Thursday, 10 November 2011

Weight & Treble - Heavy Spring (Giriu Dvasios Mix) [Cold Tear]
Intrusion - Intrusion (Phase 90 Mix) [Echospace]
Gez Varley - Les Cartes [Force Inc]
Function - Variance (Norman Nodge Mix) [Sandwell District]
Fluxion - Multidirectional II [Chain Reaction]
F.L.O. - Food For Thought [Cold Tear]
Dick Richards - Your Vertebral [Raum Musik]
Demdike Stare - Regressor [Modern Love]
Omar S & Shadow Ray - Oasis One [Fxhe]
2562 - Morvern [Tectonic]
Rod Modell - Amsterdam Remnant 3 [Soma Records]
Vainqueur - Ranges Extended [Basic Channel]

#OccupyLegoLand

Via

How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich

The nation is still recovering from a crushing recession that sent unemployment hovering above nine percent for two straight years. The president, mindful of soaring deficits, is pushing bold action to shore up the nation's balance sheet. Cloaking himself in the language of class warfare, he calls on a hostile Congress to end wasteful tax breaks for the rich. "We're going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share," he thunders to a crowd in Georgia. Such tax loopholes, he adds, "sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary – and that's crazy."
Preacherlike, the president draws the crowd into a call-and-response. "Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver," he demands, "or less?"
The crowd, sounding every bit like the protesters from Occupy Wall Street, roars back: "MORE!"
The year was 1985. The president was Ronald Wilson Reagan. Today's Republican Party may revere Reagan as the patron saint of low taxation. But the party of Reagan – which understood that higher taxes on the rich are sometimes required to cure ruinous deficits – is dead and gone. Instead, the modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us.
Modern-day Republicans have become, quite simply, the Party of the One Percent – the Party of the Rich.
"The Republican Party has totally abdicated its job in our democracy, which is to act as the guardian of fiscal discipline and responsibility," says David Stockman, who served as budget director under Reagan. "They're on an anti-tax jihad – one that benefits the prosperous classes."
The staggering economic inequality that has led Americans across the country to take to the streets in protest is no accident. It has been fueled to a large extent by the GOP's all-out war on behalf of the rich. Since Republicans rededicated themselves to slashing taxes for the wealthy in 1997, the average annual income of the 400 richest Americans has more than tripled, to $345 million – while their share of the tax burden has plunged by 40 percent. Today, a billionaire in the top 400 pays less than 17 percent of his income in taxes – five percentage points less than a bus driver earning $26,000 a year. "Most Americans got none of the growth of the preceding dozen years," says Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist. "All the gains went to the top percentage points."

The GOP campaign to aid the wealthy has left America unable to raise the money needed to pay its bills. "The Republican Party went on a tax-cutting rampage and a spending spree," says Rhode Island governor and former GOP senator Lincoln Chafee, pointing to two deficit-financed wars and an unpaid-for prescription-drug entitlement. "It tanked the economy." Tax receipts as a percent of the total economy have fallen to levels not seen since before the Korean War – nearly 20 percent below the historical average. "Taxes are ridiculously low!" says Bruce Bartlett, an architect of Reagan's 1981 tax cut. "And yet the mantra of the Republican Party is 'Tax cuts raise growth.' So – where's the fucking growth...?"

Continue reading

Tim Dickinson @'Rolling Stone'

Border Surveillance Plan Stumbles as Two-Thirds of Mexico Declared Unsafe

Unrest at Wapping spreads to The Sun after arrest

Why was this not around when I was a kid?

Via
Bit out of my price range for Spaceboy :(

♪♫ St. Vincent - She Is Beyond Good & Evil

Wednesday, 9 November 2011

ravisomaiya Ravi Somaiya

Things I did not know: Mitt Romney's favourite novel is Battlefield Earth, by Scientolgy founder L. Ron Hubbard: nyti.ms/sCG52M

Mississippi defeats anti-abortion ‘personhood amendment’

For gawdsake...

Crosby and Nash discuss #OWS here, Billy Bragg and Johnny Flynn discuss protest songs here. Or if you have a slightly masochist bent you can catch a daily protest song by the likes of Guthrie, Springsteen or Steve Earle over at Greg Mitchell's #OWS blog at The Nation.

This is the sound of 2011!!!