Senator Tom Harkin: No Deal Is Better Than This Very Bad Deal + US Goes Over Fiscal Cliff

Dandelion Salad

By Kay Steiger
Raw Story
Dec. 31, 2012

Image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr

[…] “Well I just think that’s grossly unfair. Grossly unfair,” Harkin continued. He pointed out that those who make $250,000 or more a year are the top 2 percent of income earners in America. By moving the tax cuts to $400,000, Harkin said, it sends a message that earners who make that much are “middle class.”

“Have we forgotten that average income earners in America are making $25, $30, $40, $50, or $60,000 a year? That’s the real middle class in America,” Harkin pointed out. “And they’re the ones that are getting hammered right now. They’re getting hammered with housing costs, rental, heating bills, kids going to school. They have no retirement. Now we’re talking about raising the retirement age on people who work hard every day?” […]

via Harkin blasts fellow Democrats: ‘No deal is better’ than this ‘very bad deal’ | The Raw Story

Gaza Uncut: Another Year of War and Siege + Gaza Struggles to Cope with Psychological Trauma

Image by IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation/TURKEY via Flickr

Dandelion Salad

TheRealNews·Dec 31, 2012

Four years ago, Palestinians in Gaza ended the year in a similar way. Following a cease-fire after the last war in November, Israel violated terms of the truce numerous times and on a daily basis. Gaza also remains under Israeli siege, making life more difficult.

The Idol Smasher by Chris Hedges

by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
December 31, 2012

Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr

Ishmael Reed has spent the last five decades smashing idols—idols of race, idols of capitalism, celebrity idols and the idols of national virtue and greatness. His essays, novels, poems, plays, songs and cartoons routinely shatter the delusions and myths of a nation stubbornly unwilling to confront its past or understand its present. He rips open a history that saw white Europeans exterminate one race and enslave another to create the nation’s prosperity, a past that includes the violent plundering of nations around the globe—Cuba, the Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan among them—to show us who we have become.