Blog: CONSILIENCE PRODUCTIONS

What an incredible story : The last veteran of World War I was a waitress, and for 90 years no one knew her name. Florence Green, a member of Britain's Royal Air Force who was afraid of flying, died in England on Saturday, two weeks shy of her 111th birthday. She was believed to have been the war's last living veteran — the last anywhere of the tens of millions who served. With the death in May of Claude Stanley Choules, an Englishman who served aboard a Royal Navy battleship, [...]

Shame Shame SHAME on the Susan G. Komen foundation for pulling support to Planned Parenthood : "According to Planned Parenthood, its centers performed more than 4 million breast exams over the past five years, including nearly 170,000 as a result of Komen grants." Cutting funding for breast cancer exams is a despicable political move as a result of extreme Right Wing pressure on the foundation. All men and women who are interested in eradicating breast cancer should exert pressure on them to reverse this decision. Until they do, we are urging all of [...]

It's January, but the OWS movement certainly isn't cold : Twelve protesters were arrested Sunday night on a march through Lower Manhattan to show support for Occupy protesters in Oakland, where a violent confrontation erupted on Saturday night between the police and demonstrators who tried to take over an empty convention center. The crowd in New York, about 300 strong, occasionally surged into streets, and on at least two occasions someone in the crowd threw a bottle, apparently aimed at police officers who accompanied the march on foot and in vehicles. The police plunged [...]

This number - 15% - is the presumptive Republican nominee's tax rate. FIFTEEN percent. Mitt Romney pays such a low rate because most of his income comes from the " carried interest " rule that allows those running hedge funds or private equity firms (like Romney's Bain Capital) to pay taxes at the long-term capital gains rate, which is 15%. The big question going into this election in November is why we allow these hedge fund and private equity owners to be taxed at the long-term capital gains rate. Capital gains are taxed at a [...]

It's very clear by the actions of Occupy Wall Street on New Year's Eve that this movement isn't going away anytime soon : More than 500 people associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement gathered in Zuccotti Park on Saturday and, in a return to scenes from earlier in the year, the evening began with the sound of drumming and calls of the now familiar slogan, "We are the 99 percent" -- and it ended with torn-down barricades and a scuffle with police officers. Just after 10:30 p.m. on New Year's Eve, officers carried [...]

Time's Person of the Year couldn't be more appropriate. Witness these female protesters in Egypt brutalized by members of the SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces): So disgusting. Meanwhile, here in America, the #OWS protesters are going strong. Witness this short clip of a demonstration here in Lower Manhattan last night: And make sure to follow Mona Eltahawy on Twitter . She's an Egyptian writer and activist who is in Egypt and was just detained for 12 [...]

Eight long years later...and what did we accomplish ? After nearly nine years, some 4,500 American fatalities and about $1 trillion, America's war in Iraq is about to end. Officials marked the finish Thursday with a modest ceremony at the airport days before the last troops traverse the southern highway to Kuwait, going out as they came in, to conclude the United States' most ambitious and bloodiest military campaign since Vietnam. Iraqis will be left with a country that is not exactly at war, and not exactly at peace. It has improved in many [...]

This video is disturbing, to say the least: James Fallows over at The Atlantic has some cogent thoughts on this : While the first 60 seconds of the 8-minute YouTube video are dominated by the shockingly calm brutality of the policeman, the rest of it is remarkable mainly for the stoicism and resolve of the protestors. You don't have to idealize everything about them or the Occupy movement to recognize this as a moral drama that the protestors clearly won. What is going on is a [...]

The past week of raids on Occupy encampments across America had a disturbingly similar pace, culminating in the dismantling of Zuccotti Park here in New York City. It's not a coincidence. Check out this recording from "The Takeaway" show where Oakland Mayor, Jean Quan, casually admits that she was recently on a conference call with 18 other mayors discussing methods by which they can dismantle the movement (her comments start at the 5:30 mark): "I was recently on a conference call with 18 cities across the country who had the same situation. . . ." [...]

New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg is a disgrace to all New Yorkers and the Constitution of the U.S. Watch this video to see how free speech is snuffed out at 3am. Not only did he steal his 3rd term, overruling the will of New York City voters for term limits, but now he's fulfilled his status as a Emperor Bloomberg. This will only make the movement grow larger. #OccupyWallStreet Convening 9 a.m. Sixth Avenue and Canal Street. [...]

"The individuals who linked arms and actively resisted, that in itself is an act of violence," UC police Capt. Margo Bennett said. "I understand that many students may not think that, but linking arms in a human chain when ordered to step aside is not a nonviolent protest." Yeah, right. Linking arms is violence, but slamming your night stick into the ribs of a short Asian woman isn't? This is disgusting: The movement just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger: Occupy Dallas calls [...]

Well, it was bound to happen, but in October ? On August 2, 2011 at the very first meeting of what was to become Occupy Wall Street, about a dozen people sat in a circle in Bowling Green. The self-appointed "process committee" for a social movement we merely hoped would someday exist, contemplated a momentous decision. Our dream was to create a New York General Assembly: the model for democratic assemblies we hoped to see spring up across America. But how would those assemblies actually operate? The anarchists in the circle made what seemed, [...]

Ever since the New York Police Department arrested 700 protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge last weekend, the movement to shine the light on the gross income disparity in this country grows and grows. In fact, just today, President Obama was asked about the movement in his press conference: "The American people understand that not everybody's been following the rules, that Wall Street is an example of that," Obama said at a White House press conference. He stopped short of endorsing the movement that began three weeks ago in Lower Manhattan and has spread [...]

Check it out and support this movement! Occupy Wall Street is leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. Like our brothers and sisters in Egypt, Greece, Spain, and Iceland, we plan to use the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic of mass occupation to restore democracy in America. We also encourage the use of nonviolence to achieve our ends and maximize the [...]

Published last month in the NY Times, this smart essay Drew Westen, professor of psychology at Emory University, articulates what many in the Progressive base of the Democratic party have been saying for over a year: The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred. Our brains evolved to "expect" stories with a particular structure, with protagonists and [...]

We will always remember. And because this destruction came from abroad, we must always remember how violence can never be "cured" by more violence. Ever.

The folks over at OpenCongress.org lay out quite clearly how this so-called "Super Committee" of 6 Senators and 6 Congressmen is completely undemocratic: The supercommittee on deficit reduction that Congress created in the debt ceiling bill is an absurdly anti-democratic institution. The vast majority of Americans do not have a representative serving on it, yet it's responsible for making enormous decisions about the allocation of public resources that will profoundly effect every American for decades to come. Furthermore, Congress gave it special powers that no other member or committee in Congress enjoys. Their proposal will [...]

No one wants to see carnage and death, but this is what happens to a society that ignores and widens the wealth and income gap: For a society already under severe economic strain, the rioting raised new questions about the political sustainability of the Cameron government's spending cuts, particularly the deep cutbacks in social programs. These have hit the country's poor especially hard, including large numbers of the minority youths who have been at the forefront of the unrest. Prime Minister Cameron didn't need to cut every social program right away. Look [...]

First time in history, we get downgraded : Standard & Poor's downgraded the U.S.'s AAA credit rating for the first time, slamming the nation's political process and criticizing lawmakers for failing to cut spending or raise revenue enough to reduce record budget deficits. S&P lowered the U.S. one level to AA+ while keeping the outlook at "negative" as it becomes less confident Congress will end Bush-era tax cuts or tackle entitlements. The rating may be cut to AA within two years if spending reductions are lower than agreed to, interest rates rise or "new [...]

That's the title of a recent article in The Fiscal Times by Bruce Bartlett , policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and Treasury official under the first President Bush. In it, Bartlett writes this: Liberals hoped that Obama would overturn conservative policies and launch a new era of government activism. Although Republicans routinely accuse him of being a socialist, an honest examination of his presidency must conclude that he has in fact been moderately conservative to exactly the same degree that Nixon was moderately liberal. He then goes on to list his [...]