“As you look at the economic devastation in Europe, you should bear in mind that some of the countries experiencing the worst devastation have been doing everything American conservatives say we should do here.”
—Paul Krugman
May 2012
68 posts
April 2012
24 posts
“Most worrying, if high unemployment persists it could start to feed upon itself. Right now, unemployment is mainly the result of what economists call cyclical factors: during the recession, demand plummeted, and during the recovery consumer spending, government stimulus, and exports haven’t been sufficient to make up the difference. But if high long-term unemployment continues there’s a danger that, sooner or later, cyclical unemployment could become structural unemployment—that is, unemployment that won’t go away once the good times return.”
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“Forty per cent of the unemployed have been without a job for six months or more—a much higher rate than in any recession since the Second World War—and the average length of unemployment is about forty weeks, a number that has changed very little since 2010. The economic recovery has now lasted nearly three years, but for millions of Americans it hasn’t yet begun.”
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“#CISPA would allow companies to hand over private data to the government without a warrant, without anonymity, with no judicial review.”
—Trevor Timm, a lawyer and activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation
“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, / For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith / But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. / Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: / So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
—T.S. Eliot
“I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence; / I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it is.”
—Walt Whitman
“The scariest part of #CISPA is how astonishingly broad and loose it is, like some sort of giant, poorly-built rope bridge. Over a volcano. CISPA would permit any private company (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Google, you name it) to give away any and all data it’s collected on you when asked by a government agency. Literally any government agency. This data would then head to the Department of Homeland Security.”
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“I’ll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it’ll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.”
—William Carlos Williams
“The longer the liberal class does not vigorously denounce expanded oil drilling, our corporate health insurance bill and the National Defense Authorization Act, simply because these initiatives have been pushed through by the Democrats, the more marginal the left becomes. If Bush had carried these policies, “liberal” pundits would have thundered with feigned outrage.”
—Chris Hedges
“The extremists, of course, are already in power. They have been in power for several years. They write our legislation. They pick the candidates and fund their campaigns. They dominate the courts. They effectively gut regulations and environmental controls. They suck down billions in government subsidies. They pay no taxes. They determine our energy policy. They loot the U.S. treasury. They rigidly control public debate and information. They wage useless and costly imperial wars for profit. They are behind the stripping away of our most cherished civil liberties. They are implementing government programs to gouge out any money left in the carcass of America. And they know that Romney or Barack Obama, along with the Democratic and the Republican parties, will not stop them.”
—Chris Hedges
“It’s strange that words are so inadequate.. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.”
—T.S. Eliot (via girlinlondon)
“It is absolutely necessary for me to be different from the way I am,
but there is absolutely nothing I can do about it,
because being the way I am,
I can not be different from that.” —Alan Watts
but there is absolutely nothing I can do about it,
because being the way I am,
I can not be different from that.” —Alan Watts
“I do feel a responsibility to society because of going into print: a writer has the duty to be good, not lousy; true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down. Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.”
—E.B. White
“The UC Davis case is just one in a series of recent lawsuits brought about by Occupy movement protesters asserting that their rights have been violated. Last October, protesters who where arrested while on the Brooklyn Bridge filed a civil rights complaint against the city, Mayor Bloomberg, and NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, alleging that they were lured onto the bridge in order to be arrested. Two women who were pepper sprayed in a now-infamous episode involving NYPD officer Anthony Bolgona sued Bologna, the city and the NYPD in February. Just last week, two protesters who were arrested during an action against Merrill Lynch offices in Washington, DC, sued its Metropolitan Police Department for violating their First Amendment rights and accused them of false arrest. All of these cases are pending.”
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