Patrick's Notebook

The Chance for Peace speech given by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower on April 16, 1953

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

JPMorgan boss Dimon’s pay boosted to $29.5 million while 250,000 workers get no raise.

CEO of US banking giant JPMorgan, Jamie Dimon has received a 5.9 percent increase in his earnings, despite profits falling by one percent. The bank’s workers got no raise.

Dimon now earns around 240 times the average pay of JPMorgan’s 250,000 employees. The CEO’s earnings are comprised of a $1.5 million salary and $28 million in “performance shares” linked to profitability. The average pay of the bank’s employees was not increased.

Inequality gap widens as ‘world’s richest 1% get 82% of the wealth.

Approximately 82 percent of the money generated last year went to the richest 1 percent of the global population, the report said, while the poorest half saw no increase at all, a new study by global charity Oxfam claimed.

Last year, Oxfam said billionaires would have seen an uptick of $762 billion — enough to end extreme poverty seven times over.

The report is timely as the global political and business elite gather in snow-clad Davos for the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting this week.

Mark Goldring, chief executive of Oxfam GB, said the statistics signal “something is very wrong with the global economy.”

“The concentration of extreme wealth at the top is not a sign of a thriving economy but a symptom of a system that is failing the millions of hard-working people on poverty wages who make our clothes and grow our food,” he added.

Hanan Lazaar

Find your reason, I promise you it’s deeper than “practice and all is coming” try, don’t be stubborn.

صبر is the key.

Trump approval rating is lowest for any modern president one year into his term, new NBC/WSJ poll says

Signs of starvation and death in North Korea indicate that US diplomatic strategy works fine, says the secretary of state. The objective now is not to let Pyongyang evoke sympathy around the world for its sanctions-induced woes.

The unexpectedly-revealing description of what Rex Tillerson apparently considers successful diplomacy came from his own mouth on Wednesday as he was speaking at Stanford University with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

US Secretary of State writes he is “proud” of US diplomacy and “encouraged” by the progress made under his leadership.