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Quotable Quotes
The good man understands what is right,
the bad man understands profit.
—Confucius
“The greatest country, the richest country, is not that which has the most capitalists, monopolists, immense grabbings, vast fortunes, with its sad, sad soil of extreme, degrading, damning poverty, but the land in which there are the most homesteads, freeholds — where wealth does not show such contrasts high and low, where all men have enough — a modest living— and no man is made possessor beyond the sane and beautiful necessities.”
–Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
'He leaves us a lesson, which is to never accept any injustice.'
–The French President, François Hollande, speaking of Stéphane Hessel, dead at age 95.
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered…”
–Thomas Jefferson
Around the web…
Above the law
"The laws, Cicero wrote in the days of the Roman Republic, “are silent in time of war.” But what if the war has no end, no defined enemy, no defined territory? How can markets work if the financial behemoths are too big to fail and too big to jail? If the national security state has the power of life or death above the law, and Wall Street has the power to plunder beyond the law, in what way does this remain a nation of laws? " --Katrina van HeuvelRead it on WP
Waking From My Moral Coma
"It is the killing, it is the permanent war, it is our deranged national priorities. It is the system we live under which requires the serial deaths of all those innocents to maintain our economic health that should appall us. We sup upon the blood and bonemeal that is the byproduct of the idea that is America, and we sleep. And we sleep." -William Rivers PittRead it on Truthout
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Big Beer Lobbies and Fetal Alcohol Birth Defects
By Jim Hightower | Otherwords.org
Anheuser-Busch and other big brewers blocked a Nebraska bill that would have curbed sales targeted at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
Jim_Hightower
The big beer brewers often admonish us imbibers of their products to “Drink Responsibly.” Well, I say back to them: Lobby Responsibly.
In particular, I point to a disgusting binge of besotted lobbying by Anheuser-Busch and other beer barons this year in the Nebraska legislature. At issue was the town of Whiteclay, smack dab on the Nebraska-South Dakota border.
Although only about 10 people live there, it’s home to four beer stores. Why? Because right across the state line is the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation of the Oglala Sioux tribe, which has a devastating problem of alcohol addiction, combined with intractable poverty. The sale of alcohol is banned on the reservation.
Photo Credit : Flickr by prettywar-stl
Responding to this grotesque exploitation of an epidemic illness, Nebraska state senator LeRoy Louden introduced a bill that would designate Whiteclay as an “alcohol impact zone.” This legislation would allow authorities to limit store hours and ban high-alcohol beers. Of course, Busch and its responsible beer buddies backed it, right?
Not a chance. Like gators on a poodle, their lobbyists leapt on the legislature, calling in chits from key lawmakers who’d taken thousands of dollars in campaign cash from the industry. The chair of the senate committee considering the bill had pocketed $4,000 in beer money. He dutifully refused to let the bill even go to a vote during the state’s recently concluded 2012 legislative session. “We’re not here to protect people from themselves,” he declared.
Surely there’s an especially hot bar stool in Hell reserved for these greedheads.
Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He’s also editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown.
Distributed via OtherWords (OtherWords.org)
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