Washington Liberals

Someone from France told me she found it incredible that many American streets lack sidewalks. Here many communities are built for cars, not people.  This is especially true of suburbs, where pedestrian traffic is at risk from speeding vehicles. In much of Europe people promenade through the streets in the evening, and people shop at…

“One corporation paid $26,000 a year to maintain a post office box in Bermuda as its legal headquarters. That little trick saved them $40 million in corporate taxes…  If you raise these issues you are accused of class warfare. There is class warfare all right. It’s been successfully waged by the affluent 1 percent against…

Let’s hear three jeers for Washington State, which yet again has the ignoble distinction of the most regressive tax structure in the nation – a “soak the poor” system where those with the least pay the highest tax rates. An updated report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) that examines how state…

So Mitt Romney thinks that 47 percent of us are moochers. Let’s keep in mind that Mr. Romney is only referring to the federal income tax. He disregards what comes out of each and every one of our paychecks for Social Security and Medicare. And that’s a hefty amount — 7.65 percent before the great…

Wednesday, October 3, 2012, 7:30 – 9:00pm Downstairs at Town Hall; enter on Seneca Street. $5. Activist and economist Gar Alperovitz offers a diagnosis of what ails America, and prescribes what Noam Chomsky calls “concrete and feasible” solutions. Alperovitz’s emerging “new economy” strategies propose locally-based, bottom-up efforts that democratize wealth and empower communities—changing a faltering system that,…

Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned as an activist since the birth of the Occupy Wall Street movement on Sept 17, 2011. Personal Empowerment = Social Empowerment As we learn to accept and allow folks to use their own individual voices, the group is empowered. With OWS we are learning how to bring…

Though I’m definitely not libertarian, this video makes a good point about the desirability of allowing third candidates besides Romney and Obama into the presidential debates. The same argument could apply to Justice Party candidate Rocky Anderson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

Conservative Favorite Things (lyrics and vocals by Don Smith) I wrote this about five years ago but re-recorded it with a voice track over an orchestral accompaniment. If you have a good voice, please contact me. Click here for an animated version of this with guitar and vocal, sung by Scot Lee. Tax cuts for…

“Real entitlement programs are ones where beneficiaries do not contribute, like when we working taxpayers pay bankers hundreds of billions of dollars “interest” on their reserves, or pay for puffed-up and no-bid government contracts or farm and oil subsidies, or pay pharmaceutical companies full retail price instead of negotiating discounts, or “borrow” money from the…

Faithful America writes: We’ve all seen how right-wing extremists have given Christianity a bad name by twisting Jesus’ message of love and reconciliation into a hateful political agenda. But the truth is that they don’t represent the overwhelming majority of Christians. And there are literally millions of us who are ready to take on the…