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Cinnamon Squash Recipe  This cinnamon squash recipe
is as versatile as it is easy. Featuring a delectable combination of
comforting spice and sweet caramelized squash, this dish can be served
alone, with dried cranberries on a bed of greens, or as a accompaniment
to roasted poultry. The hardest part of this cinnamon-roasted squash
recipe is resisting the wonderful aroma as the dish roasts away in the
oven... Read more. |
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Canadian Thanksgiving
 This French Canadian Thanksgiving menu
celebrates the autumn harvest with seasonal recipes. Indulge in apples,
cheese, onions, potatoes, squash, turkey, and everything else that is
in season during the cooler months. This list is something of an extreme
menu, one that you would serve if you had forty guests coming and
several days to prepare. The beauty is that you can pick your favorites,
mix and match, and stay within a budget because these dishes are made
with inexpensive seasonal ingredients... Read more.
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Cherry Cranberry Sauce Recipe
 This easy cherry cranberry sauce recipe
has a wonderfully fresh and vivid berry flavor. Try it warm over roast
poultry or duck for a delicious entree. For an easy, healthy breakfast,
layer chilled cranberry cherry relish with yogurt or spread it onto
multigrain toast...Read more.
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Maple Pumpkin Pie Recipe
 Combine two favorite fall flavors! This maple pumpkin pie is a traditional Canadian dessert recipe. Use a store-bought pie shell or make pate sucree in your own kitchen. This easy dessert is so fantastic; there won't be any leftovers... Read more.
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- IMF expects completion of Greek loan program within days
- ECB’s Juncker on the Wires
- EURUSD surges back toward and through the highs
- Charting the Majors with James Chen – Webinar Rebroadcast
- GBPUSD rebounds but remains below resistance levels
- The 1.3346 level is the close from yesterday. Next target resistance level.
- EURUSD defines the range as Trichet comments digested
- Canada Building Permits
- Trichet headline comments from his final press conference
- Canada Building Permits fall sharply
- US Jobless Claims & Continuing Claims
- Bobbys Corner-Open Market-Oct.6.2011
- EURUSD trades up and down in volatile trading. Awaits Trichet comments
- ECB leaves rate unchanged at 1.5%.
- ECB decision late…HMMM
October 6, 2011
Tomgram: Andy Kroll, America's Lost Decade
In some ways, Zuccotti Park, the campsite,
the Ground Zero, for the Occupy Wall Street protests couldn’t be more
modest. It’s no Tahrir Square, but a postage-stamp-sized plaza at the
bottom of Manhattan only blocks from Wall Street. And if you arrive
before noon, you’re greeted not by vast crowds, but by air mattresses, a
sea of blue and green tarps, a couple of information tables, some
enthusiastic drummers, enough signs with slogans for anything you care
to support (“Too big to fail is too big to allow,” “The American Dream:
You have to be asleep to believe it,” “There’s no state like no state,”
etc.), and small groups of polite, eager, well-organized young people,
wandering, cleaning, doling out contributed food, dealing with the
press, or sitting in circles on the concrete, backpacks strewn about,
discussing. If it were the 1960s, it might easily be a hippie
encampment.
But don’t be fooled. Not only does the park begin to fill fast and the conversation become ever more animated, but this movement already spreading across the country (and even globally) looks like the real McCoy, something new and hopeful in degraded times. Of the demonstrators I spoke with, several had hitchhiked to New York -- one had simply quit her job -- to be present. Inspired by Tunisians, Egyptians, Spaniards, and Wisconsinites, in a country largely demobilized these last years, they recognized what matters when they saw it. As one young woman told me, “A lot of people in my generation felt we were going to witness something really big -- and I think this is it!”
It may be. The last time we saw a moment like this globally was 1968. (Other dates, like 1848 in Europe and 1919 in China, when the young took the lead in a previously dead world, also come to mind.) It’s the moment when the blood stirs and the young, unable to bear the state of their country or the world, hit the streets with the urge to take the fate of humankind in their own hands.
It’s always unexpected. No one predicted Tahrir Square. No one imagined tens of thousands of young Syrians, weaponless, facing the military might of the state. No one expected the protests in Wisconsin. No one, myself included, imagined that young Americans, so seemingly somnolent as things went from bad to worse, would launch such a spreading movement, and -- most important of all -- decide not to go home. (At the last demonstration I attended in New York City in the spring, the median age was probably 55.)
The Tea Party movement has, until now, gotten the headlines for its anger, in part because the well-funded right wing poured money into the Tea Party name, but it’s an aging movement. Whatever it does, in pure actuarial terms it's likely to represent an ending, not a beginning. Occupy Wall Street could, on the other hand, be the beginning of something, even if no one in it knows what the future has in store or perhaps what their movement is all about -- a strength of theirs, by the way, not their weakness.
It’s true, as many have pointed out, that they don’t have a list of well thought out demands, but the demand to have such a list is just their elders trying to bring them to heel. The fact is, they don’t have to know just what they’re doing, any more than a writer or filmmaker has to understand the book being written or the film shot. It’s not a necessity. It’s not the price of admission. If there’s one thing that’s obvious and heartening, as my friend, the novelist Beverly Gologorsky, said to me while we oldsters circumnavigated the park, “The overwhelming feeling I have is that no one here is planning to go home any time soon.”
Never have they been more needed. Theirs is certainly a movement, like the ones in the Middle East, inspired in part by economic disaster and aimed at an airless political as well as corporate/financial system controlled by the 1% left out of the signs in the park hailing the 99% of Americans whom Occupy Wall Street hopes to represent. It’s a world set on screwing just about everyone in that vast cohort of Americans without compunction, shame, or even, these days, plausible deniability.
The young face a failing world -- and if you want the proof of just how thoroughly it's failed all of us in recent years, check out TomDispatch Associate Editor Andy Kroll’s post today. Nowhere else can you find assembled such a range of evidence of an American world on the decline, one which doesn’t work and shows no sign of being capable of righting itself.
If, on a planet in crisis, their government has repeatedly failed them, the Wall Street demonstrators deserve a small, hopeful cheer for their efforts. They may not be the perfect size and shape for the movement of everyone’s dreams, but they’re here and, right now, that says the world. Tom
But don’t be fooled. Not only does the park begin to fill fast and the conversation become ever more animated, but this movement already spreading across the country (and even globally) looks like the real McCoy, something new and hopeful in degraded times. Of the demonstrators I spoke with, several had hitchhiked to New York -- one had simply quit her job -- to be present. Inspired by Tunisians, Egyptians, Spaniards, and Wisconsinites, in a country largely demobilized these last years, they recognized what matters when they saw it. As one young woman told me, “A lot of people in my generation felt we were going to witness something really big -- and I think this is it!”
It may be. The last time we saw a moment like this globally was 1968. (Other dates, like 1848 in Europe and 1919 in China, when the young took the lead in a previously dead world, also come to mind.) It’s the moment when the blood stirs and the young, unable to bear the state of their country or the world, hit the streets with the urge to take the fate of humankind in their own hands.
It’s always unexpected. No one predicted Tahrir Square. No one imagined tens of thousands of young Syrians, weaponless, facing the military might of the state. No one expected the protests in Wisconsin. No one, myself included, imagined that young Americans, so seemingly somnolent as things went from bad to worse, would launch such a spreading movement, and -- most important of all -- decide not to go home. (At the last demonstration I attended in New York City in the spring, the median age was probably 55.)
The Tea Party movement has, until now, gotten the headlines for its anger, in part because the well-funded right wing poured money into the Tea Party name, but it’s an aging movement. Whatever it does, in pure actuarial terms it's likely to represent an ending, not a beginning. Occupy Wall Street could, on the other hand, be the beginning of something, even if no one in it knows what the future has in store or perhaps what their movement is all about -- a strength of theirs, by the way, not their weakness.
It’s true, as many have pointed out, that they don’t have a list of well thought out demands, but the demand to have such a list is just their elders trying to bring them to heel. The fact is, they don’t have to know just what they’re doing, any more than a writer or filmmaker has to understand the book being written or the film shot. It’s not a necessity. It’s not the price of admission. If there’s one thing that’s obvious and heartening, as my friend, the novelist Beverly Gologorsky, said to me while we oldsters circumnavigated the park, “The overwhelming feeling I have is that no one here is planning to go home any time soon.”
Never have they been more needed. Theirs is certainly a movement, like the ones in the Middle East, inspired in part by economic disaster and aimed at an airless political as well as corporate/financial system controlled by the 1% left out of the signs in the park hailing the 99% of Americans whom Occupy Wall Street hopes to represent. It’s a world set on screwing just about everyone in that vast cohort of Americans without compunction, shame, or even, these days, plausible deniability.
The young face a failing world -- and if you want the proof of just how thoroughly it's failed all of us in recent years, check out TomDispatch Associate Editor Andy Kroll’s post today. Nowhere else can you find assembled such a range of evidence of an American world on the decline, one which doesn’t work and shows no sign of being capable of righting itself.
If, on a planet in crisis, their government has repeatedly failed them, the Wall Street demonstrators deserve a small, hopeful cheer for their efforts. They may not be the perfect size and shape for the movement of everyone’s dreams, but they’re here and, right now, that says the world. Tom
Flat-Lining the Middle Class
Economic Numbers to Die For
By Andy Kroll
Food pantries picked over. Incomes drying up. Shelters bursting with the homeless. Job seekers spilling out the doors of employment centers. College grads moving back in with their parents. The angry and disillusioned filling the streets.
Pan your camera from one coast to the other, from city to suburb to farm and back again, and you'll witness scenes like these. They are the legacy of the Great Recession, the Lesser Depression, or whatever you choose to call it.
In recent months, a blizzard of new data, the hardest of hard numbers, has laid bare the dilapidated condition of the American economy, and particularly of the once-mighty American middle class. Each report sparks a flurry of news stories and pundit chatter, but never much reflection on what it all means now that we have just enough distance to look back on the first decade of the twenty-first century and see how Americans fared in that turbulent period.
And yet the verdict couldn’t be more clear-cut. For the American middle class, long the pride of this country and the envy of the world, the past 10 years were a bust. A washout. A decade from hell.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.
