socialuprooting:

The rich are different; they get richer

In 2010, according to a study published this month by University of California economist Emmanuel Saez, 93 percent of income growth went to the wealthiest 1 percent of American households, while everyone else divvied up the 7 percent that was left over. Put another way: The most fundamental characteristic of the U.S. economy today is the divide between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. It was not ever thus. In the recovery that followed the downturn of the early 1990s, the wealthiest 1 percent captured 45 percent of the nation’s income growth. In the recovery that followed the dot-com bust 10 years ago, Saez noted, 65 percent of the income growth went to the top 1 percent. This time around, it’s reached 93 percent — a level so high it shakes the foundations of the entire American project.

sanityscraps:

cultureofresistance:

From the beginning, this culture has been a culture of occupation.

What do occupiers do? They seize territory by force or threat of force. They take resources for use at the center of an empire. They degrade the landscape. They kill those who resist this theft. They enslave those whose labor is necessary for this theft, this degradation of the landscape. They eradicate those who are in the way—the humans and nonhumans whose land this is—and who must be removed so the occupiers can put the land to better use.

They force the remaining humans to live under the laws and moral code of the occupiers. They inculcate future generations to forget their non-occupied past and to aspire to join the ranks of their occupiers, to actually join in the degradation of the landbase that was once theirs.

Because exploitation is so central to any culture of occupation—that’s part of what defines it—this exploitation infects and characterizes every part of the culture.

This means any [government within our culture], by all means including the United States, is a government of occupation, set up to facilitate resource extraction (to bring resources from the country to the city, from colony to empire), a process these days called production, and to prevent interference in this process by those whose lives are diminished or destroyed by the devastation of their landbase, and also by those whose lives are diminished or destroyed laboring to serve production.

Any [economics within our culture], by all means including capitalism, is an economics of occupation, set up to rationalize resource extraction, and to pre-empt reasonable discourse about non-exploitative community relations.

- Derrick Jensen, Endgame

I literally just had a dinnertime discussion with my family about Israel’s war crimes. It turned into a lot of cognitive dissonance. >__>

(Source: queernonymoose, via socialuprooting)

(Source: sinidentidades, via folkthesystem)