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By Robert Field
NewsLanc

An article “Past Peak Prosperity” from a prominent Sunday News columnist reflects:

By MARGARET KIMBERLEY
Counterpunch

How: Gold. Tax cuts. Debts. Wars. Fat Cats. Class gap. No fiscal discipline

It's going to get worse -- a whole lot worse

By Paul B. Farrell
Market Warch

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- "How my G.O.P. destroyed the U.S. economy." Yes, that is exactly what David Stockman, President Ronald Reagan's director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, "Four Deformations of the Apocalypse."

By THOM SHANKER
New York Times

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Monday that he would close a military command, restrict the use of outside contractors and reduce the number of generals and admirals across the armed forces as part of a broad effort to rein in Pentagon spending.

By ERIC LIPTON
NY Times

WASHINGTON — Nearly a dozen current or former lawmakers have been honored by university endowments financed in part by corporations with business before Congress, posing some potential conflicts like that attributed to Representative Charles B. Rangel in an House ethics complaint.

The donations from businesses to the endowments ranged from modest amounts to millions of dollars, federal records show. And the lawmakers, who include powerful committee chairmen or party leaders, often pushed legislation or special appropriations sought by the corporations.

For the first time in years, there’s serious discussion about the size of our military budget.

By Christopher Hellman
YES!

The current economic crisis, coupled with concerns about spiraling deficits and our staggering national debt, is, at long last, bringing military spending to the forefront of the budget debate. Not since the end of the Cold War and the discussion of a “peace dividend” has the Pentagon budget—generally considered sacrosanct—received such scrutiny.

By JACQUELINE MARCUS
BuzzFlash

Are you still looking for a great summer activity? Here is one that will be fun and build your advocacy skills.

By Rep. Barney Frank and Rep. Ron Paul

As members of opposing political parties, we disagree on a number of important issues. But we must not allow honest disagreement over some issues to interfere with our ability to work together when we do agree.

Testimony of Kevin B. Zeese, Executive Director, Prosperity Agenda
June 30, 2010

By Susan Cornwell and Phil Stewart
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama sent a landmark arms-reduction treaty with Russia to the Senate on Thursday for ratification and called for $80 billion in nuclear funding, which could help win opposition support.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the funds, which would be spent over a decade, were needed to "rebuild and sustain America's aging nuclear stockpile."

Agence France-Presse

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates is vowing to rein in the Pentagon's mushrooming budget and bloated bureaucracy, hoping to succeed where his predecessors mostly failed.

After having scaled back some major weapons programs, the former CIA director wants to cut up to 15 billion dollars a year in overhead costs, saying the United States can no longer afford a "gusher" of defense spending.

By Mark Hosenball
Newsweek

By Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy

Sometime between now and Memorial Day, the House is expected to consider $33 billion more for war in Afghanistan. This "war supplemental" is largely intended to plug the hole in Afghanistan war spending for the current fiscal year caused by the ongoing addition of 30,000 troops in Afghanistan, whose purpose is largely to conduct a military offensive in Kandahar that 94% of the people there say they don't want, preferring peace negotiations with the Taliban instead.

By Brian Winter
USA Today

It’s not just the troops’ uniforms that are green: The military says its investments to conserve energy and water are beginning to pay off, with benefits for cost, national security and troop safety.

The Army has cut water usage at its permanent bases and other facilities around the world by 31 percent since 2004, according to Pentagon data. The amount of energy used per square foot at Army facilities declined 10.4 percent during that same period.

By Bill Moyers & Michael Winship

Forty-two years ago, on April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, gunned down in Memphis, Tennessee. To those of us who were alive then, the images are etched in painful memory: One day, Dr. King is standing with colleagues, including Ralph Abernathy and Jesse Jackson, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel; the next, he's lying there mortally wounded, his aides pointing in the direction of the rifle shot.

Below is the table of contents of a must read article that shows the class warfare by the top 1% against the rest of us. The funneling of money to the top has made the economic life of most Americans very fragile. It is time to do something about it. The article below lays out the case and urges action.Kevin ZeeseExecutive DirectorProsperityAgenda.USIs It Time for Law Abiding American Citizens to Stop Paying Their Taxes and Start a New Government?

By David DeGraw
AmpedStatus Report

By Ralph Nader
The Nader Page

A society not alert to signs of its own decay, because its ideology is a continuing myth of progress, separates itself from reality and envelops illusion.

One yardstick by which to measure the decay in our country's political, economic, and cultural life, is the answer to this question: Do the forces of power, which have demonstrably failed, become stronger after their widely perceived damage is common knowledge?

By Noam Chomsky
NY Times

Shifts in global power, ongoing or potential, are a lively topic among policy makers and observers. One question is whether (or when) China will displace the United States as the dominant global player, perhaps along with India.

Such a shift would return the global system to something like it was before the European conquests. Economic growth in China and India has been rapid, and because they rejected the West's policies of financial deregulation, they survived the recession better than most. Nonetheless, questions arise.

Shifts in global power, ongoing or potential, are a lively topic among policy makers and observers. One question is whether (or when) China will displace the United States as the dominant global player, perhaps along with India.

Such a shift would return the global system to something like it was before the European conquests. Economic growth in China and India has been rapid, and because they rejected the West's policies of financial deregulation, they survived the recession better than most. Nonetheless, questions arise.