Monday, July 4, 2011
Bikes vs Luggage on MAX
Discussion over at Reddit: Dear asshole cyclists, you are not entitled to everything within this great city just because you ride a bike.
The Seven-Day Itch
Portland Transport Here!
James Howard Kunstler
Do you, too, sense the dread abiding in our annual celebration of national wonderfulness? Outside today's barbeque bubble the dark shapes of wild events loom, exciting primal fears of unresolved woe and travail. Yesterday, I saw a man on a back street of a small town with spider webs tattooed on his elbows and a screaming skull on the back of his neck. America, meet your new normal: a citizenry of exterminating angels. Our political exertions mean nothing to them. They think Ronald Reagan was the offspring of John Wayne and Minnie Mouse and the House of representatives is a reality TV show about home improvement. Once they are on the loose, even Rush Limbaugh and other like-minded jingo creeps of the airwaves will despair.
ClusterFuck Nation
ClusterFuck Nation
Chris Hedges
The most important moral and intellectual voices within a disintegrating society are slowly discredited when their nonviolent protests and calls for justice cannot alter intransigent and corrupt systems of power. The repeated acts of peaceful civil disobedience, efforts at electoral and political reform and the fight to protect the rule of law are dismissed as useless by an embittered, dispossessed and betrayed public. The demagogues and hatemongers, the purveyors of violence, easily seduce enraged and bewildered masses in the final stages of collapse with false promises of vengeance, new glory and moral renewal. And in the spiral downward the good among us are reviled as naive and ineffectual fools.
Chris Hedges: Ralph Nader Is Tired of Running for President - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig
Chris Hedges: Ralph Nader Is Tired of Running for President - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig
Transit workers deserve more than a token raise for the risks they take
Here's a question for the six-figure MTA executives when they try to sell the notion that transit workers should get a series of zeros when their contract is up for negotiation later this year:
When was the last time someone tried to burn down your office when you were in it?
Two punks splashed gasoline on a token booth at the Prospect Park station in Brooklyn before dawn last week and set it on fire with a female clerk inside.
When was the last time someone tried to burn down your office when you were in it?
Two punks splashed gasoline on a token booth at the Prospect Park station in Brooklyn before dawn last week and set it on fire with a female clerk inside.
Justice Litle, Editorial Director, Taipan Publishing Group
And in Greece, the choices are seen as bankruptcy, i.e. instant fiscal death, or prolonged economic recession or even depression -- with crushing financial debt loads acting as a millstone for years or even decades to come.
The response of governments virtually everywhere has been to (1) protect the bankers, (2) shield creditors from any losses, and (3) pump up paper assets in the hope of getting things going again.
Why continue on this path if the results have been so ugly? Because the plan is working, at least for some. As the U.K. Guardian reports:
The response of governments virtually everywhere has been to (1) protect the bankers, (2) shield creditors from any losses, and (3) pump up paper assets in the hope of getting things going again.
Why continue on this path if the results have been so ugly? Because the plan is working, at least for some. As the U.K. Guardian reports:
The U.K. economy is flat, the U.S. is weak and the Greek debt crisis, according to some commentators, is threatening another Lehman Brothers-style meltdown. But a new report shows the world's wealthiest people are getting more prosperous -- and more numerous -- by the day.
The globe's richest have now recouped the losses they suffered after the 2008 banking crisis. They are richer than ever, and there are more of them -- nearly 11 million -- than before the recession struck.
In the world of the well-heeled, the rich are referred to as "high net worth individuals" (HNWIs) and defined as people who have more than $1m (£620,000) of free cash.
According to the annual world wealth report by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini, the wealth of HNWIs around the world reached $42.7tn (£26.5tn) in 2010, rising nearly 10% in a year and surpassing the peak of $40.7tn reached in 2007, even as austerity budgets were implemented by many governments in the developed world.
Greece's Turmoil: A Brief History of the General Strike
The capitalists have wealth; they have money. They invest the money in machinery, in the resources of the earth. They operate a factory, a mine, a railroad, a mill. They will keep that factory running just as long as there are profits coming in. When anything happens to disturb the profits, what do the capitalists do? They go on strike, don't they?... They close it down because there are no profits to be made there…. But the working class, on the other hand, has always been taught to take care of the capitalist's interest in the property. You don't look after your own interest, your labor power, realizing that without a certain amount of provision you can't reproduce it. You are always looking after the interest of the capitalist, while a general strike would displace his interest and would put you in possession of it.
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