because they bear so directly on the prospects for decent survival. Among them are at least these three: nuclear war, environmental disaster and the fact that the government of the world’s leading power is acting in ways that increase the likelihood of these catastrophes.

It is important to stress the "government," because the population, not surprisingly, does not agree. That brings up a fourth issue that should deeply concern Americans, and the world: the sharp divide between public opinion and public policy, one of the reasons for the fear, which cannot casually be put aside, that "the American ‘system’ as a whole is in real trouble — that it is heading in a direction that spells the end of its historic values (of) equality, liberty and meaningful democracy," as Gar Alperovitz observes in America Beyond Capitalism.

The "system" is coming to have some of the features of failed states, to adopt a currently fashionable notion that is conventionally applied to states regarded as potential threats to our security (like Iraq) or as needing our intervention to rescue the population from severe internal threats (like Haiti).