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Showing posts with label The War Is Making You Poor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The War Is Making You Poor. Show all posts
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Quote of the day
Enjoy your Sunday, y'all.
Monday, April 11, 2011
A new blog---and link
From a reader:
Its unfortunate, but in today's capitalistic society money is really the only thing that companies (or sadly politicians) listen to. I would highly suggest you check out our new open-source product search engine, filtericious. It's intended as a product search engine that lets people attach tags (for example Koch brothers), and then filter products when making everyday buying decisions. Our hope is to make the process of "voting your money" MUCH easier. We are trying to get this project launched with a kickstarter page: http://www.kickstarter.com/
From their earlier post on the site:
Filtericious is an open source search engine unlike any other search engine in many ways. First off, the content and indexing is 100% contributed by members of the community. Think of it as the Wikipedia of Internet search where all parts of the site are contributed one piece at a time creating a massive public database available to everybody. Secondly, we've developed a visual filter tool that lets you narrow on on what you're searching for in a manner similar to a game of 20-questions. By choosing what tags you want and what tags you don't want, you can more efficiently find what it is exactly you're looking for. Thirdly, because the community can link web resources with tags, we can now make our buying decisions based on hard-to-find but important political, environmental, and economical product characteristics, enabling us to efficiently and affectively "vote with our money".
Thanks for writing, Alex. We wish you all the best in the endeavor, certainly.
Its unfortunate, but in today's capitalistic society money is really the only thing that companies (or sadly politicians) listen to. I would highly suggest you check out our new open-source product search engine, filtericious. It's intended as a product search engine that lets people attach tags (for example Koch brothers), and then filter products when making everyday buying decisions. Our hope is to make the process of "voting your money" MUCH easier. We are trying to get this project launched with a kickstarter page: http://www.kickstarter.com/
From their earlier post on the site:
Filtericious is an open source search engine unlike any other search engine in many ways. First off, the content and indexing is 100% contributed by members of the community. Think of it as the Wikipedia of Internet search where all parts of the site are contributed one piece at a time creating a massive public database available to everybody. Secondly, we've developed a visual filter tool that lets you narrow on on what you're searching for in a manner similar to a game of 20-questions. By choosing what tags you want and what tags you don't want, you can more efficiently find what it is exactly you're looking for. Thirdly, because the community can link web resources with tags, we can now make our buying decisions based on hard-to-find but important political, environmental, and economical product characteristics, enabling us to efficiently and affectively "vote with our money".
Thanks for writing, Alex. We wish you all the best in the endeavor, certainly.
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Quote of the day--on war and peace
"Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out...and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel. ..And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for "the universal brotherhood of man"--with his mouth." --Mark Twain
Saturday, May 29, 2010
An alternate reality: ending these wars (guest post)
May 29, 2010
We've Always Been at War with Eastasia
On May 30, 2010, at 10:06 a.m, the direct cost of occupying Iraq and Afghanistan will hit $1 trillion. And in a few weeks, the House of Representatives will be asked to vote for $33 billion of additional "emergency" supplemental spending to continue the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. There will be the pretense of debate -- speeches on the floor of both chambers, stern requests for timetables or metrics or benchmarks -- but this war money will get tossed in the wood chipper without difficulty, requested by a president who ran on an anti-war platform. Passing this legislation will mark the breaking of another promise to America, the promise that all war spending would be done through the regular budget process. Not through an off-budget swipe of our Chinese credit card.
The war money could be used for schools, bridges, or paying everyone's mortgage payments for a whole year. It could be used to end federal income taxes on every American's first $35,000 of income, as my bill, the War Is Making You Poor Act, does. It could be used to close the yawning deficit, supply health care to the unemployed, or for any other human and humane purpose.
Instead, it will be used for war. Because, as Orwell predicted in 1984, we've reached the point where everyone thinks that we've always been at war with Eastasia. Why?
Not because Al Qaeda was sheltered in Iraq. It wasn't. And not because Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan. It isn't. Bush could never explain why we went to war in Iraq, and Obama can't explain why we are 'escalating' in Afghanistan.
So, why? Why spend $1 trillion on a long, bloody nine-year campaign with no justifiable purpose?
Remember 9/11, the day that changed everything? That was almost a decade ago. Bush's response was to mire us in two bloody wars, wars in which we are still stuck today. Why?
I can't answer that question. But I do have an alternative vision of how the last 10 years could have played out.
Imagine if we had decided after 9/11 to wean ourselves off oil and other carbon-based fuels. We'd be almost ten years into that project by now.
Imagine if George W. Bush had somehow been able to summon the moral strength of Mahatma Gandhi, Helen Keller, or Martin Luther King Jr, and committed the American people to the pursuit of a common goal of a transformed society, a society which meets our own human needs rather than declaring "war" on an emotion, or, as John Quincy Adams put it, going "abroad, in search of monsters to destroy".
Imagine.
Imagine that we chose not to enslave ourselves to a massive military state whose stated goal is "stability" in countries that never have been "stable", and never will be.
Imagine.
"Imagine all the people, living life in peace."
Sign up to end these wars.
Rep. Alan Grayson.Congressman Alan Grayson represents Central Florida (FL-8)
Follow Rep. Alan Grayson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/alangrayson
Link to original post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-alan-grayson/weve-always-been-at-war-w_b_594354.html
We've Always Been at War with Eastasia
On May 30, 2010, at 10:06 a.m, the direct cost of occupying Iraq and Afghanistan will hit $1 trillion. And in a few weeks, the House of Representatives will be asked to vote for $33 billion of additional "emergency" supplemental spending to continue the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. There will be the pretense of debate -- speeches on the floor of both chambers, stern requests for timetables or metrics or benchmarks -- but this war money will get tossed in the wood chipper without difficulty, requested by a president who ran on an anti-war platform. Passing this legislation will mark the breaking of another promise to America, the promise that all war spending would be done through the regular budget process. Not through an off-budget swipe of our Chinese credit card.
The war money could be used for schools, bridges, or paying everyone's mortgage payments for a whole year. It could be used to end federal income taxes on every American's first $35,000 of income, as my bill, the War Is Making You Poor Act, does. It could be used to close the yawning deficit, supply health care to the unemployed, or for any other human and humane purpose.
Instead, it will be used for war. Because, as Orwell predicted in 1984, we've reached the point where everyone thinks that we've always been at war with Eastasia. Why?
Not because Al Qaeda was sheltered in Iraq. It wasn't. And not because Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan. It isn't. Bush could never explain why we went to war in Iraq, and Obama can't explain why we are 'escalating' in Afghanistan.
So, why? Why spend $1 trillion on a long, bloody nine-year campaign with no justifiable purpose?
Remember 9/11, the day that changed everything? That was almost a decade ago. Bush's response was to mire us in two bloody wars, wars in which we are still stuck today. Why?
I can't answer that question. But I do have an alternative vision of how the last 10 years could have played out.
Imagine if we had decided after 9/11 to wean ourselves off oil and other carbon-based fuels. We'd be almost ten years into that project by now.
Imagine if George W. Bush had somehow been able to summon the moral strength of Mahatma Gandhi, Helen Keller, or Martin Luther King Jr, and committed the American people to the pursuit of a common goal of a transformed society, a society which meets our own human needs rather than declaring "war" on an emotion, or, as John Quincy Adams put it, going "abroad, in search of monsters to destroy".
Imagine.
Imagine that we chose not to enslave ourselves to a massive military state whose stated goal is "stability" in countries that never have been "stable", and never will be.
Imagine.
"Imagine all the people, living life in peace."
Sign up to end these wars.
Rep. Alan Grayson.Congressman Alan Grayson represents Central Florida (FL-8)
Follow Rep. Alan Grayson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/alangrayson
Link to original post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-alan-grayson/weve-always-been-at-war-w_b_594354.html
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