California Free Press

Bush AND Obama Both Responsible for Screwing Up the Middle East

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

Regime Change Was Their Common Theme

Obama wanted it to be part of his legacy that he ended two wars, those in Iraq and Afghanistan, which were started by his predecessor, George W Bush along with his vice President Dick Cheney. Only it's not working out entirely as he planned, and he's coming in for a lot of criticism from, among others, Cheney himself. In a new book, Exceptional, Why the World Needs a Powerful America, written with daughter Liz Cheney, Cheney criticizes Obama while defending his own legacy. Cheney has been in full self-rehabilitation mode ever since he stepped down as George W Bush's brain.

The criticism now is that Obama left Iraq too soon and thus created a power vacuum that ISIS has filled. No doubt ISIS stepped into the vacuum created by the departure of Saddam Hussein, but the part that Cheney is missing is that his administration took out Saddam for no valid reason whatsoever and created the power vacuum in the first place. As long as Saddam was in power, no group such as al Qaeda or ISIS could possibly have gained a foothold in Iraq.

As Colin Powell said recently on Meet the Press, and I paraphrase, you can't take out the guy at the top if there is no structure beneath him to support a stable government and expect good results. Certainly neither George W Bush, who wanted to create western style democracies in the Middle East using war as a means, nor Barack Obama, who wanted to do the same thing by encouraging the youth to rise up after getting rid of despicable dictators, have achieved the results they were hoping for.

Powell also mentioned that all sixteen US Intelligence Agencies concurred in the fact that Sadam had weapons of mass destruction. It was a massive exercise in self delusion and self deception on a national basis and giving the Boss the results the Boss wanted because the agencies knew what the Boss wanted to hear. There was no integrity or ethics in the massive intelligence apparatus of the US government and the massive deception it perpetrated on the American public, not to mention the rest of the world.

Bush's perfidy was signaled two years before 9/11 when he told his ghostwriter that he wanted to be a wartime President:

HOUSTON -- Two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, who held many conversations with then-Texas Governor Bush in preparation for a planned autobiography.

"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, 'If I have a chance to invade...if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency." Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father's shadow.

Sadam might have been a bad guy, but he was a bulwark against instability in Iraq. There is no way that al-Qaeda or ISIS could have gained a foothold there as long as Sadam was in power. Part of his effectiveness as a dictator is that he kept the religious tensions bubbling just under the surface in check. When Sadam was gone, religious factions came to the fore and destroyed Iraq's secularism under Sadam. Part of the problem is that no effective successor to Saddam has materialized, one who can put the lid back on the cauldron.

The only leaders of Iraq in the interim have been incompetent and ineffective. Obama has been too rosy in his assessment of the possibilities for reform in the Middle East. Perhaps a brutal Saddam-like leader is about the best they are capable of in those countries at the present time.

Obama encouraged young Egyptians to reform their country to become a democracy, and that too has been an abysmal failure. Egypt went from being controlled by the military through a couple of iterations, a couple of moves on the chess board, and back to being controlled by the military again despite the "Arab Spring," the youth revolt and the Internet. You can't blame Obama for trying to make a better world by relatively peaceful means.

Do Bad Dictators Serve a Useful Function?

The only problem is that that doesn't seem to be in the cards for some countries whether for historical or cultural reasons. Surely it's not for a lack of successful models including the US and the European Union, which despite their problems are still light years ahead as civilizations than the likes of Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan. The simmering cauldrons of religious animosity and hatred boiled over once there was no strong and brutal leader to hold them in check. The key to modernizing these societies is first to secularize them.

In 2011 Obama pressured Mubarek to resign and encouraged the protesters, all to no subsequent avail. In a one on one conversation by telephone with Mubarak on February 1, Obama told the Egyptian president nearly point blank to resign, and Mubarak refused. Obama told Mubarak: “It is time to present to the people of Egypt it’s next government.” Mubarak replied: “Let’s talk in the next three or four days.”

Subsequent Egyptian governments were hamhanded and incompetent. The Muslim Brotherhood's government under Mohamed Morsi turned into a fiasco. Eventually, the military which had run Egypt for years stepped back in and ousted Morsi who found himself on death row while Mubarek who had been on death row got a reprieve. It's a topsy turvy world. So it's back to square one in Egypt with the military in control and no reforms evidently taking hold. The "Arab Spring" was a bust. It turned to winter pretty fast.

Despite Obama's peaceful intentions, as contrasted with Bush and Cheney's warlike ones, Obama's meddling in the middle East has had negative results. In Obama and Egypt’s Revolution Obama was quoted:

“It is not the role of any other country to determine Egypt’s leaders. Only the Egyptian people can do that. What is clear—and what I indicated tonight to President Mubarak—is my belief that an orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful, and it must begin now.

“To the people of Egypt, particularly the young people of Egypt, I want to be clear:  We hear your voices.  I have an unyielding belief that you will determine your own destiny and seize the promise of a better future for your children and your grandchildren.”

It's clear Obama told Mubarek to leave and encouraged Egyptian young people to create a new society. Trouble was they didn't know how to do it. They weren't capable of doing it, and they had no historical or cultural precedents for doing it.

The Road to Hell by Good and Bad Intentions

Even in Libya, which was at least a stable country under Gaddafi, the lack of stability and power vacuum has been exploited by the likes of ISIS. The irony of the situation is that Gaddafi as well as Sadam were aging dictators who were mellowing toward the West. Obama's good intentions have led us down the road to hell just as resolutely as Bush and Cheney's nefarious ones. Now Cheney's advice somehow seems relevant again after attempts at reform in the Middle East have fallen flat. The road to hell has been paved with Obama's good intentions just as they were by his predecessor's bad intentions.

 From Lessons from Obama's War in Libya:

In fact, at the time of the 2011 NATO intervention, Gaddafi had made nice with the West, given up his nuclear weapons program, and was providing the United States good intelligence on Islamist terrorists. However, because Gaddafi had long been demonized, France and the United States just couldn't resist taking advantage of the Arab Spring revolt against him to get rid of him for good.

...

Yet there are still people who argue that toppling Gaddafi was needed for the symbolic goals of standing with the NATO allies and siding with Arab Spring revolts, even though the latter didn't turn out to be very democratic after all. However, such symbolism is trumped by the harsh reality that, if anything, U.S. security has been eroded by Gaddafi's weapons being spread around the Middle East and by the resulting internal mayhem in Libya, which in turn has led to terrorist training bases and ISIS strongholds in that country. Even these developments could probably be overstated as threats to the United States per se, but security-wise the United States was still better off when Gaddafi kept things under control in Libya.

Another case in point is Syria. Obama took a stand that Bashar al-Assad had to go. He said that Assad's use of chemical weapons against his own people was a game changer. He had crossed a red line. "To use weapons of mass destruction on civilian populations crosses another line in terms of international norms and laws," Obama told reporters in the Oval Office. In 2011 Obama called for al-Assad to resign after months of his violent crackdown on protesters. The rhetorical escalation was backed by new U.S. sanctions designed to undermine Assad’s ability to finance his military operation. Obama said there was a "red line" in Syria if al-Assad used chemical weapons. It was an empty threat.

“The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way,” Obama said in a written statement. “For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.” Result: he's still in power and millions of Syrian refugees are risking death and besieging western Europe. Talk about good intentions backfiring. Hindsight is making Dick Cheney look good and seem relevant again.

This is from Obama Has Insisted for Years That Assad Has to Go. Looks Like He Changed His Mind:

President Obama first declared that it was time for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down in August, 2011, five months into the uprising against his rule. Since then, it’s been the consistently stated position of the White House that resolution of the civil war in Syria requires Assad’s departure. This has remained true even as the focus of America’s attention has shifted to Assad’s enemy, ISIS, and as worsening chaos in Libya and Yemen have led many to reconsider the wisdom of overthrowing dictators in countries riven by sectarian violence.

As long as Sadam was in power in Iraq, Mubarek in Egypt and Gaddaffi in Libya there was no power vaccuum and the liklihood of an ISIS like movement being successful was nil. The fact that al-Assad is still in power in Syria is cold comfort due to the fact that the civil war in that country has destabilized it and created millions of refugees. In the world today there are some 50 million refugees many of them barely clinging to life. It's a worldwide crisis, and a crisis for western Europe because they're all determined to get there in order to have a chance at a sane, useful and happy life.

The Arab Spring Was a Total Bust

As of September 2012, governments have been overthrown in four countries: Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. The Arab Spring came to nought. All the demonstrations in Tahir Square, all the high hopes and ambitions for a better life, all the sophisticated use of the internet to organize young people, all the Facebook - it all came to nothing despite Obama's encouragement. It wasn't supposed to turn out like this.

The Arab Spring was supposed to bring peace, democracy and stability to not only the nations where it took root, but also others around it in the Middle East and North Africa. It was supposed to usher in an end of violence and heavy-handed government tactics, just like it ushered out entrenched leaders. In short, it was supposed to mean a brighter future.

Not more instability, not more violence, not fewer freedoms.

But that's what happened, even if the level of unrest hasn't been even or universal. Some countries, such as Jordan, instituted reforms without really roiling their societies. Others, such as Iraq, never saw a popular uprising, but have seen burgeoning violence. And now, Yemen is on the brink of civil war as it battles a rebel group that has overthrown the government and seized parts of key cities.

And now Cheney's new book gives him the chance to say "I told you so." Forget about the fact that he and Bush started the whole thing with the removal of Saddam.

Vijay Prashad, professor of international studies at Trinity College is the author of several books, including "Arab Spring, Libyan Winter" and, most recently, "The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South."

According to Blowback: Vijay Prashad on How Islamic State Grew Out of U.S Invasion of Iraq, Destruction of Nation:

There’s a very dangerous game going on here, both from Hillary Clinton, from the Republicans, from Tony Blair. They want to make the case that the Islamic State is a child of the Syrian war. They want to deny the fact that the Islamic State has its roots fundamentally in the destruction of the Iraqi state by the American invasion in 2003. You know, it’s very easy to destroy a state. It took the Iraqi people over a hundred years to build institutions; that was destroyed by the Americans in an afternoon.

Once you destroy the state, you create a vacuum. For the first time on Iraqi soil, one saw al-Qaeda groups come in, and that was in 2004, when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was a Jordanian militant, comes into Tal Afar and creates al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. You know, even bin Laden found him to be a bit unpalatable, because he was deeply sectarian and extraordinarily violent. The Americans tried to crush al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, but by 2006, despite the big surge, despite the bombing of Fallujah, Ramadi—you know, names that the American public now are quite familiar with—despite the razing of these cities, the Islamic State was born in 2006. It’s not yesterday’s creation. This was a product of the Iraq War.

The roots of ISIS were created when George W Bush destroyed the Iraqi state. It was helped along when Obama told Mubarek and al-Assad to step down and got rid of Gaddafi.

In his book Cheney says, “Those who say the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a mistake are essentially saying we would be better off if Saddam Hussein were still in power". Well yes, the world would be immeasurably better off if Bush and Cheney had never invaded Iraq and Sadam was still in power. Bush and Cheney had to make their case as strong as possible that Sadam was a threat to the world because he possessed weapons of mass destruction.The real reason is that Bush lusted after being a wartime President with all the "political capital" that would accrue to him.

Regarding Bush the road to hell was paved with bad intentions. As far as Obama is concerned the road to hell was paved with good intentions. Both led to similar results. Removing bad guy dictators created a power vacuum, destabilized several middle Eastern countries and led to the rise of ISIS. We would all be better off if the bad guys had remained in place. The US has been directly responsible for destroying billions of dollars worth of real estate, killing over a million people, mostly civilians, ruining millions of people's lives forcing them into refugee status and destabilizing Europe because of it. This does not even count the hundreds of billions of dollars the US military-industrial complex has spent on war and the weapons of war, money that has not been spent on creating peace around the world and taking care of pressing social and infrastructure problems at home.

The US has sown acrimony and tension in the Middle East thus insuring resentment towards the US and the west and continued war for the next hundred years unless the US immediately apologizes, turns away from spending billions on war and instead puts that money into peace building efforts in the Middle East. Money should be transferred from the war machine to the Peace Corps and similar efforts. But US war efforts sustain a self-fulfilling prophecy guaranteeing that the military will have to be used ad infinitum to tamp down the tensions and resentments that it has created in the first place. All those making money off of war should be delighted.

The problem is that Obama is still in the thrall of the neocons whose mantra is regime change. Robert Parry in How Neocons Destabilized Europe has nailed it: "The neocon prescription of endless “regime change” is spreading chaos across the Middle East and now into Europe, yet the neocons still control the mainstream U.S. narrative and thus have diagnosed the problem as not enough “regime change.”"

The refugee chaos that is now pushing deep into Europe – dramatized by gut-wrenching photos of Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi whose body washed up on a beach in Turkey – started with the cavalier ambitions of American neocons and their liberal-interventionist sidekicks who planned to remake the Middle East and other parts of the world through “regime change.”

Instead of the promised wonders of “democracy promotion” and “human rights,” what these “anti-realists” have accomplished is to spread death, destruction and destabilization across the Middle East and parts of Africa and now into Ukraine and the heart of Europe. Yet, since these neocon forces still control the Official Narrative, their explanations get top billing – such as that there hasn’t been enough “regime change.”

California's Commendable Progress With Renewables

by Frank Thomas from the San Diego Free Press

But Ongoing Exponential Growth Of Global Co₂ Emissions

California continues its remarkable legislative breakthroughs in going green under the SB 350 Clean Energy and Pollution Reduction Act of 2015. Legislation just passed sets two goals for 2030: 50% of state utility power from renewables and a 50% increase in energy efficiency of buildings. The provision for a 50% reduction in petroleum use for cars and trucks failed to pass as did the SB 32 bill that sets GHG emission targets for 2030 and 2050. Still, the sweeping new mandates passed call for DOUBLING energy efficiency and using renewables for HALF of California’s electricity generation by 2030. It is uncertain how fast and to what extent transportation electrification will proceed

California's aim to step up its commitment to clean energy acknowledges the scientific reality we humans don't have the luxury of lots of time to transition FAST to renewable energy and much improved energy efficiency. California, Germany, and Scandinavia are not being complacent about the critical need to act in big and little ways to counter Earth's energy imbalance that's intensifying global warming, recurring destructive drought and flooding weather events of scale – the huge costs of which are not included in the gasoline price.

Table 1 is a ‘big picture’ comparative look at electricity generation from renewables showing California to be among the world’s leaders:

California’s electricity generation from renewables and overall decarbonization rates were an impressive 26.6% and 36.6%, respectively, in 2013. Wind energy and biomass played a major role. The renewable share can be increased significantly by solar PV applications and electrification of vehicles bringing further improvements in California’s decarbonization levels.

Without a near term, effective, safe way to capture and bury carbon, Germany and Scandinavia are phasing out of CO2 pollution-intensive coal production. Germany is doing the same with nuclear. California, Germany and Scandinavia have resisted temptation to consider renewable energy as supplemental rather than the dominant contributors to energy consumption and energy security.

We are all affected by proliferating global CO2 emissions no matter what regions they come from. TABLE 2 shows the dramatic, near “exponential” growth of CO2 emissions since 1850 and particularly since 1950.

TABLE 2 forecasts CO2 emissions at only a 1% increase per year. This results in 52.8 billion tons of CO2 being emitted by 2050, leading to disastrous temperature rise of 3-4C. Many aspects of climate change will continue for some centuries even if CO2 emissions are stopped.

This is because up to 40%, some scientists say 80%, of emitted CO2 remains in the atmosphere for 800 years or more. This spells a substantial multi-century climate change development caused by past, present and future CO2 emissions. CO2 emissions must decline 6% annually starting in 2016 to have any hope of averting a 2C rise by 2050.

It's difficult for humans to comprehend the concept, 'exponential,’ or ‘exponential function'. This is a process where, for example, there's a period of slow growth in global warming and ice melt that can then change to an accelerated build up at a 10 or 20 year doubling rate, intensified by various positive feedbacks.

In 1970, humanity was pumping 40 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere EVERY DAY - or 14.5 billion tons annually. In 2015, CO2 emissions will almost triple to 110 million tons EVERY DAY - or 40 billion tons annually. This astronomical growth has led to an atmospheric CO2 concentration of 400 ppm today and rising. This is 40% higher than the 280 ppm level over two centuries ago, a stunning 30% higher vs. 1960's concentration level. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations are higher today than at any time in at least the past 800,000 years. America with 315 million people has highest per capita emissions. China is 2^nd highest with 1.3 billion people.

Human-induced carbon emissions are becoming ‘exponential,’ contributing also to a much faster rise infuture sea level (see: Global CO2 Emissions 1751-2010 CDIAC and (see: http://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/2015/04/07/exponential-sea-level-rise-within-three-generations/). Recorded history has never seen the CO2 atmospheric concentration rise so much in such an incredibly short time frame. In prior ice ages, such an increase would have taken thousands of years excluding an ultra-unique, massive natural event. The change since 1970 is so extraordinary that it overwhelms all natural forces including the sun (see: http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-world/).

Dr. James Hansen's recent study, which must still be peer-reviewed, projects a 10 foot sea level rise before 2100. This is based on evidence that ice sheets that come in contact with warming oceans are vulnerable to a 'non-linear' as opposed to an assumed 'linear' melt down. Rising air temperatures are the main cause of recent dramatic disintegration of ice shelves. But Hansen's study suggests that the warming of oceans may be playing a more significant role in destroying the ice shelves ... as various positive feedbacks amplify the exponential rate of ice melt.

In contrast to Hansen's calculations, the IPCC's projected 3 foot sea level rise excludes ice sheet melt. The Greenland, West and East Antarctica ice sheets are evidencing considerable instability and rapid loss of ice mass in recent years. NASA has just announced that a sea level rise of 3 feet is already LOCKED IN - thus can't be avoided by the younger generation and future generations.

Hansen concludes this all means the IPCC's 2 degrees Celsius maximum target by 2050 is unacceptably high. We actually are now on a CO2 emissions trend leading to a 3 to 4 degrees Celsius increase by 2050 - driving the CO2 concentration to well above 500 ppm and thereby drastically escalating the Earth's existing dangerously high energy imbalance. To avert this disaster scenario, global CO2 emissions must be rapidly reduced on average about 6% yearly to achieve at least a 350 ppm atmospheric concentration by 2100. (see: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26243-world-on-track-for-worstcase-warming-scenario).

The evidence of man-made CO2 emissions and correlation with global warming is obvious in the melting of glaciers, ice mass loss, multiple extreme weather events, acidic oceans, ecological disasters. It is unambiguous that the increase in CO2 concentrations is human-induced. We also know the human sources of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, cement production, agriculture, deforestation contribute half of the emissions that lead to an increase in atmospheric concentrations. The other half of the CO2 emissions is absorbed by the oceans and the biosphere. This is making the oceans more acidic and threatening sea life.

The reality is that “disruptive” technologies, lifestyle changes, stronger regulations and incentives, among other actions, are critical to achieving a “green friendly” capitalism … before Earth’s rising heat content and temperature become irreversible.

Congratulations California for recognizing the moral, social and economic necessity to exit out of fossil fuel CO2 emissions as rapidly and effectively as possible ... including ambitious actions to improve energy efficiency. Congratulations California for recognizing that half measures won’t suffice in face of the most severe life-on-Earth risk the world civilization could ever imagine.

The Pope Makes the Case for Climate Change and Helping the Poor

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

The Pope is visiting the US this week to make the case that we should take climate change seriously and start doing something about it. He is really making the case that we should change our paradigm from one of individual self-fulfillment to one of "we're all in this together," from individual salvation to collective salvation of our earthly home. This has far reaching implications. We need to be concerned about what's happening to the earth as a whole, to humanity as a whole, and not just to our own family, town, state, country.

The Pope doesn't mince words. Far from being the conservative head of a 2000 year old bureaucracy, he is using his moral megaphone and authority to speak out on the major problems of our day - global warming and capitalism - and the two are interrelated. You can't have the entire sum of people on the planet involved with saving the planet from runaway climate change without getting involved with the collective plight of all those people in their daily lives. The Pope is putting the emphasis and focus on the plight of the poor, which is really what Jesus was all about. Finally.

How many look at the refugee crisis and compare it to Jesus' parable about the Good Samaritan? The phrase "Good Samaritan" means someone who helps a stranger, whether he or she be an "illegal immigrant," a refugee or whatever. We are all in this together; we are all human beings. We put the plight of the poor, the defenseless, the destitute before the worship of money. Capitalism turns that ethic around. Wall Street and its minions worship money.

Is Capitalism the Dung of the Devil? The Pope Says So

The Pope, himself, has labeled capitalism the "dung of the devil" since doing things naturally the capitalist way results in exploitation of the environment with a consequent worsening of the climate change situation. That's how profits are made. So the Pope is calling on us to stop being capitalists, to stop exploiting the environment for personal, selfish gain. The Pope blames "unbridled capitalism" for ruining the earth and immiserating the poor. Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners said, "How we decide the morality, the integrity, the righteousness of an economy is not how the wealthiest do but how the poorest do." That is even more radical than communism or socialism.

The Pope has written, "Whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, a market that does not take into account the fundamental rights of the poor and underprivileged." The capitalist economy is for the "best and the brightest," the entrepreneurs, the college graduates, those who start with nothing and make a billion dollars.

And devil take the hindermost, meaning those who aren't the best and the brightest, but the Pope, as did Jesus before him, speaks for them, those who are left behind by capitalism: the homeless, the mentally ill, those who cannot cope, those who aren't the sharpest blades in the drawer, in other words - the hindermost. Capitalism promotes the ethic of valuing the richest and the smartest, who are perfectly capable of fending for themselves. Is it any wonder that there is runaway wealth creation at the top of the social spectrum? A good thing? I don't think so.

Right wing pundits want us to admire and emulate the rich. They want us to be in favor of policies that promote the rich. We too can be rich some day if only we are willing to work hard. We can all aspire to be Donald Trump and fly around in a helicopter with our name emblazoned on the side. The Pope takes the opposite tack. We should be in favor of policies that help the poor and middle: the 99%.

As I wrote previously:

... the Pope’s words are very important because he wields enormous moral authority. Would that the leading moral authorities from the world’s other major religions had the gumption to stand up and add their voices in the fight against climate change.

The Pope blames human greed for exploitation of the environment and an economic system that is geared to profit making rather than to rational development of natural resources which would benefit all mankind rather than just those at the top. The Pope’s 184 page encyclical is a radical statement: a condemnation of business as usual and a call for a restructuring our political and economic priorities.

To Save the Planet We Must Leave Fossil Fuels in the Ground

To be absolutely clear, we need to leave fossil fuels in the ground and convert to renewables as quickly as possible, not in a leisurely fashion. But this mindset obviously has not sunk in yet as corporations and countries seek to exploit the latest opportunity which has been provided by climate change itself: drilling for oil in the Arctic region at the top of the world. Global warming has proceeded twice as fast there as anywhere else with the result that the ice cap is melting, the Northwest passage is opening and drilling opportunities are presenting themselves. In addition shipping companies are lusting after the opportunity to shave miles off of shipping routes. Has anyone stopped to think about what an Exxon Valdez magnitude oil spill would mean in that pristine environment?

Whole communities in the Arctic are going to have to leave their traditional way of life and move elsewhere or be wiped out. The town of Kivalina, Alaska may cease to exist because the sea ice is melting making it too dangerous to hunt the whales which are their traditional source of food. In addition waves now wash across their town because there is no barrier protecting them any more. "Global warming has caused us so much problems," said Joseph Swan, Sr., a Kivalina elder. "The ice does not freeze like it used to. It used to be like 10 to 8 feet thick, way out in the ocean."

Meanwhile, corporations and countries are forging ahead to exploit Arctic resources seemingly totally oblivious to the need to leave the fossil fuels and the profits in the ground. The planet still holds vast reserves of fossil fuel that could be extracted economically. However, according to a new analysis, a third of the world’s oil, half of its gas, and 80 percent of its coal reserves, worth trillions of dollars, must remain unused if we are to have a good chance of avoiding potentially devastating climate change.

That means that a whole lot of people are going to have to squelch their primal urge to get rich and realize the capitalist and American dream of creating wealth for themselves. Leaving the exploitable profits behind is the anti-capitalist mindset that needs to be adopted if humanity is to survive. The lust for profit has characterized capitalist mentalities from time immemorial. Just one example: the "conquering" of the New World in the Age of Exploration in the 16th century. The explorers were after gold and other resources, and they didn't hesitate to kill indigenous people to get them.

How Do We Change the Capitalist Mentality When That is Essentially the American Dream?

So how to change that mentality and get people to cooperate and distribute the earth's resources more equitably, instead of seeking to gain selfishly, in order to save the planet and humanity as a whole? Will the US government's "slow as you go" reductions, which seek to reduce carbon emissions from US power plants, targeting a 32 percent drop from 2005 levels by 2030, be sufficient? Will the "cap and trade" approach which lets corporations continue to pollute if they pay other corporations for "credits" work? Will selfish capitalistic appeals to selfish interests work?

Naomi Klein doesn't think so. The author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, and one of the Pope's advisers, despite being a secular feminist, thinks that we have to change our selfish, capitalistic mentality if the earth is to remain habitable for human beings. Pope Francis agrees. The Dalai Lama agrees. Who doesn't agree? Capitalists and Republicans who want to maintain the "traditional way of American life." We should all aspire to get as rich as Donald Trump. You see America is based on capitalistic exploitation. It's traditional. If you changed that, America wouldn't be America any more.

So what do we need in order for Americans to listen and take this thing seriously? An American Pope? Someone in the position of authority to say we need to cooperate to save the West from burning up and consuming more and more financial resources just to fight fires? How much money will go to recover from Hurricanes like Katrina and Sandy? Do we need to convert the trillion dollars spent annually on the military-industrial complex to fighting fires?

This is money that needs to go to the prevention of these climate disasters in the first place which means money that needs to go to converting to renewables post haste not by 2030 or 2050. At the rate that climate disasters and extreme weather are manifesting themselves, major disasters requiring major amounts of money will be happening by 2030. Climate change refugees will be migrating from all over the world. The current European refugee crisis is just a harbinger of things to come. Wars will be fought over resources.

Who's going to pay for fighting wildfires - private corporations? The fossil fuel industry? I don't think so. All of us pay through taxes. Would you rather pay taxes to fight fires and house refugees or would you rather pay taxes to convert to renewables and leave fossil fuels in the ground? Of course there's another way to generate the money to convert to renewables at a faster rate.

It's the way Abraham Lincoln used to fight the Civil War, build the transcontinental railroad and construct the land grant colleges. He printed greenbacks, the 19th century version of quantitative easing that bypassed Wall Street and benefited all of America not just the rich. Today the government could just print the money with a few keystrokes on a computer, and, instead of giving it to Wall Street banks as it has done with its quantitative easing policy, it could just use it to create jobs converting to renewable energy at a faster rate. All dollars are fiat money meaning they aren't backed by gold or anything else. It's just that the current US policy of printing fiat money gives that money to the rich. It could just as well print fiat money and give it to the poor and middle instead: quantitative easing for the 99% instead of for the 1%.

Greenbacks could be printed again and used to put people to work converting our power plants to renewable solar on a massive scale. Subsidies could be given to get fossil fuel burning cars off the road and get people into electric vehicles in the same way that Obama initiated the "cash for clunkers" program. Well now, every gas burning internal combustion engine is a clunker that needs to come off the road. The government could make this happen if people were subsidized to the necessary extent. Electric vehicle production plants would be humming putting people back to work making good wages.

Caring More for the Earth and One Another Than Caring for Money

In The Leap Manifesto: A Call for Caring for the Earth and One Another Naomi Klein and others say:

We could live in a country powered entirely by renewable energy, woven together by accessible public transit, in which the opportunities of this transition are designed to eliminate racial and gender inequality. Caring for one another and caring for the planet could be the economy’s fastest growing sectors. Many more people could have higher wage jobs with fewer work hours, leaving us ample time to enjoy our loved ones and flourish in our communities.

Sound good? Bernie Sanders is calling for much the same thing. Of course this whole Ronald Reagan, Horatio Alger, rags-to-riches American dream of starting with nothing and becoming a billionaire will have to be seen for the sham that it is. None of these high tech billionaires, not Elon Musk, not Richard Branson, not Bill Gates, not Irwin Jacobs are going to come up with a technological solution that is magically going to "fix" the environment while keeping capitalism in place. Capitalism was never benign. And technology can be part of the solution, but it can't solve the inhumane basis of capitalism because it is part and parcel of it.

And what Bernie is talking about: if medicare-for-all, free community college, a financial transaction tax, raising taxes on the rich to where they were under the Republican Eisenhauer administration, if these measures are socialism, then count me in.

Francisco Pizarro conquered Peru in order to steal its gold from the Incan empire. He captured the Incan chief, Atahuelpa, and demanded a ranson of a roomful of gold. After taking the gold he killed Atahuelpa anyway. This is the legacy of capitalism. Regarding money more than human lives. The veritable worship of money for money's sake. This is the Wall Street mentality. Who cares about the earth? Sissies that's who. Real men are conquistadors. They conquer. All is fair in love and war. I guess that means that rape is fair because that happens in love and war.

Last year, 2014, was the hottest on earth since record-keeping began in 1880 underscoring warnings about the risks of runaway greenhouse gas emissions and undermining claims by climate change contrarians that global warming had somehow stopped.

Extreme heat blanketed Alaska and much of the western United States last year. Records were set across large areas of every inhabited continent. And the ocean surface was unusually warm virtually everywhere except near Antarctica providing the energy that fueled damaging Pacific storms.

But don't look over here. Keep you eyes on the antics of Donald Trump who wants to build a wall along the Mexican border. Note to Trump: with regard to immigration, you haven't seen anything yet. You could follow Hungary and build a wall, but what is the world going to do with all the refugees otherwise known as illegal immigrants - put them in concentration camps? Climate change refugees are already on the move. This is only the beginning. All the capitalists and billionaires in the world cannot solve this problem within the constraints of capitalism and American fundamentalism.

Some hopeful signs: in July 2015 anti-fossil fuel protests swept Vermont and Maine. The actions, along with others across the United States and Canada, were staged in remembrance of the Lac-Mégantic rail disaster on July 6, 2013, when a 74-car freight train carrying crude oil derailed and exploded in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, killing 47 people and destroying much of the town. "Fossil fuels are harmful and violent to communities along every point of production, from extraction to combustion," said Meaghan LaSala, a member of SEEDs for Justice in Maine. "We’re here to say that we’re not going to let the oil be transported by train along Lake Champlain any longer."

I will close with a quote from my collaborator, Frank Thomas, whose erudition on this subject is nonpareil:

"The risks to Mother Earth are simply too great to gamble on a "life as usual" acceptance of a potentially massive ecological and human extermination event – especially knowing the speed and scale of the CO₂ and CH₄ pollution trend line we are now on. Placing all bets and blame on cycles and natural variability for the obvious human disproportionate disturbance of nature’s environmental balance on the only planet known to harbor human life … is a bet we should all pass on for the sake of our children’s children and their children’s children."

Qualcomm Stadium: a Boondoggle from the Get-Go?

From the original San Diego Free Press circa 1968, we reprint the rundown on Qualcomm Stadium

Transcribed by John Lawrence

Hi, sports fans. Big Jim here.

Well, fans, there is a big spat brewing in major league San Diego and from this experienced observer's view the losers in this main event are going to be the city's middle- and lower-income taxpayers.

This whole new controversy is revolving around that great concrete muskmelon in Mission Valley, the San Diego Stadium.

As the Free Press goes to the printers, the news is out that the City of San Diego is suing the San Diego Chargers for one year's back rent (more than $200,000). The Chargers apparently have decided that they don't want to pay rent, at least not for the next seven years.

But that is just one of a long series of rubs - one of the first rubs in how that stadium got there in the first place.

Who Wants It?

The San Diego Stadium holds 50,000 people. The city of San Diego holds nearly 800,000 people. This means that 750,000 people in San Diego couldn't use the stadium on a day that everyone decided to see a ball game. But that doesn't mean that these 750,000 squabbling over a knot hole in the stadium's wall, are not paying for the place.

The stadium and its accoutrements cost $27.75 million, ostensibly. Actually, after interest is paid on the stadium's bonds, the total cost of it is at least $52.4 million.

The stadium is the brain child of local millionaires, who euphemistically call themselves "sportsmen," who emphatically pointed out to the public that property taxes would never be used to pay back the principle and interest on a the stadium bonds.

Instead of using property tax, these sports czars explained, the City would pick up the tab with the sales tax it received back from the state, along with some other revenues (which ultimately proved to have originated as sales tax, too).

The local media played the sports czars' tune with feeling, assuring the public that the stadium would cost little more than a "Yes" vote on the Stadium proposal on the November, 1965, general election ballot. And 100,000 of the 140,000 voters that turned out swallowed the bait.

No economist would argue against the notion that sales taxes are the most regressive form of tax we have. That means that the middle- and lower-income families are the hardest hit and carry the heaviest burden of sales taxes, while the wealthy are hardly scathed.

On the other hand, equitably administered property taxes put the brunt of the cost on the people most capable of bearing it and who ultimately benefit most from projects like sports stadiums - the wealthy.

(Even though equitably administered property taxes only exist in Camelot, they are still less burden on the middle-and lower-income families than are sales taxes. Dubious homeowners should sit down one day and figure how much they pay in sales tax compared to property tax each year.)

But the people have been conditioned to believe (by corporate media and those corporations who exercise control over them through advertising) that property tax is their ultimate bugaboo — and 100,000 of more than 600,000 San Diegans voted "Yes" on the stadium proposal.

So let's take a look at the old score board and see who's winning in the final quarter.

Sports czars ahead!

This far in the game, the middle- and lower- classes seem to be trailing. About 17 percent of San Diego's 1965 population committed the people of San Diego to pay $144 million annually for the next 35 years. People's score: minus $52,4 million.

Local and out- of- state contractors, architects and building suppliers hauled in $15.5 million on the stadium's construction and about another $12.3 million in trimmings. Construction companies' score: $27.8 million.

Two Chicago bond houses won the stadium bond issue at 3.94126 percent interest. Chicago financiers' score: $24.7 million of tax-free profit.

Motel and restaurant interests in San Diego anticipated an increased annual take of $24.9 million because of stadium visitors. Motel and restaurant interests score: $24.9 million annually.

The San Diego Chargers, whose annual revenue has risen from $660,000 in 1962 to $2.1 million last year, are demanding that they be allowed the use of the stadium rent tree for the next seven years. If they get away with this, they will augment their already mounting earnings by an estimated $2 million for those years. A great deal of their earning power was directly a result of the stadium. Chargers' score is difficult to determine but in the neighborhood of $3 million annually.

The San Diego Padres baseball team has worked out a [indecipherable] deal with the City administration. For the next seven years they will pay eight percent of their ticket sales to the City as rent.

The City estimates that this will amount to $500,000 annually. But then the City turns around and pays the Padres (going under the name of the San Diego Stadium Management Company) $306,000 each year to manage the stadium.

This will make the Padres actual rent about $194,000 per year. The Padres score, by the City's own figures: slightly over $6 million gross.

How does that grab you, sports fans? It looks like San Diego's "sportsmen" have learned something from San Diego's defense industries about government subsidy.

Welfare for the Rich

In 1965, when the designs were laid for the San Diego Stadium, the city manager, then Tom Fletcher, admitted that the stadium would not be an earning proposition. He estimated that with just a major league football team the stadium would make about $120,000 annually. If the City were to pick a Major league baseball franchise, the figure might be boosted to $340,000.

This amount, he explained, would go toward retiring the  interest and principle on the stadium bonds, about $1.5 million yearly.

What Fletcher forgot to tell us was that the City would lose property tax revenues on the 166 acres on which the stadium stands. In 1965, the land was valued at $4.1 million. At present property tax rates, the City is losing between $100 000 and $120,000 each year. As Mission Valley property values soar in the next decade, these losses will be compounded. 

Defenders of the stadium argue that in 35 years the stadium will be all paid off and be a "real moneymaker" for the people of San Diego.

In 35 years- - considering our present rate of architectural and technological growth -- the San Diego Stadium will look to us like the Whaley house looks to us now.

There will be groups of "sportsmen" wanting to tear it down and set out on another publicly subsidized project (unless, of course, today's revolutionary groups haven't changed all that by then), and there will be groups of monument minders who will want to preserve the structure for historical reasons.

Who Let the White Elephant in?

Why did such a beast ever get by the voters? Because there was no critical media. There was no scrappy little newspaper like the San Diego Free Press. There were only corporate mass media intent on getting a piece of the action.

James Copley, owner-publisher of the San Diego Union-Evening Tribune, certainly wasn't going to torpedo the stadium. He owns about a million dollars worth of the Chargers.

That's about all for this issue, sports fans. Next issue Big Jim will really lay some heavy facts on you about who, how and how much on that concrete muskmelon. There should be some really interesting playbacks on the San Diego sport czars.

In the meantime, Big Jim is going to see about opening up a jock strap factory and having the City of San Diego subsidize me, because, after all, "It's not whether you win or lose that counts; it's how your capital gains!"

How Our Stadium Saved Hilton's Ego & Other Chuckles To Cry Over

by Jim Knastick   (Part 2 of a 3 part Article)

Hi sports fans. Big Jim, again.

Well, fans, last issue - - when we looked into that great muskmelon in Mission Valley - - we found a bill for $52 million addressed for the little taxpayer in San Diego and nothing but profits for local sports czars (your druggist knows them as merchants, financiers and industrialists).

Current vignette, fans: Taking Care of Barron.

The Boys Club

The story of our stadium goes back to late 1959 when Lamar Hunt, son of the right-wing zealot billionaire H.L. Hunt, Bud Adams, Jr., son of the chairman of the Phillips Petroleum company, and Barron Hilton, son of the hotel magnate Conrad, pitched together several million dollars to create the American Football League.

Hunt was suffering a rebuff by the National Football League that had just refused to grant him an NFL franchise for Dallas. So he threw in with Adams to form his own league.

Hunt took a Dallas franchise, Adams took one for Houston and they set up six others. The Los Angeles franchise went to Barron Hilton.

As head of the Carte Blanche credit card company, Hilton decided to call his team the Los Angeles Chargers in hope of stimulating business.

In its first year of operation the AFL had a combined loss of $4.5 million. Hunt bore the heaviest losses - - $1 million, and Hilton ran a close second at $900,000.

It took Hilton less than a sing [?] to draw only 11,000 people in the LA Coliseum, which holds 101,000. The day they won the AFL’s Western Divisional Championship they drew 9,900.

It took Hilton less than that year to decide that his AFL Chargers were no competition for the LA Rams. He found it very embarrassing to draw only 11,000.

Hilton knew he had to do something. His old man couldn't bail him out; he was too busy trying to keep Castro from taking over the Havana Hilton.

Then young Hilton smelled a fish to the south: San Diego. The local sports czars (though still would-be) also smelled a fish: the public. The "civic leaders" of San Diego fell all over themselves to get the Chargers to move to San Diego, which they eventually did - - but not before Hilton got a promise from the City government to make some improvements in the Chargers' future home, the Balboa Stadium.

Hilton wanted the Balboa Stadium's seating accommodations increased from 22,000 to 34,500 seats at the City's expense.

The City followed Hilton's bidding. The cost was estimated at $800,000 originally. By the time the work was done the cost was $1.5 million. Then the Chargers' rent was waived for the first year and only a pittance was paid in successive years.

During a series of preseason exhibition games, the largest audience the Chargers could draw was 13,000 paid admissions. Charger stock, which had sold at $3 a share when the team first moved to San Diego, dropped to $2.25. It slowly inched back up to its original price after the Chargers had a winning streak during the regular season. Even then their games did little better than draw an average of 30,000 spectators, and Hilton began to feverishly look for buyers.

Enter Sports Czars

As Hilton was trying to find himself (or whatever else he was trying to find in San Diego), a group of 200 San Diego "sportsmen" organized the Greater San Diego Sports Association (GSDSA).

These men, heads of banks, bottling companies, contracting and construction firms, stated the aims of the Association as: 1. seeking a major league baseball franchise for San Diego. 2. boosting the Chargers, and 3. getting an all-purpose stadium built.

George Kirksey, the man who ramrodded a $22 million bond issue in Houston for the Astrodome, was the keynote speaker at the GSDSA organizational meeting. A. B. Polinsky, the head of the San Diego Coca- Cola Bottling Company was named as the acting president.

From the time of its inception the GSDSA had been bucking for a multi-purpose stadium. It came as no surprise in December, 1963, when Mayor Curran appointed GSDSA president, Paul Carter, to preside over The Mayor's All-American Stadium Committee, another group of "sportsmen" that was delegated the responsibility of determining the feasibility of the stadium.

The Committee was authorized by the City to spend $100,000 on the study. When the announcement was made, City officials said that they hoped private funds would be used. Apparently almost the whole amount came from the public's purse.

Other members of the All-American Stadium Committee included William Black, president of the Bank of La Jolla; William Elser, president of the Elser Elevator Company; Kenneth H. Golden, head of the Kenneth H. Golden Construction Company and a director of the City Bank of San Diego; A. B. Polinsky, head of Coca-Cola here; and Harry Sugarman who ran his own investment company. (These are among others about whose sports interests Big Jim wonders.)

Bailing Out Barron

Rumors have it that by 1964, Barron Hilton was spending more time knocking on the doors of prospective buyers for his team and franchise than he was with his team. He was also threatening to move the team to another city.

Should he actually move the team to another city, all justification for building a stadium (replete with lots of tasty profits for the czars) would be lost. So once more Paul Carter made another unsurprising entrance. This time it was before the City Council in August, 1964.

Carter pleaded with the Council to put a $25 million "general obligation" bond issue on the November, 1964, general election ballot.

The deadline for putting issues on the ballot was drawing near, and Carter told the Council, "We have to place something on the ballot now or we are cooked for another year." That Carter's committee was still waiting on the $35,000 stadium feasibility study that wasn't due until October, might make Big Jim think that Carter was in something of a hurry.

But the cooler heads prevailed, to both the chagrin of Paul Carter and Barron Hilton. A general obligation bond issue would have required approval by 2/3's of San Diego's registered voters.

William Quirk, president of the San Diego Chamber of Commerce at the time, told the Council that Carter's proposal "reflected poor timing" because there wasn't sufficient time to "mount a campaign that will guarantee passage of the bond issue." If the bonds lost November, 1964, Quirk explained, the stadium measure would be set back for years. Besides, he added, the bond issue could jeopardize other ballot issues. (Other ballot issues included pay raises for Council members and the Mayor.)

Hilton was dejected when the Council announced that it wou1d not act to put the bond issue on the November ballot.

It was about then that Hilton, who knew little about the odd machinations of San Diego's fine establishment, started to sell his team to C. Arnholt Smith, a local industrialist (and owner of the San Diego Padres) who knows plenty about the machinations of San Diego's establishment. The sale price was set at a pitiful $750,000, which would just start to cover his first year losses in Los Angeles.

Then, apparently, someone put a bug in Hilton's ear, and he dropped the idea like a hot football.

Super Campaign

All through 1965, San Diego "sportsmen" waged a super campaign. Their theme was that the stadium would be a boon for local tourism, which they stressed was some kind of panacea for the San Diego economy.

Tourism's appeal is based on the remembrances of the '50s and the defense layoffs. Obviously, explained the "sportsmen," the stadium would bolster tourism and take San Diego's economic emphasis away from defense. (Well, fans, tourism accounted for about 6 percent of San Diego' s gross income last year, while the 11th Naval District made up 25 percent. San Diego's 5 largest corporations are General Dynamics Convair, Ryan, Rohr, Solar and National Steel and Shipbuilding Company. San Diego is the same old war baby it has always been.)

Despite the chest beating of stadium boosters, public support wasn't really very strong during the campaign (or at the polling places for that matter).

The Citizens for a Stadium, the only campaign committee for the stadium, reported only receiving $932.25 in contributions of $10 or less (if each, of all those contributions in this category, gave only $1, that's only 932 and 1/4 people.

The $11 to $25 contribution category amounted to $660. Considering that the total contributions were $39,617.09, small contributions only accounted for 4% of the committee's backing.

All contributions over $25 were listed by the contributor at the City Clerk’s office, and, fans, let Big Jim tell you that they're interesting. Surprisingly, the GSDSA was the second largest contributor. They only contributed $10,000. But what's more interesting is the first and third highest contributors, The Associated General Contractors of San Diego County and The San Diego County Rock Producers Association, respectively.

The General Contractors describe their Association as an organization of local "heavy construction contractors, the builders of freeways, airports, dams and high rise structures." They contributed $12,500.

The Rock Producers Association is an organization of 18 local transit mix concrete companies, cement and sand and gravel companies. They donated $4,000. Rancho Bernardo, Inc. contributed almost $3,000, and the San Diego Pepsi-Cola Bottling Company (then headed by the late Frank Alessio) put $500 on the line. A Schlitz-Burgie and Lucky Lager distributor put up $1,000. And the list goes on, with many $50 contributions from all sections of the White-Power-Structure.

By the registration deadline, September, 1965 there were over 244,000 registered voters in San Diego. Only 140,000 voters showed at the polls in November. According to Big Jim's slide rule, that’s about 58 percent of the registered, and only 100,000 voted "Yes" on the stadium proposal – that’s 41 percent of the city’s registered voters.

But, then, the average fan is asking himself, how did the stadium get built?

Well, fans, the City wanted to simplify the administration of the bonds, according to the City. So it did an appendectomy on the "general obligation" bond (like Big Jim said, that would have required a 2/3’s vote of all registered voters) and changed it into a City charter amendment (which requires only a simple majority of people voting).

The charter amendment proposed to form a "joint power agreement" between the City and the County governments to administer the stadium, hold title to it and to issue bonds for its construction.

Magic Tally

After the election, all the City’s czars were beating their chests, bragging about the "72 percent landslide victory". Home safe, a local sportswriter said that he wanted to "make it clear once and for all" that what the public voted on wasn't a general obligation bond issue, but a charter amendment. Big Jim felt badly that the sportswriter (who has been described as the richest small town sportswriter in the country and was a member of the GSDSA) didn't tell his readers that before the election.

The charter amendment's bond wording leaves the so-called Stadium Authority an open-ended power to issue bonds. So the idea that they will only issue $27 million of bonds ain't necessarily so. If  they wanted to, they could issue bonds from now through the next 50 years.

Barron Is Back In The Saddle

After the new stadium was approved, Barron Hilton was a new man. During a half-time ceremony in Balboa Stadium, Hilton walked onto a platform before thousands of San Diegans and signed a ten-year occupancy agreement, saying that the Chargers would pay 10 per-cent gross of all ticket sales at the new stadium and receive a third of all concession and parking profits.

Less than a year later (to show his gratitude to San Diego), he sold the controlling interest of the Chargers to two Los Angeles tycoons for $10 million. Quite an improvement over $750,000 eh, fans? Well, fans, Big Jim is running out of newspaper faster than he's running out of facts and other historical curiosities. So I guess Big Jim will stretch this out one more issue after this one so we can take a look at how the contracts were awarded and where those profitable bonds went.

Until next time, fans, this is Big Jim with a few late scores off the sports wire: $3.5 million to $329,000; $275,000 to $578,000; and $20.1 million to $1.95.

Big Jim Says: ‘Let’s Put the Lid on Her, Sportsfans.’

Part Three of a Two Part Series

Hi, sports fans. Big Jim, King of the Sport Freaks, here.

Everybody in the press box is getting upset with Big Jim taking up so much newspaper, so I’m going to wrap up the stadium thing, PDQ.

When construction bids were open for the stadium, the lowest bidder was from a group of three companies: Alex Robertson and W. D. Larsen companies of San Diego and the Donovan Construction Company of St. Paul.

Their bid was $14,082,240. The other two bids were about $15.4 million and $15.8 million, therefore the Robertson, Larsen and Donovan bid was accepted.

But, alas, the City Manager of that day, Tom Fletcher, exclaimed at what a bargain that was -- such a bargain that he and the City Council approved an additional $1.5 million worth of keen 'additions,' including some extra elevators, escalators, a restaurant and such.

That put the final cost above the bid of the next highest bidder.

Not that the costs stopped there, either.

By the time the actual edifice was completed, the Robertson, Larsen and Donovan people had submitted about 50 changes in cost to the City Council for approval. The City was free with its approval. The cost changes amounted to $620,433 above the $15,546,891 figure - - totaling $16,167,324.

That is more than $2 million above the original bid and almost $400,000 above the highest of the three original bids. How does that grab you, sales tax fans?

Robertson-Larsen-Donovan wasn't the only company submitting price changes. All in all there were probably several hundred cost changes by people who had one kind of contract or other on that silly stadium.

Then there is the question of the bonds that were issued to pay for the stadium.

The latter part of 1965 and early 1966 were excellent times for selling municipal bonds. People were looking around to jump on the next issuance of bonds and interest rates were low.

Today, tax-free municipal bonds are getting interest rates as high as 5.1 per cent. In the days of the stadium bonds, they were only getting about 4 per cent -- that means there were a lot of people interested in getting hold of the bonds. So one might ask, "How do we assure ourselves that insiders involved in the issuance of the bonds don't take unfair advantage of their knowledge in making a bid?"

Two Chicago bond houses submitted the lowest bid on the bonds: 3.969847 percent. That amounts to $24,672,203.74 of tax-free profit over a period of 35 years.

There are a lot of Chicago interests in San Diego and vice versa. So, Big Jim asked himself, "Where did that money go?"

Big Jim called the City Treasurer’s office and asked who received the bonds. The people there said they didn't know. They thought it went to two Chicago bond houses. "Sure," said Big Jim, "but they are only middle-men. Do you know where they went after that?"

"No," said the City, "All we care about is that we got the money."

Big Jim then learned that Southern California First National Bank (SCFN) was the trustee for the stadium authority. So Big Jim called their trust department and they were unaware (or so they said) as to where the bonds went.

(Little vignette, fans: You may already know that the Foodmaker Company - -Jack-in-the-Box - - owns a controlling interest in Southern California First National. According to the recent Patman report on bank trust departments, SCFN has 73 percent of all San Diego's trust funds and one of its directors, Richard T. Silberman, is head of the Stadium Authority, the people authorized to spend stadium money.

Rumor has it that SCFN branch drive-thru windows are serving Bonusburgers to anyone with one hundred or more dollars in their checking accounts.

That's enough for now, sports fans. But remember, this week is International Eat the Rich Week, paying tribute to one of the fastest growing indoor sports in the world.

The Fight Against GMOs and Toxic Food

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

While Other Countries Ban GMOs, US Congress Endorses Them

Scotland has banned genetically modified organisms (GMOs) within its country. "Scotland is known around the world for our beautiful natural environment—and banning growing genetically modified crops will protect and further enhance our clean, green status," said rural affairs secretary Richard Lochhead. Here in the US the fight is just for the right to know that a food product should be labeled as GMO, and that's not going so well.

Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 1599, the Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act of 2015. This is BS, of course, since the bill's real purpose is to preempt the rights of state and local governments to pass laws requiring the mandatory labeling of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), to overturn GMO labeling laws already in place in several states, and to prevent the passage of any federal mandatory GMO labeling law in the future. So there is no free speech insofar as knowing what's in something we are eating is concerned. The law's attempt is to suppress truth in labeling.

GMOs were developed primarily to be resistant to Monsanto's Roundup so that Roundup could be sprayed directly on crops and only the weeds would die. So whether or not GMO corn and soybeans are good or bad for you, the presence of poison sprayed on them can't be too good for human consumers when they eat such crops. Especially crops such as grapes and apples which have very thin skins and are vulnerable to soaking up the herbicides and pesticides sprayed on them.

The GMO process starts with the seeds only available from Monsanto which grow into the Roundup resistant corn and soybeans which must be purchased on an annual basis from Monsanto. Farmers who save seeds from the current crop are subject to lawsuits by Monsanto which claims the GMO seeds as their intellectual private property.

Food activist Vandana Shiva has been delivering a message that she has honed for nearly three decades: by engineering, patenting, and transforming seeds into costly packets of intellectual property, multinational corporations such as Monsanto, with considerable assistance from the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the United States government, and even philanthropies like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are attempting to impose “food totalitarianism” on the world. She describes the fight against agricultural biotechnology as a global war against a few giant seed companies on behalf of the billions of farmers who depend on what they themselves grow to survive. Shiva contends that nothing less than the future of humanity rides on the outcome.

Ever increasing amounts of Monsanto's poison are being sprayed on crops that American consumers are eating as super weeds have adapted to the stuff and are growing bigger than ever requiring more and more Roundup to kill them. The only rational solution is to go back to natural organic ways of dealing with weeds and pests as Monsanto's GMO crops are not sustainable. The only rationale for using Monsanto's GMO seeds and herbicides is that the farmers can get a larger crop yield per acre and thus make more money. But quality rather than quantity is what savvy American consumers are demanding more and more. So the market for organic food is growing. Organic food is non-GMO food that hasn't been sprayed with pesticides or herbicides. With regard to animals they haven't been fed GMO corn or soy and haven't been given antibiotics or hormones.

San Diego Loves Roundup

San Diego is spraying Monsanto's Roundup (generic name - glyphosate) all over its freeways, public lands and waterways exposing San Diegans to this poison whenever they are driving or boating. In a letter to the editor of the San Diego Union, Susan Trump of North Part said this:

San Diego is liberally using Roundup, glyphosate, on public lands and waterways.

Entire countries such as France, Sri Lanka, Brazil and South Africa are banning the substance. We are past the age of ignorance. We understand the consequences and it is generally known that Roundup is not safe for humans, plants, insects or animals, yet its use continues to the extent that it is now in the food supply.

San Diego has just sued Monsanto for similar reasons. This must stop.

This month a French court confirmed Monsanto was guilty of chemical poisoning. Also in September 2015, Latvia and Greece Kicked Monsanto Out and Opted to Ban GM Crops!

San Diego Dr Robert J Rowen says:

What does your grocery shelf and San Diego’s bay water have in common? Monsanto and its poisons!

...

According to the French agency, glyphosate is used in more than 750 different herbicide products and its use has been detected in the air during spraying, in water and in food. Experts said there was "limited evidence" in humans that the herbicide can cause non-Hodgkins lymphoma and there is convincing evidence that glyphosate can also cause other forms of cancer in rats and mice. IARC's panel said glyphosate has been found in the blood and urine of agricultural workers, showing the chemical has been absorbed by the body.

Monsanto, which produces the glyphosate-containing herbicide, Roundup, strongly disagreed with the decision. "All labeled uses of glyphosate are safe for human health," said Phil Miller, a Monsanto spokesman, in a statement. (Did you know that this horrible stuff is routinely found in toxic screening on umbilical cord blood in our babies?)

And what did our own EPA say about this compound? “The EPA's 2012 assessment of glyphosate concluded that it met the statutory safety standards and that the chemical could "continue to be used without unreasonable risks to people or the environment."

About 180 million pounds per year are dumped on your food. It’s a systemic poison for plants, meaning the entire plant takes it up. More is deliberately dumped on “Roundup Ready” soy, etc. They are literally drenched and drowning in the toxic soup. Monsanto engineered crops to be resistant to a chemical it can more readily sell. It’s a win-win for the most evil company on the planet. Make and sell seeds of crops resistant to a poison it sells. And buy the government so that you will not be able to be informed if what you buy is GMO, and where possible get these bought off cronies to spoon-feed the public that your wares are safe. Now an ignorant public will be forced to buy and ingest your Frankenfoods and all the cancer causing poisons that have been sprayed on them. What a tremendous and diabolical scheme.

In a major victory for  activists, it was announced last week that the California Environmental Protection Agency is planning to label Monsanto’s RoundUp herbicide as a cancer-causing chemical.

Nathan Donley, staff scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity in San Francisco said that this is a major victory in the fight against dangerous pesticides.

“California’s taking an important step toward protecting people and wildlife from this toxic pesticide. It’s nearly impossible for people to limit exposure to this toxin because it is just so widespread. That’s why we need much tighter controls on its use,” Donley said.

“More than 250 million pounds of glyphosate are used each year in the United States, and the science is clear that it’s a threat to public health and countless wildlife species. It’s long past time to start reining in the out-of-control use of glyphosate in the United States,” he added.

Shop Organic for the Sake of Your Family's Health

So shopping organic and buying from local farmers makes more sense if you want to protect your family's health. GMO crops won't kill you immediately. Glyphosate won't kill you immediately. That's safe to say. But cancer rates are going skyward for all segments of the population as toxic chemicals permeate our diets and our lifestyles. There is no proven link between GMOs and cancer, but common sense dictates that unnatural chemicals as part of our diet aren't good for us regardless of the lower prices for such foods. It's better to pay a little more and protect your family's health. Like cigarettes, GMOs sprayed with glyphosate won't kill you immediately, but cancer will eventually get you. Monsanto's role is to deny the link between the two as long as they possibly can.

To be sure GMOs allow for more food production per acre if you want to call it food. It's actually Frankenfood. But the demographics of the growth of human population are indeed scary:

The global food supply is indeed in danger. Feeding the expanding population without further harming the Earth presents one of the greatest challenges of our time, perhaps of all time. By the end of the century, the world may well have to accommodate ten billion inhabitants—roughly the equivalent of adding two new Indias. Sustaining that many people will require farmers to grow more food in the next seventy-five years than has been produced in all of human history. For most of the past ten thousand years, feeding more people simply meant farming more land. That option no longer exists; nearly every arable patch of ground has been cultivated, and irrigation for agriculture already consumes seventy per cent of the Earth’s freshwater.

But we shouldn't panic and conclude that GMOs are the only way to go. There are natural methods to produce more food. One way is to reduce the production of beef and encourage a more vegetarian diet. Beef cows consume tremendous amounts of grains in order to produce one pound of meat. If humans consumed the grains directly, more could be fed and more water would be available for human consumption rather than the vast quantities required for animal production.

In addition beef cows are fed tremendous amounts of hormones and antibiotics in order to fatten them up and grow to maturity faster. Whatever animal protein humans consume should be organic for the same reasons that vegetables need to be non-GMO and organic if one's family's health means more than the slightly increased dietary costs. Money can be saved by not eating out which costs about five times as much as the same meal prepared at home, and what's more most restaurants are serving GMO and non-organic foods. Most restaurants are serving GMO foods and animals who have consumed them unless stated otherwise. Their whole trip is to make foods taste good without regard to whether or not those foods are good for you. So you pay through the nose and get a dose of poison to boot.

If you need more reasons to avoid GMO foods, here's a few:

1. The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) urges doctors to prescribe non-GMO diets for all patients. They cite animal studies showing organ damage, gastrointestinal and immune system disorders, accelerated aging, and infertility. Human studies show how genetically modified (GMO) food can leave material behind inside us, possibly causing long-term problems. Genes inserted into GM soy, for example, can transfer into the DNA of bacteria living inside us, and that the toxic insecticide produced by GM corn was found in the blood of pregnant women and their unborn fetuses.

2. Between 1996 and 2008, US farmers sprayed an extra 383 million pounds of herbicide on GMOs. Overuse of Roundup results in "superweeds," resistant to the herbicide. This is causing farmers to use even more toxic herbicides every year. Not only does this create environmental harm, GM foods contain higher residues of toxic herbicides. Roundup, for example, is linked with sterility, hormone disruption, birth defects, and cancer.

3. Most of the health and environmental risks of GMOs are ignored by governments' superficial regulations and safety assessments. The reason for this tragedy is largely political. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), for example, doesn't require a single safety study, does not mandate labeling of GMOs, and allows companies to put their GM foods onto the market without even notifying the agency.

Their justification was the claim that they had no information showing that GM foods were substantially different. But this was a lie. Secret agency memos made public by a lawsuit show that the overwhelming consensus even among the FDA's own scientists was that GMOs can create unpredictable, hard-to-detect side effects. They urged long-term safety studies. But the White House had instructed the FDA to promote biotechnology, and the agency official in charge of policy was Michael Taylor, Monsanto's former attorney, later their vice president. He's now the US Food Safety Czar.

Will the US be the Last to Ban Monsanto's GMOs?

Many other countries are not falling for Monsanto's corporate nonsense and are labeling or outright banning GMOs. As I wrote previously:

Russia is considering legislation to criminalize GMO foods describing GMO food producers as terrorists. France, the largest agricultural producer in Europe, is preparing to restore a GMO maize ban in their country. Twenty-six countries, including Switzerland, Australia, Austria, China, India, France, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, Greece, Bulgaria, Poland, Italy and Mexico, have a total or partial ban on GMOs. Significant restrictions on GMOs exist in about sixty other countries.

Why does the US insist on doing the opposite by passing legislation that prevents states from banning or even labeling GMOs?

Even supposedly healthy restaurants like Subway are purveying meats from animals that have been factory farmed. This means they have been fed vast quantities of pesticide and herbicide sprayed corn and soy. They have been given huge amounts of antibiotics and hormones. Then they are made into sandwiches that people eat.

This is from an article by Reynard Loki, How Subway Sandwiches Are Fueling a Major Public Health Crisis:

Subway's slogan is, "Eat fresh." But while the company may have established itself as the "healthy" fast-food alternative, many people don't realize that as the world's largest fast food chain, it is also contributing to a serious public health crisis, animal cruelty and environmental damage due to the company's use of meat from factory farmed animals. These filthy and inhumane operations cause an incomprehensible amount of animal suffering, poison our air, land and water, and give rise to antibiotic-resistant bacteria that impact human health.

...

"Every year, more than two million people in the United States get infections that are resistant to antibiotics and at least 23,000 people die as a result," according to a 2013 report issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "In addition to the illness and deaths caused by resistant bacteria, the report found that C. difficile, a serious diarrheal infection usually associated with antibiotic use, causes at least 250,000 hospitalizations and 14,000 deaths every year."

...

“Without urgent, coordinated action by many stakeholders, the world is headed for a post-antibiotic era, in which common infections and minor injuries which have been treatable for decades can once again kill,” said Dr. Keiji Fukuda of WHO. “Effective antibiotics have been one of the pillars allowing us to live longer, live healthier, and benefit from modern medicine. Unless we take significant actions to improve efforts to prevent infections and also change how we produce, prescribe and use antibiotics, the world will lose more and more of these global public health goods and the implications will be devastating.”

The antibiotics used to fatten animals are hastening the day when they won't be effective against antibiotic-resistant bacteria and humans will die from minor infections as they used to before antibiotics were invented. And this is all so that factory farmers can make a few more dollars by bringing animals to market in less time.

Unless Americans wise up to where their food is coming from particularly restaurant foods, they are putting themselves at risk for diseases for which there aren't proven links to toxic substances in the food supply. These toxicities are put there so the corporate food giants and corporate farmers can make more money than they would have if they had supplied food products which hadn't been sprayed with toxic substances or had toxic foods fed to animals which are then butchered and fed to humans. As long as the link between these practices and actual human disease remains hazy, these corporations will continue to get away with it much as the cigarette manufacturers got away with selling a product that it took years to prove that it was cancer causing.

Extreme Weather Watch: August 2015 - The Western US Burns Up

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

Wildfires swept through the states of Washington, Idaho, Oregon and northern California in a record setting conflagration. Thousands of firefighters from all over the world tried to protect houses, but, nevertheless, hundreds burned. A call went out for volunteers and thousands have responded.

Thousands have been evacuated. The cost is soaring past what state and Federal budgets can afford. The choice is to let the West burn up or bankrupt state and national budgets. The Forest Service is spending $10 million a day to fight wildfires.

In 1995 16% of the Forest Service's budget went to fight forest fires. Today it's 52% with 70% predicted in the next decade if present trends continue. US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said, "No one wants our Forest Service to become one large fire department," but that is exactly what is happening. Vilsack said the federal government has spent more than $1 billion fighting this year’s deadly wildfires

Wildfires across the U.S. have burned a massive 8 million acres so far this year, an area larger than the state of Maryland. It's the largest total for the same period over the last decade, but more than 5 million of those acres have been in rural Alaska. This year a total of 3,382 fires have burned in Oregon and Washington with 93 categorized as large fires. Four new wildfires sparked to life near the end of August, bringing the total acreage scorched this year in Washington and Oregon alone to just over 1 million acres, according to the national Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.

According to the Washington Post, there are only six other years that have seen more than 8 million acres burned — 2012, 2011, 2007, 2006, 2005, and 2004 — based on National Interagency Fire Center records that date back to 1960. It is hard not to notice that all of these years came since the year 2000. The United States remains at wildfire preparedness level 5 — the highest level — where it has been since Aug. 13.

Fires weren't the only the disruption of normal life that was of concern. Almost the entire state of Idaho was under an air quality alert as ash and particles from fires blew downwind, creating health hazards for those outdoors. Large swaths of eastern Washington, eastern Oregon and western Montana were under similar warnings. People with asthma and other breathing problems were at high risk.

Air sensors in some portions of central Idaho around the Nez Perce tribal reservation showed the air quality index reaching “hazardous” levels — the highest possible designation — with values higher than 300 on the scale, the worst in the state. That's the level at which officials urge residents not to do any physical activity outdoors.

A 400 square mile group of wildfires was called the largest in Washington State's history by officials. This was the Okanogan Complex which killed three firefighters, injured four and burned 200 homes. This fire began with a lightning strike on August 15. More than 1,200 firefighters and support personnel were battling the Okanogan Complex fire. Firefighters battled 17 major blazes burning across more than 400,000 acres in Washington. Residents in the popular recreation centers in Twisp and Winthrop in the scenic Methow River Valley were forced to evacuate.

The Chelan complex fire in Washington state covers about 100,000 acres. To date it is only 65% contained. 21 residences have burned. The cost so far is $13.9 million. There have been 9 injuries. Crews secured the fireline around Hungry Mountain. The fire spotted over the line in a few places on its northwest tip, and crews worked to contain those spot fires.

A hotshot crew assessed the area northwest of Rainy Creek, looking for opportunities to directly suppress the fire. However, the difficult-to-traverse terrain makes the area too dangerous for firefighters. They continue to use aircraft to hold the fire within established lines as they develop a sound strategy for the area. Structure-protection crews continue to defend structures. 9 crews, 48 engines, 6 dozers, 22 water tenders and 4 helicopters battled the fires which continue to burn.

Tens of thousands of firefighters battled to get the upper hand against dozens of large blazes across the West and Northwest. In California, the Summit fire in the San Bernardino Mountains near the resort community of Big Bear Lake burned 100 acres, threatened hundreds of homes and caused most area schools to be closed.

Inciweb, an aggregating website for U.S. wildfires, reported 40 active fires in California alone. The largest to date is the Happy Camp Complex Fire which scorched over 134,000 acres and is currently listed as being 100% contained, but there are scores of other fires in California that are burning 30, 40, and 50 thousand acres at a time.  There are 11,000 firefighters on the front lines in California alone. A good portion of the state is currently on fire.

As of August 24 Oregon had 19 ongoing active wildfires. The largest reported is the Cornet-Windy Ridge Fire which had grown to 103,887 acres. This fire began on August 10 with a lightning strike and is currently 80% contained. The immediate danger with all wildfires, even those seemingly contained, is the shift in winds or the change in weather. Bad weather with lightning, little rain, followed by hot, dry conditions contributes to fires that, once considered under control, spark to life again.

Lightning strikes are the most common way that fires begin. This could be the reason why the Northwest and not the Southwest has seen the largest conflagrations this year. In southern California lightning strikes are relatively more rare.The ones not started by lightning are usually started by arsonists.

And as August ended most fires were still only 50% contained. Southern California still hasn't entered its usual Santa Ana wind driven fire season which usually comes later in the year.

Huge wildfires are being driven by climate change according to recent studies:

The risk of so-called “very large wildfires” could increase as much as six times in the U.S. by mid-century as a result of man-made global warming, researchers concluded in a study announced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“Very large fires” are defined as the top 10% of fires based on acreage. Such blazes account for the majority of burned acres across the U.S. each year. There are currently 66 large fires burning, a step down from “very large.”

Climate change is expected to both intensify fire-friendly weather conditions – such as heat and drought -- and lengthen the season during which these fires tend to spread, according to the study, which was published in the International Journal of Wildland Fire.

Huge sections of the western U.S. would see the risk of very large fires increase by as much as 200% to 500%. The highest risk area includes the Great Basin and Northern Rockies, as well as the Sierra Nevada and Northern California.

Meanwhile in Iran the heat index reached a staggering 162 degrees F forcing Iran to call a public holiday. No one could be expected to work in that heat.

Upgrading the American Constitution

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

It has come to my attention that some of my conservative friends think that the American Constitution was chiseled in stone. Well, no, actually unlike the Ten Commandments which were written in stone, the American Constitution was written on parchment. I have a lot of respect for the Founding Fathers who came up with this document based on the best Enlightenment thinking at the time with the help of French philosophes such as Montesquieu who believed in the separation of powers and checks and balances. Unfortunately, the Founders didn't heed the advice of the Marquis de Condorcet who came up with a better voting system than majority rule.

Condorcet and my other friends, Voltaire and Rousseau are entombed in the basement of the Pantheon in Paris where I visited them a while back and thanked them for their efforts in getting the fledgling United States off the ground. But speaking of being "written in stone", did God really hand Moses two tablets or did Moses have a little workshop up on the mountaintop where he meticulously chiseled out the Ten Commandments?

If Moses had handed them out on a piece of paper to his constituents, they would have laughed in his face so he had to make them believe that they were inviolable because they came directly from a Higher Power. That vested them with considerable authority, much more so than if Moses had told his followers, "Here, follow these rules that I came up with for it's really in the best interests of everyone concerned." Human beings will not always do what is the best for everyone concerned as has been demonstrated time and again especially in the mass denial of global warming. Moses knew what he was doing when it comes to human nature.

But I digress. Whatever the case with Moses and the Ten Commandments, the Constitution of the United States was definitely created by Homo Sapiens. No one concerned believes it was handed down by God. So it represents the best thinking up to that time which was considerable. However, I think some of my conservative friends could really go for a rewrite to correct some of its obvious defects. Take the Second Amendment for instance. Now some on the left including myself would just leave it out entirely, but the right would probably seize the chance of a rewrite to strengthen it. You could just leave out all the nonsense about "a well regulated militia" and just go for it - something like this:

New 2nd Amendment to the Constitution of the United States: Every American citizen is free to buy, sell and own firearms of any description and any quantity without restriction.

Just think of how this would boost the economy. There would be such a commerce in firearms for people of all ages that guns would be as ubiquitous as smartphones or tatoos. This would add immeasurably to GDP. And the trick would be to come out with new models every year just like the iPhone. People would be induced through advertising to get rid of their old models in order to have the latest. Planned obsolescence would be built in as gun manufacturers planned a few years ahead to add enticing bells and whistles one step at a time.

Already pink rifles are being sold directly to little girls with blue ones reserved for little boys. The .22 caliber Crickett rifle is already being manufactured and marketed. Not only should the market be expanded more to little kids, but special models should be  designed for senior citizens as well.

Every resident in the retirement home would be encouraged to own one because you never know when some nut would go in to these mostly unsecured facilities and start shooting. The senior citizen version could have a button installed on it: the Help, I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up button. That way there would be no need for any additional, superfluous medallions worn around the neck. The senior citizen gun would cover all the bases.

And speaking of unsecured venues where some nut might just go in with a load of guns and start shooting, there are a number of them that are just accidents waiting to happen. Take hospitals, for instance. There's no security in most hospitals, no metal detectors. That's why doctors and nurses should be encouraged to carry guns. Especially in the operating theatre the Doc should always have a sidearm as he performs surgery. Otherwise, the blood spatters might not end up being just those of the patient. We have already seen how unsecured churches, schools and movie theaters have interested twisted minds. Sports venues by now have been mostly secured with metal detectors, because it's common knowledge that those venues attract a lot of gun nuts.

Of course, principals and teachers should be carrying guns. We've already seen what happens when some nut chooses to take out his anger on innocent school children. Along the same lines, no one attending a movie theater should do so without packing heat. Venues where people congregate are prime targets for nuts with guns which is their right as American citizens according to the Second Amendment as presently constituted. Librarians should also obviously be armed as libraries are an obvious place to mow down defenseless people and shoot up a bunch of offensive books at the same time.

If we are to have a revolution in gun ownership in order to eliminate senseless violence, gun manufacturers need to start getting creative about their offerings. Already video games offer 5 year olds the thrills of vicariously murdering their enemies, but what if they had an actual AK-47 with associated software where you could hook it up to a computer or a Play Station or an X-box with a USB cord? Instead of using a joystick to murder villains and enemies, kids could use a real AK-47 in virtual reality mode of course. A switch on the gun would change between reality and virtual reality modes.

Also information could be wirelessly downloaded to compute the statistics of how many targets the kid had successfully vanquished. Kids could compete online with each one trying to outdo the other in the number of kills in real time. When the gun is taken out in the field, the flip of a switch would take it out of virtual reality mode and back into reality mode so that actual bullets could be fired. Here's another idea: the gun could be fired automatically and remotely from a smartphone!

Guns could be a fantastic component of the Internet of Things that is now all the vogue. San Diego based Qualcomm is looking to be a major player in the Internet of Things that hooks up every household component and device to the internet so that it can be controlled from your smartphone. Guns should be a prominent part of the Internet of Things. myAK-47.com would handle all ancillary merchandise, such as bullets and ammo, which could be ordered from amazon.com and be delivered in two hours!

All the practice of using the gun in virtual reality mode would transfer directly to reality mode with kids developing sharpshooter skills at an early age. Then when they went into the Army, the task of training them to kill actual enemies would be a lot simpler. Some of those kids would have been training for ten years or more at home.

There is a slight problem in that some people would get to the point where they wouldn't know the difference between virtual reality or fantasy and reality so that a few accidents might occur along the way where someone thought he was dealing with virtual reality and in fact the switch was turned the wrong way and the guy was actually operating in real world mode. That is always a possibility, but that is why everyone should be armed with several different types of weapons for several different types of situations. The gun manufacturers shouldn't stop with selling just one gun to every American. There's one gun out there for every American now. The US leads the world with almost one gun per capita. So advertising should be directed in such a way as to make every American a gun collector, not just a (single) gun owner.

There are some that decry violent video games as the source of narcissistic pleasure for those who seek to be famous by committing a violent act:

I’m horrified that Bryce Williams was live tweeting his own footage of his murders within minutes of the story hitting the headlines — that he waited to shoot himself until after his Twitter and Facebook accounts were suspended, that he very directly sacrificed others’ lives and his own for the immediate dopamine rush of getting hundreds of retweets.

I’m horrified that the video is still up and easily findable on Google. And I’m horrified that when I watched the video — I admit it, I’m human — it was shot to resemble the point-of-view of a first-person shooter video game.

I’m someone who loves social media, and who loves gaming. I’ve staunchly defended both in the past, and I would say the negative things about them are symptoms of broader negative social trends, not their cause.

But I can’t ignore anymore the toxicity that comes with the world of social media or that the gaming world is the birthplace of deranged social movement after deranged social movement — so much so that the biggest terrorist organization in the world, ISIS, uses video game tropes as a recruiting tool — and succeeds in getting Westernized middle-class teenagers to join up so they can feel badass.

Every place that people congregate is fertile territory for some gun wielding nut with a grievance against the world. That's why Americans have to follow the Boy Scout motto, "Be Prepared." We shouldn't trust that there are any places that are safe any more. And statements like "No one saw this coming" or "Who could have imagined such a thing happening?" are ridiculous in light of the fact that we are averaging more than one mass murder per day in the US. Mass murders are commonplace. They're as American as apple pie. Now they don't even make the evening news unless they are really spectacular.

Of course, if I had my way, I would replace the Second Amendment, the Right to Bear Arms, with the Right to Have Health Care. It seems that some societies have gone that route - restricting gun ownership while providing free health care. Somehow that seems more decent, and gun homicides are a rare happening in those societies. Some people have even suggested that a high incidence of gun ownership is correlated with a high incidence of gun homicides. However, you can't get around the fact that if everyone owned a gun, criminals would not be the only ones with guns.

Bernie Sanders, American Socialist

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

Bernie for President

Bernie Sanders has been drawing huge crowds to his rallies. The American media cannot ignore that. But they will never use the S word to describe Bernie even though that is how he describes himself. Bernie represents those who would tax Wall Street to preserve social security and a host of other common sense proposals. He dares to suggest that college should be free rather than the first stage of a life of indentured servitude and indebtedness.

People are listening - especially young people. Bernie has been saying these things for years but the media for the most part has been ignoring him. Now he has a bigger megaphone. His decision to run for President in order to get his message out there is paying off.

As Bernie himself has said: “the ideas and the points that we are making are reverberating very strongly with the American people.” Whoever would have thought that Bernie Sanders, Socialist, would be reverberating with the American people, the American people who love freedom and think that society should be set up in such a way that everybody has a chance, no matter how small, of getting rich?

On the other hand Bernie points out that social security is not in danger of running out of money. All you have to do is lift the cap and let rich people pay the same percentage of their income into it as do poor people. That is pretty reverberating if you can just get the message out. Bernie is getting the message out.

The media wants to call Bernie a "populist." Well, in this instance populism equals socialism. The notion that rich people should pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes as they did during the Eisenhauer administration, that there should be a tax on financial transactions and that taxes on the rich should support programs that aid the poor, is that populism or socialism, or both?

But then Americans have always been hypocritical about socialism. Even when they are enjoying the benefits from it, they don't want to acknowledge it. In an article in the New York Times, Socialism, American Style, Gar Alperovitz and Thomas M Hanna point out that socialism is a way of life in many American states including those that are considered "conservative." Only you can't call it that. That would not be politically correct.

Conservative Alaska is a Hotbed of Socialism

Take Alaska, for example. In this ultra conservative state there is a little socialist program known as The Alaska Permanent Fund. The Alaska Permanent Fund, established by a Republican governor in 1976, combines not one, but two socialist principles: public ownership and the provision of a basic income for all residents. The fund collects and invests proceeds from the extraction of oil and minerals in the state. Dividends are paid out annually to every man, woman and child in the state. Even Sarah Palin's family collects them.

This is from an article I wrote titled The Alaska Permanent Fund: Socialism in a Republican State:

Alaska is a land of rugged individualists - Republicans all the way. However, a little known fact is that Alaska taxes the oil and gas corporations operating there and distributes the proceeds on an annual basis equally among every man, woman and child living in the state. The biggest farce of all is that Tea Party touter, Governor Sarah Palin, slapped an excess profits tax on the state's oil companies in 2008, the year she ran for vice-President alongside John McCain, so that every person in Alaska received a dividend of $3269 that year. That was a pretty good haul for a family of four: $13,076. For Palin's family - husband Todd, sons Track and Trig and daughters Bristol, Willow and Piper - it came to an even better haul - $22,883!

We have also written about the Alaska Permanent Fund here. With global warming heating up the climate, more people will be moving to Alaska, not only in search of a moderate climate, but also to take advantage of the yearly stipend which might grow to the point that citizens of Alaska wouldn't have to work at all especially in view of the minerals that are becoming available due to the melting of the Arctic ice cap. Of course, that oil should stay in the ground if the earth has a chance of not warming up by 2 degrees C and causing widespread calamity.

Political correctness and hypocrisy demands that neither Palin nor any Republican politician mention the Alaska Permanent Fund nor any other socialist program from which money is taken from corporations and redistributed to the people. After all other states might get the idea that, if Alaska can do it, their state might be able to do the same thing. Well, in ultra conservative Texas, they've already figured that out: give lip service to conservative, rugged individualist principles while employing de facto socialist ones.

Texans Don't Mind Benefiting from a Socialist Policy

As Alperovitz and Hanna state:

Texas is another example of conservative socialism in practice. Almost 150 years ago the Texas Permanent School Fund took control of roughly half of all the land and associated mineral rights still in the public domain. In 1953, coastal “submerged lands” were added after being relinquished by the federal government. Each year distributions from the fund go to support education; in 2014 alone it gave $838.7 million to state schools. Another fund, the $17.5 billion Permanent University Fund, owns more than two million acres of land, the proceeds of which help underwrite the state’s public university system.

You'd think that Bernie Sanders would have plenty of supporters in Texas, namely all those who benefit from the Texas Permanent School Fund and Permanent University Fund, but instead they're all supporters of ultra conservative Governor Rick Perry, at least the majority consisting of white Texans are. Again lip service to conservatism while the actual reality they benefit from is socialism.

It's the same with Obamacare. All those southern conservatives who are benefiting from it love the reality while at the same time calling for its repeal. As a Washington Post article stated: "When the political history of the Affordable Care Act is written, Kentucky will occupy a special place in the tale. The implementation of the ACA there has helped produce the second steepest drop in the uninsured rate of any state. Yet even though that’s occurring in one of the most unhealthy regions in the country, the general idea of 'Obamacare' remains deeply unpopular."

Many countries employ the same principles, but without the hypocrisy. These funds are called sovereign wealth funds. Norway imposes a 50% tax on oil extraction which is put into its sovereign wealth fund which provides pensions and benefits for the Norwegian people. There's no talk there of "ending social security" because they don't have the money. Norwegians have plenty of money since they have profited from their co-owned public wealth in the form of oil extraction.

Only in America is there talk about the nonviability of social security. Most people don't even realize that if the rich paid into social security at the same rate as the poor, social security would be overfunded not underfunded and senior citizens could get a nice raise especially the needy ones.

Frank Thomas has written knowledgeably about Norway's sovereign wealth fund here:

The sovereign wealth fund in which Norway saves its oil-gas income is invested internationally primarily in stocks, bonds, and, starting recently, real estate. The strict primary goal is to save for future generations, when hydrocarbons run out.  Investing abroad also helps to avoid overheating the Norwegian economy. In 2009, the fund advanced 34% to recover most of the bubble losses.The fund now owns more than 1% of the world’s shares in over 8000 companies. It is Europe’s biggest equity investor. Strategically, the fund takes a 30 year investment horizon. Thus, not surprisingly,the fund is  currently investing aggressively in green industries. Helped by the past 30 year petroleum revenues that have been well-invested, Norway has become the 2nd richest nation per capita.

What if California Had Invested in a Sovereign Wealth Fund?

What if California would have taken control of its oil and gas revenues and invested in a sovereign wealth fund? There would be no budget problems today and there would be plenty of money to invest in infrastructure like desalination plants. California would have had the money to deal with its water shortage problems. Instead it became a debt based economy owing what amounts to a mortgage to Wall Street.

Another example: The Permanent Wyoming Mineral Trust Fund, with a market value of more than $7 billion accumulated from mineral extraction, has helped to eliminate income taxes in the state. The basic principle is that the mineral resources of the state belong to the citizens of that state not some private corporation. The idea is that the state should endeavor to enter into a relationship that adequately compensates the citizens for the extraction of their property.

One of the largest “socialist” enterprises in the nation is the Tennessee Valley Authority, a publicly owned company with $11 billion in sales revenue, nine million customers and 11,260 employees that produces electricity and helps manage the Tennessee River system. It seems that some socialist enterprises are not only very successful but are also very popular with the citizens who collectively profit from such enterprises.

Another example is publicly owned utilities. There are, in fact, already more than 2,000 publicly owned electric utilities that, along with cooperatives, supply more than 25 percent of the country’s electricity, now operating throughout the United States. In one of the most conservative states, Nebraska, every single resident and business receives electricity from publicly owned utilities, cooperatives or public power districts. Partly as a result, Nebraskans pay one of the lowest rates for electricity in the nation.

Perhaps the best example of public ownership or socialism, if you will, is the Public Bank of North Dakota (BND). Instead of shipping money to Wall Street, North Dakota uses the profits from its state owned bank to reduce taxes, invest in infrastructure and provide reasonable student loans. Many cities, counties and states are waking up to the fact that the profits that have heretofore been reaped by Wall Street from operations in their states should instead be reinvested in the state or public entity itself. The BND is serving as an example for them to follow. Private profit that goes into out of state investors' pockets is replaced by public profit which benefits citizens locally whether in a state or a city or other public entity.

The American People Should Derive Part of their Income From Public Wealth

As I said in the aforementioned article: Rich people live off of dividends, rent or interest paid to them in one form or other from their accumulated wealth. Public wealth is owned by the citizens of the US collectively. To receive a dividend from their co-owned wealth would tend to ameliorate the growing inequality of wealth ownership in the US and supplement poor and middle class incomes. Every citizen should be in a position of deriving at least a part of their income from co-owned wealth, especially since income from jobs is going downhill due to automation and outsourcing. This would eliminate poverty, provide a basic income guarantee, stimulate the economic system from the bottom up and restore the middle class.

The US is a debt based country which by virtue of the dollar's place as the world's reserve currency can continue to go into debt. Most other countries don't have this luxury so they start sovereign wealth funds which invest in American debt among other things so that their citizens are in the position of being investors while American citizens are essentially debtors for whom the chickens have not yet come home to roost.

Bernie Sanders' message is starting to make good sense to thousands of American people who are fed up with the BS Republicans have been feeding them. They are listening to Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, the Pope and the Dalai Lama and beginning to take seriously the facts of climate change, free public education up to the university level, Medicare for all and a beefed up social security program. Ownership of wealth and assets should not be only for the rich. Socialism provides that public wealth shall be redistributed to the poor and middle class as well.

Tyranny of the Majority: The American Winner Take All System

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

A lot of people these days are concerned with getting the money out of politics. That's an admirable goal, but it doesn't solve the problem that's built right into the American political system: a voting system in which the majority rules and there is no minority representation because the winner takes all. At every level the US is divided up into districts whether its state assembly and senatorial districts, US Congressional districts, San Diego city council districts or what have you. Citizens in a particular district can only vote for one candidate and the candidate with the most votes wins in that district.

Even states can be considered voting districts and in each state you can vote for two US Senators, just not at the same time. If there are candidates you like outside of your district, you have no democratic decision making process with which to vote for them. For example, I can't vote for Bernie Sanders for Senator because I'm not a resident of Vermont. Similarly, I can't vote for Elizabeth Warren because I'm not a citizen of Massachusetts. The US voting system on every level is archaic.

One of the characteristics of the districting system is that districts can be gerrymandered in such a way that the majority always wins in every district even though the total constituency contains a significant minority. In addition to all the ways Republicans have tried to suppress minority voting such as demanding ID, making voting as inconvenient as possible, intimidation and disinformation such as robo calls misinforming voters about election dates or polling places, majoriy rule within districts is a baked in the cake, structural method of suppressing minorities. It all starts with a system of dividing jurisdictions up into districts.

Let's take gerrymandering which is the attempt to set the boundaries of districts in such a way that the desired outcome of the election is manifested. Lawrence's theorem is that no matter how significant a minority there is in any political jurisdiction, the districts can be gerrymandered in such a way that the majority wins in every district. I'm sure political parties have algorithms and computer programs that produce the desired results.

Let's take an example. As a hypothetical, oversimplified case, lets say a jurisdiction, a city for example, consists of a white majority and a black minority. Let's say all the whites vote Republican and all the blacks vote Democratic. Since district boundaries are usually drawn by the party in power, a Republican administration can draw each district in such a way that it includes a minority of black voters and a majority of white voters even if all the blacks live in one part of the city and all the whites live in a different part.

However, California decides the boundaries of districts in a much fairer way:

Though the process varies from state to state, redistricting is usually a partisan endeavor. In most cases, a state’s district lines--for both state legislative and congressional districts--are redrawn by the state legislature, and the majority party controls the process. [Districts are redrawn every ten years after the census is taken.] Some states require bi-partisan or non-partisan commissions to oversee the line-drawing. However, the state governor and majority party leaders often control who is appointed to these commissions. At the local level, city council presidents and/or council members usually oversee the redistricting process.

Some states are moving toward involving citizens in the redistricting process and creating truly independent redistricting commissions. In 2008, California voters passed Proposition 11, a referendum establishing an independent redistricting commission made up of citizens. This commission will draw state legislative districts--though not congressional districts--for the 2012 elections.

However, California's progressivity in this regard is not true of most other states especially southern states with large minority (black) populations. They just gerrymander away with the result that white Republican politicians stay in power year after year with no or very little actual minority participation in governing. No wonder that minorities don't bother to vote.

This is the way that white Republicans dominate politics in southern states even though those states contain significant black minorities. Then the way our majority rule, winner-take-all system of voting works is that one member is elected from each district. Each voter can vote for one and only one candidate, and one and only one candidate wins. As an example, let's say there are three candidates running for office in a particular district - A, B and C and there are N voters. 51% of the voters are white Republicans who vote for candidate A; 49% of the voters are black Democrats who vote for candidate C. No one votes for B. Obviously, A wins and the minority that voted for C are entirely left out of the governing process. Now imagine a voting system in which all voters rank order the candidates.

Then, in our highly simplified example, we find that 51% prefer A to B and B to C and 49% prefer C to B and B to A.  If the voters vote approval style, they would give 1 vote to their first place choice and one vote to their second place choice. When the votes are tallied,  A would have .51N votes, B would have N votes and C would have .49N votes. The clear winner then would be B since all voters have B as their second place choice. B would win the election, but, more importantly, B would represent both the majority and the minority. Instead of winner take all, a compromise candidate who was acceptable to all voters would be chosen.

Instead of the single member district system, a far better way of deciding political elections would be to have multi-member districts and use proportional representation, a system that guarantees that minority parties are represented in proportion to their support in the voting population. For example, a city could just be composed of one super district and voters could rank all the candidates. The beauty of this method is that voters get to cast a vote on the composition of the entire city council and not just on the candidates running in their district. The elected city council members would more accurately reflect the entire voting population not just the majority. Thus democracy has been augmented.

Many countries elect their parliaments by proportional representation including Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Mexico, Russia, New Zealand and many others. The entire European Union elects its members in this way:

The first week of June should see 500 million EU citizens exercise their right to vote for Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). The EU does not have a single electoral law for these elections. Many details are decided at a national level, but a basic set of rules has been established in 1999: MEPs must be elected on the basis of proportional representation, the threshold must not exceed 5%, and the electoral area may be subdivided in constituencies if this will not generally affect the proportional nature of the voting system.

Proportional representation allows for the election of many more women and minorities than does the American system. For example, 40% of Sweden's parliament are women. In Norway it's 39%; it's 33% in Finland and Denmark vs 12% in the US. There is also greater voter turnout since the voters have more choices. Many don't bother to vote in the US because they know the majority that does not represent their interests will win in the winner-take-all US system so what's the use?

The American system of majority rule and single member districts effectively eliminates third party candidates. In fact third party candidates end up just taking votes away from the party that they are closest to in political philosophy. They become spoilers as Ross Perot was in 1992 when he took enough votes away from George H W Bush that the election went to Bill Clinton. Considering the fact that, if he wasn't in the race, most Perot voters would have voted for Bush, Perot didn't do Republicans any favors.

The same thing happened in 2000 when Ralph Nader ran to the left of Al Gore and took enough Democratic votes away from him that George W Bush won the election with disastrous consequences in that, if Gore had won, there would have been no lying the US into the Iraq war which destabilized the whole middle East.

If proportional representation were used to elect US Senators and Congressmen, Green Party and Peace and Freedom  Party candidates as well as those of other minority parties would stand a chance of being elected and would be able to make their values manifest at the national level in terms of actual governing. As it is Greens and others don't stand a chance at the state or the national level because of majority rule within single member districts.

Proportional representation (PR) voting systems are used by most of the world's established democracies. Under PR, representatives are elected from multi-seat districts in proportion to the number of votes received. PR assures that political parties or candidates will have the percent of legislative seats that reflects their public support. A party or candidate need not come in first to win seats.

In contrast, in the United States the "winner-take-all" single seat districts determine that votes going to a losing candidate are wasted, even if that candidate garners 49.9% of the vote. This leaves significant blocs of voters unrepresented. Voters sense this, and so often do not vote for a candidate they like, but rather the one who realistically stands the best chance of winning -- the "lesser of two evils."

No wonder that, among the 21 democracies in Western Europe and North America, the United States is next to last in voter turn-out, with only about 50% of voters voting in Presidential elections since the 1970s.

An advantage of proportional representation is greater voter turn-out (typically 70-90%) because there are more choices for voters - third, fourth, fifth parties and more, from diverse perspectives, including more women and minorities elected.

The US, compared to European countries which are much older, has the oldest Constitution because the older countries have updated their Constitutions since the US' was originally implemented. The US could rewrite its Constitution too to reflect more modern political science thinking, but prevailing sentiments are that it is written in stone and cannot be changed. It is to be taken literally much as the Bible is in some circles, and nothing newer under the sun stands a chance of replacing it.