more on trickle-down:
The folks that put words and ideas into the mouth of Ronald Reagan in the economic insanity of the 1980s cut the top tax bracket from 70% down to 50% and then down to 28%. How well I remember Reagan’s budget director David Stockman telling American workers that the tax cuts would stimulate the American economy and benefit the workers.
(...) Cold war profits soared, but the number of people below the poverty level increased from (31.8 million) to (39.3 million) according to the Statistical Abstract of the United States. The federal budget deficit grew from $74,000 million in 1980 to $221,000 million in 1986 and what was called the greatest collapse of U.S. financial institutions since the 1930s left the working poor devastated and facing foreclosures on their homes.
(...) From 1986 to 1989, 296 savings and loan institutions with total assets of $125 billion were forced to close and many workers realizing the American dream of home ownership for the first time lost their homes.
(...) Henry Wallace, vice President under FDR and Presidential candidate then, said back in 1948 "War preparations create record profits for big business, but only false prosperity for the people—their purchasing power shrinks as prices rise, their needs go unfilled, and they are burdened with new debts." He was right then, as Harry Truman prepared for the war In Korea and became the worst trickle down labor president in history, and Wallace would be right today.
(...) Thousands of holocaust survivors living in Israel live in shameful poverty, as Trickle down is a stanchion of Israel’s economy. Some 80,000 of the 260,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel are living under the poverty line, according to the Holocaust Survivors' Welfare Fund.
(...) War profits do not trickle down they land on the workers drip by drip, but inflation keeps them at the faucet trying to survive. Those of us who call ourselves "peace people" do what we can issue by issue.

interview with chomsky and zinn (part 2):
[chomsky] Raul Hilberg is the founder of Holocaust studies, you know, the most distinguished figure in the field. In fact, he says Norman didn't go far enough. And it's the same -- Avi Shlaim is one of the -- maybe the leading Israeli historian, has strongly supported him, and the same with others. I can't refer to the private correspondence, but it's very strong letters from leading figures in these fields.
(...) [zinn] , universities, colleges are not democratic institutions. Really, they’re like corporations. The people who have the most power are the people who have the least to do with education. That is, they're not the faculty, they're not the students, they're not even the people who keep the university going -- the buildings and grounds people and the technical people and the secretaries -- no. They're the trustees, the businesspeople, the people with connections, and they're the ones who have the most power, they're the ones who make the decisions. And so, that's why I was fired from there, and that's why I was almost fired by John Silber at Boston University
(...) [zinn] One of Eugene V. Debs: “While there is a lower class, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” And Henry David Thoreau: “When the subject has refused allegiance and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished.”
(...) [zinn] I mean, the Mexican War had some of the same characteristics as the war in Iraq today, and that is that the American people were lied to about the reasons for going into Mexico, and they weren't told that the real reason for going into Mexico was that we wanted Mexican land, which we took at the end of the Mexican War, just as today we're not being told that the real reason for being in Iraq has to do with oil and profits and money.
(...) [chomsky] It's true that the country, that in terms of the institutional structure -- government for the wealthy and so on -- there hasn’t been much change in 200 years. But there's been enormous progress, I mean, even in the last forty years, since the ’60s. Many rights have been won: rights for minorities, rights for women, rights of future generations, which is what the environmental movement is about. Opposition to aggression has increased. The first solidarity movements in history began in the 1980s, after centuries of European imperialism, and no one ever thought of going to live in an Algerian village to protect the people from French violence, or in a Vietnamese village. Thousands of Americans were doing that in the 1980s in Reagan’s terrorist wars. It’s now extended over the whole world. There’s an international solidarity movement. I mean, after all, the Iraq war is the first war in hundreds of years of Western history, at least the first one I can think of, which was massively protested before it was officially launched. And it actually was underway, we have since learned, but it wasn’t officially underway. But it was huge, millions of people protesting it all over the world, so much so that The New York Times lamented that there's a second superpower: the population. Well, you know, that's significant and, I think, gives good reason for hope. There are periods of regression. We're now in a period of regression, but if you look at the cycle over time, it's upwards. And there's no limits that it can't reach.

on how the Holocaust should teach us about the present (freedman):
And thus, while “never forget” is a worthy and worthwhile refrain, it rings a bit hollow if all we do is remember without taking the next step and actively confronting abuses, wherever in the world they flourish unchecked.