Lula tells it like it is; Brown looks mildly uncomfortable

We white folks really are funny. We get so embarrassed at the wrong stuff. We're ashamed of being called out on crashing the world economy (e.g., Lula's "outburst"), but we aren't ashamed of crashing it in the first place. Can't have "fuck" written on the canisters of napalm we use to incinerate women and kids, after all.

clipped from www.guardian.co.uk "This crisis was caused by no black man or woman or by no indigenous person or by no poor person," Lula said after talks with the prime minister in Brasilia to discuss next week's G20 summit in London. "This crisis was fostered and boosted by irrational behaviour of some people that are white, blue-eyed. Before the crisis they looked like they knew everything about economics, and they have demonstrated they know nothing about economics." You go to a shopping mall and you are filmed. You go to the airport and you are watched. I can't imagine that only the financial system has no surveillance at all." Brown looked mildly uncomfortable during Lula's outburst.

Promise and perils of the growing public anger

clipped from www.regressiveantidote.net There is a growing public anger out there, anger that is long overdue. People are finally beginning to wake up, however foggily, to who is the real enemy of America’s interests and who is the real predator with its fingers rifling their pocketbooks. If this populist rage is properly directed, we could get some sort of healthy outcome, like a reprise of the New Deal social safety net and a badly needed robust regulatory apparatus. If it is not, it might instead be miraculously used to breathe political life back into the very corpses of those who brought this storm down on all of us.

"Reality has entered the house of America without knocking."

clipped from www.counterpunch.org FDR got his pressure from the left; Obama gets his from the right thanks to the unwillingness of progressives to push him. FDR could take action without a gang of media manipulators telling him to be careful. There wasn't an inordinate pyramid of bureaucracy chipping away at every decision before it went into action. Liberals had more passion than status and really cared about those at the bottom of the American heap. Are we trapped forever in this contemporary paradigm? Or can we face what has happened to us and start to change it? Can liberals once again represent the ordinary American or can such Americans only expect a few nods in their direction? Can we condemn a whole class of citizens because of what we fear some rightwing Republicans will say if we do something real to help them? This is a time when status, style and semantics won't save us. Reality has entered the house of America without knocking. It can't be spun away. And time is running out.

Judges who imprison kids for kickbacks deserve a shivving in the pokey

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