Blah, blah, blah

Obama doesn’t sound so bad in his Dreams from My Father:

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.

And now he makes about a million dollars a year - about half of which comes from sales of his two books. His family’s gross income was $3.9 million from 2000 to 2006.

Meanwhile, Clinton made 28 times what Obama did, with income totaling more than $100 million in the same period.

• CEOs are overpaid, more executives are saying - up 14 percent since last year.

A recent poll found that 35 percent of corporate executives think the heads of their companies are paid too much. Last year, 21 percent said the same. The median compensation for a CEO of a large U.S. company is $8.8 million.

Over the past decade, CEO pay (for the companies of the Dow Jones industrials) increased at a whooping annual rate of 15.1 percent - while the median household income rose at a rate of 0.68 percent annually from 1996 to 2006.



• More people are losing their home - bank repossessions soared 129 percent since last year

And the rate of foreclosure is up 57 percent since last year. People were forced out of 234,685 homes just in the month of March.

• “Palestine: Peace not Apartheid.”

Today the Haartz editorial board spoke against Israel’s boycott of Jimmy Carter - who Israel PM Ehud Olmert refused to see because of his visit with a Hamas leader - declaring that “he deserves the respect reserved for royalty for the rest of his life.”

More to the point, Haartz agreed with Carter’s characterization of the situation in Palestine and acknowledged that it “begs” such a comparison to Apartheid South Africa: “the system of separate roads for Jews and Arabs, the lack of freedom of movement, Israel’s control over Palestinian lands and their confiscation, and especially the continued settlement activity, which contravenes all promises Israel made and signed.”