Titanic Post

by James Parks, Aug 12, 2008
AFL-CIO NOW

Most corporations, including a large majority of foreign companies doing business in the United States, pay no income taxes, according to a report released today.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that two-thirds of both American and foreign companies doing business here end up avoiding all income tax obligations to the federal government, despite corporate sales totaling $2.5 trillion. (more…)

Fear is an insidious destroyer of a good time, also fear is bad for your health. To deal with fear, people are always looking over their shoulder to see how close they are to something bad happening. Fearful people are forever devising strategies to be safe, secure, and protected from all the worlds evils. To escape bad happenings, people hoard things—things and money, and they organize their world in such a way so as to preclude bad things happening . They become Republicans.

And yet, bad things happen anyway. Life is not fair. For example: In Otero County and Southern New Mexico, as in most of the country, the wolf had been hunted to extinction, Apaches and Mexicans were marginalized and killed to make life safe for the Anglos who had migrated here from Texas, via Appalachia, and originally, Northern Ireland. (more…)

The mainstream obituaries are emphasizing Kurt’s off-beat career and the mixed reviews for his books. Don’t believe a word of them. Kurt Vonnegut was a force of nature, with a heart the size of Titan, an unfettered genius who changed us all for the better. He was possessed of a sense of fairness and morality capable of inventing religions that could actually work. Now he’s having dinner with our beloved siren of social justice, Molly Ivins, sharing a Manhattan, scorching this goddam war and this latest batch of fucking idiots.

~Harvey Wasserman

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies - ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes. Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.”

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