California Free Press

Trump Rebuked for Lashing Out at San Juan Mayor Who Criticized Govt Aid Efforts

Published on Saturday, September 30, 2017 by Common Dreams

"Doesn't matter if you're desperate and dying—if Trump feels criticized, he will lash out," noted one critic after the president tweeted about Puerto Rico

by Jessica Corbett, staff writer

 

4 Comments

President Donald Trump lashed out at a Puerto Rican officials on Saturday morning after the mayor of San Juan, the island's capitol, criticized the administration's response to Hurricane Maria. (Photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr/cc)

President Donald Trump is under fire Saturday morning for lashing out on Twitter at the mayor of San Juan, who on Friday raised major concerns about the Trump administration's slow action and misleading commentary regarding Hurricane Maria relief efforts in Puerto Rico.

In a series of tweets, the president purported that unidentified Democrats had told the Puerto Rican official "you must be nasty to Trump." He also claimed "the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico" had demonstrated "poor leadership ability."

The backlash on social media was swift:

You're going straight to hell, @realDonaldTrump.
No long lines for you.
Someone will say, "Right this way, sir."
They'll clear a path. https://t.co/xXfJH0KJmw

— Lin-Manuel Miranda (@Lin_Manuel) September 30, 2017

And just like that, Trump paints himself as the victim in Puerto Rico crisis. https://t.co/yasJK71WPW

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) September 30, 2017

Doesn't matter if you're desperate & dying -- if Trump feels criticized, he will lash out. His tweets re: Puerto Rico are cruel & inhuman.

— Tony Schwartz (@tonyschwartz) September 30, 2017

Trump's tweets about Puerto Rico today show again that we are dealing with a narcissistic sociopath, a clinically deranged individual. This is not normal politics. And it is very dangerous.

— Jeffrey D. Sachs (@JeffDSachs) September 30, 2017

The disaster unfolding in Puerto Rico will be Trump's Katrina. His lack of response, then tweets attacking Puerto Ricans will live in infamy

— Soledad O'Brien (@soledadobrien) September 30, 2017

Speaking to CNN on Friday, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin had expressed shock at the Trump's administration claims that Puerto Rico's recovery from the devastating hurricane is "a good news story," and made headlines for saying: "When you're drinking from a creek, it's not a good news story. When you don't have food for a baby, it's not a good news story.... Damnit, this is not a good news story. This is a people-are-dying story," as Common Dreams reported.

The president and his team have been broadly criticized for the federal government's slow reaction to the growing humanitarian crisis, with some critics already deeming this Trump's Hurricane Katrina, in reference to former President George W. Bush's botched response to the disastrous hurricane that struck the Gulf Coast in 2005.

Currently in Puerto Rico, most the of island has no electricity—which could take up to six months to fully restore—and nearly half of its more than 3 million residents lack clean drinking water. Food and fuel supplies are critically low, and many are warning that Americans of the U.S. commonwealth will continue to die unless the federal government ramps up its relief efforts.

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Six Reasons Why American Corporations Shouldn’t Get a Tax Cut

 by Robert Reich

Friday, September 29, 2017

Trump and Republicans are trying to sell you the idea that American corporations need a tax cut in order to be competitive. That’s rubbish. Here are 6 reasons why:

First, American corporations don’t need it in order to be competitive internationally. After tax credits and deductions, their effective tax rate is just about the same as paid by corporations in most of our major trading partners, according to the U.S. Treasury. 

Second, American corporations are making more money than ever. Their after-tax profits are a higher share of the total economy than ever. American corporations earn nearly half of all global profits, even though the U.S. economy is about a fifth the size of the world economy.

Third, the long-term competitiveness of American corporations depends far more on a well-educated and skilled workforce, modern infrastructure, and basic research than on tax rates. And the way we finance these necessary public investment is through … taxes.

Fourth, American corporations are now paying less in taxes than they have in 65 years. Corporate tax receipts are the lowest percentage of the economy since just after World War II. If corporate taxes are cut, you will have to pay even more in taxes in order to make up the difference.

Fifth, if their taxes were cut, corporations won’t use the extra money to make new investments in plant, equipment, research and development, or jobs. They’re already using their vast stockpiles of cash to buy back shares and thereby boost stock prices, and for extravagant bonuses and salaries to CEOs and other top executives. That’s what they would do with any additional cash. 

Sixth, the reason they’re not investing more is because consumers don’t have the purchasing power to buy more, and that’s because most people’s incomes have gone nowhere for decades. And why is that? Because corporations have been holding down wages by outsourcing abroad, substituting software for jobs, contracting work out to part-time workers, and fighting unions. 

A corporate tax cut is the wrong solution to the wrong problem. The real problem is stagnant wages of most Americans, coupled with declining public investments in schools, roads, public transportation, and basic research – all the things average working Americans need in order to become more productive and get higher wages. To finance these we need higher corporate taxes, not lower.

Off the Top of My Head

Advice to Puerto Ricans: Get Out as Soon as You Can

b y John Lawrence

There's one loophole in your situation: you're American citizens and can leave Puerto Rico and come to one of the 50 states. In my opinion none of the Caribbean islands have any future due to global warming. They're going to get shellacked again and again. But not all of them have the advantage of being American citizens and can move to the mainland any time they want. The Mayor of San Juan is upset by the Trump administration's lack of concern.

San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz reacted with shock and anger to acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke on Friday, saying Puerto Rico's recovery is "not a good news story." "This is a 'people are dying' story," she said in disbelief. Then, of course, Trump fought back. President Donald Trump launched a Twitter attack on her for "poor leadership ability," saying she and others in Puerto Rico "want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort."

The people of Puerto Rico are conceived of as poor by the Trump administration. The Puerto Rican government even before Maria was in a debt crisis. The government's outstanding debt exceeds $70 billion with an additional $50 billion in pension obligations. Even before the hurricane doctors were leaving at the rate of one per day. Due to a decade-long recession, more than 50,000 residents leave each year - most for jobs and new lives on the mainland.

So who's left? Mainly poor people. Professionals, especially health care professionals, have left just when they are needed most. You're in a ton of debt. Get out while the getting's still not totally bad. The Trump administration and Republican philosophy in general is not in the business of charity. They believe charity should be privatized. It's not a government function. The only legitimate government function, they believe, is war. Everything else should be privatized. That's why every time Americans buy food for themselves or their pets they are asked by some corporation to donate to charity.

 

The Constitution Project: Russia

by John Lawrence

Russia has a Constitution adopted in 1993 consisting of 137 articles. There are three independent branches of government: the President, the legislature and the judiciary. The legislature is the Federal Assembly which consists of two houses, the Duma or lower house and the Council of the Federation. There are ten chapters or sections to the Constitution. There is a division of power which is executed by the Federal, state and local governments. Russia is a secular state; no state religion can be established.

Russia's Constitution Similar to UN Declaration of Human Rights

The first section is the Fundamentals of the Constitutional System. It reads like the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights. Article 1 reads: "Russia is a democratic federal law-bound State with a republican form of government." Russia is a democratic republic similar to the US. Sounds like we could be friends.

Article 2: "Man, his rights and freedoms are the supreme value. The recognition, observance and protection of the rights and freedoms of man and citizen shall be the obligation of the State." Rights and freedoms - sounds good to me. Other articles go on to guarantee free elections and "economic freedom".

Finally, we get to Article 7 which tends to deviate a bit from US values: "The Russian Federation is a social State whose policy is aimed at creating conditions for a worthy life and a free development of man." The US state is not tasked with that responsibility. It's up to the individual, not the state,  to create their own conditions for a worthy life. Article 7 goes on: "In the Russian Federation the labour and health of people shall be protected, a guaranteed minimum wages and salaries shall be established, state support ensured to the family, maternity, paternity and childhood, to disabled persons and the elderly, the system of social services developed, state pensions, allowances and other social security guarantees shall be established."

There are a lot of articles regarding freedoms such as freedom of speech, religion and association. For example, Article 28: "Everyone shall be guaranteed the freedom of conscience, the freedom of religion, including the right to profess individually or together with other any religion or to profess no religion at all, to freely choose, possess and disseminate religious and other views and act according to them."

The right to own private property is protected by law. Article 39 guarantees social security: "Everyone shall be guaranteed social security at the expense of the State in old age, in case of an illness, disability, loss of the bread-winner, for upbringing of children and in other cases established by law."

The GOP Tax Plan Is Ridiculous. Here’s Why.

By Catherine Rampell, Washington Post  September 28

Last year, I proposed a handy rule of thumb for evaluating the economic proposals of politicians: The more growth they promise, the worse their plan probably is.

Why? Because the promise of bonkers growth usually means the politicians need that bonkers growth to paper over the ginormous deficits sure to follow — in the real world, under more realistic assumptions.

If you assume that the economy goes gangbusters and everyone gets a lot richer, then the tax base swells, spending on social-safety-net services falls, and hallelujah! That expensive thing you want no longer looks so expensive. Maybe it’s even free!

“We think we can pay for the entire tax cut through growth over the cycle,” he explained. Uh-huh.

This rule of thumb was useful during the presidential campaign, when candidates promised that their infrastructure, health and tax proposals would “pay for themselves” through faster growth. It’s relevant again with the “Big Six’s” new tax “plan.”

I put “plan” in scare-quotes here because it’s not really a plan. At best it’s an outline, offering barely more detail than the bullet points the Trump administration released in April. It doesn’t even specify the thresholds for the individual income-tax rates it proposes. It also doesn’t identify a single individual tax preference it would kill, despite claiming to simplify the code and close lots of “loopholes.” Even the state and local tax deduction, which administration officials have talked about eliminating, isn’t explicitly mentioned.

The plan’s designers may not know what their proposal is, exactly, but they know it will turbocharge growth.

First There is Upheaval, Then Exploration, Then a New Reality

Dear friends,

     With the passing of Playboy founder, Hugh Hefner, there has been much debate over his influence on the “sexual revolution.” Like all shifts in a culture, the pendulum swung far to the side of the new, but eventually came to rest in a more centric position. Hefner exploited women, to be sure, making them very much sexual objects. On the other hand, he turned sex into playful sport, removing the shame that had been attached to it.  This was in the 1950’s, a sexually repressed time when girls were also taught to be virginal and lady-like. It was quite confusing. When the 1960’s arrived, sexual freedom was the hue and cry of the day. It was all an attempt, albeit unconscious, to escape from the chains of early religious dogma.  

     Big change requires participation. Most of us jumped right on the sexual freedom train in the 1970’s. Divorce was not the stigma it had once been. Young fathers took off and did not pay child support.   It was in the 1980’s with the advent of AIDS that we all took a deep breath and began to settle into a new norm, which included the equality of women in relationships. We are still working on that one.

     From a spiritual perspective, this is how we make deep shifts in our shared reality.   First there is upheaval, then exploration, then we begin to see the effects of this new cause, whatever it may be.   We arrive at a higher level of experience, and we look back and ask “how did I ever think that was acceptable?” Then the whole sequence begins again, usually after a decade has past. It is fascinating to observe. It happens on a very personal level as well. We are forever evolving upwards, out of superstition and dogma.

     Today we are in a spiritual revolution. There are more self-identified atheists than ever and they are not afraid to be vocal about it. Science is beginning to take its rightful place in our view of the natural world. The pendulum will swing far away from old-time religion but eventually will right itself in a renewed awe and wonder at the mystery and majesty of this universe.  Then we will tell ourselves a new story.  It won’t be the last one, either, but it will be more inclusive, more respectful of diversity, more celebratory of this life, more willing to live in this moment even if we do not have all the answers of our origins. I wonder what it would be like for a technological culture to be equally interactive with Nature in the most perfect relationship we can ever have. 

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes

www.carolcarnes.com www.mvcsl.org

Watch us on You Tube Living Consciously with Carol Carnes

Crackdown on Tent Sites Pushes Homeless to Parks

From the San Diego Union, September 29, 2017

NELVINC. SEPEDA U-T At 17th and Commercial Streets Jean Calma and her boyfriend were looking for a place to sleep Thursday after being dispersed from their tent in a vacant lot at 17th Street and Imperial Avenue over the weekend.

Effort to curb hepatitis A outbreak leads to dispersal to Balboa Park, elsewhere

By Gary Warth

The recent crackdown on large sidewalk homeless camps in downtown San Diego has forced people without shelter into Balboa Park and other parts of the city. “For the first time during the day, I’m seeing people sleeping in the colonnades,” said Balboa Park Conservancy director Tomas Herera-Mishler, who also said he’s seen shopping carts for the first time in the park recently. More homeless people have also been seen in Embarcadero Marina Park South behind the San Diego Convention Center.

The dispersal follows a crackdown on large downtown tent sites on 17th Street, Commercial Street, National Avenue and other places. That action was part of the city’s effort to curb the hepatitis A outbreak that has left 17 people dead and more than 300 hospitalized over the course of the monthslong outbreak. The virus is spread through fecal matter, and steps to stop the outbreak have included installing restrooms and hand-washing stations downtown and using a bleach solution to power-wash sidewalks where homeless people have set up tents.

Lt. Scott Wahl, public information officer with the San Diego Police Department, said clearing downtown tent sites was part of the effort to stop the spread of the virus. “This is not an attack on the homeless,” he said Thursday. “This is to protect the homeless. We’ve had 17 deaths.” City crews already had been cleaning up trash on downtown sidewalks every week where homeless people camp. Notices about the cleanups were posted at the sites 72 hours in advance, and homeless people usually pack up their tents and return later in the day after crews have left.

Off the Top of My Head

We Have Been Given a Great Gift: Our Individual Identities

by John Lawrence

Whether or not we were created by God, the universe, evolution or the Great Whatever, we got here somehow. It's not clear exactly how but in any case we have been given an individual identity and we have free will. We can pretty much, within certain constraints, decide what we are going to do today. This gift may be time limited in that it might end at some point in time just as it had a beginning at some point in time. It doesn't make it any less of a gift if it does end, if it doesn't continue in some other time and space after we die.

If someone gives you a gift, say $10,000, you don't complain that they didn't give you a bigger gift. The gift was limited in its monetary value but it still was a gift to be thankful for. By the same token if the gift of individual identity doesn't continue after we die, it is still a tremendous gift to be grateful for. Life still goes on with other life forms including people and perhaps in other places in the universe. And whether this gift was given to us by God or the Great Whatever, it is still a gift to be thankful for.

The Equivalence Principle plays a big part in science. In the theory of general relativity, the Equivalence Principle as developed by Albert Einstein was that the gravitational force as experienced locally while standing on the Earth is the same as the pseudo-force experienced by an observer in an accelerated frame of reference. I think that the Equivalence Principle as applied to life is that whatever happens to any lifeform after death is the same for all lifeforms.

So if I swat a fly on the wall, thereby causing its life to come to a sudden end, whatever then happens to that fly is the same thing that will happen to me or any other life form after its life ends. But I don't really believe there is a fly afterlife or a fly heaven. I believe individual lives are time limited. It makes that life no less a gift to be thankful for. Rather than saying, but you should have given me more, say gee that was great and thanks for that even if at some point it's over. Same applies to a gift of money or a relationship for that matter.

Even if our individual identity ends, it was still a great gift while it lasted.

'What a Rigged Economy Looks Like': Top 10% Now Own 77% of American Wealth

Published on

Thursday, September 28, 2017 

by

Common Dreams

 

 

 

As Trump and the GOP push massive tax cuts for the rich, new data shows that the wealthy are doing better than ever

 

 

 

by

Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

 23 Comments

"Meanwhile, the Walton family of Walmart has a net worth of $144 billion. This is what a rigged economy looks like," wrote Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). (Photo: Jason Hargrove/Flickr/cc)

As President Donald Trump and the Republican Party unveiled their "cruel joke" of a tax plan that would provide an enormous boon for the rich disguised as a "middle class miracle," an analysis by the People's Policy Project (3P) published Wednesday found that the top 10 percent of the income distribution now owns a "stunning" 77 percent of America's wealth while those in the bottom ten percent are "net debtors," owning -0.5 percent of the nation's wealth.

"We do not live in a democracy. We live in an oligarchy." 
—Digital LeftIn response to the analysis, conducted by 3P president Matt Bruenig, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote on Twitter: "Meanwhile, the Walton family of Walmart has a net worth of $144 billion. This is what a rigged economy looks like."

"We do not live in a democracy. We live in an oligarchy," added the progressive group Digital Left.

3P's examination of newly released Federal Reserve data also found that "[t]he bottom 38 percent of American families have an average net worth of $0." By contrast, the top one percent—set to benefit massively from Trump's tax agenda—owns 38.5 percent of the nation's wealth. In 1989, that number was 29.9 percent.

(Image credit: People's Policy Project)

The new Fed data also highlighted America's enormous racial wealth gap.

A recent study conducted by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and the Corporation For Economic Development (CFED) found that "[i]f average black family wealth continues to grow at the same pace it has over the past three decades, it would take black families 228 years to amass the same amount of wealth white families have today."

"For the average Latino family," the study found, "it would take 84 years."

Bruenig notes that in 2016, mean white wealth exceeded $900,000 for the first time. Mean black wealth, by contrast, registered at just under $140,000.

Overall, Bruenig concluded, "[t]he median family in every racial group remains worse off than they were in 2007."

(Image credit: People's Policy Project)

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Tax Plan Would Hit State Hard

GOP proposal would end a big tax break for Californians and may curtail the mortgage interest deduction.

By Jim Puzzanghera, from the LA Times

WASHINGTON — Many Californians face a big financial hit under the Republican tax plan, which would eliminate a major tax break that benefits state residents more than those anywhere else in the U.S.

The federal deduction for state and local taxes allowed Californians to reduce their taxable income by $101 billion in 2014, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation.

The tax outline released Wednesday by President Trump and top congressional Republicans would ax the break, which largely benefits residents in states that are Democratic strongholds.

“Republicans in Washington have once again zeroed in on California to punish us and make our state the single biggest loser in their reckless tax scheme,” said state Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles).
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said the elimination of the deduction was one reason the plan was a “nonstarter” for her.

“I don’t believe California should suffer in order for President Trump to give tax cuts to the rich,” she said.

The plan also left open the possibility of another big hit: new limits on the deduction for home mortgage interest, which would have a greater effect on states with higher housing costs, such as California and New York.

RISE To The RIGHT In GERMAN ELECTIONS

MUST BE SEEN In Context Of GERMANY’s EXCELLENT PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION SYSTEM

by Frank Thomas

The recent German elections show that, since the arrival of over 1.2 million refugees (mostly from Syria) in 2015 and 2016, Germany is indeed changing to the right – but I certainly would not say in a radical or unhealthy way. This is because EU economies and political proportional representation systems, like Germany’s, generally combine stable elements of basic social needs and safety nets with individual/corporate capitalistic initiatives and market mechanisms. Rules are enacted and enforced to insure fair play and social harmony.

In the German elections, the CDU/CSU centrist coalition together with the SPD socialist party went from a very high 502 Parliamentary seats or 79.7% of the 630 seats, BEFORE the elections, to a lower total of 399 seats or 56.3% of 709 Parliamentary seats now. In light of the SPD’s decision not to join Merkel’s CDO/CSU centrist party group in a new coalition government, Merkel must find a way to unite, for example, with the Green left of center party and FDP right of center party to form a reasonably centrist coalition government. Although the rising AfD rather conservative nationalistic party won 12.6% of the total vote for all parties, making it the 3rd largest party followed closely by the FDP party with 10.7% of the total vote, Merkel will not be forming a coalition government with this far right party.

Forming a governing coalition will be no easy task. But Merkel will respect the clear voter message of getting disciplined control of and cutting back drastically on her open-door immigration policy. The extraordinary extent and speed at which the flood of refugees have entered Germany under Merkel’s leadership is creating considerable societal strains, ^e.g. severe problems of assimilation as well as fears of expanding criminality and terrorist acts, and a watering down of the German culture. Very understandable and natural concerns, in my view.

But I don’t think Germany is heading into a radical, socially-polarizing, ultra-right transition under their multi-party, proportional representation system. This is because as noted earlier, there are many structural “checks and balances” inherent in the European political multi-party, proportional representation constitutional structures. Far more than the paralyzed two-party Mess the US is trapped in where “social polarization” is evolving on a scale and depth many, many times more alarming and potentially dangerous to our democracy than most EU countries.

Be Reborn in the Awareness of our Brief Time Here

Dear Friends,

     Every day, indeed every moment, sentient beings are entering and leaving the planet. People we love, animals, insects, worms, birds and bacteria, come into form and leave it.   It is a grand circle of expression.   In some way each makes its mark, leaves something that wasn’t here before. This applies most observably to humans, since we have the greatest direct influence over our environment. We are the ones who can contribute to, or disrupt, the natural flow of life supplying itself.

     The ancients told us to die every day and be reborn. Of course, they were referring to our awareness. They taught us to die to the past, old ideas, dysfunctional perceptions, even what was agreeable, and to awaken to possibility in this moment. It also means to reconnect with our origins, with Nature, with the cosmos. To be reborn in the awareness of our brief time here and the power of our presence.

     When I think of all those I have known and loved, or not loved so much, who have left the planet, there is the realization of what each one gave me. Some were reminders of the powers of forgiveness, words and laughter. Others helped me appreciate books and knowledge; others served as examples of what not to do and some showed how to unlock the real self. I have learned from beloved pets, too, and even those microscopic viruses who came to visit occasionally, reminded me of the treasure of good health.

     What are we giving in this life? How will we be remembered? More importantly, how current are we in our thinking? How much past are we dragging around? When was the last time we were “reborn? Yogi Berra said, ‘it ain’t over till it’s over.”   Yes, and even then it is just beginning.  

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes

www.carolcrnes.com or www.mvcsl.org

My New Thought lessons are on You Tube “Living Consciously” with Carol Carnes

www.californiafreepress.net

Off the Top of My Head

Trump Has Numerous Ties to Russian Businessmen

by John Lawrence

Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. told Russian media while in Moscow that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets" in places like Dubai and Trump SoHo and elsewhere in New York. It's not really a secret. Trump has been doing a lot of business with Russians for a long time. Three owners of Trump condos in Florida and Manhattan were accused in federal indictments of belonging to a Russian-American organized crime group and working for a major international crime boss based in Russia.

During the campaign and over the several years before it, Trump had business deals with several figures who are close to the Kremlin. Trump has tweeted and talked about his strong relationship with Aras Agalarov, the Azerbaijani-Russian billionaire and Putin ally who partnered with Trump on the Miss Universe pageant that was held in Moscow, in 2013, and from which Trump made a twelve-million-dollar profit, according to his lawyers. At the time, Trump tweeted about his hope that the pageant would be the occasion for him and Putin to become close. (“Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow – if so, will he become my new best friend?”)

Trump's ties to Russians, some of them criminals, will probably come out in the investigation by Robert Mueller, but so what. Will he be prosecuted for working with shadowy underworld types, some of them Russians? I don't think so. It's no crime doing business with Russians even though the US government and in particular the CIA is trying to start another Cold War. Mikhail Gorbachev said when he and Ronald Reagan agreed to end the Cold War, "I have deprived you of an enemy." Not so fast Mr. Gorbachev. The US can always recreate Russia as an enemy as they are doing now.

Despite Trump's and Rex Tillerson's cozying up to Putin, Russian oligarchs and Russia in general, there is no suggestion that "secrets of state" were exchanged as in the old days of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were electrocuted for spying. It's one thing to sell Russia state secrets; it's another to do business with Russia where the only interest is the profit motive. Isn't that want the US wanted when the Soviet Union capitulated - to turn Russians into a country of greedy profit mongers like the US? Trump was certainly doing his part to try and achieve that. But he was depriving the US of an enemy. Sad!

How to Make the Electoral College Irrelevant

by Robert Reich

Tuesday, September 26, 2017

We must make sure our democracy doesn’t ever again elect a candidate who loses the popular vote. That means making the Electoral College irrelevant.

Here’s how: As you probably know, the Constitution assigns each state a number of electors based on the state’s population. The total number of electors is 538, so any candidate who gets 270 of those Electoral College votes becomes president.

Article II of the Constitution says states can award their electors any way they want. So all that’s needed in order to make the Electoral College irrelevant is for states with a total of at least 270 electors to agree to award all their electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote.

If they do that, then automatically the winner of the popular vote gets the 270 electoral college votes he or she needs to become president.  

Already 10 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws to do this – awarding all their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote, as soon as the 270 elector goal is met. Together, these states total 165 electoral votes.

So all we need now is some additional states with 105 electors to pass the same law, agreeing to reward all their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote – and it’s done. We’ll never again elect a president who loses the popular vote.

The effort is known as the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. If your state hasn’t yet joined on, make sure it does.

The Immensity of the Universe and the Diversity of Life

Dear friends,

     To draw from the teachings of the great Thomas Troward; steam and electricity have no intention of their own. They have no plan for how they are to be used. They simply respond to the user with complete neutrality. Whatever we give them to do is done, if we have prepared the right vehicle for them to deliver their power. This is a wonderful analogy to how “God” operates as Law or Principle.  It does not have a plan or us as individuals, only one for Life to be forever becoming.   We give it shape and form by means of our use its Intelligence.

     But what about “God” as Presence? Ah, that seems to be the personal aspect of its nature. We feel its Presence in us when we “do the right thing.” When we love unconditionally, give unstintingly, dance with abandon, sing the praises of Life, care for each other, plant a garden, give birth or think. The aliveness in us is the Presence of Source, as far as I can tell. It is the capacity to “make all things new” by the right use of Love that is the Divine in us.

     If you have been going through hard times, or a dark night of the soul, which can manifest as depression or anxiety, one of the most effective means to alleviate the pain and lead us into a more natural frame of mind, is gratitude. It is not merely being thankful for things we like; it is a kind of awe and wonder at the immensity of the whole universe and the stunningly diverse life forms right hear on our planet. Look up, look around, see what a magnificent place this is. Connect with the pure love and intelligence that is the Cause of it all and know that same Cause is within you and is Present for your use of it as Principle.

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes

www.carolcarnes.com or www.mvcsl.org (pay pal donations appreciated) check out our tv shows on You Tube.

www.californiafreepress.net great thinkers on many subjects

Off the Top of My Head

by John Lawrence

Hippety Hoppity Hump

All hail to the Chief, Donald Trump.

So the Tweeter-in-Chief

Can Get Some Relief

He tweets while he's taking a dump.

Sad!

 

What next? Trump will make fun of Kim Jong Un's haircut? The Korean War, which is still evidently going on, predated the debacle of the Vietnam War which is officially over. We lost by the way. Ken Burns has an excellent series on PBS about Vietnam. He details how American soldiers were turned into killing machines. The veneer of civilization is pretty thin. The corruption of the South Vietnam government that we were fighting to maintain was endemic.

But then it's back to the future. Kim Jong Un will not let us forget that the Korean War is not over, and what a mess we created there. Was there ever a starker difference between a communist dictatorship (North Korea) and a capitalist democracy (South Korea)? Un is giving communist dictatorships a bad name! If only Korea could have gone the route of Vietnam. After killing 2 million Vietnamese civilians on both sides and some 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters, we're still friends, amazingly enough. Communism has morphed into capitalism. We lost the war and won the peace. Aren't most of our clothes being manufactured in Vietnam by workers making sweatshop wages?

Ken Burns, we need you now to point out the idiocy of the Korean War, a war we didn't win, but I thought it was a standoff. Evidently not. Un doesn't want a peaceful standoff, one that presents a stark difference to the world of the difference between a capitalist democracy and a communist dictatorship. No, he wants to start up the war with the US again, but this time with nuclear weapons and guided missiles. I guess his ultimate goal is not only to destroy the United States, but to reunite Korea under his leadership.

That would be a disaster for Samsung, Hyundai and Kia. Where would I get spare parts from for my Kia Sportage? Meanwhile the war of words continues between the Rocket Man and the Dotard. Did he mean to say retard? The important point is that a wound left to fester - the non-ending of the Korean war - can come back to haunt you many years later. US military involvement after World War II has created a pretty mess for the US and the world. President Eisenhauer was right when he characterized the military-industrial complex as a mess: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

What Is Our Song Today?

Dear friends,

     It came into my mind this morning that musicians will never run out of music. All of it has never been played and never will be. Yet there are just a few basics, chords and notes, but the possible combinations and uses of them are infinite. As Paul Pearsall wrote in his book “Making Miracles” ‘the last symphony has not been written.’ The theme of his book is that miracles don’t just happen, they are made. We might use music making as an analogy.  

     Composers work with what they have become aware of, taking imaginary sounds and turning them into magnificent works of art. They have developed the skill of translating an inner awareness into something that everyone can experience. The same is true of artists of all genres. Think about speech, using English as an example. We learn the alphabet, learn the symbols called words and learn to string them together to express an inner experience, an idea, a feeling, an emotion. Some languages, like Hawaiian, are more a combination of singing and talking. Based on the belief that the sounds we make as humans can be in vibrational harmony with the universe, chanting is important in many cultures.

     What is in us will find its way through us into the world in some form or experience.  What are we singing to ourselves right now? What do we hear in our innermost self? What is the chant running on a loop in our mind? Is it in harmony with what the universe is singing? What is the universe singing if not possibility? It must be chanting wholeness, sufficiency, energy, vitality, harmony and of course Love.   That is the sound of God itself; Love humming along, bringing into visibility what matches its vibrational field and giving it a voice. Are we that voice? What is our song today? What miracle will we compose?

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes www.carolcarnes.corm or www.mvcsl.org    (you can donate via paypal)

Our tv show is on You Tube! Living Consciously with Carol Carnes

I also write for www.californiafreepress.net

Off the Top of My Head

by John Lawrence

Our good friend, Nurse Wubbles

Got herself in a whole lot of twubbles

When she refused to draw blood from a crook,

"Now Officer Payne, you cannot complain

This procedure is not in the book."

 

 

Which brings up the question, if an officer has a warrant for a doctor who's performing open heart surgery, can he barge into the operating room and put the doctor in handcuffs? Obviously, there should be some protocol involving these situations. Mrs. Wubbles was following procedure correctly. Officer Payne did not have a warrant so she could not draw blood. Then Officer Payne put her in handcuffs and roughed her up a bit before someone came to their senses and let her go.

Nurse Wubbles said, "This is crazy," as she sobbed. Obviously, no nurse should be placed in such a situation. Nurse Wubbles was only doing her job. The officer was out of line. He obviously had very little impulse control and an inability to deal with the situation correctly. How many other officers are in the same frame of mind when put in challenging or frustrating situations especially by black people. Is that why so many black people have been killed by officers? Out of fustration? Out of a lack of patience?

Political Football

From the San Diego Union:

Political football NFL players, owners show solidarity in response to Trump’s tweets

LONDON:Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shahid Khan links arms with players during the national anthem before Sunday’s game against the Baltimore Ravens at Wembley Stadium in London. Players on both teams either knelt or locked arms. (PAUL CHILDS Reuters ) CHICAGO: Pittsburgh Steelers left tackle and former Army Ranger Alejandro Villanueva stands alone for the anthem outside the tunnel before playing the Chicago Bears. (Nam Y. Huh AP)

By Liz Clarke & Abby Phillip

Some stood. Some knelt. Some remained in the locker room, choosing to speak through their absence from the NFL’s pregame ceremonies in which the American flag is displayed and the national anthem sung.

But from London to Los Angeles, virtually all NFL players on the sidelines prior to kickoff of Sunday’s slate of 14 games locked arms with each other in response to President Donald Trump’s three-day campaign demanding that team owners “fire or suspend” players who kneel during the anthem and calling on fans to boycott games if the form of protest continued.

The silent rebuke to the president, determined independently by each of the 28 NFL teams in action Sunday, represented an unprecedented collective action and show of solidarity.

Some, such as the Jacksonville Jaguars and Philadelphia Eagles, were joined on the sideline by their team owners, Shahid Khan and Jeffrey Lurie, respectively. Most were joined in standing shoulder-to-shoulder by coaches, staff and, in some cases, police officers. Dean Spanos, owner of the Los Angeles Chargers, also stood with his players before Sunday’s Chargers-Chiefs game in Carson.

All but five of the NFL’s 32 team owners and CEOs issued statements Saturday night and into Sunday morning in response to Trump’s objection to protesting NFL players, which began in earnest during a Friday night rally in Alabama.

After making a thinly veiled allusion to former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who sparked a national debate by taking a knee during August 2016 preseason games to protest police violence against minorities, Trump called on NFL coaches to get the “son of a bitch” players off the field if they continued to kneel. The president repeated his call on Twitter on Saturday and Sunday morning.

Calling Kaepernick 'Son of a Bitch,' Trump Urges NFL to Fire All Protesting Players

Published on Saturday, September 23, 2017 by Common Dreams

'This is the President of the United States referring to an American who has exercised his right to protest racial injustice.'

by Jon Queally, staff writer

 

113 Comments

In this Monday, Sept. 12, 2016, file photo, San Francisco 49ers safety Eric Reid (35) and quarterback Colin Kaepernick (7) kneel during the national anthem before an NFL football game against the Los Angeles Rams. (Photo: AP)

Civil libertarians, racial justice advocates, and NFL players from across the league expressed outrage overnight after President Donald Trump called on owners of professional football teams to fire players who express their political views.

In a veiled reference to quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who last season started a wave of protest by kneeling during pre-game National Anthems in protest of police killings of unarmed black men, Trump said during a campaign-style rally in Alabama on Friday night, "Wouldn't you love to see one of the NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say 'Get that son of a bitch off the field right now?'"

Bishop Sankey, running back for the Minnesota Vikings who called the president's behavior a "disgrace," was among the many players in the league who condemned the president for his comments.

Kaepernick remains unsigned to a team this season and though Trump did not mention him specifically by name the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback has remained a key target among right-wingers who express the opinion that black athletes should keep quiet about their political opinions.

When asked by a reporter about the president's insult that appeared to reference her son, Kaepernick's mother reportedly responded by saying, "Guess that makes me a proud bitch!"

Meanwhile, ESPN journalist Jemele Hill, who also became a target of the White House recently after stating publicly she considers Trump a white supremacists (a widely held belief which plenty of evidence supports), took to Twitter and predicted that neither owners nor league officials would speak out against the president's latest statement.

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San Diego City Councilmember Calls For Increased Action For Homeless

OFFICE OF COUNCILMEMBER CHRISTOPHER WARD, THIRD COUNCIL DISTRICT M E M O R A N D U M

DATE: September 22, 2017

TO: Mayor Kevin Faulconer, Rick Gentry, President & CEO, San Diego Housing Commission

FROM: Councilmember Christopher Ward, Chair, Select Committee on Homelessness

SUBJECT: Call to Action: Emergency Homelessness Response Plan

Recent efforts to provide vaccination, sanitation and education in the city of San Diego in
response to the widespread and deadly Hepatitis A outbreak public health emergency are a
necessary start but have proven insufficient to address the crisis at hand. There is no
question that if any other type of emergency was threatening and taking the lives of so many
San Diegans, immediate measures would be implemented overnight and throughout the city.
San Diegans have shown their generosity and commitment to each other before in such
moments and we must do so again now.

The city must go far beyond temporary measures that simply reset the homeless crisis to
where we were six months ago. My March memo, which was issued before the Hepatitis A
outbreak, outlined a comprehensive, systemic response to address the conditions
perpetuating homelessness and I reiterate those recommendations now to quickly address
this crisis.

Additionally, the city cannot expect the full Federal and State support that this crisis merits
if we do not have a comprehensive plan in action, nor can we expect that people will trust
that there is real resolution coming unless the city moves forward immediately with real
solutions.

I am calling for immediate action on the following programs and services that can and
should be implemented now:

• Implement Safe Camping/City-Sanctioned Camp Zones at the Qualcomm/SDCCU
Stadium parking lot, 20th & B Central Operations Property, and Sports Arena/Valley
View Casino Center parking lot.

• Implement Safe Parking opportunities at Qualcomm/SDCCU Stadium parking, Sports
Arena/Valley View Casino, Council District 6 Properties identified by Councilmember
Cate (5748 Copley Drive, Convoy Street & Copley Place, Aero Drive & I-15, 5255 Mt.
Edna Drive), and at any other viable location identified.

• Install mobile shower units and additional restrooms throughout the city, most
immediately at the Old Central Library, Golden Hall, and Mission Bay parking lots and
increase the current capacity and reach of existing mobile shower service providers
such as Think Dignity.

• Provide Bridge shelter beds for families, women and children in Golden Hall.

• Expand storage opportunities at Golden Hall and other locations identified here for
the provision of homeless services.

• Increase street cleaning, handwashing stations, sanitation, and security along the San
Diego River and in Balboa Park, Bankers Hill, Barrio Logan, Downtown, Hillcrest,
Logan Heights, Ocean Beach, Pacific Beach and other communities most impacted by
homelessness.

Lastly, I recommend that the San Diego Housing Commission be immediately granted the
authority and resources to bring these programs to fruition.

cc:
Council President Myrtle Cole

Life Can Be Much Easier Than We Make It

Dear friends,

     Plato said: “Two things alone cannot be satisfactorily united without a third; for there must be some bond between them uniting them together.”

   In a romantic relationship, we know the third thing to be love, uniting the two and binding them to a commitment to the others happiness. But there is a still deeper meaning of love here. It is the energy that binds us to God, as it were. It is that awareness that rises in silence, in meditation, in prayer, in chanting and ecstatic dance. It is the experience of oneness with the Great Power.

     Taken still further, this binding love is the power that connects us with a higher idea for our own life. A desire made real within the mind creates the third thing.  It generates jov, ie: agreement with, acceptance of, belief in the idea as real, as so now. Then we can say “lead me on” or “prove me now herewith” or “let it be.” There is no effort in trying to make it happen, we are participants in its unfoldment.

   Emerson said life can be much easier than we make it. It becomes difficult when we are so outwardly directed that we cannot achieve the third thing. We are seeking where it does not exist. It can be found within the field of awareness that contains both the original I AM and the I am that we are. Connecting the two gives us what Martin Buber said was I,Thou as opposed to I and Thou. Finding ways into the experience of one/with is the Royal Road to fulfillment. We simply must be still part of the time to allow the mind to perceive Reality.

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes www.carolcarnes.com or www.mvcsl.org (donate!)

Watch my tv show on You Tube “Living Consciously with Carol Carnes

www.californiafreepress.net better ideas about everything!

Off the Top of My Head

The Whole NFL Takes a Knee

by John Lawrence

Colin Kaepernick started something. This NFL quarterback, currently a free agent, started going down on one knee during the National Anthem played before every football game. It's played before every football game just to show how much this violent national pastime is so interwound with the USA with its twin themes of violence and competition. So taking a knee in protest of the way black people have been treated since even before America's founding is widely seen as heresy against the national quasi religion.

So no team in the NFL, which pays its football players millions of dollars, bothered to sign Colin up, and he might have quietly disappeared into the good, quiet night except for one thing - President Trump got involved with his tweeting penchant. And he made Colin Kaepernick a hero of the movement for black justice.

As ESPN reported about what happened yesterday:

Dozens of NFL players took a knee during the anthem -- Kaepernick's revised form of protesting police brutality and racial inequities in society -- and at night, around the bend from the White House, a whole procession of Raiders took a seat before playing Washington. The Steelers, Titans and Seahawks declined to take the field for the anthem. Scores of players, coaches and owners stood on two continents with arms locked in a show of unity after President Donald Trump profanely called for the firings of men who had peacefully exercised their First Amendment rights.

Trump has just tweeted himself into oblivion and divided the country between those loyal to the NFL and indeed all professional sports and those loyal to the National Anthem. Indeed he has even pissed off the NBL by disinviting the Golden State Warriors from the White House. Even a baseball player got into the act by taking a knee yesterday.

Pretty soon perhaps the fans will even start taking a knee during the National Anthem, maybe even the refs. How will they sell all the products during commercials if something so antithetic to commercialism takes over the status quo of professional sports - those few moments when everyone waxes patriotic before the ump cries out "Play ball." It's then that people feel they have discharged their patriotic duty and can get down to the true purpose of the game - drinking beer and consuming junk food while watching muscular black men bash their heads together.

Hepatitis A Outbreak Tests Local Medical Community

From the San Diego Union-Tribune, September 23, 2017:

Virus is infecting more vulnerable populations

By Paul Sisson

 

 

Dr. Darcy Wooten is an infectious disease specialist at UCSD and has been treating patients with hepatitis A

 

As jaundice faded and abdominal pains subsided in July, it looked like the 61-year-old homeless man lying in a bed at UC San Diego Medical Center had beat the hepatitis A infection that had attacked his already-damaged liver.

But, after five days of positive medical signs, those symptoms unexpectedly returned, thrusting him back into a fight that his doctors thought was finished.

Dr. Darcy Wooten, an infectious disease specialist at UC San Diego and no relation to Dr. Wilma Wooten, the county’s public health officer, said the virus’ return was devastating for her patient.

“It’s hep A today, but it’s going to be something else tomorrow if we don’t address those underlying infrastructure issues,” Wooten said.

“Over the course of a week and a half to two weeks he went into liver failure and died,” Wooten said. “It was a case of relapsing hepatitis, which occurs in 10 percent of patients, but it’s not something I have seen in my career before.”

In recent months that has been the experience in several San Diego hospitals closest to the places where the region’s ongoing hepatitis outbreak has continued to grow. These are cases that no one has seen in recent memory.

“Hepatitis A illness is usually pretty mild. They may seek care or they may not seek care, but, in the past, it has usually not been severe enough to be admitted to the hospital,” Wooten said.

However, the situation has been different in this case because hepatitis A is infecting homeless people and drug users, a population known to be medically vulnerable.

Off the Top of My Head

The Good Woman of Szechwan

by John Lawrence

The Good Woman of Szechwan is a play by Bertolt Brecht. It is about a woman, Shen Te, who runs a store and sells goods. At first she tries to help her friends in distress by giving them goods or lowering the price. After a while she finds her business going downhill so she cuts out the charity and her business revives. She adopts an alter ego, a male - Shui Ta, who cracks the whip on all the leechers trying to take advantage of Shen Te. The theme of goodness is rendered unstable as Shen Te realizes she must operate under the guise of both in order to keep her ship afloat.

The play is a parable which compares the differences in the capitalistic and socialistic approaches to life at a very personal level. The capitalist approach says get out there and work you lazy bastard. You don't work, you don't eat. The socialistic approach says do what you can and I will help you out. Will people take advantage of the socialistic approach and take whatever they can while working as little as possible? Or will they take advantage to get their house in order so that they can support themselves?

Is the capitalistic approach necessary in order that people support themselves and not become lazy good-for-nothings? Does compassion and love encourage people to be "good"? Or do they need to be prodded into it? One analysis says, "It is for the spectator to figure out how a good person can possibly come to a good end in a world that, in essence, is not good." Another analysis might conclude that it is impossible to live a good life in a bad society. Or, if you can't lick 'em, join 'em. Is society or the individual at fault?

In the final analysis, a good society must incorporate both the female aspect of compassion and the male aspect of demanding accountability. I think the Nordic socialist/capitalist countries do it best. They will help you if you are out of work, but if you can work and refuse to work, there comes a point where they won't help you any more. They will find you a job, and you can refuse to take it. Then they will find you another one. You can refuse to take that one too. But if you refuse to take the third job, they won't help you any more.

It's called tough love. It combines both masculine and feminine elements. Those trying to find a solution for the homeless problem would do well to read Bertolt Brecht's The Good Woman of Szechwan.

Why We Must Raise Taxes on Corporations and the Wealthy, Not Lower Them

by Robert Reich

Saturday, September 23, 2017

When Barack Obama was president, congressional Republicans were deficit hawks. They opposed almost everything Obama wanted to do by arguing it would increase the federal budget deficit.

But now that Republicans are planning giant tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, they’ve stopped worrying about deficits.

Senate Republicans have agreed to cut taxes by $1.5 trillion over the next decade, which means giant budget deficits.

Unless Republicans want to cut Social Security, Medicare, and defense, that is.  Even if Republicans eliminated everything else in the federal budget – from education to Meals on Wheels – they wouldn’t have nearly enough to pay for tax cuts of the magnitude Republicans are now touting.

But Republicans won’t cut Social Security or Medicare because the programs are overwhelmingly popular. And rather than cut defense, Senate Republicans want to increase defense spending by a whopping $80 billion (enough to fund free public higher education that Bernie Sanders proposed in last year’s Democratic primary, which deficit hawks in both parties mocked as being ridiculously expensive).

There’s also the cleanup from Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, estimated to be least $190 billion. And Trump’s “wall” – which the Department of Homeland Security estimates will cost about $22 billion.

Oh, and don’t forget infrastructure. It’s just about the only major spending bill that could be passed by bipartisan majorities in both houses. Given the state of the nation’s highways, byways, public transit, water treatment facilities, and sewers, it’s desperately needed. Trump campaigned on spending $1 trillion on it.

So how do Republicans propose to pay for any of this, and a big tax cut for corporations and the wealthy – without exploding the federal deficit?

Easy. Just pretend the tax cuts will cause the economy to grow so fast – 3 percent a year on average – that they’ll pay for themselves, and the benefits will trickle down to everyone else.

If you believe this, I have several past Republican budgets to sell you, extending all the way back to Ronald Reagan’s magic asterisks.

The Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation don’t believe it. They realistically assume that the economy won’t grow over 2 percent a year on average over the next decade.

The Federal Reserve estimates the fastest sustainable rate of economic growth will be 1.8 percent, given how slowly America’s working-age population is growing as well as the slow rate of productivity gains.

But Trump has already made a fetish out of discrediting anyone that comes up with facts he doesn’t like, and other Republicans seem ready to join him.

Senator Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican who sits on the budget committee, says he doesn’t want to rely on estimates coming from economists at the CBO and the Joint Tax Committee. He’d rather rely on supply-side economists outside government. “I do think it is time for us to have a real debate and to have real economists weighing in and we should take other things into account other than Joint Tax and C.B.O,” Corker said last week.

Unfortunately for the Republican tax cutters who used to be deficit hawks, we already have real-world historical evidence of what happens after massive tax cuts. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both cut taxes on the wealthy and ended up with huge budget deficits.

Besides, there’s no reason to cut taxes on big corporations and the wealthy. If anything, their taxes should be raised.

Trump says we’re “the highest taxed nation in the world.” Rubbish. The most meaningful measure is taxes paid as a percentage of GDP. On this score, the United States has the 4th lowest taxes of any major economy. (Only South Korea, Chile, and Mexico ranking lower.) 

American corporations aren’t overtaxed. After taking deductions and tax credits, the typical U.S. corporation today pays an effective tax rate of 24 percent. That’s only a tad higher than the average of 21 percent among advanced nations.

The rich aren’t overtaxed. The wealthiest 1 percent in the U.S. pay the lowest taxes as a percent of their income and total wealth of the top 1 percent in any major country – and far lower than they paid in the U.S. during the first three decades after World War II, when the American economy grew faster than it’s been growing since the Reagan tax cuts.

But we do have a deficit in public investment – especially in education and infrastructure. And we do have a national debt that topped $20 trillion this year and is expected to grow by an additional $10 trillion over the next decade.

What’s the answer? Raise taxes on big corporations and the wealthy. That’s what rational politicians would do if they weren’t in the pockets of big corporations and the wealthy.

Socialism vs Capitalism

by Jon Kofas

From CESRAN International, 19 September, 2015

Introduction
Contemporary civilization and its progress under capitalism are measured largely, though not exclusively, by stock market indicators and the wealth index of corporations and millionaires that mainstream media celebrates. All other issues are only significant if they enhance or diminish corporate wealth. This includes the political, social, environmental issues that may either entail greater profit opportunities or instability and lower profits.“Accordingly, the extent to which corporate democracy represents general, social interests or narrow, profit-oriented interests is largely a function of political contestation and state policy.” Carl Gershenson, “Protecting Markets from Society: Non-Pecuniary Claims in American Corporate Democracy” Politics and Society (March, 2015, vol. 43, no. 1

Socialists envisioning a society rooted in humanist values and not capital accumulation for the tiny minority endeavored to tame the capitalist system from within with reforms and from the outside with protests so that it does not leave as many children and their parents destitute in soup kitchens and in back alleys sleeping in cardboard boxes, especially during hard times of deep recessions.

This “corporate measure” of the social contract in modern society is to the exclusion of the misery index in what Frantz Fanon once called “The Wretched of the Earth”, referring to the manner that imperialism determines social class in Africa and the masses’ reaction to create a more socially just society. The conditions Fanon described pertaining to Algerian struggle against French colonialism pertains today to conditions that capitalism universally creates and perpetuates as it always has since its nascent phase in the 15^th century when European colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade began. An African-American youth shot by the police in the ghetto in 2015 is just as much a victim of the same class formation that capitalism creates as an Algerian youth fighting against French colonial rule in the 1950s.

The corporate measure of the social contract and a successful civilization based on linear econometric progress of corporations is a sharp deviation from the humanist values of the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and Enlightenment in Western Civilization rooted in creativity, intellectual achievements in everything from the arts to natural sciences, and to the welfare of humanity as a whole. The corporate measure of the social contract is an assertion of elitism and inequality and a rejection of humanist values and social justice.

Apologist of capitalism would of course give credit to capitalism as a system for unlocking human creative potential of such scientific and technological innovation. Since the transition in the 15^th century from the Feudal/Manorial social order/mode of production to capitalism there have been phenomenal technological and scientific inventions intended to improve everything from human health and comfort to unlocking the secrets of the universe. The same apologists, however, do not fault capitalism for structural poverty that persists on a world scale; for the countless wars in the name of capturing markets and increasing profits that have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of millions in the last five centuries; for societal violence emanating from socioeconomic inequality; and for human rights abuses and absence of social justice that are invariably at the core of capitalism.

In the post-Communist era, the specter haunting the entire world is neo-liberalism, driving many people to seek alternatives in some form of Socialism. The fall of Communist regimes had their experiments with one-party states and “command economies” in the name of the proletariat in the 20^th century. Those regimes failed for a variety of reasons including constant assault from capitalist countries at every level from the costly arms race to counterinsurgency operations and ideological propaganda campaigns. In the early 21^st century many people are wondering if the “End of History” celebrating the US Cold War victory over Communism (Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man) that marked capitalism’s triumph means anything more than hegemony of the wealthy over the rest of the world’s population in every domain from economy and politics to the arts for profit.

Capitalism under neoliberal policies is indeed without rivals throughout the planet in the post-Communist era where the US remains the world’s sole superpower despite China’s economic challenge. Communism as it operated during the Maoist era no longer exists even in contemporary China that practices capitalism and abides by the same rules of the international market economy and its institutions such as the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization. The “end of history” is indeed the end of Communist regimes but merely another step in society’s evolution and the continued struggle between the hegemonic capitalist class and the masses seeking social justice.

Unlike Most of Senate GOP, McCain Is a 'No' on Bill That Analysis Shows Would Kill Tens of Thousands by 2027

Published on

Friday, September 22, 2017

by

Common Dreams

The Arizona senator's opposition deals a significant blow to the GOP's chances of repealing the Affordable Care Act

by

Jake Johnson, staff writer

 30 Comments

Physicians and public health researchers Drs. Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein estimated in an analysis released Friday that, if passed, the Graham-Cassidy repeal bill could kill as many as 41,600 people by 2027. (Photo: Dong question/Flickr/cc)

The Republican Party's last-ditch effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act was dealt a major blow Friday when Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz) announced that he "cannot in good conscience vote for the Graham-Cassidy proposal," which analysts have called the most "brutal and deadly" version of Trumpcare yet.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is expected to bring the legislation to the floor for a vote before the end of next week.

Physicians and public health researchers Drs. Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein estimated in an analysis released Friday that, if passed, the Graham-Cassidy repeal bill could kill tens of thousands of people per year.

"The Graham-Cassidy bill—what we're calling 'The Undertaker Full Employment Act'—would cut health coverage by 14 million Americans in 2020, rising to at least 32 million in 2027," Dr. Woolhandler said in a statement. "That means 18,200 extra deaths in the first year, climbing to 41,600 annually within a decade."

Read McCain's full statement:

As I have repeatedly stressed, healthcare reform legislation ought to be the product of regular order in the Senate. Committees of jurisdiction should mark up legislation with input from all committee members, and send their bill to the floor for debate and amendment. That is the only way we might achieve bipartisan consensus on lasting reform, without which a policy that affects one-fifth of our economy and every single American family will be subject to reversal with every change of administration and congressional majority.

I would consider supporting legislation similar to that offered by my friends Senators Graham and Cassidy were it the product of extensive hearings, debate and amendment. But that has not been the case. Instead, the specter of September 30th budget reconciliation deadline has hung over this entire process.

We should not be content to pass health care legislation on a party-line basis, as Democrats did when they rammed Obamacare through Congress in 2009. If we do so, our success could be as short-lived as theirs when the political winds shift, as they regularly do. The issue is too important, and too many lives are at risk, for us to leave the American people guessing from one election to the next whether and how they will acquire health insurance. A bill of this impact requires a bipartisan approach.

Senators Alexander and Murray have been negotiating in good faith to fix some of the problems with Obamacare. But I fear that the prospect of one last attempt at a strictly Republican bill has left the impression that their efforts cannot succeed. I hope they will resume their work should this last attempt at a partisan solution fail.

I cannot in good conscience vote for the Graham-Cassidy proposal. I believe we could do better working together, Republicans and Democrats, and have not yet really tried. Nor could I support it without knowing how much it will cost, how it will effect insurance premiums, and how many people will be helped or hurt by it. Without a full CBO score, which won't be available by the end of the month, we won’t have reliable answers to any of those questions.

I take no pleasure in announcing my opposition. Far from it. The bill's authors are my dear friends, and I think the world of them. I know they are acting consistently with their beliefs and sense of what is best for the country. So am I.

I hope that in the months ahead, we can join with colleagues on both sides of the aisle to arrive at a compromise solution that is acceptable to most of us, and serves the interests of Americans as best we can.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the estimated number of deaths that could result from the Graham-Cassidy legislation. It's actually higher than indicated, but was not stated properly.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Off the Top of My Head

God Bless You John McCain

by John Lawrence

Funny how a diagnosis of brain cancer will tend to enhance your conscience and bring out your more compassionate side. It's twice now that Senator John McCain has foiled the Republican Party's attempt to deny health care to millions of people. His No vote on the latest attempt to "Repeal and Replace" Obamacare means that Obamacare will remain the law of the land until something better comes along. That something better could be Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All.

The Republican Party had nothing to offer in terms of a plan to Repeal and Replace Obamacare. It's just that the Repeal and Replace meme had been talked up for years by hate talk radio's Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones and others Haters and hatchet jobs such as Ann Coulter had made a very nice living out of ginning up anger and hate throughout the US. The original meme was just Repeal, but some of the haters moderated that to Repeal and Replace. It turns out they had nothing to replace it with. The Republican effort was not to come up with a better health care system. It was just to cater to a hateful meme that had been shouted from the rooftops of hate talk radio and Fox news. Funny how much money there is to be made by hateful speech.

Sort of reminds me of the 30s in Germany. Hitler was one of the greatest hate talkers of all time renowned for his speaking ability and his ability to stir up an audience to where they were shouting the German equivalent of "Right On." Before Hitler stumbled into a German beer hall where the half dozen member Nazi club was assembled, the Nazis were no threat to anyone. They were a bunch of tired old men with no speaking ability among them. Then Hitler came along and revived them. Pretty soon a Munich beer hall was not big enough for the assembled throngs. They had to rent a stadium.

Now in 21st century America, there is not one Hitler type figure. There is a whole slew of surrogates dedicated to whipping up the hate among Americans who feel that immigrants have moved in and taken their jobs. Just as Hitler wanted to purify Germany by getting rid of the Jews who had taken their jobs, the Republican "base" wants to purify America by getting rid of the various ethnic minorities especially immigrants. Health care was only a symbol; Repeal and Replace was only a slogan. When it came right down to it, one Republican Senator, John McCain, put the kibosh on the Republican Party who wanted to patronize the hate talkers and their groupies all over America and also pass their real agenda of tax cuts for the rich. So what if 40 or 50 million Americans died an early death.

One Republican Senator, however, found his conscience after realizing that he personally had the best health care in the world and he personally was just as vulnerable as any other American. He couldn't stomach his own hypocrisy if he voted to deny health care to other less fortunate people. He alone didn't give in to the hate talkers of America. In the final analysis his humanity won out. He didn't want his legacy to be that he participated in the denial of decent health care to millions of people.

'Blank Check to Kill With Impunity': Trump to Quietly Scrap Drone Restrictions

Published on Friday, September 22, 2017 by Common Dreams

Human rights groups argue the move could led to an upsurge in civilian casualties, which are already soaring under Trump

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

6 Comments

U.S. President Donald Trump signs executive orders as Defense Secretary Gen. James Mattis and Vice President Mike Pence look on in the Hall of Heroes at the Department of Defense on January 27, 2017 in Arlington, Virginia. (Photo: Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images)

President Donald Trump is reportedly gearing up to roll back even the most limited restrictions on U.S. drone operations overseas, further opening the door for the expansion of airstrikes and commando raids into nations like the Philippines and Nigeria and setting the stage for an upsurge in civilian casualties—already at record highs in Afghanistan and soaring in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

"The administration cannot write itself a blank check to kill with impunity."
—Zeke Johnson, Amnesty International USAZeke Johnson, senior director of programs for Amnesty International USA, told the New York Times in an interview that while Obama-era restrictions on drone strikes "fell far short on human rights protections," any move to water down drone warfare rules even further would be a "grave mistake."

The White House appears to be committed to the move nonetheless, the Times reported on Thursday, noting that the plan "has quietly taken shape over months of debate among administration officials and awaits Trump's expected signature."

The Times notes that at least two rules are on the chopping block:

• "First, the targets of kill missions by the military and the CIA, now generally limited to high-level militants deemed to pose a 'continuing and imminent threat' to Americans, would be expanded to include foot-soldier jihadists with no special skills or leadership roles."
• "And second, proposed drone attacks and raids would no longer undergo high-level vetting."

The plan, in effect, would deepen American military involvement in nations considered to be beyond combat zones and allow the U.S. military—and the CIA, which has for months lobbied for more drone authority—to target individuals that are not even deemed national security threats by the U.S. government.

"[D]rone operators and commanders would face fewer internal hurdles to launching specific strikes or raids," the Times concluded.

As Common Dreams reported last month, Trump has repeatedly shown a willingness to bow to endless war advocates, as he did in his speech outlining the White House "strategy" for the 16-year-war in Afghanistan. Central to his address was the promise to lift restrictions on military operations and "expand authority for American forces."

"The Trump administration needs to ensure that its guidance for operations outside armed conflict comply with human rights law."
—Zeke Johnson, Amnesty InternationalWith his expected drone rule rollback, Trump appears to be moving closer to fulfilling this promise.

According to a recent analysis by the human rights organization Reprieve, the Trump administration's more belligerent and less accountable foreign policy is already having devastating consequences. Trump, the group notes, "has overseen a projected fivefold increase in drone strikes" in Yemen, the site of a U.S. assassination campaign that "eclipses all that came before it in scale and brutality."

Johnson of Amnesty International noted in a statement late Thursday that Trump's ability to expand the use of lethal force abroad is due to the "legally and morally murky" policies that were put in place and maintained by his predecessors, and sustained by a Congress that refuses to debate the merits of the endless "war on terror."

Thus, any proposal that "gut[s] already weak human rights protections" that restrain American forces abroad "would be unacceptable," Johnson concluded. "The Trump administration needs to ensure that its guidance for operations outside armed conflict comply with human rights law. The administration cannot write itself a blank check to kill with impunity."

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Diversity is the Greatest Gift

Dear friends,

   This morning I made a list of the greatest gifts of this lifetime, for me personally.   I saw a pattern of gratitude for having lived in many different places, for traveling the world, for meeting people of various cultures. I realized the one gift I cherish the most is Diversity!  The world would be such a bland place without it. It is impossible for me to understand the fear of difference that is so prevalent in our world.

     Yes, there are the psychological reasons of self-rejection, the need to fit in, to belong, the fear of being left out. But why can’t we fit in anywhere? Why think we must look alike? The worst of all is the gender prejudice. How utterly stupid it is to think one is superior to the other. We have been divided and emotionally conquered by religious fundamentalism. The great breakthrough is coming by means of New Thought spirituality which goes hand in hand with the new science.

     What will we think about humanity when we all realize there is only One Life being all life, diversifying itself just for the joy of it, just for the fun of it, just because it can? How would we be together, knowing that every one of us is a unique expression of the One?  That would include all of Nature, animals and the earth itself. How differently we would behave knowing that all of it is sacred. We can only begin as individuals, challenging those divisive ideas that we inherited. It is time for humanity to get over the dogmatic views of the past and to awaken to the miraculous present. God is everywhere, all of it, in everything, all the time, all at once.  And so it is!

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes www.carolcarnes.com or www.mvcsl.org (donate via pay pal)

www.californiafreepress.net

watch my tv show on You Tube

Off the Top of My Head

No Rest Rooms in Downtown San Diego Plus Thousands of Homeless Equals Hepatitis A Outbreak

by John Lawrence

What did they expect to happen? To be blunt people were living on the streets, the same streets tourists and residents were plodding down, and they were shitting and pissing all over the streets and sidewalks. I say again: what did they expect to happen? People were going to Padres games, spending hundreds of dollar on tickets, food, beverages and merchandise and they're walking over streets contaminated with human and animal waste products. Don't forget a lot of homeless people have pets. They had nowhere to go either.

San Diego didn't used to provide public rest rooms for anybody, much less the homeless. It's just that they couldn't afford to. They spend millions of dollars on everything else, but they couldn't afford public bathrooms. If you couldn't afford to patronize some profit making establishment where you could use the bathroom, you were just out of luck. You had to go in the bushes. That's just what thousands of homeless have done... and the sidewalks.

European cities provide public rest rooms on practically every corner, even the poorest cities. San Diego, by contrast, set up a Portland Loo and then decided that there was too much crime going on there and took it away. Most European public bath rooms have attendants who oversee the operation and make sure it stays clean and safe. Of course San Diego never thought of that. These European bathroom attendants were probably not paid very much, but at least they had a job. Suppose San Diego could afford that?

Now the LA Times reported that Los Angeles County health officials declared a hepatitis A outbreak, days after a public health emergency was announced in San Diego County, where at least 16 people have died of the highly contagious virus. It has been known for some time that the homeless were running up huge bills for taxpayers to pay at San Diego emergency rooms, but that and the extra costs for police were not enough to persuade local "leaders" to provide housing and sanitary living conditions for those who couldn't provide it for themselves. So public expense, public safety and now public health evidently are not enough motivation for the public to do something about the homeless situation. As has been pointed out, the City has the money in various funds, but it won't spend it on housing for the homeless.

The San Diego Union reported:

Councilman David Alvarez, one of the memo’s co-authors, said the city is sitting on “literally hundreds of millions of dollars” it could spend on housing.

“Unfortunately, the mayor has refused to take action on this issue,” Alvarez said. “We are seeing more and more money coming back to the city in the general fund. ... This was intended to be used for more housing and it hasn’t been.

“You’d have to ask the Mayor’s Office why they don’t want to use it for that purpose.”

Katheryn Rhodes and I did a series of articles on money the City of San Diego has squirreled away in the LMIHAF fund and other funds that it is supposed to use for affordable housing but won't do it. Something like $30 million altogether. It seems the Mayor doesn't want his reputation tarnished by catering to the homeless. It would be unseemly. So tourists and downtown residents living in million dollar condos will just have to take the Hepatitis A risk on themselves.

 

Capitalism: The Nightmare

From truthdig:

 

A worker in a costume representing world capitalism during a 2017 May Day rally in Jakarta, Indonesia. (Dita Alangkara / AP)

The neoliberal, arch-capitalist era we inhabit is chock-full of statistics and stories that ought to send chills down the spines of any caring, morally sentient human. Nearly three-fourths (71 percent) of the world’s population is poor, living on $10 a day or less, and 11 percent (767 million people, including 385 million children) live in what the World Bank calls “extreme poverty” (less than a $1.90 a day). Meanwhile, Oxfam reliably reports that, surreal as it sounds, the world’s eight richest people possess among themselves as much wealth as the poorest half of the entire human race.

The United States, self-described homeland and headquarters of freedom and democracy, is no exception to the harshly unequal global reality. Six of the world’s eight most absurdly rich people are U.S. citizens: Bill Gates (whose net worth of $426 billion equals the wealth of 3.6 billion people), Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Larry Ellison (Oracle) and Michael Bloomberg (former mayor of New York City). As Bernie Sanders said repeatedly on the campaign trail in 2016, the top 10th of the upper 1 percent in the U.S. has nearly as much wealth as the nation’s bottom 90 percent. Seven heirs of the Walton family’s Walmart fortune have among them a net worth equal to that of the nation’s poorest 40 percent. Half the U.S. population is poor or near-poor, and half lacks any savings.

Just over a fifth of the nation’s children, including more than a third of black and Native American children, live below the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level, while parasitic financiers and other capitalist overlords enjoy unimaginable hyper-opulence. One in seven U.S. citizens relies on food banks in “the world’s richest country.” Many of them are in families with full-time wage-earners—a reflection of the fact that wages have stagnated even as U.S. labor productivity consistently has risen for more than four decades.

Failure by Design

These savage inequalities reflect government policy on behalf of “the 1 percent” (better, perhaps, to say “the 0.1 percent”). U.S. economic growth since the late 1970s has been unequally distributed, thanks to regressive policy choices that have served the rich and powerful at the expense of ordinary working people. As Joshua Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute showed in his important 2011 study, “Failure by Design,” the following interrelated, bipartisan and not-so-public policies across the long neoliberal era have brought us to a level of inequality that rivals the Gilded Age of the late 19th-century robber barons era. These policies include:

● Letting the value of the minimum wage be eroded by inflation.
● Slashing labor standards for overtime, safety and health.
● Tilting the laws governing union organizing and collective bargaining strongly in favor of employers.
● Weakening the social safety net.
● Privatizing public services.
● Accelerating the integration of the U.S. economy with the world economy without adequately protecting workers from global competition.
● Shredding government oversight of international trade, currency, investment and lending.
● Deregulating the financial sector and financial markets.
● Valuing low inflation over full employment and abandoning the latter as a worthy goal of fiscal and economic policy.

These policies increased poverty and suppressed wages at the bottom and concentrated wealth at the top. They culminated in the 2007-09 Great Recession, sparked by the bursting of a housing bubble that resulted from the deregulation of the financial sector and the reliance of millions of Americans on artificially inflated real estate values and soaring household debt to compensate for poor earnings.

After the crash, the government under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama bailed out the very financial predators who pushed the economy over the cliff. The Obama administration, populated by Goldman Sachs and Citigroup operatives, left the rest of us to wonder “Where’s our bailout?” as 95 percent of the nation’s new income went to the top 1 percent during his first term.

Take Up Thy Bed and Walk

Dear friends,

     Ernest Holmes wrote: we cannot expect to be happy if we are carrying corpses on our back.

      The dead past becomes a heavy burden if we do not let it fall away from us.   Furthermore, we attract more baggage as we go if we do not know how to forgive and let go in the current moment.   People say and do very unconscious things. We may feel that we are the target, but that is not so. Unkind acts stem from the burden they are hauling on their own backs!

     We are all pretty much in the same boat together, rowing like crazy trying to get somewhere. There can be no real advance unless and until we lighten our load. It helps if we imagine our past as a train attached to the center of our back. Now reach around and unhook it. See it fall away, sliding in to oblivion, the nothingness from which it came.

     Last evening on a tv talent show a young woman was among the final five contestants.  She had a great singing voice but she did not look like any of the other contestants. Some years ago, she survived a plane crash. Her body and face are covered with scars and disfigurement.  Yet, she did not allow that to dissuade her from auditioning and performing before millions of people.  Her past is not a burden. She has released it and is moving on. What a great example to the rest of us who may be emotionally scarred and feeling diminished. What is that great moment in the story of Jesus as healer? His advice was, “take up thy bed and walk.” Is it possible to be so present now that our dominant awareness is of our own worth and spiritual wholeness? It seems to be true and that is our path.

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes

www.carolcarnes.com or www.mvcsl.org donate via pay pal

www.californiafreepress.net for informed views on everything

The World's Common Humanity and US Foreign Policy

Published on

Thursday, September 21, 2017

by

Common Dreams

 

'A sensible and effective foreign policy recognizes that our safety and welfare is bound up with the safety and welfare of others around the world.'

by

Bernie Sanders

 

 61 Comments

"We all want our children to grow up healthy, to have a good education, have decent jobs, drink clean water and breathe clean air, and to live in peace," Sanders says. "That’s what being human is about." (Photo: Bernie Sanders/Facebook)

Common Dreams Editor's Note: The following are the prepared remarks for a speech delivered today, Thursday September 21, by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) as the 58th Green Foundation Lecture at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. The speech will also be live streamed here (and below).

Let me begin by thanking Westminster College, which year after year invites political leaders to discuss the important issue of foreign policy and America’s role in the world.  I am honored to be here today and I thank you very much for the invitation.  

"Foreign policy is directly related to military policy and has everything to do with almost 7,000 young Americans being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and tens of thousands coming home wounded in body and spirit from a war we should never have started. That’s foreign policy. And foreign policy is about hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan dying in that same war."

One of the reasons I accepted the invitation to speak here is that I strongly believe that not only do we need to begin a more vigorous debate about foreign policy, we also need to broaden our understanding of what foreign policy is. 

So let me be clear:
 
Foreign policy is directly related to military policy and has everything to do with almost 7,000 young Americans being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and tens of thousands coming home wounded in body and spirit from a war we should never have started. That’s foreign policy. And foreign policy is about hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan dying in that same war.
 
Foreign policy is about U.S. government budget priorities. At a time when we already spend more on defense than the next 12 nations combined, foreign policy is about authorizing a defense budget of some $700 billion, including a $50 billion increase passed just last week. 

Watch the speech:

Meanwhile, at the exact same time as the president and many of my Republican colleagues want to substantially increase military spending, they want to throw 32 million Americans off of the health insurance they currently have because, supposedly, they are worried about the budget deficit. While greatly increasing military spending they also want to cut education, environmental protection and the needs of children and seniors.  

Foreign policy, therefore, is remembering what Dwight D. Eisenhower said as he left office: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”  

And he also reminded us that: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.  It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway…”  

Off the Top of My Head

New and Different Not Always Better Than Old and the Same

by John Lawrence

Take music, for example. The Golden Age of American popular music was in the 1940s and 1950s. You had great composers of popular songs like Richard Rogers, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Jimmy Van Heusen, Harold Arlen. They wrote great songs like "All the Things You Are" and "Here's That Rainy Day." Where are those great composers today? There aren't any.

You also had great singers like Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. Fortunately, at 90 years of age, Tony Bennett is still with us, still performing, still reminding us of the Golden Age. The guys and gals from that era, for the most part, sang the songs like the composers intended. They memorized the melody. That was the singer's function - to sing the melody. Today the concept of melody has pretty much gone by the boards. Are there any melodies worth humming in popular songs today?

That was Frank Sinatra's secret. He absorbed the melody. I can see him working with his rehearsal pianist who is playing the melody one note at a time until Frank had it down. Frank was not a jazz singer although his music was jazz inflected and influenced. He could not improvise with his voice commonly known as scat singing. When he deviated from the melody, the results were not always good.

Instead Frank employed the best arrangers such as Nelson Riddle, Don Costa and Billy May and full orchestras. The arrangements were jazz influenced. Tony Bennett tends to sing with small jazz oriented backup groups. Jimmy Van Heusen and Frank were good buddies, and Jimmy wrote songs such as "Come Fly With Me" especially for Frank. By the way Jimmy's real name was Chester Babcock. He took the name Van Heusen because he saw an ad for Van Heusen shirts out the window.

A lot of the younger singers today are rerecording the old chestnuts, but the results are not as good as they were when recorded originally. Especially I can't stand Bob Dylan singing "Fly Me to the Moon." One of the worst voices ever, when he comes on the radio, I immediately switch channels. Fortunately, Sinatra's music is kept alive by the Seriusly Sinatra channel on Serius satellite radio. As Duke Ellington said, "There's only two kinds of music: good music and bad music." Amen to that. Thankfully, we still have the old recordings because today's popular music is mostly crap.

US Says No Money for Social Programs, But '$700 Billion to Kill People? Yeah That We Have'

Published on

Tuesday, September 19, 2017

by

Common Dreams

 

 

"Note 'where will the money come from?' deficit trolls will be silent on this $700 billion defense spending bill."

 

 

by

Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

 80 Comments

As The Intercept's Alex Emmons observes, the annual increase in military spending alone—$80 billion—would be more than enough to "make public colleges and universities in America tuition-free. In fact, Sanders' proposal was only estimated to cost the federal government $47 billion per year." (Photo: David B. Gleason/Flickr/cc)

Where were the pundits and elected lawmakers who complain about the cost of providing healthcare to all Americans when the Senate voted to spend $700 billion on the military?

"Note 'where will the money come from?' deficit trolls will be silent on this $700 billion defense spending bill." 
—Adam Johnson, FAIRMany critics were raising this question Monday after the Senate—in what was portrayed as yet another indication of bipartisan support for endless war—overwhelmingly approved the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which will dump a larger sum of money into the military budget than even President Donald Trump asked for while also authorizing the production of 94 F-35 jets, two dozen more than the Pentagon requested.

Passage of the NDAA—which this year approves a $700 billion defense budget, an annual increase of $80 billion—is something of an automated process in Washington, one that often flies under the radar and garners little opposition.

However, with support for Medicare for All and free public college tuition soaring, many are calling attention to the hypocrisy of pundits who yell about the costs of single-payer healthcare providing debt-free higher education while remaining entirely silent about the war budget.

Adam Johnson, a contributor to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, argued that the explanation for this double standard is simple: America's dominant political class and mainstream commentators view exorbitant military spending as a given.

"Note: neither Vox or WaPo will have pundits lament over 'where the money will come from' for [the Department of Defense]," Johnson wrote on Twitter following the Senate's vote, implying a reference to those who slammed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) Medicare for All bill on budgetary grounds. "Money for war just is. Like the tides."

Others echoed Johnson, noting that many U.S. reporters are not "programmed" to question military spending—a stark contrast to their reflexive skepticism of ambitious healthcare proposals or free public college tuition plans.

As The Intercept's Alex Emmons notes, the implications of this persistent refusal to question the bloated military budget are massive.

Emmons observes that the annual increase in spending alone—$80 billion—would be more than enough to "make public colleges and universities in America tuition-free. In fact, Sanders' proposal was only estimated to cost the federal government $47 billion per year."

"If the additional military spending over the next ten years instead went to pay off student debt," Emmons added, "it could come close to wiping it out entirely."

Instead, as Monday's vote revealed, the a bipartisan majority of U.S. senators appear content to continue unquestioningly pouring money into a military budget that already far exceeds spending of any other nation in the world.

Only 8 senators voted against the NDAA, which is expected to become law by the end of this year: Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Pat Leahy (D-Vt.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Ron Paul (R-Ky.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Bob Corker (R-Tenn.). Three senators did not vote.

Here are the 89 senators who voted in favor of the measure.
 

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Our Natural Joy Is Always Present

Dear friends,

     Small things make a big difference. My car radio quit working some months back. My love for music is strong and I missed it terribly. Replacing the audio on an older car seemed silly, so I kept putting it off. There were other places that required my attention and money.   But one day recently I suddenly realized that I was denying myself one of my favorite things; singing along with the radio as I drive. I asked a friend where a good audio shop was and took myself there and got a new sound system.

     Yesterday I sang along (sort of) with Gabby Pahinui, Crosby Stills and Nash and June Christy. The only word to describe the feeling was “Yippee!” Life is Good. It doesn’t take much to elicit our natural joy. It is always present, behind the sadness, the sorrow or the anxiety. I think of the devastation in the world right now, with the terrible storms that have left so many with so little. Right now, a drink of water, a helping hand, an understanding friend, these things are what are important to those affected.

     Next time you see someone in need, do something to help them realize they are still human, still worthy, still alive. In our Center last Sunday, we made a pact that we would give something to everyone we meet this week. It could be a smile, a compliment, a listening ear, money, some actual thing we want to share, anything at all. To be in the flow of giving begins with giving to ourselves and extends to everyone else. You can ignite that spark of natural joy in yourself and others. Little things mean a lot.

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes www.carolcarnes.com

www.mvcsl.org

donate via pay pal and watch us on You Tube Living Consciously with Carol Carnes

Paul Ryan Just Now Realized He Was Ignorant About Poverty

Rana Foroohar’s new book, "Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business," gets to the stuff Ryan conveniently left out.

 

By Lynn Stuart Parramore / AlterNet April 3, 2016, 8:55 AM GMT 

Print

235 COMMENTS

 

Photo Credit: The Crown Publishing Group

This post was originally published on the blog of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. 

From the lips of Paul Ryan, Chief Spokesman of Blame-the-Poor politics, came a curious mea culpa just last week: He should not have referred to hard-working Americans trying to feed their families as “takers.” Oops! (Mitt Romney gained attention for similar remarks in 2012, but his running mate Ryan had already been on the makers/takers theme for years.) Ryan further admitted that when it comes to economic distress, he didn’t really know what he was talking about.

“There was a time when I would talk about a difference between ‘makers’ and ‘takers’ in our country, referring to people who accepted government benefits,” said the speaker. “But as I spent more time listening, and really learning the root causes of poverty, I realized I was wrong.”

Well, yes. But a question: If the takers aren’t standing in the unemployment line or rushing home from the second job to change diapers, just where are they? Because an awful lot of America’s resources have gone missing. Like money that should be going to education, job training, healing the sick, retirement funds, infrastructure and, you know—life.

 

Off the Top of My Head

Toys R Us Bankruptcy Caused by Hedge Fun Leveraged Buyout

by John Lawrence

It's the same old game plan for private equity firms Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR), Vornado Realty Trust, and Bain Capital Partners. They acquired the publicly traded shares of Toys R Us in a leveraged buyout during the LBO boom in 2005 in a deal valued at $6.6 billion. They funded the acquisition in large part by loading up the company with debt — hence “leveraged buyout.” Remember Mitt Romney and Bain Capital?

First the PE firm borrows the money to buy out the publicly traded shares. Then they load the company - in this case - Toys R Us with the debt. Get the Bait and Switch going on here? The PE firms borrow the money, but they are not the ones that have to pay it back. It's the company they take over that's turned into the debtor. The PE firms pay themselves handsomely out of the borrowed money. The only losers here are the employees of Toys R Us.

Wolfstreet.com reported:

So here’s what the three PE firms did to Toys R Us: they stripped out cash and loaded the company up with debt. And these are the results: At the end of its fiscal year 2004, the last full year before the buyout, Toys R Us had $2.2 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments. By Q1 2017, this had collapsed to just $301 million. Over the same period, long-term debt has surged 126%, from $2.3 billion to $5.2 billion.

This table shows the astounding results of asset stripping and overleveraging. It takes a lot of expertise and Wall Street connivance to pull this off. So whatever happens to Toys R Us, the PE firms already extracted their wild profits:

So what if then Toys R Us goes under. The PE executives already have their money. That's what a "leveraged buyout" is all about. This is exactly the same thing that happened to Hostess brands, the makers of Twinkies. Check out my article, "How Twinkies Made a Few Billionaires Richer While Thousands Lost Jobs" I wrote in February of this year. 18,000 Hostess workers lost their jobs in that LBO. The pension fund was stripped. Here's what I said:

Twinkies have been around since the 1920s. They are as American as, well, apple pie. But Twinkies parent company, Hostess, was more akin to a pinata for the rich and their penchant for financial engineering. Hostess had been bought and sold at least three times since the 1980s, racking up debt and shedding profitable assets along the way with each successive merger. Then the company filed for bankruptcy in 2004. After it emerged from the longest bankruptcy in history in 2009, it had changed its name to Hostess Brands and a private equity group, Ripplewood Holdings, had taken control of the company with a 50% equity stake. There were also loans and lines of credit from hedge funds, Silver Point Capital and Monarch Alternative Capital. Hostess Brands’ union workers agreed to pay cuts and made contract concessions in exchange for equity.

The same thing that happened with Twinkies is happening to Toys R Us. The last part of the game plan didn't work however. The attempt to take Toys R Us public which would have netted the PE firms even more money failed. Investor money was not going to flow in enriching KKR, Vornado and Bain even more leaving the "public" with a turkey on its hands that would eventually go bankrupt anyway. Instead TRU went bankrupt on the PE firms' watch and now will be "restructured' which is another name for screwing the employees in order to enrich PE firms. Capitalism sucks!

And you know what? There was not a mention of the role of PE firms in the Toys R Us bankruptcy in the discussion on the NBC evening news last night. The mainstream media don't want you to know about the dirty little secrets of capitalism or global warming.

We Must Be Comfortable With Change

Dear friends,

     Change is not loss although it can seem to be. Things come to a natural completion; such as graduation from school. We did not see that as a loss, but knew it was coming and welcomed the next adventure.   This is not so easy when only one partner sees a long-term relationship as complete. When the other feels incomplete there is a desire to keep trying to make it something it has ceased to be. What we all know when we are thinking clearly is that only the form has changed, the relationship will continue, but with minimum involvement. This is something many cannot realize; it is all or nothing with them.

     Adult children will naturally leave the family home. We expect it and know we will be available should they need us. A healthy mind will accept the inevitable but get busy with their own life again. Most of us have had to let go of a cherished family dog or cat. It is a hard thing to do but we know when it is time to release them from pain and infirmity. When a disaster takes our home and all our belongings, it would seem insane not to see it as a loss. It is, on the one hand, but most things are replaceable. Not everything, of course, but when they are gone we must find a space in our mind to let it be. We are still here and that is what continues.

     Someone wise once said; the only important thing that is always present in your life is YOU! You are the deciding factor in how you perceive anything. You are still here, still capable of great love, joy, happiness.   You can make more money, build another house, love another pet. Those who come back from combat with missing limbs find ways to drive cars, ski, compete in sports events.   We are always present regardless of what the other person is doing or what is the condition of our body. That spark is the one true thing we can count on; our own awareness of Be-ing. Life is an adventure that changes forms almost constantly. It is not getting worse, it is becoming new. If we can be comfortable with that, we will always be ready for the next big thing.

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes

www.carolcarnes.com

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our tv show is on You Tube “Living Constantly with Carol Carnes

Off the Top of My Head

Berniecare: The Only Rational and Cost Effective Alternative for Health Care in the US

by John Lawrence

Will the American people listen to reason regarding health care? If so Berniecare could be the next health care policy in the US. It would be the best health care system in the entire world - bar none. Bernie has been touting "Medicare for All" for years. Health care should be a right not a privilege, the way it is in most civilized countries of the world. Universal health care is certainly as important as universal education if not more so. Bernie now has 17 Senate co-sponsors on his bill which is 17 more than he had a year ago - Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Kamala Harris of California, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Cory Booker of New Jersey.

Bernie's plan will cover dental and vision care which are not covered by conventional insurance plans. It will cover prescription drugs and bring their cost down because of the government's immense bargaining power. It will cover nursing home care which isn't covered by Medicare now. It will do all this for far less money than is being spent on health care now. America spends far more on health care than any single payer country, and the results are more meager by any standard or measure.

There will be no co-pays and no deductibles. You will be able to go to any doctor or hospital and simply present your insurance card, the way it is in Canada now. Last year, the average working family paid $4,955 in premiums and $1,318 in deductibles to private health insurance companies. Under this plan, a family of four earning $50,000 would pay just $466 per year to the single-payer program, amounting to a savings of over $5,800 for that family each year.

The United States currently spends $3 trillion on health care each year—nearly $10,000 per person. Reforming our health care system, simplifying our payment structure and incentivizing new ways to make sure patients are actually getting better health care will generate massive savings. This plan has been estimated to save the American people and businesses over $6 trillion over the next decade.

The American people will clearly be the winners if Berniecare is implemented. So who will be the losers? The insurance companies, the pharmaceutical corporations even for profit hospitals who will be forced to bring their costs under control. Doctors who take payoffs from pharmaceutical corporations will lose too. So their lobbyists will work overtime to make sure Berniecare never happens.

Let's hope that more influential people including politicians, celebrities and billionaires get behind Berniecare. Let's get it implemented. Let's get the next President of the US to be someone who is fully behind Berniecare. It will restore the US as one of the world's leading nations. Or we can stick with the abortion of health care we have now.

Possibly even Trump could get behind Berniecare. He's a renegade from traditional Republican orthodoxy. It could happen, but don't hold your breath.

A Wake-Up Call for Students

From Angry Bear Blog | September 18, 2017 8:00 pm

Guest Author: Alan Collinge, StudentLoanJustice.Org,

Both Alan and I have written various posts on the student loan crisis. Alan has been featured on Angry Bear Blog from time to time.

If you are in college and looking for something worthy to fight for today; as a student, you should consider the student loan issue. Student loans and how they are administered are the national injustice of our time reaching threatening proportions and impacting the livelihood of young adults going forward. While at first glance, the problem appears complicated, confusing, and overwhelming; it is actually quite simple and its debt genesis hearkens back to the creation of this country. This problem transcends partisan and cultural divides and could serve to bring together those on the left and right on campus.

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and others were in debt up to their eyeballs to British banks and merchants. They came to understand how a lending system could be used against the citizens. Of course it was not just the Founders who were being exploited, many early settlers were indebted to English banks as well. John Adams famously remarked;

“There are two ways to enslave and conquer a country. One is by the sword. The other is by debt”

.When the Founders created the Constitution, they made it a point to reflect on bankruptcy rights prominently. Few people realize that a uniform bankruptcy system is called for before the power to raise an army or a navy, ahead of the power to coin currency, and even ahead of the power to declare war in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.
Obviously, bankruptcy rights were very important to these men.

Free men are not forced into any type of behavior by the government that We The People established and ordained. The government is to serve the people – not to force them into servitude and obedience. The people are sovereign, as the people came before the government and the Constitution that gave rise to the government.

Adam Smith, the founder of free market economics provided the basis for western economic theory, was compelled to advocate for bankruptcy protection as a means to encourage entrepreneurship, risk taking, and also a means to compel good faith in a lending relationship.

When an individual or firm goes bankrupt, a legal process is instigated to discharge debts that cannot be repaid. In former times such debtors might have been put into a debtors’ prison and languished there for years. The process weighs assets against liabilities and allows the debts to be discharged at some fraction of their nominal value, leaving the debtor free of the burden, albeit subject to rules of financial behaviour and with a blemish on their credit record which can last for years.

We Will Never Have Peace Without Prosperity

Dear friends,

     What is a consciousness of wealth if not the realization that Infinite plenty is revealed as what we possess. Not what possesses us, but what we possess, which means what we allow into our mind first, and into our life as a result. Do we think wealthy thoughts or are we focused on what seems to be missing? Look at that place in your mind and fill it with something you love. Something you love might be art, travel, philanthropy, a home, a new car, savings. What we think is missing is an open vessel awaiting our recognition.

     We think of Source as out-poring its substance into the mold of our thought.   But first, we must create the mold by in-pouring our belief, perception and acceptance. We are the architects, but Source is the builder. It is a living partnership that is ongoing.  Sometimes students of New Thought mistakenly think we are being selfish and ought to be focused on world peace.  The irony is we will never have peace without prosperity. Those in need and in desperate want, or those who live in greed and grasping, are prone to violence, either to themselves or to society.

     It is understandable to be angry when half the world seems to be lavishly supplied and the other half is starving. This kind of disparity is causing mayhem. We need to demonstrate prosperity principles and to teach them to anyone who will listen. Everyone can be supplied with what is needed in the moment to live well and to express themselves authentically. It is a kind of violence to the soul to deny our immediate power to co-create our good. Superstition and religious dogma must be eliminated from our shared perception of Reality.

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes

www.carolcarnes.com  www.mvcsl.org

Watch me on tv on You Tube “Living Consciously with Carol Carnes”

www.californiafreepress.net

Homeless in Paradise: Third World Living in AMERICA

San Diego's Homeless Situation Has Been Neglected For Years

by John Lawrence

San Diego's neglect of the homeless situation in downtown has finally come to a head with the outbreak of Hepatitis A. But Hush Hush non-homeless people have also contracted it. It is a genuine public health issue. The fate of downtown high rise residents and the tourism industry is at stake. Maybe that will finally motivate city leaders to do something about it. Homeless advocates have been suggesting solutions for years. But city leaders have decided to just let the situation sit there and fester. So what is next: cholera? Third World diseases inevitably will break out among people living in filthy conditions. Already, emergency room bills are being run  up by the homeless which must be paid for by tax payers in one form or another. The homeless can't pay for them. People concerned about the homeless situation have appealed to the city leaders' compassion for years and have practical solutions which cost a pittance to implement. Finally, now that the real estate and tourism industries are at stake as well as the city's shining reputation, greed and pride might actually come up with a viable solution.

The following is from Voice of San Diego:

Morning Report: Restroom Panic

By Randy Dotinga on Sep 18, 2017 05:25 am | View in browser

Downtown wants to be a place where people can get out of their cars and go for long walks — tourists, office workers, residents. But if they walk, they’ll need restrooms. And for years, there’s been a conflicting urge: Let’s not make the homeless too comfortable by installing easy-to-access public restrooms.

Now city officials are scrambling to address a problem they have acknowledged for years: We don’t have enough bathrooms. A deadly outbreak of hepatitis A has them panicked. It is said to be the second-largest outbreak in the United States. since a vaccination became available 22 years ago. The outbreak, which has killed 16 and sickened hundreds, is linked to poor hygiene and lack of restrooms.

Meanwhile, the city’s new bleach-enhanced cleaning of “fecally contaminated” streets and sidewalks is garnering unwanted national and international attention.

County officials warned patrons of a Pacific Beach restaurant they might have been exposed. It may not be long until late-night hosts hear about this and give us a new motto.

New portable restrooms and hand-washing stations are appearing downtown. But what happened, or failed to happen, earlier? The city “hit debacle after debacle even in far less urgent attempts to add them,” reports our Lisa Halverstadt in a new story.

The glitches continue, she notes. A high-profile “Portland Loo” at Park Boulevard and Market Street, near the downtown library, vanished earlier this month. Meanwhile, some of the homeless say they avoid 10 toilets at Father Joe’s Villages because they’re filthy. “I’d rather use a bucket,” one said.

More Outbreak News: Inside the Restaurant Scare

• Hepatitis A is actually quite rare, with an estimated 2,500 cases a year in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. “Keep in mind that most people do not get sick when someone at a restaurant has Hepatitis A,” cautions the CDC. “However, if an infected food handler is infectious and has poor hygiene, the risk goes up for patrons of that restaurant.”

• L.A. is worried that San Diego’s outbreak will spread there. Why hasn’t it already? Possibly because the city has been cleaning certain streets and sidewalks with bleach solutions for years. Officials in both L.A. and Orange counties have begun vaccinating the homeless against hepatitis A.

To provide some perspective about how big our outbreak is, L.A. County — more than three times our county’s size — hasn’t had more than 60 annual cases of the disease in the past five years. (L.A. Times, KPCC) We are marching toward 500 cases in the last year.

• A U-T reporter visits the edges of the Santa Ana River in Orange County, where “tent cities along the river offer a level of comfort and perhaps sophistication unparalleled by any prominent homeless camps in the San Diego region. Many people control a relatively stable piece of real estate, complete with couches, beds, small refrigerators powered by gas generators, cook stoves, even amenities such weight benches and a communal bike shop.”

But there aren’t any restrooms.

Off the Top of My Head

Bumper Sticker Mentality Won Election for Trump

by John Lawrence

Hillary was too practical. Her math actually added up. Bernie was more passionate. Hillary blamed him because his math didn't add up. And then there was Donald Trump. he didn't even pretend to do math. He just dealt in slogans and banalities. The people loved it. The people didn't want to follow Hillary's math. They just wanted to be entertained, the way they'd been entertained by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Alex Jones. Hate talk radio has become de rigueur as an adjunct to the Republican party. Republicans are glad to have all the haters under their tent as long as they can get their tax cuts for the rich passed in the process.

Hillary just wasn't entertaining enough, and she seems to be resentful of the fact that Bernie wasn't that concerned about his math adding up. Besides in addition to all the phony email stuff the haters had tried to hang around her neck for years, she had real troubling issues like being too cozy with Wall Street. She was all too willing to take immense amounts of money for giving speeches to the CEOs of Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase. For the amount of money they gave her, she should have given them a blow job as well. Her husband had deregulated them and unleashed the terror of credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations which led directly to the 2008 financial meltdown.

Barack Obama had "saved" Wall Street, and Hillary had come to the conventional wisdom that Wall Street was the sine qua non to US hegemony in the world. The world rested on Wall Street's shoulders. The Value of the American dollar was not secure unless no Wall Street bankers went to jail. The financialization of the economy was sancrosanct. Bernie, being a Democratic Socialist, challenged all that. He was no friend of Wall Street.

The Republican establishment  thought Trump was their friend. Now they're not so sure after he sided with "Chuck and Nancy" over the debt ceiling. They thought that Trump could be their useful idiot the way Ronald Reagan with his celebrity status had been. They knew all this stuff about getting the coal miners back in the coal mines was a bunch of rubbish, but they gave him credit for appealing to the working man and all the folks who were longing for the good old days of the 1950s when there were separate drinking fountains and bathrooms for whites and coloreds.

Next time the Democrats or whoever might replace them on the Left should not worry about the math adding up. Get right to the heart of the matter. Find a candidate, preferably a well known celebrity, who can deliver a speech with passion and a commanding presence. It's time to fight fire with fire.

 

 

The Growing Danger of Dynastic Wealth

by Robert Reich

Saturday, September 16, 2017

White House National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, former president of Goldman Sachs, said recently that “only morons pay the estate tax.”

I’m reminded of Donald Trump’s comment that he didn’t pay federal income taxes because he was “smart.” And billionaire Leona Helmsley’s "only the little people pay taxes.”

What Cohn was getting at is how easy it is nowadays for the wealthy to pass their fortunes to their children, tax-free.  

The estate tax applies only to estates over $11 million per couple. And wealthy families stash away dollars above this into “dynastic” trust funds that escape additional taxes. 

No wonder revenues from the estate tax have been dropping for years even as wealth has become concentrated in fewer hands. The tax now generates about $20 billion a year, which is less than 1 percent of federal revenues. And it applies to only about 2 out of every 1,000 people who die.

Now, Trump and Republican leaders are planning to cut or eliminate it altogether.

There’s another part of the tax code that Cohn might also have been referring to – capital gains taxes paid on the soaring values of the wealthy people’s stocks, bonds, mansions and works of art, when they sell them.

If the wealthy hold on to these assets until they die, the tax code allows their heirs to inherit them without paying any of these capital gains taxes. According to the Congressional Budget Office, this loophole saves heirs $50 billion a year.

The estate and capital gains taxes were originally designed to prevent the growth of large dynasties in the U.S. and to reduce inequality.

They’ve been failing to do that. The richest 1 tenth of 1 percent of Americans now owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent.

Who Stole the American Dream

Wealth Concentrated in a Few Hands Not Compatible with Democracy

by John Lawrence

From YouTube

The book by the same name was written by Hedrick Smith. In it he quotes Louis Brandeis, a Supreme Court justice and advisor to President Woodrow Wilson: "We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." I guess America has made its choice: democracy concentrated in the hands of a few. A new class system is taking hold composed of two classes - the 1% of super wealthy and the 99% of what formerly was the middle class. Now the middle class has been turned into the debtor class. To get anywhere, most people think, you have to go into debt in order to get a college diploma. Meanwhile, you run up credit card debt in order to live. Then add to that car payment debt and you have a perfect storm for the creation of the new debtor class regardless of whether or not you get a job when you graduate college.

A growing number of people will never pay off their student loan debt even over the course of a life time. Instead it will come to haunt them when their social security payments are garnished after they turn 65 or 70. The income gap and the wealth gap are continuing apace. The internet has facilitated this as certain companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple have established beachheads all over the world. The globalization of corporations has precluded local operations from getting started with the result that profits are shipped back to one corporate profit center instead of being distributed broadly.

How Big Business Got Brazil Hooked on Junk Food

From the New York Times:

By ANDREW JACOBS and MATT RICHTEL

Photographs by WILLIAM DANIELS for The New York Times

SEPT. 16, 2017

 

 Mrs. da Silva and other vendors like her make regular deliveries for Nestlé to a quarter of a million households in Brazil.

FORTALEZA, Brazil — Children’s squeals rang through the muggy morning air as a woman pushed a gleaming white cart along pitted, trash-strewn streets. She was making deliveries to some of the poorest households in this seaside city, bringing pudding, cookies and other packaged foods to the customers on her sales route.

Celene da Silva, 29, is one of thousands of door-to-door vendors for Nestlé, helping the world’s largest packaged food conglomerate expand its reach into a quarter-million households in Brazil’s farthest-flung corners.

As she dropped off variety packs of Chandelle pudding, Kit-Kats and Mucilon infant cereal, there was something striking about her customers: Many were visibly overweight, even small children.

“What we have is a war between two food systems, a traditional diet of real food once produced by the farmers around you and the producers of ultra-processed food designed to be over-consumed and which in some cases are addictive,” said Carlos A. Monteiro, a professor of nutrition and public health at the University of São Paulo.

She gestured to a home along her route and shook her head, recalling how its patriarch, a morbidly obese man, died the previous week. “He ate a piece of cake and died in his sleep,” she said.

Mrs. da Silva, who herself weighs more than 200 pounds, recently discovered that she had high blood pressure, a condition she acknowledges is probably tied to her weakness for fried chicken and the Coca-Cola she drinks with every meal, breakfast included.

Nestlé’s direct-sales army in Brazil is part of a broader transformation of the food system that is delivering Western-style processed food and sugary drinks to the most isolated pockets of Latin America, Africa and Asia. As their growth slows in the wealthiest countries, multinational food companies like Nestlé, PepsiCo and General Mills have been aggressively expanding their presence in developing nations, unleashing a marketing juggernaut that is upending traditional diets from Brazil to Ghana to India.

A New York Times examination of corporate records, epidemiological studies and government reports — as well as interviews with scores of nutritionists and health experts around the world — reveals a sea change in the way food is produced, distributed and advertised across much of the globe. The shift, many public health experts say, is contributing to a new epidemic of diabetes and heart disease, chronic illnesses that are fed by soaring rates of obesity in places that struggled with hunger and malnutrition just a generation ago.

The new reality is captured by a single, stark fact: Across the world, more people are now obese than underweight. At the same time, scientists say, the growing availability of high-calorie, nutrient-poor foods is generating a new type of malnutrition, one in which a growing number of people are both overweight and undernourished.

Conflicts and Climate Change Fueling Rise in World Hunger

Published on Friday, September 15, 2017 by Common Dreams

"This has set off alarm bells we cannot afford to ignore," according to U.N. report

by Julia Conley, staff writer

 

13 Comments

A rise in armed conflicts has led to an explosion in the world's refugee population, many of whom live in a state of food insecurity at refugee camps like the one seen here in Uganda. (Photo: UNMISS/Flickr/cc)

Armed conflicts and climate change are key factors being blamed for a rise in worldwide hunger—the first in over a decade, according to a new United Nations report.

Malnutrition and food insecurity affected 815 million people around the world in 2016—up from 777 million the previous year. Many of the countries where people suffer the most from hunger have been affected by armed conflicts. Conflicts between armed groups has gone up by 125 percent since 2010, often growing into larger wars and affecting countries including Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia, and South Sudan, where the situation spiraled into a famine for several months earlier this year.

The report casts doubt on the U.N.'s stated aim to eradicate hunger by 2030—a theoretically achievable goal, considering, as the U.N. stressed when it announced the goal, the amount of food in the world is more than enough to feed the global population.

"This has set off alarm bells we cannot afford to ignore," said the authors of the report, who represent five U.N. agencies. "We will not end hunger and all forms of malnutrition by 2030 unless we address all the factors that undermine food security and nutrition. Securing peaceful and inclusive societies is a necessary condition to that end."

A rise in armed conflicts since 2005 has led to an explosion in the worldwide refugee population, leading to greater food insecurity for 64 million people.

The report also names the destruction of wheat and barley fields in Iraq, damage to infrastructure in Syria, and the loss of livestock and crops in South Sudan as effects of conflict which are linked to hunger.

Climate change has led to chronic hunger around the world as well, especially in places impacted by drought and flooding. Even in places not currently impacted by ongoing fighting, according to the report, climate change can have a domino effect on the region—creating conflict over scarce fertile land and water, and in turn leading to food insecurity:

Competition over productive land and water has been identified as a potential trigger for conflict...Sources estimate that over the past 60 years, 40 percent of civil wars have been associated with natural resources.

"The concurrence of conflict and climate-related natural disasters is likely to increase with climate change," the report says, "as climate change not only threatens food insecurity and malnutrition, but can also contribute to further downward deterioration into conflict, protracted crisis and continued fragility."

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