Kudos, Rep. Crowley - Speechless

Hats off, to our Queens Representative Joe Crowley for his extremely short but impactful speechless statement on the House floor

The video begins with a distance shot:

Last Fall the American People
Gave us our Marching Orders
Jobs Jobs Jobs ....

Peace hugs,
Kate Anne

Peace -- Million Doors, a Festival, and Rest-In

This weekend I got to meet and re-meet some of my neighbors as I knocked on doors for the multi-group sponsored non-partisan Million Doors for Peace campaign. While anyone can sign the petition (do so at the website), it is aimed at getting more people a little more invested in the waging of peace. The petition scheduled to be given to senators and representatives on Thursday is a request for a date-certain to leave Iraq within a year. We're wasting 3 trillion dollars for an unnecessary war (While thanks to Fox, about half of America still believes Iraq had something to to with 9-11, it didn't, so why are we there?), killed or maimed 35,000 American troops and well over a hundred thousand, perhaps two hundred thousand, Iraqis have died as a result of the war and occupation. And we've lost our standing in the world, thanks to this illegal war and occupation. Oh, peace, please, now, or soon....

Meanwhile, Johnny Sonneborn and I joined Sarah Schindler and her husband in trekking to Shadowcliff in Nyack for national Fellowship of Reconciliation's Fourth Annual Peace Festival last weekend. There were booths, music, food, and awards -- but my favorite was Peace Troubadour Celia St. King whose new CD Your Word Is Magic I just had to purchase and whose shirt I wore while taking part in the Million Doors for Peace campaign: Inspiring songs and great peace logo -- modified musically. (Pictures will be posted on Flickr.com soon!)

As for Peace, Rest-In....we've got Wall Street doing strange stuff. It is pretty dire, or not-so-pretty dire. As for corporate bailouts -- they must not be allowed to come without strings. Please read Senator Bernie Sanders' press release and David Sirota's article in In These Times. 

Dreier: Bush's Class Warfare

Great and eye-opening statistics quoted by Peter Dreier in his essay Bush's Class Warfare posted at CommonDreams.org and at Huffington Post.

As Robert Kuttner observes in his new book, The Squandering of America, from 1966 to 2001, the wealthiest one-tenth of all Americans captured the lion’s share of society’s productivity growth. But it was the top one tenth of 1 percent that gained the very most. Those between the 80th and 90th percentiles about held their own. Those between the 95th and 99th percentiles gained 29 percent, while those between the top 99 and 99.9 percentile, gained 73 percent.

“But,” Kuttner writes, “it was those at the very pinnacle –the top one tenth of 1 percent of the population - one American in a thousand - who gained a staggering 291 percent.”

Wealth has become even more concentrated during the Bush years. Today, the richest one percent of Americans has 22 percent of all income and about 40 percent of all wealth. This is the biggest concentration of income and wealth since 1928. In 2005, average CEO pay was 369 times that of the average worker, compared with 131 times in 1993 and 36 times in 1976. At the pinnacle of America’s economic pyramid, the nation’s 400 billionaires own 1.25 trillion dollars in total net worth - the same amount as the 56 million American families at the bottom half of wealth distribution. MORE

NOTE: But is is actually not just Bush's Class Warfare, it is the Republican's Class Warfare. Look at their debates. They don't care about the poor and America's middle class either. And some Democrats are corporatists, too. We need a new president who care's about the rest of us. (See: John Edwards and/or Dennis Kucinich).