COFFEE BREAK 219

+ updated at 4:41pm ESDT on Thursday, October 28, 2010

+ CounterPunch offers "America's Jobs Losses are Permanent" by Paul Craig Roberts. It begins: "Now that a few Democrats and the remnants of the AFL-CIO are waking up to the destructive impact of jobs offshoring on the US economy and millions of American lives, globalism’s advocates have resurrected Dartmouth economist Matthew Slaughter’s discredited finding of several years ago that jobs offshoring by US corporations increases employment and wages in the US."

+ Spirituality and Practice offers "Religion, Politics: Walking Away from Church" by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat.

Excerpt 1: "Today, 17 percent of Americans say they have no religion, and these new 'nones' are very heavily concentrated among Americans who have come of age since 1990. Between 25 and 30 percent of twenty-somethings say they have no religious affiliation — that signals an increase in that age group four times higher than in other generations."

Excerpt 2: "What explains this shift? These young people have been turned off from joining organized religion by its conservative politics. Putnam and Campbell point out that the majority of Millennial youth was liberal on most social issues, and above all, on homosexuality. 'Increasingly, young people saw religion as intolerant, hypocritical, judgmental, and homophobic. If being religious entailed political conservatism, they concluded, religion was not for them.'"

Excerpt 3: "If this trend continues — and there is no reason for it not to, given the push of conservatives to use the issue of same-sex marriage as a means of getting Republicans elected — we will be seeing many more churches with low attendance eventually having to close their doors, as has happened with congregations in Europe."

+ Progressive Democrats of America offers "Remarks by Bill Moyers at the 40th Anniversary of Common Cause." Excerpt: "The founder of Common Cause was a prophet in seeing money as the dagger directed at the heart of democracy. Like his fellow Republican Teddy Roosevelt, he opposed the ‘naked robbery’ of the public’s trust. A century ago, in one of the most powerful speeches in American political history, Roosevelt said: 'It is not a partisan issue; it is more than a political issue; it is a great moral issue. If we condone political theft, if we do not resent the kinds of wrong and injustice that injuriously affect the whole nation, not merely our democratic form of government but our civilization itself cannot endure.'"