At Alternet, Sarah Jaffe explains that Brazil's wealthy folks finally learned that vast economic inequity was putting them at risk. You can either share the wealth or you can spend more on alarm systems and guard dogs.
Michael Hudson, author of a book titled Super Imperialism, looks to the privatization of Greece as what we should expect in the United States. In the meantime, the media keep examining the issue from the perspective of speculators rather than ordinary citizens, who are about to be crushed with debt that they did not cause.
We human animals are an irrepressibly symbolic species. So much so that any thing can represent almost anything else. A cloth flag, a firecracker or a slogan can represent a social order. A piece of bread or an animal can represent a god. The bottom of a shoe can represent a harsh put-down. We endow some of our things with a special significance, such that we deem them “sacred.” I struggle to define what is sacred, but Jonathan Haidt gives us a big clue: sacred things seem to be the opposite of things that disgust us. But there usually seems to be something more to those thing that are the most sacred; there usually seems to be a public declaration or at least an implicit group acquiescence that the thing is sacred. By recognizing things to be sacred, we seem to endow them with other-worldly significance; with heavenly significant. Once a thing is declared “sacred,” it would be disgusting and, indeed, immoral to consider compromising with regard to that thing. [More . . . ]
Here's the proof, by the Axis of Awesome:
But we're still in Afghanistan, for no good reason at all. Greg Mitchell of The Nation tells us what we should have learned and discussed about Afghanistan one year ago, in light of the Wikileaks release of classified U.S. documents regarding Afghanistan:
[The Wikileaks release] not only recounts 144 incidents in which coalition forces killed civilians over six years. But it shows just how deeply elements within the US’s supposed ally, Pakistan, have nurtured the Afghan insurgency. . . . The Guardian carried a tough editorial on its web site, calling the picture “disturbing” and raising doubts about ever winning this war, adding: “These war logs—written in the heat of engagement—show a conflict that is brutally messy, confused and immediate. It is in some contrast with the tidied-up and sanitized ‘public’ war, as glimpsed through official communiques as well as the necessarily limited snapshots of embedded reporting.”