While U Wait

• Media distraction.  (AlterNet)

  The most critical problem American society faces right now is, arguably, inequality, and the plutocracy that benefits from it, and the corruption that puts remedies for it beyond our constitutional reach. Every breathless story about impeachment occupies bandwidth not given to exploring the structural problems that Naomi Klein addresses in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, or the disinformation that Paul Krugman decimates in his columns, or the oligarchy that the Occupy movement was crushed for trying to put on the national agenda.

  It's almost impossible to avoid junk news now.  Even the New York Times does "lifestyle journalism."  (OK, it isn't your lifestyle; when I lived in New York, it wasn't my lifestyle either, and I occasionally bought stuff at Zabar's.  But the reader is supposed to go "Oooooooh," and the advertisers are supposed to pony up.  That's not a newspaper's purpose.)  The fact that I have some vague idea who the Kardashians are is more down to osmosis.  (Because why else would I even know?)
• American violence and its roots.  (Obsidian Wings)

  So as we wait for the Grand Jury report from Ferguson and see police and National Guard forces being rallied "just in case", read some of the accounts in Killed By Police. Notice how many people are killed for "non-compliance", or for holding a knife, or for burglary, or for other crimes that do not normally get the death penalty. Notice how much damn sloppiness we tolerate from police -- who really killed 5-year-old Cadence Harris, after all?
  
  We tolerate these things because we're used to them, because we have a centuries-old tradition of authorities compelling submission by violence. The past isn't dead.

• Moving forward.  (Republic of T)

  The aftermath of Michael Brown’s death, revealed Pentagon program that has distributed paramilitary weapons and equipment worth $4.3 billion since 1992. What if we had infested even a fraction of the $4.3 billion in education, training, and jobs for young people in places like Ferguson?

  22 years. 4.3 billion. Tell me again about how Americans love their children? Because I'm not seeing it.
  

All three of these are Read The Whole Thing.