America Detached from War
Mon, 08/02/2010 - 09:28 — Dave CulverBush’s Pilotless Dream, Smoking Drones, and Other Strange Tales from the Crypt
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Admittedly, before George W. Bush had his fever dream, the U.S. had already put its first unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drone surveillance planes in the skies over Kosovo in the late 1990s. By November 2001, it had armed them with missiles and was flying them over Afghanistan.
In November 2002, a Predator drone would loose a Hellfire missile on a car in Yemen, a country with which we weren’t at war. Six suspected al-Qaeda members, including a suspect in the bombing of the destroyer the USS Cole would be turned into twisted metal and ash -- the first “targeted killings” of the American robotic era.
Just two months earlier, in September 2002, as the Bush administration was “introducing” its campaign to sell an invasion of Iraq to Congress and the American people, CIA Director George Tenet and Vice President Dick Cheney “trooped up to Capitol Hill” to brief four top Senate and House leaders on a hair-raising threat to the country. A “smoking gun” had been uncovered.
Trickle Down Economics doesn't work says Alan Blinder. Here’s what does.
Fri, 07/30/2010 - 11:31 — Dave Culver- Redirecting money from the expiring Bush tax cuts to unemployment benefits would be a net job creator and give the economy a much-needed boost.
- Long-term Economic Pain
Posted by rmontero, AlterNet
Top Economist Alan Blinder wrote this article last week supporting letting the Bush tax cuts on the rich expire.
The Basic idea behind it is that an unemployed person or a lower income person will spend any extra money he gets right away (he doesn’t have a choice) and thus stimulate the economy, whereas a rich person will save it and thus not stimulate the economy.
One thing that’s left out in almost all discussions is class. Most of the rich people that received the Bush tax cuts will make most of their money through investments and controlling businesses for a profit, most of the poor make their money on their labor. Any sound businessman knows the way you make a profit is to spend the least amount of money while profiting the most, any of the money you give to businessmen will be used to make them more money. That money won’t trickle down, hiring won’t increase simply because those doing the hiring have more money, hiring will only increase if those doing the hiring must hire more in order to make more profit, which will only happen when demand increases.
Related:
Lady Gaga: Pop Star for a Country and an Empire in Decline
Thu, 07/29/2010 - 10:42 — Dave CulverWe have made monsters out of others in order to kill them without fear. Gaga makes herself a monster to try to show us ourselves.
Sarah Jaffe, AlterNet
"If there are zeitgeist moments for products, movie stars, and even politicians, then such moments can exist for weaponry as well. The robotic drone is the Lady Gaga of this Pentagon moment."
So wrote Tom Engelhardt, in an essay titled "America Detached from War," and he couldn't have picked a more perfect metaphor. Gaga is sexy, ubiquitous, and oh so of-the-moment. She exists on a line between monstrous and beautiful, making us ask questions about progress, about agency, about control, about men and women, about Americans and the world. She is both a perfect embodiment of American cultural dominance and subverting what that means at every turn.
Gaga-analysis could fill a library at this point. It is impossible to ignore her. She demands in a voice somewhere between a howl and a snarl at the Grammys "I wanna be a star!" and she makes philosophers (like Nancy Bauer, in a New York Times piece) as well as pop critics talk about her.
