Here's a letter I just sent to the White House:
Dear President Obama, and Members of the Obama Administration,
I have hope. I believe in Change. I believe that we can heal the world. Yes we can!
But not without challenging the unjust status quo. Take for example the wealth discrepancy between rich and poor. It is astronomical. It's almost unfathomable and it takes great powers of conceptualization in order to comprehend. It's iniquitous, and I believe, totally indefensible.
Please take some concrete steps toward change that I can believe in.
Please do not continue this landslide toward war, profligacy and environmental degradation. That's not change. War is waste and pollution, and it's just more of the same.
The United States spends more on military than the entire rest of the world combined. This is unacceptable to me. It cannot be logically argued that the military might of the USA exists solely for the purposes of legitimate defense. These military expenditures are immoral, and a betrayal of common ethical values. Military policies and practices are hurting people, and it's just not right.
Please, take concrete steps toward real change. For example: pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan, making a formal apology to the world, requesting international support for efforts toward reconciliation, and holding members of the Bush Administration accountable for wrongly driving the nation to war.
Thank you, and sincerely wanting of change that I can believe in,
Berd Whitlock
This is from the September 2009 issue of The Progressive Magazine, an article called "Wall Street's Gall, by Les Leopold:
ReplyDelete• In 1970, the ratio of the top100 corporate CEOs and the average worker's pay was 40 to 1. By 2007 it was 1,723 to 1.
• In 1970, the top 1 percent received 8 percent of the national income. By 2007, it was gobbling up 23 percent of the national income.
• In 2006, the top one-tenth of 1 percent of tax payers (about 140,000 tax returns) reported as much income as the bottom 50 percent (67.4 million tax returns). The last time we suffered from such an extreme income distribution? 1928-29.
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