We're supposed to be "the land of the free" yet all of our choices are being made for us by the market. We have a system where they say, in order to meet your basic needs you have to turn over a large amount of your freedom to this market system that's really designed to take money from you and give it to Wall Street. LINK

Are Republicans in Congress really willing to let these cuts fall on our kids’ schools and mental health care just to protect tax loopholes for corporate jet owners? Are they really willing to slash military health care and the border patrol just because they refuse to eliminate tax breaks for big oil companies? Are they seriously prepared to inflict more pain on the middle class because they refuse to ask anything more of those at the very top?

The nation is no longer facing a single trigger point that would unleash economic calamity. Instead, with no deal in sight, we face a series of them:

March 1 — The “sequester” — a very large remnant of the deal that averted the “fiscal cliff” at the beginning of the year — kicks in and cuts a whopping $85 billion from military and domestic programs.

March 27 — Funding to continue running the country expires, meaning the government shuts down.

May 18 — Uncle Sam again hits the debt ceiling, meaning we can’t borrow more money. Come July or August, we’ll be facing default.

http://www.aarp.org/politics-society/government-elections/info-02-2013/how-the-sequester-could-affect-social-security-and-medicare.html 

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/02/08/fact-sheet-examples-how-sequester-would-impact-middle-class-families-job

The GOP Plan to Flush Your State’s Economy Down the Toilet  - LINK
The new “red-state model” seeks to turn your state into Mississippi.




Bill Moyers: America’s vast inequality didn’t just happen, it’s been politically engineered. LINK

How, in a nation as wealthy as America, can the economy simply stop working for people at large, while super-serving those at the very top? Through exhaustive research and analysis, the political scientists Hacker and Pierson — whom Bill regards as the “Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson” of economics — detail important truths behind a 30-year economic assault against the middle class.

Who’s the culprit? “American politics did it– far more than we would have believed when we started this research,” Hacker explains. “What government has done and not done, and the politics that produced it, is really at the heart of the rise of an economy that has showered huge riches on the very, very, very well off.” Bill considers their book the best he’s seen detailing “how politicians rewrote the rules to create a winner-take-all economy that favors the 1% over everyone else, putting our once and future middle class in peril.”