Jorge Aquino's List: Panamerican Saints | Fall 2011

• Homelessness is not a side issue unconnected to plutocracy and greed. It's where we all could be headed — the 99%, or at least the 70%, of us, every debt-laden college grad, out-of-work schoolteacher and impoverished senior — unless this revolution succeeds.

• Of all the "ex-gay" ministries, this was the most cult-like -- with Smid keeping tight control over the social lives of his clients, who paid a pretty penny to live in the residential program.

• the $120 million project has now raised $116 million
• 15 percent of donations came from everyday Americans,
• GM is the largest donor to the project — giving $10 million in cash and ad space to tout the memorial.
• "Many of our owners cherish the same ideals, dreams and common sense values that Dr. King stood for. And they have the right to know that the automobile company they do business with shares their dedication to this vision."
• Ford Motor Co. Fund and Toyota Motor Corp. each donated $2 million to the memorial
• Volkswagen AG donated $1 million. Hyundai Motor Co. also donated $1 million. Honda Motor Co. donated $500,000.
• TV ads GM is running for the "Table of Brotherhood" — a conversation on race that's being held in four cities, with the last in Washington on Friday afternoon.

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• King Jr. delivered a haunting sermon at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church about a eulogy that might be given in the event of his death.
• “If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice,” King told the congregation. “Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.”
• designers of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington selected those lines to be inscribed on the memorial’s towering statue
• the exact quotes had to be paraphrased,
• Maya Angelou, says the shortened inscription is misleading and ought to be changed.
• the inscription reads: I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.
• “The quote makes Dr. Martin Luther King look like an arrogant twit,” Angelou, 83, said Tuesday. “He was anything but that. He was far too profound a man for that four-letter word to apply.

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• Youth unemployment in the 27-nation European Union stands at just over 20 percent, ranging as high as 45.7 percent in Spain. In Britain youth unemployment has risen from 14 percent in the first quarter of 2008 to 20 percent.
• Brits from Tottenham to Teesside have watched the most patrician cabinet since Macmillan cutting everything from libraries to youth counseling services. Theirs is a “No Future” revolt.
• A feeling has grown in Western societies that uncontrollable forces are at work shrinking possibility. History has never seen a global power shift as radical as the current one that managed to be peaceful.
• Now the American quasi-imperium, and more generally the dominion of the West, is ending, not rapidly but steadily.
• As new powers emerge, globalization has altered the relationship between capital and labor in the former’s favor. Many more cheap workers have become available outside the West as technology has eliminated distance. Returns on capital have proved higher relative to wages. That’s the story of the post-cold-war period. The gap between rich and poor has become a gulf.
• The only people who walked away unscathed from the great financial binge that preceded this mess were its main architects and greatest beneficiaries: bankers, financiers and hedge-fund honchos.

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