According to Fed Chair Ben Bernanke: “at the present time the major industrial economies apparently cannot sustain significantly higher real rates of return”

You probably read (here or elsewhere) about yesterday’s mini-firestorm in the blogosphere: the report that a wealthy right-winger, Joe Ricketts, was considering a $10 million super-PAC ad campaign reviving old charges about President Obama’s supposed connections to Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

You may have missed the punch line, though. The denial issued by Ricketts described him as “a fiscal conservative,” and his super-PAC is (rather ludicrously) named the “Ending Spending Action Fund.”

Palast takes us on a fast paced, kick ass narrative that globe trots from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, to the coast of Alaska, to New Orleans, to Liberia, to Azerbaijan, to Fukushima, Japan. It’s the real-deal investigative reporting of corporate irresponsibility. As Greg Palast said himself in an interview,” This book is a story of the 1%. It’s why we occupy.”

It’s almost as if the wealthy were running the government.

The Smithsonian magazine highlights — and supports — evolution in the cover story of their January issue. Online, they go even further, with additional information and links.

Cue the TheoCon heads exploding in five, four, three . . .

The media bullhorn given to the plutocrats and Villagers-for-life continues its free profitable and responsibility-free call for our destruction. They get to make ALL the money, they get to be the ONLY voice that matters, and they get to pick the targets when we need to bomb yet another country so we don’t get rusty.

And who better than Evan Bayh to emit the dreck?

The late poet and Lutheran seminary professor Gerhard Frost once wrote “My check stubs are enough” to give you his autobiography. The former Chancellor of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, Giles Fraser, wrote similar words in June 2010: the best way to assess what someone believes is to look through their bank statement. Forget fancy words and sermons, money is the way we mean it – or we don’t. Money is the sacrament of moral seriousness.”

Given the reactions of the MOTUs and Powers That Be to the Occupy Movement, I’d say they don’t enjoy having their morals examined.

The NYT’s Mary Williams Walsh fails to mention the role played by the massive tax cuts that the vast majority of states pushed through in the 1990s. It was known, as far back as 2002, that these tax cuts were going to cause major problems down the road — in fact, they were already causing problems for the states, and the people who help.

When the tipping point is reached, it seems at once both unexpected and completely obvious. We are nearing that tipping point in the United States. We have witnessed the Arab Spring and the blossoming of the European Summer. We ask ourselves if now we will experience the American Autumn.

Antonia Juhasz’ Black Tide drills into our past, our present, and all too possibly, our future. Black Tide gives us the chance to learn from Antonia’s years of expert work on the oil industry and the industry’s effects upon us all and the planet we all depend on. This book goes far beyond history and policy – the book draws on the months Antonia spent with Gulf Coast residents living with the consequences of the oil catastrophe BP and partners brought upon them and the Gulf one year and thirteen days ago. The result is a powerful, compelling work of non-fiction that reads like a novel. But unlike a novel, Black Tide brings us into the lives of real people, and Antonia brings them to us in their own words.