In these times in this land

I'm glad it is Easter, a time of hope, and how we need that. Here is a clear summary of these days in the land, an excerpt from Bob Herbert's article, "The Era Of Exploitation" in the Mar. 25 NY Times:

"President Bush believes in an 'ownership' society, which means that except for the wealthy, you're on your own. The president's budget would cut funding for Medicaid, food stamps, education, transportation, health care for veterans, law enforcement, medical research and safety inspections for food and drugs. And, of course, it contains big new tax cuts for the
wealthy."

Social Security reality

An editorial in today's NY Times points out the latest trickery being used to push Bush's privatization plan. Here is an excerpt:

"It's bad enough that the trustees began some of their calculations with that $10.4 trillion figure. It's arrived at by projecting the system's shortfall over infinity, rather than the usual 75-year time frame - as if the system's finances 10,000 years from now are a legitimate policy concern....

"Fortunately, the unpoliticized numbers in yesterday's report are not overly dire. Using a 75-year time horizon, the trustees project that the system will be able to pay full benefits until 2041, at which time it will be able to pay 74 percent of the promised benefits, falling to 68 percent by 2079. That works out to a gap of $4 trillion, which could be bridged with modest tax increases and benefit cuts, phased in over the next few decades. If people try to tell you different, they need to be set straight."

Why they migrate north

In the Crossfire: Mesoamerican Migrants Journey North
By Miguel Pickard

Human migration is as old as the human condition itself, but rarely before have emigrants suffered so many hardships and perils in their journey. Throughout Mesoamerica (Mexico and Central America) emigrants are in the crossfire.
In their home countries economic policy has failed to create needed jobs. Quite the opposite: in the agricultural, industrial, and service sectors jobs are disappearing faster than new ones are created. En route and in the receiving countries, migrants face contempt, discrimination, extortion, xenophobia, persecution, abuse, and even death. 
To reverse the flow of poor migrants, an alternative economic program is needed that emphasizes economic growth, the domestic market, and the national priorities of poor countries. Without major changes, the coming decades will bring increasingly unstoppable displacement of the uprooted poor of the South, marching toward the prosperous citadels of the North.

See full article online at:
http://www.americaspolicy.org/reports/2005/0503migrants.html
With printer-friendly PDF version at:
http://www.americaspolicy.org/pdf/reports/0503migrants.pd

Most Iraqis want the U.S. out

Norman Solomon writes today in Truthout.org:

"Most Iraqis want the U.S. military out of their country - pronto. As Newsweek reported in its Jan. 31 edition: 'Now every major poll shows an ever-larger majority of Iraqis want the Americans to leave.' Yet we hear that U.S. troops must stay for the good of the Iraqi people - even though most of those people clearly want U.S. troops to leave. (Are we supposed to believe that Americans know better than Iraqis whether American troops should stay in Iraq?)"

A reminder about tomorrow forTucsonans reading this blog:

END THE WAR - BRING THE TROOPS HOME
SATURDAY, MARCH 19

10 a.m. Rally at Catalina Park (4th Ave, 1 blk. so. of Speedway)
11 a.m. March for Peace
11:15 a.m. Stop for short rally at UA ROTC bldg.
Noon to 1 p.m. Protest at Military Recruiting Office on Speedway

Is anybody surprised?

Today's New York Times has a long article on the Bushites' stealth infiltration of the media across the land to gain support for their machinations. Here is just one paragraph from the article:

"Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production."

Bush's cynical chopping block

This is from an editorial in today's edition of the NY Times. Has anyone in history come anywhere near George W. Bush's cynical mutilation of the word "compassion?"

"Mr. Bush knows that wartime is no time to go after veterans' benefits. But by proposing changes that are politically implausible while challenging Congress to cut spending, the administration gains a bargaining chip: if lawmakers aren't willing to make the veterans' cuts the president has proposed, they will be pressured to make even deeper cuts in programs for people who don't have the veterans' ability to fight back.

"In effect, Mr. Bush's budget pits veterans against the 660,000 women, infants and children whose food assistance is on the chopping block; against the 120,000 preschoolers who would be cut from Head Start; against the 370,000 families and disabled and elderly individuals who would lose rental assistance; against the whole communities that would lose support for clean air and drinking water; and so on."

A note and a quote

Sorry to be so behind with posts. It is the same story with articles to my j&p list. Time constraints, but I hope to get "up to speed" soon.

In the meantime:

"He that is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death."

--Thomas Paine, philosopher and writer (1737-1809)