California Free Press

'Alarm Bells Ringing': Global CO2 Levels at Highest in 3 Million Years

Published on Monday, October 30, 2017 by Common Dreams

Ahead of UN climate talks, report warns of "severe ecological and economic disruptions" without more drastic moves to cut emissions

by Jessica Corbett, staff writer

 

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A U.N. report released Monday Oct. 30, detailing concentrations of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, is raising concerns among scientists that more drastic action is needed to reduce emissions. (Photo: Walter Siegmund/Wikimedia Commons/cc)

Ahead of the COP23 climate negotiations in Bonn, Germany next week, an annual bulletin released on Monday revealed that last year, the average global concentration of carbon dioxide surged at a record-breaking pace to the highest level in approximately 3 million years, renewing scientists' concerns that more action is needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

"There's still time to steer these emissions down and so keep some control, but if we wait too long humankind will become a passenger on a one-way street to dangerous climate change."
—Dave Reay, University of Edinburgh

"This should set alarm bells ringing in the corridors of power," Dave Reay, a professor of carbon management at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved with the research, told the Guardian. "We know that, as climate change intensifies, the ability of the land and oceans to mop up our carbon emissions will weaken."

"There's still time to steer these emissions down and so keep some control," Reay added, "but if we wait too long humankind will become a passenger on a one-way street to dangerous climate change."

The Greenhouse Gas Bulletin (pdf), published by the United Nations World Meteorological Organization's (WMO) Global Atmosphere Watch program, found that globally averaged CO2 concentrations increased from 400 parts per million (ppm) in 2015 to 403.3 ppm last year.

Scientists have reliable data on carbon dioxide concentration spanning approximately 800,000 years, and researchers estimate the last time the planet had a comparable concentration of carbon dioxide was 3 to 5 million years ago, during the Pliocene epoch, when the global temperature was up to 3°C warmer and due to melting ice sheets, sea level was about 66 feet higher than it is today.

The bulletin attributes the increase in CO2 levels to the El Niño event and greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, including "growing population, intensified agricultural practices, increases in land use and deforestation, industrialization, and associated energy use from fossil fuel sources" since the "industrial era, beginning in 1750."

Top Trump Pollster: 'No Question' Bernie Sanders Would Have Won

Published on Tuesday, October 31, 2017 by Common Dreams

The remarks come as polls continue to show the democratic socialist from Vermont is far and away America's most popular politician

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

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"I think Sanders would have had the ability to reach a lot of the less than college-educated, low-income white voters," said Tony Fabrizio, the chief pollster of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. (Photo: Phil Roeder/Flickr/cc)

At a Harvard University Institute of Politics event on Monday, Tony Fabrizio—the chief pollster of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign—argued there is "no question" that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would have defeated Trump in the general election had he emerged victorious from the Democratic primary.

"I think Sanders beats Trump," Fabrizio concluded. "I think Sanders would have had the ability to reach a lot of the less than college-educated, low-income white voters."

Fabrizio's comments are consistent with polls conducted in 2016 showing that in a hypothetical head-to-head match-up with Trump, Sanders would have prevailed handily.

More recent polls have produced similar results.

As Common Dreams reported in August, a Public Policy Polling survey found that in a hypothetical 2020 match-up with Sanders, Trump would lose by 13 points.

Polls have also consistently found that Sanders is America's most popular politician. According to a recent Harvard-Harris poll, Sanders is the only politician in the United States who "a majority of Americans actually like."

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Off the Top of My Head

China's Xi Jinping: "Our Socialist System Demonstrate Great Strength and Vitality"

by John Lawrence

While the US fritters away its money on useless and even frivolous wars, many of them made up and unnecessary, China is building a powerhouse of an economy and is set to exert major influence in many parts of the world. Xi Jinping has no qualms about calling the Chinese system "socialist." Most of the countries of the world who are the US' actual friends are socialist, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, for instance. After fighting a disastrous war there, now they are our friends and make most of our clothes and shoes so trade is abundant. Trade is a peace time activity, and we don't hold it against Vietnam for winning the war as long as some American corporations can make a profit there off of cheap labor.

All of the Scandinavian countries are socialist even if not in their actual name. Welfare benefits are high including free medical care, free education up through the university level, parental leave, free child care etc etc. Basically, citizens there have all the benefits that Bernie Sanders wants to implement in the US. In Germany education is free up through the university level. In most developed and advanced countries, money is spent by the government on improving the lives of the people instead of on advanced weaponry and military offense. The US has so many military bases in practically every country in the world that our own Senators and Congressmen were surprised to learn we had a military presence in Niger until four soldiers were killed there.

Meanwhile, the US national debt increase by leaps and bounds. Each year the deficit gets bigger. Each year there's no money to spend on infrastructure or on increased social benefits for the people, but plenty for tax cuts for the rich. As the US sinks under a ton of debt, China is moving forward with its Belt and Road initiative with elaborate plans for connecting China via the old Silk Road. China's goal is to be the preeminent powerhouse in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. The US is a nation on the decline as it only knows how to spend colossal amounts of money on weapons, pretending it's the world's policeman and thereby providing a much needed service, and it has a nincompoop for a President.

As the world changes from fossil fuels to renewable energy, petrodollars, which guaranteed the preeminence of the US economy after the Bretton Woods system failed, will be a thing of the past. China, Russia and some other countries, the BRICS nations, are already agreeing to price oil in other currencies. There is nowhere else for the US dollar to go except for creditor nations to buy up US assets. So the world's policeman, which is already the world's leading debtor nation, will become the world's tenant nation paying rent to the world's creditor nations.

When the chickens come home to roost, the US will have nothing to show except a tremendous load of debt and the rusting hulks of a lot of military equipment. Our empire will have been relegated to the dustbin of history and our legacy will be 300 million-plus people with no health care and no social safety net. But we will be free except for the debt that is. Freedom is just another name for nothing left to lose as Janis Joplin said.

Jazz 103: The Next Five Most Important Jazz Artists/Albums

by John Lawrence

Jazz 101 can be found here. Jazz 102: here.

11. Horace Silver: Silver 'N Voices

Horace Silver along with Art Blakey was the most important small group bandleader of the 50s and 60s. He employed the standard small group line-up of tenor saxophone, trumpet, piano, bass, and drums. His group was the training grounds for young players who went on to be major artists. In addition Horace was a prolific composer. All the compositions - words and music - on this album are by Horace. Horace had a very uplifting message, not found too often in the jazz world. It is well represented on this album. In addition there are some classic trumpet solos by Tom Harrell. Great solos by saxophonist Bob Berg also. This album is very accessible for the neophyte jazz listener.

His most successful album and well worth listening to in addition to this one was Song for My Father. He recorded frequently on Blue Note records which became the most successful jazz label of that era and is still going today. Horace's comping behind his soloists was fantastic and added energy to the solo. Many of his varied repertoire of songs, including "Doodlin'", "Peace", and "Sister Sadie", became jazz standards that are still widely played. His considerable legacy encompasses his influence on other pianists and composers, and the development of young jazz talents who appeared in his bands over the course of four decades. 

12. Art Blakey: Moanin'

Art Blakey's group along with Horace Silver's became the training grounds for young jazz players many of who went on to record under their own names and create great careers. Unfortunately, Art was also the one who got many of them hooked on heroin including Bobby Timmons, the pianist on this album who composed Moanin', and Lee Morgan who is the trumpeter on this album. His band served as a developmental stage for future bandleaders including Hank Mobley, Kenny Dorham, Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan, Chuck Mangione, Jackie McLean, Wayne Shorter, Cedar Walton, Wynton Marsalis, Benny Golson, and Bobby Timmons.

The rest of the tunes on the album were composed by Benny Golson, one of the most prolific jazz composers. In his autobiography, Whisper Not: The Autobiography of Benny Golson, Benny relates how his composition Killer Joe was always played by Doc Severinsen and the Tonight Show Band every night when they went to commercial. This resulted in a check for $100. sent to Benny each time the tune was played. Benny is one of the most important figures in the jazz having composed numerous standards and played sax in some great groups. Later he gave up jazz for a career in Hollywood, but came back to it in later years. He currently is still playing.

13. Art Farmer - Modern Art

One of the best and most underrated trumpet players in jazz was Art Farmer. Together with Benny Golson he formed the Jazztet in 1959, the high water mark for jazz and influential and popular jazz albums like Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue", Dave Brubeck's "Time Out." and John Coltrane's "Giant Steps. Art was the most tasteful and musically literate of all the trumpet players of the 50s and 60s. The arrangements and consistency on this album are first rate. His playing is known for its lyricism, warmth of tone and sensitivity. Bill Evans, also know for these same qualities, accompanies Art and Benny on this album. The combined quality of professionalism and musicianship is outstanding.

Art came from a musical family. His mother played piano in the AME church. His identical twin, Addison, who is also on this album was a professional jazz bassist. Art grew up in Phoenix, AZ when the schools were segregated and no music lessons were available. He taught himself to read music and play the trumpet. In later years he used the more mellow sounding flugelhorn.

The Sad State of Disaster Relief

Published on Sunday, October 29, 2017 by OtherWords

Former presidents are cajoling individual Americans to donate for relief. Maybe they should lobby Congress instead.

by Jill Richardson

 

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President Donald Trump throwing paper towels to hurricane victims during a visit to Puerto Rico.

Five former U.S. presidents recently came together to raise money for hurricane relief for the victims of hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria. This generous, bipartisan act is one of true generosity and statesmanship.

And yet, as former presidents, all five men know that there’s another way to help hurricane victims, or victims of any natural disaster. The federal government can quickly provide far more in money, personnel, and resources to help disaster victims than even the most generous outpouring of donations by Americans.

Congress recently approved $36.5 billion for disaster relief. That’s nowhere near enough given the scale of the crises from California to Puerto Rico. And further funding is going to run up against a GOP plan to cut $1.5 trillion worth of taxes — about 80 percent of which will go to the richest 1 percent.

It’s a sad comment on the current state of our government, when the current president and Congress aren’t doing enough to help disaster victims using the full weight and power of the federal government, so five former presidents have to cajole millions of Americans to give voluntarily.

I don’t want to demean those efforts. If you gave, you did the right thing. The victims of the hurricanes no doubt need your support and appreciate your generosity.

I’ve got only one friend in Puerto Rico and he’s relatively well off. He’s a professor, and he lives in a nice home in the capital, San Juan. He has electricity and Internet, so he’s been posting photos of the damage.

Enormous trees block roads. Buildings are damaged. After a month of clearing debris and attempting to clean up his own home and neighborhood, my friend is depressed. And, with electricity and internet, he’s one of the lucky ones — some 80 percent of the island still lacks power.

My heart hurts for those who are less fortunate.

As much as we complain about the federal government, it has an important role to play in natural disasters. Paying taxes is never fun, but by paying them, we can create a whole that’s worth more than the sum of its parts.

If your home is incinerated by a wildfire in Montana or California, or demolished by a hurricane in Texas, Florida, or Puerto Rico, odds are you can’t recover without some form of help.

The fortunate have insurance. Yet in my home of San Diego, many families who lost homes in past fires found that their insurance didn’t actually cover the cost to rebuild their homes.

Ultimately, if we are to recover from natural disasters in a timely fashion — before victims who survived the initial disaster lose their lives in the aftermath, and before children lose days of school and adults lose days at work — we need each other. We need our government.

Ideally, we need our government for more than just disaster relief. We need it for disaster prevention. The government can buy homes from people who live in places that will repeatedly flood, allowing them to move somewhere else.

It can work to prevent catastrophic climate change so that hurricanes, wildfires, landslides, and other disasters don’t become more severe or more common.

Individual, voluntary efforts are great, and they produce needed relief for disaster victims. But we need something more.

Those five former presidents could probably make a much bigger impact if they joined forces to lobby Congress and the White House to fully fund disaster recovery efforts and to then take the action needed to prevent these disasters from becoming more common.

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

 

Jill Richardson is the founder of the blog La Vida Locavore and a member of the Organic Consumers Association policy advisory board. She is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It.

The Huge Tax Heist

by Robert Reich

Sunday, October 29, 2017

You know the plot: The bank robbers set off a bomb down the street from the bank, and while everyone’s distracted they get away with the loot.

In the reality TV show we’re now suffering through, Donald Trump is the bomb.

The robbers are the American oligarchs who bankroll the Republican Party, and who are plotting the biggest heist in American history – a massive tax cut estimated to be up to 5.8 trillion dollars.

Around 80 percent of it will benefit the richest 1 percent, according to the Tax Policy Center. 

Trump is busily distracting America with his explosive tweets and incendiary tantrums – blasting Republican senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, NFL players who take the knee, Dreamers, refugees, immigrants, transgender people, the media, “rocket man,” Hillary Clinton, Obama, NAFTA, Muslims.

The Trump bomb is hugely damaging – unleashing hate, threatening democratic institutions, isolating America in the world.  

But none of this seems to bother Republicans in Congress, except for a handful of Senators who won’t be running again. That’s because congressional Republicans are concentrating their efforts on pulling off the giant heist for their rich patrons. 

They want to move quickly so no one notices – passing the tax cut before Christmas, with no hearings and minimal debate.

If the plot succeeds, most Americans will be robbed in three ways.

First, they’ll lose tax deductions they rely on – such as the deduction on earnings they put into tax-deferred savings in 401k plans. Some 55 million Americans now rely on 401(k) plans to save for retirement. 

They’ll also lose the deduction for what they pay in state and local taxes. More than half of this deduction now goes to taxpayers with incomes of less than $200,000.

Republicans say the middle class will come out just fine because they’ll get a larger standard deduction. Not true. The average American’s tax bill will rise because the deductions they’ll lose will total more than the higher standard deduction Republicans are proposing.

Second, most Americans will lose government services that will have to be eliminated in order to pay for the giant tax cut – including, very likely, some Medicare and Medicaid.

About $1.5 billion in Medicare and Medicaid cuts were quietly included in the budget resolution Republicans just passed, in order to get their tax bill through the Senate with just 51 votes. (No one paid much attention because Trump was attacking grieving combat widows.)

Third, most Americans will have to pay higher interest on their car and mortgage loans and other money they borrow, because the huge tax cut will explode the national debt.

That debt is now around $20 trillion, or 70 percent of the total economy. If it goes much higher, it will crowd out borrowing and force interest rates upward.

Putting all this together, the theft would be the largest redistribution from the bottom 90 percent to the richest 1 percent in history.

Republican’s biggest fear is that word of the heist will leak out to the public, and their tax bill will be defeated by a handful of Senate Republican holdouts who feel the public pressure.  

That’s exactly what happened with their plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The GOP’s big-money patrons pushed for repeal not because they had any principled objection to the Act, but because they didn’t want to fork over $144 billion in taxes on incomes over $1 million to pay for the Act over the next decade.  

In the end, Republicans couldn’t get away with it because Americans learned that more than 23 million people would lose their health coverage, and Medicaid would also be on the chopping block.

Trump was willing to distract the public’s attention to give congressional Republicans a shot at repeal, but the moment the public started catching on he blew their cover. After the Congressional Budget Office announced the consequences of the Republican health bill, Trump called it “mean.”

He could do the same with the tax bill. He almost has. When word leaked out last week that Republicans were planning to limit 401(k) deductions, Trump tweeted that it wouldn’t happen (and then backtracked on his tweet).

The moneyed interests who run the GOP depend on the Trump bomb to divert attention from their huge heist. Their challenge is to make sure the bomb doesn’t go off in the wrong direction.

Off the Top of My Head

There's No Money in Peace Just Like There's No Money in Health

by John Lawrence

Think about it. We don't have a health care industry. We have a sick care industry. If everyone were healthy, there would be very little money involved with doctors and hospitals. X-Ray machines would just sit there useless. Ditto for MRI machines, CAT scan machines, infusion pumps and medical lasers. The only money would be in gym memberships and running shoes, and that's not all that much. Sure there would be some money in healing diseases caused by genetic malfunctions, but not enough for corporations to get involved. Even now pharmaceutical corporations are abandoning the development of new anti-biotics because there's no money in it. You use them a couple times, you get better and then stop using them. The real market is for drugs you use every day for the rest of your life like cholesterol and blood pressure medication.

It's the same with war. There's no money in peace, but there is an infinite amount of money in developing new high tech weaponry, new battleships, new airplanes, drones, surveillance equipment. As long as there's an enemy, there's a huge market for new military equipment. If peace broke out, well, there's no money in peace. There would maybe be an increase in tourism or consumption of educational or entertainment experiences, but nothing that would require a lot of money. Good food, various materials to enhance love making - not a lot of money involved compared to a B-2 Spirit at $737 million a copy. The B-2 Spirit can easily fly into enemy territory without being detected and deliver a damaging payload of bombs. Originally designed to carry nuclear explosives, the B-2 Spirit can now carry multitudes of bombs. No peace time activity could possibly command such a high price.

If we had a peace enhancement or a health enhancement industry, we'd be better off. Both expensive military equipment and expensive medical equipment play on peoples' fears more than anything else. We must be safe from enemy attack at all costs and safe from some disease that might kill us at all costs. We'd be better off if we promoted peace and good health for people everywhere in the world. That would entail clean water and foods devoid of herbicides, pesticides and artificial additives to make them look and taste better. But there's not a lot of money in that.

Off the Top of My Head

San Diego Would Be Bankrupt Without Military Spending

by John Lawrence

Last year $25.2 billion came into San Diego County from the Defense Department. this spurred another $25 billion of commercial activity by the ripple effect. What if peace broke out and San Diego was suddenly minus that $25 billion infusion of cash? San Diego would go broke. Thousands of people would lose their jobs. San Diego is a case study on just why there needs to be perpetual war in the US. Peace would cause a major depression.

All those working in the military-industrial-intelligence complex have to hope and pray that the money keeps flowing, that there are threats that need to be contained, that military spending keeps increasing. I know because I used to work in the military-industrial complex in San Diego. Everyone was encouraged to vote Republican in order to keep their job. If Democrats were in charge, defense spending might decrease and that would mean a RIF - Reduction In Force - and your job might go down the tubes. Then there goes your ability to pay your mortgage and your car payment. Voila! You would be out on the street having to move your family to somewhere, anywhere where a defense contract was still in effect and there were still jobs available.

Last year there was a 3.2% rise in military spending for San Diego so San Diego is in good shape. The dollars are flowing in. Congressmen have identified enough threats to national security to keep the money flowing and peace is not at hand, thank God! San Diego is a major port for the Pacific fleet, THE major port. All the San Diego Congresspersons can be proud of themselves because they have brought home the bacon. They have employed enough scare tactics to convince American citizens and the establishment that spending a trillion dollars a year on defense is a good thing because, after all, we're the world's policeman. Somebody has got to do it, and if not us, well ....

So 22% of the Gross Regional Product is military spending in San Diego accounting for 338,000 jobs. Then think of all those jobs in real estate, car dealerships, insurance products and so on. San Diego would go back to being a little backwater town whose major economic activity was centered around Indian casinos without the major investment that the military brings year after year after year. Let's all hope and pray, for San Diego's sake, that peace doesn't break out.

You Can Go Home Again Part 2

by John Lawrence

The following is a work of fiction. Contrary to the Thomas Wolfe novel, "You Can't Go Home Again," you do have a right to go home again despite your hospital doctor's attempts to have you go to a nursing home. None of the names or places in the following bear any resemblance to actual persons or places. Part 1 can be found here.

Oliver had a reverse mortgage on his house. This let him take out as much as he wanted, whenever he wanted, until the fixed amount ran out. He supplemented his living expenses from this fund. Once the cash ran out, he wouldn't be able to live there any more so he was very frugal. He also had a pension from the Post Office - he had been a mail carrier for many years - and his social security.

He complained that his pension check from the Post Office plus his social security put him just over the line so that he wasn't quite poor enough to get MediCal. If he had gotten MediCal, he would have qualified for In Home Supportive Services (IHSS) and MediCal would have paid for a caregiver to come in so many hours a week. As it was Oliver had to pay the caregiver out of his own pocket, and he could only afford a few hours a week. He was lucky to have the two volunteers from ElderAssist plus Raphael who brought him Starbucks on Saturdays plus his neighbor, Bonny. When you added it all up, Victor had plenty of help, just not 24/7 caregiving.

Oliver had an old Ford Focus in the carport that had not been driven in years. He still paid the insurance premium every month. He said that having a car visible on the property deterred thieves. The house was a modest one story which was typical in Apex Gardens. What once had been a working class neighborhood had gentrified over the years and many folks had added on and put in nice landscaping. What their homes lacked in square footage, they made up for in charm.

The local shopping center was a bit decrepit. The major grocery store anchor had closed a few years ago. The anchor was now a Union bank. They still had an ancient Foster's Freeze, a newer 7-11, a Mother's restaurant, a plumber and a bar of course where they had Karaoke on Thursday nights. Los Panchos, a liquor store and a beauty parlor rounded out the offerings. The nearest Vons was up the hill on Mission Heights Road. That's where I did Oliver's shopping.

Oliver's house was even more modest than the average Apex Gardens place. It was a two bedroom, but that's all Oliver needed as he lived by himself. His living room was decorated with a large picture of a white wolf on a white snowy background. There was a picture of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans on the wall and a tile that said "Mi Casa es Su Casa." The library that took up the wall next to the front door was filled with books mostly by conservative authors: Ann Coulter, Patrick Buchanan, Sean Hannity, James Michener.

to be continued

Demise of Sears Canada Should Be Catalyst for Change

Published on Saturday, October 28, 2017 by the Toronto Star

We’re by no means helpless to prevent such fiascos. We need to change our corporate laws so those controlling corporations can be held personally liable for money owed to their employees.

by Linda McQuaig

 

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The downfall of Sears Canada seems tragic and unnecessary, and the devastating blow to its employees should not have been allowed to happen.

Suddenly jobless after two decades as a sales manager for now-defunct Sears Canada, Rose Dalessandro found herself unable to pay for dental appointments for her two children. She could blame her financial difficulties and the demise of the once-mighty Canadian retail giant on the usual suspects — poor management, globalization, the rise of internet shopping.

But it might be more accurate to blame Eddie Lampert, the billionaire U.S. financier who is the company’s largest shareholder as chairman of Chicago-based Sears Holding Corp.

The downfall of Sears Canada seems tragic and unnecessary, and the devastating blow to its employees should not have been allowed to happen.

Once the leading department store in Canada, it was innovative and successful, with an extensive distribution network based on its early years in the catalogue and home delivery business.

Of course, many big players have gone under in the dog-eat-dog retail market of recent years.

But, whatever competitive pressures Sears Canada faced along with other big retailers, its controlling shareholders almost certainly made the company’s demise more likely with their decision to pay out more than $2.7 billion in dividends since 2005 to themselves and other shareholders.

Those dividends went heavily to its largest shareholder, Sears Holding, controlled by Lampert, according to Bloomberg and the Globe and Mail.

Forbes currently estimates Lampert’s wealth at $1.65 billion U.S., and describes the source of his fortune as “Sears, self made.”

Sears Canada might well have survived if some of the $2.7 billion paid out in dividends had been redirected into updating and redesigning its more than 130 stores to attract a new generation of shoppers.

If the company felt unable to compete, it could have, at least, set aside enough money to pay its employees severance and fully fund the company pension plan.

Instead, it left some 12,000 workers without severance and a shortfall of $270 million in its pension fund, leaving 18,000 retirees uncertain about collecting future benefits.

The media has devoted considerable attention to the story, and there’s been good reporting highlighting the role of Lampert in the Sears Canada demise.

There has been less focus on solutions. Indeed, there’s been a tendency to lament the plight of the Sears workers and even rail against human greed, but to resign ourselves to all this as a sad but inevitable aspect of today’s capitalism.

This sense of resignation is weird. We’re by no means helpless to prevent this sort of fiasco.

No, I’m not advocating the overthrow of capitalism, but rather something easier — changing our corporate laws so that those controlling corporations can be held personally liable for money owed to their employees.

If, for instance, Eddie Lampert were personally liable for his employees’ severance and pensions, he would have likely covered these costs from corporate funds before paying out $509 million in dividends in 2013.

“That’s what he would have done,” insists Harry Glasbeek, professor emeritus at Osgoode Hall Law School and author of Class Privilege: How Law Shelters Shareholders and Coddles Capitalists.

Holding people responsible for their actions and their debts isn’t some far-fetched, ultraleft idea. On the contrary, it’s a basic principle of our legal system, Glasbeek notes.

But we abandon this basic legal principle when it comes to laws governing corporations — by limiting the legal liability of those who control corporations. “This ‘limited liability’ is an extraordinary privileging of one class of people,” Glasbeek says.

It wasn’t always this way. Wealthy capitalists used to be personally responsible for unpaid wages when their businesses went under. But capitalists fought hard in the late 19th and early 20th century to win the right to limit their liability.

At first they won only a partial limit, but over the years U.S. and Canadian courts have extended that limit.

The change was fiercely resisted on the grounds that it would leave vulnerable employees in dire situations — like the situations faced today by thousands of Sears ex-workers.

Over the years, countless workers have found themselves similarly disempowered.

The Sears Canada tale is particularly epic, with a loyal workforce and a cartoon capitalist in Eddie Lampert — a hedge fund manager who reportedly owns three lavish homes and 288-foot megayacht, believed to be among the world’s biggest. (Who would have guessed?)

Of course, there will always be greedy capitalists. But we don’t have to continue to provide special legal privileges that allow them to simply turf long-time employees, and then sail off into the sunset scot-free.

 

Linda McQuaig is an author, journalist, and former NDP candidate for Toronto Centre in the Canadian federal election. She is also the author (with Neil Brooks) of Billionaires’ Ball: Gluttony and Hubris in an Age of Epic Inequality, published by Beacon Press.

The Time to Move Off Fossil Fuels is Now

Published on Friday, October 27, 2017 by Common Dreams

This bill—the strongest, most aggressive climate and energy legislation ever written—is what we need to solve the climate crisis. That's why we're mobilizing to make it the law.

by Wenonah Hauter, Jean Ross

 

13 Comments

"Now is the time," write Hauter and Ross, "for members of Congress to step up and heed the call – to provide full support for recovery efforts in Puerto Rico, Northern California, Texas and Florida, but also to take bold action that will minimize the frequency and severity of these disasters in the future." (Image: Food & Water Watch)

More than a month after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, many of the island’s residents still struggle without electricity or clean water. A major humanitarian and health care crisis is rapidly unfolding there, on American soil, with disgracefully inadequate help from our federal government. Meanwhile, unprecedented wildfires have burned in Northern California, where dozens were killed and tens of thousands were rendered homeless. In Texas and Florida, the recovery from Hurricanes Harvey and Irma has only just begun. These are tumultuous, catastrophic times, made much worse by human-induced climate chaos.

"The OFF Act is a bold solution, but one that is absolutely necessary to ensure that our planet avoids the worst effects of deepening climate chaos."

Science has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that decades of burning of fossil fuels has already caused significant climate disruption, and that this has led to an increase in the frequency and severity of major natural disasters. If we don’t take aggressive, forward-thinking action now, the storms and floods and fires will get worse and worse. This will mean more homelessness, more water contamination, more food shortages, more refugee diasporas and many more lives lost.

On the front lines of the most recent disasters, for more than a decade, including in Puerto Rico and Texas, hundreds of nurses backed by National Nurses United joined first responders to provide urgent medical care in the face of disasters intensified by climate change and help save lives and assist recovery.

The urgency of our fight is critical. As the planet steadily warms, science indicates we will trigger various climate ‘tipping points,’ causing irreversible new impacts on the planet. Many of these changes will be triggered at global temperature increases below 2°C; we have exceeded 1°C of warming already. In 2010, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated a two-thirds chance of avoiding a 1.5°C rise in temperature if carbon dioxide emissions are kept below 400 gigatons. At the current rate of emission, the planet will blow past that critical threshold in the next five years. There is no time to lose.

Thankfully, we don’t have to wait. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) recently introduced in Congress the strongest, most aggressive climate and energy legislation ever written. It’s called the Off Fossil Fuels for a Better Future Act (OFF Act) [pdf] and it would move us to 100 percent clean, renewable energy by 2035, with 80 percent of that transition coming in a critical ten-year period. Along the way, it would halt new fossil fuel projects, ban profit-driven fossil fuel exports, end foolish oil and gas subsidies, and tax overseas corporate earnings to properly fund renewable energy research and development. Not least, this plan would create millions of good jobs and protect public health.

The OFF Act is a bold solution, but one that is absolutely necessary to ensure that our planet avoids the worst effects of deepening climate chaos. Fortunately, bold solutions to big problems are becoming more popular in Washington and across the country. As our healthcare system teeters on the brink, the growing Medicare-for-All movement is responding to the crisis with the urgency and scale required to ensure adequate coverage for all Americans. The OFF Act is the Medicare-for-All of our climate and energy crisis. It’s what we need to solve the problem, and we’re mobilizing to make it the law.

A grassroots movement behind the OFF Act has been growing for months. Food & Water Watch, though its Off Fossil Fuels national organizing campaign, is engaging volunteers and community leaders from coast to coast to fight local fossil fuel projects and enact clean energy policies in small towns, big cities across the country. Nearly 200 elected officials and more than 400 organizations have endorsed the OFF Act and the principles within it. But we need federal action as well.

Now is the time for members of Congress to step up and heed the call – to provide full support for recovery efforts in Puerto Rico, Northern California, Texas and Florida, but also to take bold action that will minimize the frequency and severity of these disasters in the future. This means moving off fossil fuels now, not later. The OFF Act is the solution.

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Wenonah Hauter is the executive director of the consumer advocacy group Food & Water Watch. She has worked extensively on energy, food, water and environmental issues at the national, state and local level. Experienced in developing policy positions and legislative strategies, she is also a skilled and accomplished organizer, having lobbied and developed grassroots field strategy and action plans.

Jean Ross is a registered nurse and a co-president of National Nurses United.

 

Off the Top of My Head

The Proliferation of Churches and Doctrines

by John Lawrence

For millenia the Catholic church has pretty much held together as an institution. There was a Schism in 1054 AD which separated the Roman Catholic church from the Eastern Orthodox. Then of course the Protestant revolution initiated by the Czech, Jan Hus, who was excommunicated and executed by the church, and Martin Luther who effectively broke with the church in 1517 when he posted his 95 theses. His refusal to renounce all of his writings at the demand of the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor at the Diet of Worms in1521 resulted in his excommunication and condemnation as an outlaw. From then on Luther hid out in a castle and subsisted on a diet of worms (just kidding) but managed to escape Hus' fate.

Thus Protestantism was born. Hus and Luther were very upset by the Pope's engaging in what are called indulgences. So a person could give the church a sum of money and pay their way or a relative's way out of Purgatory and into Heaven. Makes sense in this over commercialized world where there is a price for everything. However, this practice did not sit well with Hus and Luther. There was a doctrinal change too with Luther emphasizing salvation by faith instead of salvation by good deeds. So a person could enter the Kingdom of Heaven just by believing certain things rather than by leading a good life helping other people and trying to make the world a better place.

Luther expressed antagonistic views towards Jews,  writing that Jewish homes and synagogues should be destroyed, their money confiscated, and liberty curtailed. Condemned by virtually every Lutheran denomination, these antisemitic statements have contributed to his controversial status.

The Protestant movement continued to fragment as more and more theologians started their own religious movements and churches. Full disclosure: I was raised Presbyterian, but I have not been a member of that or any other church for 50 years. Presbyterians believe in predestination which I consider a ridiculous concept. One is predestined before birth either to go to Heaven or Hell. So what is the purpose of even being born?

Salvation by faith also smacks of salvation by indoctrination or even brain washing. It allows for a murderer to go to Heaven as long as he believes the correct things as taught by some other human being who claims to have special knowledge of what God wants. Salvation by works is the only thing that makes sense to me. In a mathematical sense one can conceive of a Judgment Day in which one's bad works or sins are subtracted from one's good works, and then, if the sum is positive and exceeds some threshold, one will be allowed to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. I'm not saying that is the way it is, only that that is a concept which I could support.

In the 16th and 17th centuries there were a number of religious wars in Europe as the Catholic church strove to reassert their authority and wipe out the Protestant movement. These wars got under way with the German Peasants War in which the German Peasants revolted in order to obtain a better economic situation. Soon, however, economic issues were forgotten  and war for wars' sake ensued. Some of these wars raged on for years ^e.g. the 30 years war and the 80 years war. When all was said and done they established the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 which established a modicum of toleration among Catholics and Protestants.

The bottom line is that the Protestant movement continues to fragment while the Catholic church, for all its problems with renegade priests, continues to hold together as an institution. One of the reasons for this in my opinion is the "preferential option for the poor." While Protestant churches were aligning themselves with capitalism in which worldly success was taken as an indication of God's favor, the Catholic church aligned itself with the poor and needy, as Jesus himself clearly did, especially in Latin America.

The preferential] option for the poor refers to a trend of preference being given to the well-being of the poor and powerless of society in the teachings and commands of God as well as the prophets and other righteous people. Jesus taught that on Judgment Day God will ask what each person did to help the poor and needy: "Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me." This is reflected in Catholic canon law which states, "The Christian faithful are also obliged to promote social justice and, mindful of the precept of the Lord, to assist the poor." In fairness some of the Protestant churches have also recently taken an interest in the plight of the poor and needy.

Opioid Plan Called 'Band-Aid on Gunshot Wound': Trump's New and Unimproved War on Drugs Predicted to Fail

Published on

Thursday, October 26, 2017

by

Common Dreams

 

 

 

President's remarks on opioid epidemic little more than a collection of Reagan-era "just say no" talking points

 

 

by

Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

 21 Comments

Used syringes are viewed at a needle exchange clinic where users can pick up new syringes and other clean items for those dependent on heroin on February 6, 2014 in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

"There's a danger that this president will use an emergency declaration as an excuse to ratchet up the war on drugs." 
—Grant Smith, Drug Policy Alliance

With remarks immediately slammed as a collection of recycled Reagan-era "just say no" tropes and war on drugs rhetoric, President Donald Trump officially declared America's opioid epidemic a "public health emergency"—a designation accompanied by proposals critics said are akin to "putting a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound."

"President Trump's declaration today amounts to a drop in the bucket compared to what the White House and Congress should be delivering to address this crisis," said Grant Smith, deputy director of national affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance. "We need to end drug criminalization and stop incarcerating people who are struggling."

Ahead of Trump's speech, reports emerged that the president would not declare the epidemic a national emergency as he had previously promised. Doing so would have "immediately unlocked billions of dollars of federal money." Instead, no new federal funds will be allocated to combat the crisis that kills tens of thousands of Americans a year.

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, a Democrat, argued in a statement following the presidents remarks that without any new funds, Trump's "plan" is "woefully inadequate to address the challenges we face."

"Our communities need federal funding and resources to fight this epidemic," Healey added. "Fire and police departments are struggling to afford overdose reversal drugs. Schools and health centers need to expand prevention education to all students. Families need expanded access to substance use treatment. These are actions we can take right now. And this announcement does little to support any of them."

"A national strategy on opioids must include a plan to rein in the corrupt abuses of the pharmaceutical industry, or it likely will fail." 
—Peter Maybarduk, Public Citizen

In the place of substantive policy moves, Trump floated proposals ranging from a "really tough, really big" advertising campaign aimed at convincing the public that "drugs are bad" and that people shouldn't take them, to a "law-and-order" style crackdown on "criminals who peddle dangerous drugs to our youth."

These remarks show "there's a danger that this president will use an emergency declaration as an excuse to ratchet up the war on drugs with more funding for locking up more people and harsher sentencing laws," warned Grant Smith of the Drug Policy Alliance.

Also absent from Trump's speech was any mention of the role the pharmaceutical industry has played in perpetuating the opioid crisis.

"A national strategy on opioids must include a plan to rein in the corrupt abuses of the pharmaceutical industry, or it likely will fail," said Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen's Access to Medicines Program, in a statement following the president's speech.

 As an alternative to Trump's fact- and substance-free remarks, the Drug Policy Alliance highlighted its "Public Health and Safety Plan to Address Problematic Opioid Use and Overdose," a 17-page document (pdf) outlining proposals that reach beyond "the status quo policy of criminalization."

"We need a well thought out plan from the Trump administration that resolves the many obstacles people face trying to access medication-assisted treatment and naloxone to save lives," Smith concluded. "We need new funding from Congress to fix our broken treatment infrastructure and boost public health capabilities to end this crisis. We need to implement proven strategies that have not been tried yet in the U.S., like supervised injection facilities to prevent overdose deaths and reduce opioid-related harm."

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Off the Top of My Head

The Proliferation of Holidays

by John Lawrence

There are 10 official American holidays: New Year's Day, Martin Luther King Jr Day, George Washington's Birthday, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veterans' Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas. In addition there are the unofficial holidays: Valentines Day, Mothers' Day, Fathers' Day, Groundhogs Day, Cinco de Mayo, Saint Patrick's Day, Easter, Flag Day, National Cleanup Day, Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, Chanukah, American Indian Heritage Day, Kwanzaa, Halloween and a whole bunch more. There are so many holidays that you wonder when does any work get done.

Of course most holidays are an opportunity to go out and buy stuff. This year consumers are expected to spend over $9 billion on Halloween, a worthless "holy day" if there ever was one. They might better spend the money on Refugees' Day in honor of the 65 million refugees in the world or on Childrens' Health Day or on War Victims' Day or on Global Warming Day.

The word Halloween is a contraction for All Hallows Evening and means "holy evening", a time to honor the saints and martyrs. Of course it's been totally corrupted so that Halloween is a time for kids to stuff themselves with candy contributing to childhood diabetes, honor ghosts and goblins and otherwise raise hell, a total perversion of the original intent of the holiday and a waste of money.

Charlie Brown lamented that Christmas has become too commercialized. What holiday hasn't? Thanksgiving has become a time to stuff your face and then watch football on TV. Most holidays are an opportunity to get shit faced drunk. If a holiday went back to its original meaning of "holy day", then maybe there would be a Peace Day honoring the peacemakers of the world. Thanksgiving might be a time not only to give thanks but to actually help those who are less fortunate instead of a time to gorge yourself with turkey and all the trimmings.

There might be a Mankind Day, a day of service to mankind. The National Cleanup Day is a good idea. The other 364 days of the year we are in the business of trashing the environment. Having one day to clean it up might help some. Instead of Columbus Day honoring a man who dealt in the slave trade, we might have a day honoring those who freed the slaves. Instead of holidays continuing to degenerate into what they've become, days to buy stuff, stuff your face and lounge around, holidays might become anti-commercial and anti-consumerist. Labor Day should take back its meaning of honoring the Union movement and people like Eugene Debs who fought for the 8 hour day.

Halloween should be the first holiday to be gotten rid of. It's not a "holy day" but a perversion of all that's holy.

As Tensions Simmer, Poll Shows Majority of Democrats Want Bold Leftward Shift

Published on

Wednesday, October 25, 2017

by

Common Dreams

 

 

 

The survey suggests Democratic voters want to ditch the current party leadership and embrace the grassroots

 

 

 

by

Jake Johnson, staff writer

 77 Comments

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and DNC Chair Tom Perez walk past each other as Sen. Sanders takes to the stage to speak during their 'Come Together and Fight Back' tour at the James L Knight Center on April 19, 2017 in Miami, Florida. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Amid an ongoing battle within the Democratic National Committee between its progressive wing and the more "centrist" establishment, a Harvard-Harris poll (pdf) published Tuesday found that a majority of Democrats think their party should be embracing grassroots movements, ditching its current leadership, and moving to the left.

"Those results, taken together, appear to bolster the left's broad critique of the Democratic Party." 
—Andrew Joyce, Mic

The survey found that 52 percent of registered Democratic voters want "movements within the Democratic Party to take it even further to the left and oppose the current Democratic leaders."

Desire for a leftward move was strongest among young Democrats, who overwhelmingly backed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the 2016 Democratic primary.

The Harvard-Harris poll found that 69 percent of Democratic voters between the ages of 18 and 34 believe the party should embrace the leftward shift pushed by grassroots movements urging Democrats to back Medicare for All, free public college tuition, a $15 minimum wage, and a bevy of other progressive goals.

"Those results, taken together, appear to bolster the left's broad critique of the Democratic Party, which accuses the party of focusing too much on feuding with Trump and not enough on building a coherent vision for the left," concluded Mic's Andrew Joyce.

Some prominent Democrats have in recent weeks indicated that they agree with this critique, and with the majority of their voters

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) angered centrist Democrats back in August when she told the audience of a Netroots Nation conference in Atlanta, Georgia that "the Democratic Party isn't going back to the days of welfare reform and the crime bill."

"We're not going back to the days when a Democrat who wanted to run for a seat in Washington first had to grovel on Wall Street," Warren added.

Record support among congressional Democrats for Medicare for All and a $15 federal minimum wage also indicates that Democrats are beginning to shift left under pressure from the grassroots.

Consistent with previous surveys, the new Harvard-Harris poll also found that Sanders is far and away the most popular politician in the country, while President Donald Trump and the congressional leadership of both parties remain broadly unpopular.

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by Robert Reich

 

Wednesday, October 25, 2017

AMERICA NOW HAS 6 POLITICAL PARTIES

The old Democratic and Republican parties are exploding. When you take a closer look, America actually has six political parties right now:

1. Establishment Republicans, consisting of large corporations, Wall Street, and major GOP funders. Their goal is to have their taxes cut. 

2. Anti-establishment Republicans, consisting of Tea Partiers, the Freedom Caucus, and libertarians. Their goal is to have a smaller government with shrinking deficits and debts. Many of them also want to get Big Money out of politics and end crony capitalism.  

3. Social conservative Republicans – evangelicals and rural Southern whites. They want America to return to what they call “Christian” values.

4. Establishment Democrats – corporate and Wall Street executives and upper middle-class professionals. They’d also like a tax cut, but they believe in equal rights. 

5. Anti-establishment Democrats – younger, grassroots movement types, and progressives who still call themselves Democrats. Their biggest issues are widening inequality, racism, sexism, and climate change. They also want to get Big Money out of politics and they reject crony capitalism.

6. The sixth party is Trump. This party consists of Donald J. Trump and his fanatical followers. Trump’s goal is to get more money for himself, get more power for himself, get more attention to himself, and get even.

Whoever can put together elements of a governing coalition among these six parties will win future elections. 

One possibility is a coalition of anti-establishment Democrats who want to get big money out of politics and who reject crony capitalism, and anti-establishement Republicans who want the same. 

The other possible coalition is establishment Democrats who want their taxes cut and establishment Republicans who want the same. 

Hepatitis A outbreak among homeless a byproduct of California’s housing crunch

From the Washington Post:

 

By Scott Wilson October 25 at 5:51 PM 

A homeless man sleeps along 14th Street in the East Village area of downtown San Diego on Sept. 26. (Sandy Huffaker/For The Washington Post)

SAN DIEGO — California’s exorbitant housing costs are driving a public-health crisis here, as a ­developing-world disease is racing through homeless encampments in cities along the coastThe hepatitis A outbreak in Los Angeles, Santa Cruz and San Diego, long considered a model of savvy urban redevelopment, is the extreme result of a booming state economy, now driving up home prices after years of government decisions that made low-cost housing more difficult to build.

Unlike in some other large U.S. cities, the homeless population in San Diego has been rising sharply, outstripping the local government’s ability to manage its scope. State lawmakers passed more than a dozen measures in the recent legislative session to address the state’s lack of affordable housing, none of which will help resolve the crisis in the short term.

Nowhere is the need more urgent than in this prospering city, where the number of people living on the streets rose 14 percent in the past year, tracing a hepatitis A outbreak that thrives in unsanitary conditions. Health officials believe an epidemic that has infected more than 500 people statewide since March began in San Diego County, where 19 people have died as a result of the disease, nearly all of them homeless.

Extremely rare in the United States, and rarely fatal when it does occur, hepatitis A attacks the liver and causes symptoms such as fever, nausea and jaundice. It is spread when a person ingests food or water tainted by the feces of someone who is infected — that is, it is a virus that stalks the unclean places where the poor are often consigned to live. California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) declared a state of emergency as the result of the outbreak this month.

“An epidemic like this in California — are you serious?” said Timothy Berry, 48, who lives amid the mattresses and tarps lined up along 16th and Island streets outside God’s Extended Hand mission.

Berry lives below the brushed-steel apartment buildings that in recent years have remade this city’s downtown, on streets that crews now power scrub with bleach. Portable toilets and hand-washing stations mark downtown corners in the shadows of buildings where sea kayaks are visible through the glass balconies of $2,000-a-month studios.

The first of three large, city-sanctioned tents opened earlier this month to bring some of the more than 9,000 homeless people into sanitary conditions, at least temporarily. A vaccination program that already has protected more than 65,000 residents continues with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has called this outbreak the deadliest since it began tracking the disease in the United States two decades ago.

Paulina Bobenrieth, a nurse with the public health department, gives a hepatitis A vaccine to a homeless man in San Diego on Oct. 4. A hepatitis A outbreak has killed numerous homeless people and sent hundreds to hospitals. (Sandy Huffaker/For The Washington Post)

But the long-term solution is simple and elusive: constructing more housing that those on the streets, and the estimated 500,000 San Diego County residents living a missed paycheck away from homelessness, can afford.

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Off the Top of My Head

Tax Reform is Actually Tax Deform

by John Lawrence

Tax reform as used by the Trump administration is an oxymoron, a travesty of words. a complete no sequitur. It reminds me of the Cole Porter song, Anything Goes.

The world has gone mad today
And good's bad today,
And black's white today,
And day's night today,
When most guys today
That women prize today
Are just silly gigolos

When Trump today,
Can say one thing today
And the complete opposite next day
He's keeping you on your toes.

Words coming out of the President's mouth have no meaning, no significance. Well, back to tax "reform." There are those who, if they get a few cents reduction on their taxes, don't care if millionaires and billionaires get hundreds of thousands reductions on their taxes. This is the crowd Republicans play to. But Californians among others will actually pay more because they are going to do away with deductions for state and local taxes. What the Repubs give you with one hand they take away with the other.

True tax reform would be increasing taxes on the rich while reducing taxes on the poor. When you reduce taxes on everyone, then you have to ask yourself the question: what social programs are they going to do away with? Social security? Medicare? Medicaid? TANF? SNAP? Or are they simply going to add to the national deficit and consequently the national debt. They sure aren't going to cut the military-industrial complex budget, otherwise known as the defense budget.

Republicans are lusting after their tax cuts for the rich so much that they bite their tongues over Trump with a few exceptions like Flake and Corker who lashed out at the President. Even former Presidents have broken their silence. Corker even called the White House an "adult day care center." But Trump just laughs it off. Na na ne na na. Sour grapes. I'm President and you're not. I've got my finger on the nuclear trigger and you don't. America, under my administration, is great again.

Tax reform coming out of the mouths of Republicans is tax bullshit, tax legerdemain, tax chicanery, tax skullduggery. Now you see it. Now you don't. Beware the tax man cometh for you, but not for your rich neighbor. The economic divide wideneth.

VP Mike Pence Swings into Senate to Deliver 'Wet-Kiss-to-Wall-Street' Tie Breaker

Published on Wednesday, October 25, 2017 by Common Dreams

"No wonder Americans think the system is rigged against them," says Senator Elizabeth Warren. "It is."

by Jon Queally, staff writer

 

15 Comments

Vice President Mike Pence presiding over the Senate on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2017, during the Senate's vote on Education Secretary-designate Betsy DeVos. On Tuesday night, Pence returned to the chamber again to a break another tie. This time it was to make sure it's easier in the future for financial service companies and other Wall Street darlies to make it easier to rip-off consumers. (Photo: Senate Television)

Just in time to do the bidding of the "rich and powerful," as one Democratic Senator put it, Vice President Mike Pence was summoned to the Senate chamber on Tuesday night where he cast the tie-breaking vote in order to scrap a federal rule designed to protect consumers from so-called "rip-off clauses" used by Wall Street and other corporations.

"The vice president only shows up in this body when the rich and powerful need him." —Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio)While in the end it was two Republicans, Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John Kennedy of Louisiana, who joined with Democrats and the Senate's two Independents in voting against the resolution, Pence broke the 50-50 tie in order to scrap the rule.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), an outspoken propopent of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's rule which sought to restrict use of forced arbitration clauses, condemned both Pence and her Republican colleagues for trying to undermine consumer protections by delivering a "gift to the bank lobbyists." 

"Let's be clear: No organization that represents actual human beings wants the [Senate] to reverse the [CFPB's] arbitration rule," Warren declared in a pair of tweets. "Servicemembers, vets, seniors, and small businesses all support the rule. Only people who don't? Bank lobbyists. Oh, and Equifax."

In a nearly eight-minute speech objecting to the passage of resolution, Warren explained that at a time when "millions of Americans of all parties think Washington is rigged against them," the vote on Tuesday night should be considered "Exhibit A."

Robert Weissman, president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, blasted the Senate Republicans.

"Voting to allow banks and other financial institutions to rip off customers with impunity is a savage attack on American consumers," Weissman said in a statment. By overturning the rule, he continued, Republicans "are ensuring that predatory banks, payday lenders, credit card companies and other bad actors in the financial industry can steal from Main Street

It was during his floor speech against the passage of the resolution when Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) learned that Pence had arrived to provide the deciding vote.

"The vice president only shows up in this body," announced Brown, "when the rich and powerful need him."

Both Warren and Weissman suggested killing the rule would be a major betrayal of Trump's repeated promises to "drain the swam" and protect regular Americans from the ravages and greed of Wall Street predators.

"If President Donald Trump wants to remain true to his promise to defeat cronyism, he should veto this resolution," said Weissman. "But we're not holding our breath, given that he has staffed his Cabinet and White House with Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street refugees."

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We the people of planet earth are enjoying the fruits of spiritual awakening

Dear friends,

     Ask yourself: Am I as happy as I could be? Am I as loving as I want to be? Am I healthy as I know I can be? Am I as peaceful as I need to be? Am I as prosperous as I am meant to be?

     Of course the answer to all of these questions is “no!” Happiness, love, vitality, supply and peace are infinite possibilities. They are open at the top, so to speak, with no end point. We can always raise our experience of each of these necessary components of a life well lived. That is the key; they are experiences of being, not things to achieve.

     How much of each am I claiming for myself today? No need to quantify it; just declare: “Today I feel a greater love than ever before, right inside myself. Today I claim a greater abundance of financial freedom than ever before. Today I know a deeper peace than I thought possible. Today I am strong and vital, healthy and on the move in new ways.”

     Since we are dealing with boundless possibility, we ought to see increase where we claim it, incrementally! Life just gets better and better as we have a deeper experience of what we declare to be ours. Let’s know this is true for all people everywhere, regardless of current circumstance.   This is our affirmation for humanity:   “We the people of planet earth are enjoying the fruits of spiritual awakening, right now, all at once, everywhere, no exceptions.”

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes www.carolcarnes.com

Support us via pay pal at www.mvcsl.org

Read enlightened views on life at www.californiafreepress.net

Watch our tv show on You Tube!

Set your clocks back one hour this weekend the 29th

Off the Top of My Head

Technological Progress Has Not Led to a Better World

by John Lawrence

First you have to decide what is a better world. For me a better world is a world at peace. War would be relegated to past history. but technological progress has only led to more destructive weaponry, ongoing wars that are more violent and involve more civilian casualties as time goes on. 65 million refugees roam the earth having lost everything and causing a backlash in more advanced countries straining under the pressure to take them in.

The internet represents technological progress, but right away it is criminalized, hacked, personal information stolen, hospitals extorted, electrical grids vulnerable, elections defrauded. We'd live in a more secure world without it. Handwritten letters and notes are a thing of a past, but they worked just fine. Kids are glued to the screen watching and participating in violent video games instead of playing outdoors.

A better world is one in which there is no poverty, but poverty has not been ameliorated. Millions of people live in trash dumps existing on one or two dollars a day. Children go unschooled, their only means of getting ahead joining an army where at least they will be well fed. A better world is one in which nature flourishes, but we have global warming destroying the environment because of the 20th century progress of the internal combustion engine. People and the environment were better off when the mode of transportation was the horse and buggy.

"A better World through Chemistry". Wasn't that the slogan. Instead we have the proliferation of toxic materials invented by chemists. Firefighters are getting cancer at an alarming rate due to the toxic chemical substances found in the smoke of fires. More people die each year because of the polluted environment than anything else. 9 million people a year, the Washington Post found. Plastic gyres pollute in the ocean. Plastic bags contaminate the streets. Plastics don't decompose as natural materials do. We were better off with paper bags.

The food supply  is being contaminated by GMOs which enable crops to be sprayed with pesticides and herbicides and still be reaped. Then foods are "enhanced" with artificial colors, flavors and preservatives. The result is an unnatural concoction. Farm animals are being fed with antibiotics in order to make them grown bigger and faster. The result is that antibiotics are overused and no longer perform their intended function in humans. Natural agriculture, although not as efficient, was better than the factory farms of today.

War, poverty, the environment: three things the first two of which need to be eliminated in order to have a better world, the third of which needs to be enhanced and protected. Instead we are living in a world where, if nuclear war doesn't destroy it, climate change and increasing poverty probably will.

Spending Millions to Get Their Billions: GOP Mega-Donors Plot to Pass #TrumpTaxScam

Published on Tuesday, October 24, 2017 by Common Dreams

"The GOP knows their donors will drop them like a hot rock if they don't deliver tax cuts for their billionaires."

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

3 Comments

Jared Kushner, senior advisor to U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence attend a joint statemen in the Rose Garden held by U.S. President Donald Trump and Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong October 23, 2017. (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Just days after 51 Senate Republicans approved a budget resolution that paves the way for over a trillion dollars in cuts to life-saving safety net programs and a massive windfall for the wealthy, White House staffers teamed up with the President Donald Trump's rich donors to launch a multi-million dollar sales campaign aimed at winning over the American people, who polls have found are overwhelmingly opposed to slashing taxes for millionaires, billionaires, and large corporations.

"The GOP's plan to sell its tax bill is obvious: lie."
—Ben Wikler, MoveOn.orgLate Monday, top White House officials quietly met with leaders of the "non-profit" America First Policies, which is affiliated with the pro-Trump super PAC America First Action. As Politico's Alex Isenstadt reports, both organizations have raised around $25 million in 2017, and the groups are looking to "play a more visible role" in the struggle to convince Americans that enormous tax breaks for corporations and the top one percent will primarily benefit the working class.

Non-partisan analyses have shown that the Trump-GOP plan, contrary to White House talking points, would disproportionately favor the rich.

Isenstadt summarized the White House donor meeting:

Those involved in Monday's gathering included Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner and Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Nick Ayers. Also present were Brian Walsh, Brad Parscale, Katie Walsh, and Corey Lewandowski—all top strategists for the pro-Trump nonprofit America First Policies.

During the course of the hour-long meeting, top officials with America First Policies signaled plans to wage an aggressive effort to push tax reform, according to four people with knowledge of the discussion. The group told the White House it was planning to spend in the millions.

Trump is also set to meet with Senate Republicans on Capitol Hill Tuesday, where he hopes to "forge unity" behind a plan that critics have denounced as a "tax scam."

The White House's gathering with well-heeled donors and congressional Republicans to "plot" its tax plan sales campaign came as resistance groups are also preparing for a long fight against the Trump administration's efforts.

As Common Dreams reported last week, MoveOn.org and a coalition of progressive tax organizations are teaming up to mobilize and counter White House and GOP "turbo spin mode."

Ben Wikler, Washington director of MoveOn.org, reiterated in a Twitter thread late Monday the importance of calling attention to the potentially devastating consequences of the Republican tax push and remaining focused amid the "constant barrage" of Trump-related chaos.

"The GOP's plan to sell its tax bill is obvious: lie. The longer the debate rages, the more their lies crumble. So they want speed. We delay," Wikler wrote. "The GOP knows their donors will drop them like a hot rock if they don't deliver tax cuts for their billionaires. Works for me. Let's do that... and in the process, we just might rescue healthcare, pell grants, disaster preparedness, and every other damn thing the federal government does."

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The Importance of Trust

Dear friends,

     Do you often hear people saying such things as “I don’t trust the weather or “ I can’t trust my kids” or “I have no trust in this person.” Lots of folks have trust issues but the underlying one is a lack of self-trust! Do we trust ourselves to be authentically us in any situation? Do we feel we can see through the problem to a solution? Are we capable and effective in the midst of challenge?

     A lack of self-trust is sometimes the cause behind possessiveness or jealousy. If we trust ourselves to be faithful and loyal, why would we question the motives of our partner? We are experiencing the content of our own mind all the time. Our spiritual practice is not something outside of our day to day life. If we are having trouble trusting others, we might want to lengthen our meditation a bit or create some new affirmations. It has to do with loving the self and feeling loved by the Self that lies behind the personality. Meditation helps us to be more aware of its presence.

     Self-trust is key to personal happiness. It extends into all the choices we make; what we eat, who are our friends, where we live, the work we do, the state of our health and everything else! Are we making conscious choices based on knowing we can trust our intuition, our instincts, our own wisdom? If we can answer in the affirmative, then we are always free to make new choices should we decide to do so.  A person who loves and honors their very own Being is not self-destructive or self-sabotaging and they make great partners in any venture.

Stay tuned in,                          

Carol Carnes www.carolcarnes.com

Our tv show is on You Tube with a new show weekly

You can support my work via a pay pal donation on www.mvcsl.org

Check out www.californiafreepress for wise comments on our shared reality

Off the Top of My Head

AI and UBI

by John Lawrence

AI is Artificial Intelligence and UBI is Universal Basic Income. Why are they connected? They should be spoken about in the same breath because AI will put so many people out of work that, in order to keep the economy functioning, a Universal Basic Income will be required.

Self driving cars are the most noticeable manifestation of AI. Self driving cars and trucks will put truckers, cabbies and Uber and Lyft drivers out of work. It's just the tip of the iceberg. Many other jobs will be lost as well. AI takes robots and automation to a new level. Little human supervision will be necessary. This phenomenon could create a utopia if the benefits of AI were to be widely distributed, but the trend in American society today is that technological advances remove jobs while distributing the rewards very narrowly. In fact a few billionaires are created while lots of people lose their good paying jobs and have to scramble for lesser paying or minimum wage jobs.

A Universal Basic Income along with a Universal Health Care system and Universal Public Education would go far to prevent America and the "Americanized" world from turning into a dystopia where the strong survive and the weak perish. The possibility of a utopia is no guarantee there will actually be one even if no work is required in order to produce everything needed in a consumerist society. Since consumption is 70% of the US economy, consumers are most desperately needed in order to keep the economy functioning. However, consumers can only consume if they have the money to do so and in many but not all cases money comes from having a job. In some cases money comes from unearned income such as rent, interest, stocks and bonds and various other financial instruments. That's where the economic divide comes in.

The way American society is headed is not the way of a utopia where work is not required to have a comfortable and productive life. What is happening is a separation into three main classes. There is Thorstein Veblen's leisure class whose money comes from unearned income, the 1%. Then there is the class of people scrambling for low paying jobs, usually putting two or three jobs together for two or more members of the same household. Then there are the homeless who are becoming a definite class with definable characteristics, even a distinct look.

An American dystopia is taking shape in which the few have most and the many have but very little. There is a resemblance to the Middle Ages in which there was a nobility (the billionaires of today), the serfs (the minimum wage workers of today), and those who have fallen through the cracks (the homeless of today). The serfs of today are also the debtor class perpetually indebted to the creditor class who own most of the wealth.

Bill Maher on Radical Islam

The Democratic Party Must Part Ways with Wall St

From Alternet:

A former Clinton aide writes a love letter to big banks in the New York Times, conveniently forgets the 2008 crash.

By Dean Baker

Photo Credit: Butz.2013 / Flickr Creative Commons

Doug Schoen, a former consultant to Bill Clinton, argued the case that the Democrats should keep their ties to Wall Street in a NYT column this morning. While he does advance his argument with some red-baiting and bad logic, he uses tradition as a starting point.

"Many of the most prominent voices in the Democratic Party, led by Bernie Sanders, are advocating wealth redistribution through higher taxes and Medicare for all, and demonizing banks and Wall Street. "Memories in politics are short, but those policies are vastly different from the program of the party’s traditional center-left coalition. Under Bill Clinton, that coalition balanced the budget, acknowledged the limits of government and protected the essential programs that make up the social safety net.

"President Clinton did this, in part, by moving the party away from a reflexive anti-Wall Street posture. It’s not popular to say so today, but there are still compelling reasons Democrats should strengthen ties to Wall Street."

Of course memories are not actually short, contrary to what Schoen claims. Many supporters of harsher policies directed against the financial sector remember the stock bubble whose crash led to what was at the time, the longest period without job growth since the Great Depression. They also remember a financial sector that continued to run wild as the housing bubble inflated. And they remember the Great Recession that followed the collapse of that bubble. And, they remember the government's bailout policies that ensured that the financial industry types would end up on their feet and not in jail.

But Schoen does go beyond appealing to tradition.

"America is a center-right, pro-capitalist nation. ... Even in May 2016, when Senator Sanders made redistribution a central part of his platform, Gallup found that only about 35 percent of Americans had a positive image of socialism, compared with 60 percent with a positive view of capitalism."

It's good that Schoen found an occasion to denounce "socialism" and tout capitalism. It also has nothing to do with the issue at hand. Very few of the people criticizing Wall Street consider themselves socialists. In fact, many view the waste and corruption of Wall Street as being an obstacle to a more efficient productive capitalist economy. Given the enormous damage caused by the collapse of the last two Wall Street driven bubbles, there is a pretty good case here.

Change Your Self Identity, Change Your World

Dear friends,

     Emerson said we “take our own out of the multiplicity that sweeps and circles around us”. That is a lovely way to say Like attracts Like. The content of our mind is a net that we throw out before us. We automatically gather in what belongs with us. It is a net of consciousness layered with a myriad of ideas. However, it is the most dominant thoughts about our self that tend to become “real” to us. It is our self-identity that rules.

     Fortunately, self-identity is renewable, forever revealing higher and higher levels of itself. Our part is to discover and affirm. How do we do that? The only way in to the self is silence. Yes, we can learn much about who we are in the field of doing, but mostly we are observing our personality in action. To find the self that is uninvolved with doing, but entirely about Be-ing, we must leave the outer and enter the field of non-action. I love the ancient wisdom; “to the one who can perfectly practice inaction, all things are possible.”

     That is another way of saying our answer is in the realm of being, not doing. Be still and know that “I am “ is God. If that is so, then we ought to think well of ourselves! Sure, we have made errors in judgement; we have regrets and maybe some guilt. But all of those choices came from a lower sense of self. We can only be, do and have what we believe we are worth, therefore, worthy of receiving.

Change your thinking, change your life would be better said “change your self identity, change your world.”

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes www.carolcarnes.com and www.mvcsl.org

Our tv show is on You Tube every week.

www.californiafreepress.net for more insightful views on everything.

I’m Homeless. There’s Nowhere for Me to Go.

From Voice of San Diego:

When I first became homeless, the sidewalks weren’t so heavily monitored. Fast-forward three years, and now homeless people are constantly being told to move almost every single time they sit down. It wears down one’s patience, happiness and quality of life.

Photo by Jamie Scott Lytle

Tents line an I-5 underpass along Commercial Street in downtown San Diego.

By Ginger Stamper

As I lie here in my tent, smoking the day’s first cigarette, I think of how grateful I am that it’s raining. With the possibility of a flooded tent, soaked clothing and the chance of intensified depression due to the dark and gloomy weather, one might wonder why this homeless gal is so grateful.

I’m grateful because when it rains here in San Diego, which it so rarely does, we homeless people get to leave our tents up. It may not seem like such a big deal to those of you who live indoors. But to us homeless folks, it’s a day off and a chance to rest for once.

San Diego’s homeless population doesn’t get much of a chance to rest during the day. Any time we stop to smoke a cigarette, take a load off or even just to daydream a little bit about how life used to be and what it might be like once again, our little snippet of resting time will soon be interrupted as we hear the words, “Move along.”

Those cold and callous words come from the San Diego Downtown Partnership’s “safety ambassadors.” These people are hired to manage the homeless. They wake us up in the mornings if we are lagging and the real police are too busy to show up. It never fails that once five or so minutes passes, one or more of these rabid relocaters arrives and tells me to move along.

I have grown to hate that phrase and those like it.

“Pack up your things, take them and go.”

How to End Crony Capitalism

by Robert Reich

Sunday, October 22, 2017

The largest corporations and richest people in America – who donated billions of dollars to Republican candidates the House and Senate in the 2106 election – appear on the way to getting what they paid for: a giant tax cut.

The New York Times reports that business groups are meeting frequently with key Republicans in order to shape the tax bill, whose details remain secret. 

Speed and secrecy are critical. The quicker Republicans get this done, and without hearings, the less likely will the rest of the country discover how much it will cost in foregone Medicaid and Medicare or ballooning budget deficits.

Donald Trump has been trashing democratic institutions – the independence of the press, judges who disagree with him, uncooperative legislators – while raking in money off his presidency. But don’t lose sight of the larger attack on our democracy that was underway even before Trump was elected: A flood of big money into politics.  

Lest you conclude it’s only Republicans who have been pocketing big bucks in exchange for political favors, consider what Big Tech – the industry that’s mostly bankrolled Democrats – is up to. 

It’s mobilizing an army of lobbyists and lawyers – including senior advisors to Hillary Clinton’s campaign – to help scuttle a proposed law requiring Google, Facebook, and other major Internet companies to disclose who is purchasing their online political advertising.

After revelations that Russian-linked operatives bought deceptive ads in the run-up to the 2016 election, you’d think this would be a no-brainer. But never underestimate the power of big money, whichever side of the aisle it’s aimed at. 

Often, it’s both sides. Last week The Washington Post and “60 Minutes” reported that Big Pharma contributed close to $1.5 million to Democrats as well as Republicans in order to secure enactment of the so-called “Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act of 2016.”

This shameful law weakened the Drug Enforcement Authority’s power to stop prescription opioids from being shipped to pharmacies and doctors suspected of taking bribes to distribute them – a major cause of the opioid crisis. Last year, Americans got 236 million opioid prescriptions, the equivalent of one bottle for every adult.

Overwhelming majorities of House and Senate Democrats voted for the bill, as well as Republicans, and President Obama signed it into law.

There you have it, folks. Big money is buying giant tax cuts, allowing Russia to interfere in future elections, and killing Americans. That’s just the tip of the corrupt iceberg that’s sinking our democracy. 

Republicans may be taking more big money, but both parties have been raking it in. 

Average Americans know exactly what’s going on. 

I just returned from several days in Kentucky and Tennessee, both of which voted overwhelmingly for Trump.

A number of Trump voters told me they voted for him because they wanted someone who’d shake up Washington, drain the swamp, and get rid of crony capitalism. They saw Hillary Clinton as part of the problem.

These people aren’t white nationalists. They’re decent folks who just want a government that’s not of, by, and for the moneyed interests. 

Many are now suffering buyer’s remorse. They recognize Trump has sold his administration to corporate lobbyists and Wall Street. “He conned us,” was the most polite response I heard.

The big money that’s taken over American politics in recent years has created the biggest political backlash in postwar American history – inside both parties.

It’s splitting the Republican Party between its large corporate patrons and a base that detests big corporations and Wall Street.

Trump is trying to straddle both by pretending he’s a champion of the working class while pushing for giant tax cuts. But if my free-floating focus group in Kentucky and Tennessee is any indication, the base is starting to see through it.

Which you might think creates a huge opportunity for Democrats heading into the 2018 midterms and the presidential election of 2020.

Think again. Much of the official Democratic Party is still in denial, continuing to debate whether it should be on the proverbial “left” or move to the “middle.”

But when it comes to getting big money out of politics and ending crony capitalism, there’s no right or left, and certainly no middle. There’s just democracy or oligarchy.

Democrats should be fighting for commonsense steps to reclaim our democracy from the moneyed interests – public financing of elections, full disclosure of all sources of political funding, an end to revolving door between government and business, and attempts to reverse the bonkers Supreme Court decision “Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission.”

For that matter, Republicans should be fighting for these, too.

Here's a wild idea. What if the anti-establishment wings of both parties came together in a pro-democracy coalition to get big money out of politics? 

Then it might actually happen.  

Off the Top of My Head

Aspiring Starlets and the American Sleaze Machine

by John  Lawrence

For some women Hollywood moguls are sexual predators. For others they are a potential way of becoming a star, a means to an end. There are those that are repulsed by the casting couch as well they should be. It is just the first step, an entree of sorts, into an industry that is characterized by sleaze. So it is altogether fitting that the first introduction to the industry is a sleazy encounter with the likes of Harvey Weinstein. After all if your goal is to purvey sleaze, why not immerse yourself in the real life sleaze that goes on behind the scenes?

For other women a rejection of the casting couch means that they will probably never make it in the sleazy movie industry. They should rejoice in that fact alone because then they might have a chance to lead a more healthy, productive and ethical life.

The first movie that Harvey Weinstein fully financed was Pulp Fiction. Its script was reportedly turned down by Columbia TriStar as "too demented". Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein was instantly enthralled with it. The film is about criminality, drugs and murder, a wonderful combination that is what aspiring starlets who make the cut will be involved in. The entertainment industry is inherently sleazy. Pulp Fiction won a lot of awards; it was considered a great movie. Nevertheless, it characterized the vacuity and emptiness of unproductive lives involved in borderline and in some cases outright criminality. This is what women, who want to become known in that industry and who will do anything to attain their goal, including accepting the advances of Harvey Weinstein and others like him, aspire to.

Some who accept mogul advances and then never become big stars have a case of sour grapes and later decide that they were taken advantage of. Some of these "come forward" with accusations many years later after having a change of heart regarding that encounter which was a potential entree into the movie business. The ethical ones reject mogul advances in the first place and make the decision that it isn't worth it even if that means they are throwing away their chances at becoming a star.

What is purveyed onscreen in many but not all cases is a twisted, illicit sexuality which evidently is more entertaining than sex which is portrayed as part of a love affair. I have no problem with sex as an inherent part of a love story between two consenting married or unmarried adults. But this kind of sexuality is not the kind that sells most movies. This is the kind that brands a movie as a "chick flick" or a European movie which is too dull for most American audiences. American audiences want cultural depravity and this is what producers like Harvey Weinstein know will sell.

The bottom line is that women shouldn't be too outraged when  the vicarious sleaze portrayed on the Big Screen turns out to be the reality of real life in an industry in which fantasy and reality merge. You can only realistically commit to portraying sleaze if you are fully committed to it in real life. You have to live what you then can realistically portray. It's called method acting, the Stanislavski system. Women with a moral or ethical bone in their body should expect to be part of movie moguls' real life, reject it and go on to something better. They might not then become famous though. Too bad. They will just have to live with that.

Taking 9 Million Lives Per Year, Pollution Bigger Killer Than War, Tobacco, and Various Diseases Combined

Published on Friday, October 20, 2017 by Common Dreams

New Lancet Commission spotlights "profound and pervasive threat that affects many aspects of human health and wellbeing."

by Andrea Germanos, staff writer

 

7 Comments

Garbage is seen in the Santiago River in Jalisco, Mexico. (Photo:  WATERLAT GOBACIT/flickr/cc)

Pollution, "one of the great existential challenges of the Anthropocene epoch," kills 9 million people per year. That's more than the number of deaths caused by tobacco, three times as many deaths caused by AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined, and 15 times as many deaths caused by war and other violence.

The data comes from a new global study on pollution and health published in The Lancet, which calls for a mobilization of both resources and political will to tackle the worldwide and costly menace.

"Pollution is much more than an environmental challenge—it is a profound and pervasive threat that affects many aspects of human health and wellbeing. It deserves the full attention of international leaders, civil society, health professionals, and people around the world," says Professor Philip Landrigan of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and co-leader of the two-year, international Lancet Commission.

Air pollution, including indoor and outdoor, plays the biggest role in pollution-related deaths (6.5 million deaths in 2015 ), and is linked to heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, and COPD. Polluted water, workplace pollution (such as asbestos exposure), and lead pollution also add to the death toll—which researchers say is likely an underestimate.

Looking at those impacted most reveals global inequality at play.

The bulk of pollution-related deaths (92 percent) strike in low- and middle-income countries. India and China tallied the highest numbers of such deaths, with 2.5 million and 1.8 million respectively. In addition, the researchers note, across the board, the deaths are most prevalent among minorities and the marginalized.

"Now is the moment to accelerate our collective response."
—Pamela Das and Richard Horton, The LancetPollution is an extremely costly problem, even without environmental damage costs taken into account. Looking at welfare costs alone, the total in 2015 topped US$4.6 trillion, or 6.2 percent of world GDP.

The World Health Organization (WHO) applauded the new analysis. "Pollution is a symptom and unintended consequence of unhealthy and unsustainable development," write Maria Neira, Michaela Pfeiffer, Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, and Annette Prüss-Ustün of WHO's Department of Public Health, Environmental, and Social Determinants of Health.

"If we want to substantially reduce the global environmental burden of disease, we need to act further upstream and address the drivers and sources of pollution to ensure that development policies and investments are healthy and sustainable by design and that the choices we make—at the government, private sector, and individual levels—cultivate a healthier and safer environment. In other words, we need to move beyond a 'do-no-harm' approach and ensure that development actively and explicitly improves the environmental and social conditions that give rise to, and expose populations to, disease," they add.

According to Pamela Das, senior executive editor, and Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, the new report should be "a timely call to action."

"Now is the moment to accelerate our collective response. Current and future generations deserve a pollution-free world," they write in a comment linked to the report.

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Off the Top of My Head

Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Elvis Presley etc.

by John Lawrence

Every day it seems a new Hollywood sexual predator comes to light. It's now an all too familiar saga. Just recently more than 30 women have come forward to accuse movie director James Toback of sexual harassment.  Dozens of women are "coming forward" to claim unwanted sexual advances or in some cases outright rape. However, it usually is the case that none of these women ever reported the situation to the police or other authorities at the time that the incident occurred. In some cases they come forward 20 or 30 years later. So it all amounts to a public shaming as is the case with Harvey Weinstein. The public shaming cost him his job, his company and evidently his wife and children - a considerable penalty.

For what it's worth here's my advice to women who find themselves in the situation of being in a hotel room with a powerful mogul in a bathrobe. #1 Never agree to meet anyone for a supposedly "business meeting" in a hotel room. #2 If there are unwanted sexual advances, take Nancy Reagan's advice and "Just say No!". #3 If there is an actual rape, go immediately to the police and demand that a rape kit be started. They will do a vaginal swab which will contain semen which can be directly connected to the perpetrator by means of DNA testing. That is an open and shut case for criminal prosecution. Even if the authorities are so corrupt that they won't proceed with a criminal prosecution there will be documentation that the event took place.

There are probably a considerable number of cases where women consensually had sex with the Harvey Weinsteins of the world  in return for the chance of getting their face and/or body on the Big Screen or even the Little Screen. If things didn't turn out as they had envisioned, they could decide many years later that they had been the victim of a sexual predator. Well, it's not sexual predation if the sex was consensual, that is, if the woman was a willing participant. It doesn't matter who made the advances or how powerful or powerless the guy was or is.

Consider the case of famous rock stars and athletes. Women used to throw their panties at Elvis Presley inasmuch as saying "Come and get it!" I'm sure he and many others did. Does that make them sexual predators or sexual accommodators? Wilt Chamberlain, the basketball star, in his autobiography claimed he slept with 20,000 women. Does that make him a sexual predator or only someone with a healthy sex drive? The fact is that many women will gladly have sex with rich or famous or powerful men, even throw themselves at them. They will even make the advances, in some cases even, unwanted sexual advances. Does that make them the sexual predators?

The Scarlet Letter, an 1850 novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter through an affair and struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. Throughout the book, Hawthorne explores themes of legalism, sin, and guilt. She is forced to be branded with a red "A" for adulturess and must wear that stigma for the rest of her life. The guy who got her pregnant was not even considered to be culpable. Now a couple of centuries later, the tables have turned and Harvey Weinstein might as well have a scarlet letter emblazoned on his chest. But somehow the question of adultery is entirely moot. It's all about whether or not the sex was consensual. It's "He said;she said."

The other side of the coin is what happens when women throw themselves at famous or powerful men, in some cases calculatedly, because in the back of their minds they think they might get a part in a motion picture or become a rock star's girlfriend. If they are disappointed, they can always have a change of heart later and decide that the guy was at fault. If there is an actual rape, then the situation is legally actionable provided they go to the police and get a rape kit started right away. Otherwise a public shaming is about all they can hope for if enough other women come forward and say #MeToo.

'Hypocritical BS': Critics Slam Establishment's Applause for 'War Criminal' George W. Bush

Published on

Friday, October 20, 2017

 by

Common Dreams

 

 

"The Iraq War was worse than anything Donald Trump has done (so far)."

by

Jake Johnson, staff writer

 56 Comments

In a piece for Vice News, Eve Peyser argued that the "racist and authoritarian" policies of the Bush administration paved the way for Donald Trump's ascent to the White House. (Photo: The Washington Post/Youtube)

While media outlets and television talking heads were quick to applaud former President George W. Bush's implicit rebuke of Trumpism in a rare political address delivered in New York on Thursday, many critics dissented from the chorus of applause, calling the speech "hypocritical bullshit" and highlighting Bush's long list of offenses that includes wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Patriot Act, an overseas torture regime, and "heinous" treatment of Muslims at home and abroad.

"Never forget the most consequential conspiracy theory in U.S. history—that Iraq was behind 9/11—was pushed by Bush administration and mainstream U.S. media." 
—Adam Johnson, Fairness and Accuracy in ReportingBush delivered his remarks before a conference hosted by his foundation, which he convened "to support democracy," in the words of the New York Times.

During the course of his 16-minute address, the former president lamented that "our discourse" has been "degraded by casual cruelty," and that "we've seen nationalism distorted into nativism."

Bush also turned his attention to foreign affairs, noting: "We've seen the return of isolationist sentiments, forgetting that American security is directly threatened by the chaos and despair of distant places."

"Bullying and prejudice in our public life sets a national tone and provides permission for cruelty and bigotry," Bush said. "The only way to pass along civic values is to first live up to them."

The former president's remarks were largely greeted with positive press, and many echoed pundit Chris Cilizza's celebration of the Bush's "major smackdown" of Trumpism.

Others, however, saw Bush's speech as nothing more than "hollow words," given his long record of human rights abuses.

In a piece for Vice News, Eve Peyser argued that the "racist and authoritarian" policies of the Bush administration paved the way for Donald Trump's ascent to the White House.

While "Bush never verbalized his Islamophobia," Peyser notes, his "administration detained more than 1,200 people—most of whom were Muslims or of Middle Eastern descent—without charge, instead holding them as 'material witnesses.'"

"The Iraq War was worse than anything Donald Trump has done (so far)." 
—Chris Hayes, MSNBC

Bush may now be denouncing the "conspiracy theories and outright fabrication" of the present moment, but "the war in Iraq, which destabilized the region, killed hundreds of thousands, and helped give rise to ISIS was predicted on intelligence that Bush's administration misrepresented to the American people," Peyser observes.

The Trump administration is now simply building upon the bigoted policies put into place by the Bush White House and ignoring the former president's "platitudes," Peyser concluded.

Others similarly criticized the media's largely positive treatment of Bush's brief emergence from retirement, arguing that such favorable press amounts to "rehabilitation" of a "war criminal" who helped intensify the bigotry and war-mongering he now claims to oppose.

Some commentators from major networks also sounded off.

MSNBC's Chris Hayes concluded simply: "The Iraq War was worse than anything Donald Trump has done (so far)."

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51 GOP Senators Just Voted To Cut $1.5 Trillion from Medicare and Medicaid To Give Super-Rich and Corporations a Tax Cut

Published on Thursday, October 19, 2017 by Common Dreams

The Republican budget, declared Sen. Sanders after its passage, "is not a bad bill. It's a horrific bill."

by Jon Queally, staff writer

 

128 Comments

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, center, with fellow Republican leadership on Capitol Hill. (Photo: Reuters/Gary Cameron)

"Another dark deed done: GOP passes obscene budget to slash Medicare/Medicaid & explode the deficit – all in the name of tax cuts for the 1%."
—Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon)

Along strict party lines, the Republican-controlled Senate on Thursday night voted to pass a sweeping budget measure—one criticized as both "despicable" and "horrific" for providing massive giveaways to corporations and the super-rich while eviscerating funding for social programs, healthcare, education, and affordable housing.

The measure passed by 51-49 vote, with only one Republican, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, joining every Democrat and the chamber's two Independents who voted against it. Its approval now paves that way for massive tax giveaways to the wealthy and corporations envisioned by President Donald Trump and the GOP in both the House and the Senate.

"51 Republican Senators just voted to cut Medicaid by $1 trillion and Medicare by $500 billion so that millionaires and corporations can get a tax cut. It's immoral and despicable," said TJ Helmstetter, a spokesperson for Americans for Tax Fairness, in a statement immediately following the vote.

Off the Top of My Head

What's Worse: Facebook Ads from Russia or Fentanyl from China?

by John Lawrence

Folks in the military-industrial-intelligence establishment are all in a tizzy about Russia putting ads on Facebook. How dare they? Facebook is our American way of communicating with each other. No need to write letters any more. And Twitter. Did they put ads there too? That Putin - up to his old tricks. Trying to corrupt our youth and bring down the US of A.

But China has been exporting fentanyl to the US which has been actually killing numbers of people. But no harm in that. Of course Xi Jinping had nothing to do with it. He's a nice guy. He wouldn't be trying to hollow out our society by actually killing people. No, it must be just a few bad apples unlike Russia where it's Putin that's responsible for putting ads on Facebook which distorted our election. We all know that Americans always fall for an ad because they can't think for themselves. That's been proven time and again. Therefore, Russian ads are more dangerous than Chinese fentanyl.

Dan Kovalik writes in his book, The Plot to Scapegoat Russia:

...it was the USSR's socialist system and message that the US claimed to despise and to be fighting against in the first Cold War. Where is the ideological justification for the new Cold War? There really isn't one. And that is the reason the US has had to focus so much on the personality of Vladimir Putin, imbuing him with a level of power, reach and craziness that he just doesn't have.

The US M-I-I establishment just needs enemies to justify its colossal budget, and it has decided that, come hell or high water, it is going to remake an enemy out of Russia. As Kovalik points out, the mere increase in the US military budget of $54 billion thanks to President Trump is equal to over 80% of Russia's total military budget.

As for messing in our election, the US has messed in the elections of or overthrown at least seven governments including those of Iran, Guatemala and Chile, in some cases ushering in brutal dictatorships. It was mostly to protect US corporate interests. Even Saddam was talking about selling Iraq's oil for currencies other than dollars. That  is where his troubles began. If Saddam had remained in power, he would have made short work of ISIS which could never even have gotten started.

The Foreign Policy Journal reports in their review of Kovalik's book:

So, it’s worth recalling that Russia was promised no NATO expansion, that Russia tried to join the EU and NATO, that Russia has tried many times for mutual disarmament, that Russia helped the U.S. attack Afghanistan, that hostility toward Putin really took off in Washington, D.C., when he refused to help attack Iraq, and that Russia was lied to about Libya. That last one, Kovalik points out, has a lot to do with Putin being in office and with Putin resisting the U.S. in Syria. Russia has tried repeatedly to make peace in Syria, and when Obama finally agreed to a ceasefire in Syria the U.S. military nixed it by bombing Syrian troops (either with Obama’s approval or with Obama’s acceptance).

The US after WW II had a chance to bring peace to the world. It started in that direction with the Marshall plan, but somewhere got derailed into being the world's policeman and, carried away with the trappings of global empire and corporate interests, forgot about creating peace in the world because perpetual war was much too profitable.

Too bad the US decided to become the world's policeman instead of the world's peacemaker.

Why We Must All Fight for the Dream Act.

by Robert Reich

• Thursday, October 19, 2017

  By repealing DACA – Deferred Action For Childhood Arrivals – Trump has endangered both these young immigrants and the economic security of America.

  In 2012, the Obama  administration created DACA as a temporary way to address the needs of young people who came to America as infants or toddlers, and know no other country.  

  To apply and qualify for DACA, these young people had to risk entering the system by giving their identifying information. Once approved, they were granted two years of “deferred action” on deportation, with the promise that they could reapply every two years indefinitely.

  This allowed “dreamers” to go to college, get a job, and pay taxes without fear of deportation. DACA was never perfect, but for 800,000 immigrant youth it meant freedom from fear and an opportunity to fully contribute to the country they were raised in. 

  But now these young people are threatened with deportation. 

  For no reason. These young people are not taking jobs away from native-born Americans.  Even the conservative Cato Institute has said that the economic cost of cancelling DACA would be $200 billion over ten years.  And that’s just direct costs. The Center for American Progress estimates that if we lost these young workers the U.S. gross domestic product would shrink by $433 billion over the next decade.

  The moral case is even more compelling than the economic one.

  These kids grew up in America. To enter the DACA program they already had to step forward and show that they were contributing  to their communities and then prove it again every two years to stay in the program. It is immoral to now put them in the crosshairs of deportation.

  This is just the latest effort by Trump to play to his base and divide us, but we must not allow that. Americans of all races and creeds must push congress to pass the Dream Act, and allow these young people to become American citizens – without the Act being a bargaining chip for more border security or anything else. 

  These DACA young people are our neighbors, our colleagues, and our classmates. They represent the the best of the dream that my parents and most of our ancestors had when they came to America:  To make a better life for themselves, and for their kids.  Trump’s attempt to divide us and fuel our differences along racial and ethnic lines is an attack on the America I believe in, and we must not let it stand.  

  That’s why the DACA fight is my fight, and why I stand with the dreamers – and I hope you will too.

  

 

Off the Top of My Head

Most Americans Unprepared for Retirement

by John Lawrence

While some Americans contemplate living in RVs and hopefully avoid living on the street, rich older people are doing better than ever. Among people over 65, the wealthiest 20 percent own virtually all of the nation’s $25 trillion in retirement accounts, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Social security payments are hardly keeping up with inflation. While the government charges more every year for Medicare, which comes out of the social security payment, social security is not raised enough to keep up with the result that effectively retirees get less and less in their social security year after year. Most older people are going to have to work until they die or get too sick to work any more.

Fundamental changes in the U.S. retirement system have shifted responsibility for saving from the employer to the worker, exacerbating the nation’s rich-poor divide. Two recent recessions devastated personal savings. And at a time when 10,000 baby boomers are turning 65 every day, Social Security benefits have lost about a third of their purchasing power since 2000.

Nearly 20% of older people have no other income than social security. For a third of this population social security represents 90% of their income. Social security payments are slightly better than the poverty threshold, but significantly less than the Federal minimum wage.

Old folks are less afraid of dying than they are of running out of money. One in 5 have no savings, and millions retire with nothing in the bank. Nearly 30 percent of households headed by someone 55 or older have neither a pension nor any retirement savings, according to a 2015 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

While COLAs have increased social security benefits by 43% since 2000, Medicare Part B payments have increased by 195%. Prescription drugs have increased 184%. Real estate taxes have increased by 147%. If the government wants to keep seniors in their homes (Ha! Ha!), real estate taxes should be waived for senior citizens.

Meanwhile Trump is slashing taxes for the rich and "reforming" the tax code by making mortgage interest and state taxes not deductible any more. Some reform.

 

 

To Be Enthused is to be Filled with Spirit

Dear friends,

     On my tv show this week I talked about Low Tech Spirituality. That is an apt description of New Thought/Science of Mind.   We do not need special clothing, a certain place, an altar, beads, shawls, cushions, or a strict diet. We need nothing but our mind, our attention, our willingness to be in the presence of our very own being. This means, of course, to take ourselves out of the doing for a period of time every day. The benefits are many, beginning with greater emotional stability, a happy for no reason feeling, cheerful expectation and a kind of child-like sense of The More.

     Why bother? Simply because we cannot avoid being in the doing world. We take ourselves out into the fray every day. What are we bringing with us? Would our lives be better if we were more emotionally stable, happier and cheerfully expectant? Well, yes, because we are experiencing our inner life all the time and it is cause to our outer actions, which, in turn, create effects that seem to be coming at us.  

     Emerson said that always a certain enthusiasm attends the individual’s consciousness of the divine presence (The More.) To be enthused is to be filled with Spirit, the power within. We are more eager to get out into the world and to do what is ours to do. We have a greater sense of what that is and how to achieve the results that are in alignment with our true calling. Sitting in the silence is the most powerful healing technique known to humankind. As they say, Just do it!

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes

www.carolcarnes.com or www.mvcsl.org

Out tv show is on You Tube, new shows weekly

www.californiafreepress.net

Sent to Destroy Sanders' Case for Democratic Socialism, Danish Right-Winger Bolsters It

Published on Thursday, October 19, 2017 by Common Dreams

Fellow at Peterson Institute, a regressive-minded think tank, concedes the many benefits of a nation that provides universal access to pre-school, healthcare, and college

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

6 Comments

Sanders concluded the debate by calling on Americans to resist attempts by Cruz, President Donald Trump, and the Republican Party to "give $1.9 trillion in tax breaks to the top one percent" while shredding what is left of the safety net. (Photo: CNN/Youtube)

In a televised debate with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on CNN Thursday night that quickly became a social media sensation, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tore into the "fraud" that is the Trump-GOP tax plan, slammed America's corrupt campaign finance system that allows the wealthiest Americans to buy policies and politicians, and "dunked on" a Danish representative of a right-wing think tank who challenged Sanders on his support for Scandinavian social democratic policies.

"This Trump Republican tax proposal is a disaster. And together we are going to defeat that awful proposal."
—Sen. Bernie Sanders

Jacob Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, charged late in the debate that Sanders wants to spend like a Scandinavian nation, but not tax like one.

Sanders responded by highlighting the benefits citizens of Denmark, Sweden, and other Scandinavian nations reap as a result of paying more in taxes and concluded that these benefits far outweigh the costs.

"How much do you pay when you go to the hospital, if you have cancer, God forbid, and you went to the hospital?" Sanders asked.

"Zero," Kirkegaard said.

"And what about college in Denmark?" Sanders went on. "Our kids can't afford to go to college. How much does it cost to go to college in Denmark?"

"Well, in fact, you get a government stipend to go to college," Kirkegaard said.

"Oh. In other words, not only is it free, they give you a stipend, because they want to make sure—correct me if I'm wrong—that they take advantage of the wisdom of all of the kids," Sanders replied. "They want to make sure that every kid in that country gets the best education he or she can have."

"Wow," tweeted Josh Miller-Lewis, Sanders' deputy communications director, "Bernie just dunked on this guy from the Peterson Institute."

"Bernie Sanders just (peacefully) disarmed a Danish Pete Peterson plant—brilliantly," added Katrina vandenHeuvel, publisher of The Nation.

By the end of their exchange, Kirkegaard conceded that familiar right-wing talking points about single-payer healthcare—for instance, the oft-repeated claim about extraordinarily long waiting lists—are false.

"I do not believe that America is about giving tax breaks to the very, very wealthy and cutting life-and-death programs for working families. This Trump Republican tax proposal is a disaster," Sanders concluded. "And the American people have got to stand up. And together we are going to defeat that awful proposal. Thank you very much."

 

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Take Time to be Conscious of Where You Are

Dear friends,

     Since the weather has cooled, I have been out walking in the mornings. Being on foot gives me a chance to stop into shops that, usually, I just whiz by in my car.  I had some nice conversations with people I would not have met otherwise. At one point I sat for a phone call under a tree in a tiny park with a babbling fountain nearby. I am not sure I have ever noticed it before. The aroma of roasting chiles in the air was tantalizing.  It is that time of year here in the Southwest. The point, of course, is that we miss so much when we do not take time to be conscious of where we are!

     Likewise, we miss so much when we are not conscious of WHO we are, what is our power and how it can be used for the greater good. The whole world is suffering because of a lack of awareness. Millions see themselves as victims; thinking animals that must fight for their share of anything. They believe there is not enough to go around. That belief is driven home by those who share the belief but have figured out a way to take the lion’s share of what is available. It is a vicious cycle of ignorance.

     As was said by Ernest Holmes; “we have learned all we need to know from suffering.” He then wrote a book about how to end the cycle; how to find the path to freedom and plenty for all. The book was titled The Science of Mind because the answer is in conscious perception!

Try this: The answers are within my own field of consciousness. I walk through my mind with ease and joy. This is a spiritual universe, governed by spiritual laws and I am a spiritual being.  

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes

www.carolcarnes.com and www.mvcsl.org

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www.californiafreepress.net

Off the Top of My Head

Technological Progress Has Not Led To a Better World

by John Lawrence

By all accounts we live in a pretty technologically sophisticated world: self-driving cars, robots, automation, the internet, smartphones that have the computing power of mainframes of 20 years ago. You'd think that we wouldn't have to work as hard, that poverty would have been eliminated and that there would be no more war. But that isn't the case. Far from it.

There is more poverty than ever with masses of people living on one or two dollars a day. War rages all over the planet. There is a permanent war establishment. More and more destructive and sophisticated weapons are being developed and deployed every day. 65 million refugees roam the world looking for a permanent home preferably in a more developed country than the one from which they came. Their homes and cities have been destroyed by war. The old saying, "We had to destroy the town in order to save it" applies to large swathes of the Middle East and Africa.

In the preeminent country of the world, the US, the world's policeman, infrastructure is crumbling and large numbers of homeless people roam the streets of downtown urban centers. Hepatitis A and other diseases are breaking out due to the fact that people must urinate and defecate on the streets. It is a veritable dystopia.

The problem is that no one, including government, is concerned about the overarching problems of peace, a decent standard of living for all and protecting the planet and the environment. People are only concerned about selling boxes whether those boxes be cars, houses or smartphones. There is no profit in protecting the environment; there is only profit in exploiting and destroying it. There is no profit in providing for the poor and wretched of the earth. There is only profit in exploiting them. Frantz Fanon's book, The Wretched of the Earth, needs updating.

Too bad that this is the official mindset of the world's formerly greatest country, the US, where seeking profit above all else is the first and essential commandment. And devil take the hindermost.

 

New law puts California on path to offering first year free at community colleges

by Melanie Mason, LA Times, October 13, 2017

Roommates Jeffrey MacGillivray, center, and Randall Jenkins, right, both 20, enjoy their philosophy class at El Camino College in Torrance. (Christina House/For The Times)

A push to make California community colleges more enticing to first-year students was signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown on Friday.

The proposal, AB 19 by Assemblyman Miguel Santiago (D-Los Angeles), lays the groundwork to waive the fees for the first year of community college for all first-time students. It's an incentive that would draw in new students who wouldn’t otherwise enroll, Santiago said.

"Community college changed my life. It gave me choices and opportunities and it opened doors," Santiago said. "I know free community college will change the lives of Californians."

The state already offers fee waivers for low-income students, but some community college districts report that a substantial percentage of students eligible for the waiver don't apply for it.

The new law is contingent on securing funds in next year’s budget to fully roll out the promise of a free first year.

Brown signed the bill despite opposition from his own Department of Finance, which expressed concern that all students, regardless of financial need, would be able to get their fees waived. The administration has focused its student aid efforts on those with demonstrable financial hardship.

The measure was supported by a number of community college districts. It also became a rallying call for Rise Inc., a recently launched grassroots group of California students seeking to do away with college tuition and reduce student debt. The group collected more than 6,000 signatures for a petition to the governor urging his signature. 

The support "reflects demand among students, among families who want to access higher education," said Max Lubin, the CEO of Rise. "People want to go to college but don't see themselves pursuing college because of the cost."

The cost of college has increasingly become a political flashpoint, with student debt climbing over $1 trillion nationwide. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) proposed free college tuition during his 2016 presidential campaign and California Democrats proposed, but did not enact, a plan to make college debt-free by helping cover living expenses.

Let Your Soul Shine Through Today

Dear friends,

     With Halloween coming up soon, it is impossible not to think of the various disguises we wear. Emerson had a lot to say about it; “(we) are a façade of a temple wherein all wisdom and good abide.” He went on as to how the self we represent to the world is not who we are, that we are mis-representing ourselves. Yes, everyone is a better being than they know and therefore what is seen and known in the world as “me” is far less than the “I” behind the mask.

     This is one of my favorite parts of his essay on the Over-Soul. He refers to the inner genius that comes through us according to our willingness to be seen and known for who we really are. We are in that place of receptivity, perhaps out of desperation and not knowing what to do, when the great soul that we are comes through as light. Emerson said; “when it breathes through the intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through the will it is virtue; when it flows through our affections it is love.”

     We only get caught up in limitation, fear and immobility when we disallow this greater presence, right here where we reside! Ask your true self to let what Emerson called the soul shine through you today.  Give it permission to neutralize your small sense of self. Say yes to the power within that is ready to make all things new, simply by being revealed. Don’t over-think this, just say yes and let it out. (I am speaking to myself today!!)

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes www.carolcarnes.com and www.mvcsl.org

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Stiffing US Taxpayers on 'Grand Scale,' Fortune 500 Holding $2.6 Trillion Offshore

Published on Tuesday, October 17, 2017 by Common Dreams

"As Congress considers proposals to institute a near zero percent tax rate on profits booked offshore by multinational corporations, the findings in this report should give policymakers pause."

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

18 Comments

"Congress created the loopholes in our tax code that allow offshore tax avoidance and force ordinary Americans to make up the difference," the new study observes. (Photo: Michael Fleshman/Flickr/cc)

As President Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress intensify their push for massive corporate tax cuts that critics have said would encourage businesses to offshore profits and jobs, a new report published Tuesday by U.S. PIRG and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) found that 73 percent of companies on the Fortune 500 list are already taking advantage of overseas tax havens—costing the United States $752 billion in federal tax revenue last year alone.

"Lawmakers shouldn't be discussing how to sweeten the pot and give corporations a huge tax break that amounts to a huge financial reward for engaging in bad corporate behavior."
—Richard Phillips, Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy

The new study discovered that, in total, America's most profitable corporations in 2016 had $2.6 trillion stashed overseas in over 9,000 subsidiaries in various locations, including notorious tax havens like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

Clark Gascoigne, deputy director of the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency (FACT) Coalition, cautioned in a statement on Tuesday that the Trump-GOP tax proposals would, if passed, make this bad situation even worse.

"As Congress considers proposals to institute a near zero percent tax rate on profits booked offshore by multinational corporations, the findings in this report should give policymakers pause," Gascoigne said. "The study shows that today's flawed tax system allows for gaming on a grand scale."

The PIRG-ITEP analysis makes clear that corporate tax avoidance is both an unnecessary problem—"Congress created the loopholes in our tax code that allow offshore tax avoidance and force ordinary Americans to make up the difference"—and a pervasive one.

At least 366 of the 500 companies on Fortune's list "operate one or more subsidiaries in tax haven countries." Furthermore, "30 companies with the most money officially booked offshore for tax purposes collectively operate 2,213 tax haven subsidiaries."

But the report also highlights the fact that there are several "particularly egregious examples":

• Apple, which "holds at least $246 billion offshore, a sum greater than any other company's offshore cash pile," would owe $76.7 billion in U.S. taxes if this profit was not overseas;
• Citigroup, which stashes $47 billion overseas, would owe $13.1 billion in U.S taxes; and
• Nike, which holds $12.2 billion offshore, would owe $4.1 billion in U.S. taxes.

Off the Top of My Head

Denmark: The World's Happiest Country?

by John Lawrence

In a National Geographic survey, Denmark ranked as the world's happiest country. It's a combination of several factors including the feeling that their country cares for them. They can never sink too low because their country will always help them if they are willing to help themselves. They can truly pursue their passion in life because they are set free from worrying about the need to just survive. They have free health care, free education up to and including the university level and parental leave at full pay for a year after every child is born. This can be shared between the two parents including gay and lesbian parents.

There are 5 criteria that the survey used to rate happiness: financial, social, purpose, physical and community. The thought is that you can't be really happy if your physical body is out of whack. And that comes down to not just treating illness as what "health care" in the US consists of. It means how active physically you are. Danes and other Europeans do a lot of walking as well as participate in other physical activities so they have a more robust personal power plant.

The private and the public are in a healthy balance. There's not the intense conflict between the two spheres as you find in the US. There's a feeling that "We're all in this together. An American anthropologist, Jonathan Schwartz, based in Copenhagen said, "Danish happiness is closely tied to their notion of tryghed, the snuggled, tucked-in feeling that begins with a mother's love and extends to the relationship Danes have with their government."

Engaging work and rewarding play are more in balance. Danes get 4 weeks of vacation each year. They feel free to work in a job that is personally rewarding instead of one that represents a daily grind to eke out a living. "The Danes seem more aware of the total needs of a person than most other places," said a psychologist at Claremont Graduate University in California. In other words they are more in tune with life. Maybe it's because they don't devote half their national budget to militarism as we do in the US. The US, assuming for itself the role of world policeman, has been a colossal failure resulting in the fact that there are 65 million refugees in the world.

Perhaps the world's refugees should take up a chant #Refugees' Lives Matter similar to #Black Lives Matter. Their plight at the hands of the US military is similar to the plight of black people at the hands of US police forces.

'Low As It Gets,' Says NBA Coach in Searing Takedown of 'Soulless Coward' Trump

Published on Tuesday, October 17, 2017 by Common Dreams

"To lie about how previous presidents responded to the deaths of soldiers" is "beyond the pale," said San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

7 Comments

"The people who work with this president should be ashamed," Popovich said. (Photo: ESPN/Youtube)

Shortly following President Donald Trump's false claim Monday that his predecessors did not reach out to the families of soldiers killed overseas, San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich called the president a "soulless coward" and slammed his remarks as "beyond the pale" in a phone interview with The Nation's Dave Zirin.

Popovich has been outspoken about his disdain for Trump's "disgusting" conduct and actions since he took office, but Zirin writes that he has "never heard this man more frustrated, more fed up, and more tense with anger than he was" following Trump's surprise press conference with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

Here are Popovich's comments in full:

I've been amazed and disappointed by so much of what this president had said, and his approach to running this country, which seems to be one of just a never ending divisiveness. But his comments today about those who have lost loved ones in times of war and his lies that previous presidents Obama and Bush never contacted their families are so beyond the pale, I almost don't have the words.

This man in the Oval Office is a soulless coward who thinks that he can only become large by belittling others. This has of course been a common practice of his, but to do it in this manner—and to lie about how previous presidents responded to the deaths of soldiers—is as low as it gets. We have a pathological liar in the White House, unfit intellectually, emotionally, and psychologically to hold this office, and the whole world knows it, especially those around him every day. The people who work with this president should be ashamed, because they know better than anyone just how unfit he is, and yet they choose to do nothing about it. This is their shame most of all.

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Maintain a Calm Serenity of Thought

Dear friends,

Here is a quote from Ernest Holmes.

”We know the background of human thought is, to a great extent, one of negation, a denial of a harmonious and spiritual universe; consequently, our outlook on life must be transformed by the renewing of our mind and even when the results are not immediately forth-coming, we must still maintain a calm serenity of thought”

It is that last sentence that becomes the greatest challenge to a student of New Thought (and we are all students.) We are naturally inclined to look outside to assess the weather, are we not? We watch the news to see what is happening in our town and the world. We can see and hear and take in information, and we do so constantly. It makes sense that our state of mind would be affected by the outer realm of experience.

But Holmes, a great spiritual master, tells us to make our assessments based on what is real, not what appears to be. This is where we lose people. So trained is our mind to believe only what we see, we miss the greater possibility that is inherent in what we see, residing behind it, if you will.  The flip side of our negation is bliss; the most natural state possible for a human being. We rarely get there after age two or so, because of the seeming solidity of things and the reality of them. It would seem only a fool would be serene in the midst of turmoil. The question is: why would we assume so? What do fear, anger, anxiety and hopelessness create? Anything good? It is the person who sees through the appearance of negation to the possible that is attending it, who will lead and help make the great changes that we long to see.

Our practice is to attend to the state of our mind. Quite literally to……

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes www.carolcarnes.com  www.mvcsl.org.

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Off the Top of My Head

Middle Class Families Today Worse Off Than They Were 70 Years Ago

by John Lawrence

In the 1950s usually only the husband worked outside the home. Today both spouses work to maintain a middle class lifestyle. So the amount of parent-hours worked to maintain a middle class lifestyle has increased. So who's taking care of the children, maintaining the home, doing the shopping and all those other things that "mothers" used to do?

Answer: today's parents pay for child care. They pay for pre-school, they pay for after school activities, and they pay for two cars instead of one because both parents need a car to get to their respective jobs. Is this an improvement in generational lifestyle or a degradation? Most families today can't make ends meet in terms of the time available and the necessary things that have to get done.

For some lucky parents, a grandparent steps in and fills the gap in terms of child care or after school care. For others they have to pay for strangers to take care of their kids if they can afford it. Others have to relegate their children to the role of latch key kids. In other words there is no one to take care of them. The role of "mother" has largely disappeared from American life.

Income per parent-hour worked doesn't go as far today as it did in the 1950s when one job per household produced enough income for all the necessities of life plus a yearly vacation and enabled parents to send their kids to college. Americans are being duped into spending their money on huge mortgages, two car payments and massive consumerism to make up for the fact that there is no mother in the home. There are effectively two people playing the father role. And the children suffer.

Trump’s “Shoot-From-The-Hip” Presidency Reflects The Decay ....

.... In America's Politics And Democracy

by Frank Thomas

Doug Sosnik’s article, Trump Is On Track To Win Reelection provides some startling insights into Trump’s power expansion strategy. He is playing upon working class feelings of voicelessness and powerlessness in having a say about what the government does. So he spews a flurry of one-liners and sows confrontation, chaos, divisiveness to appeal to his working class base. For Trump (and Steve Bannon) it’s about destroying all of today’s so-called Washington ‘establishment’ to advance an agenda of power and “making America great again” … his promise to a desperate core of supporters starving for change at almost any cost and disregard for truth.

In reality, Trump’s only idealogy is himself. He is cynically and recklessly inflaming racial, ethnic and religious tensions. He’s widening the partisan divide in basic political values related to immigration, racial discrimination, environment, and for those in need. From the very start, he has been exploiting and profiting on the social, political, economic frustrations that have been building up for some time. Employing disruptive “shock effects” to rally his core supporters, Trump is amplifying the social-polarization that has been long in process under our two-party “duopoly” and money-corrupted political system so blatantly dysfunctional in serving the Common Good. (see Inside the ‘adult day-care center’: How aides try to control and coerce Trump)

When significant numbers of Americans don’t think they have a political voice or influence on policy, this is a crucial warning our nation is in danger of ceasing to be a constitutional republic and rather is on course towards an authoritarian oligarchy. This suits a president fine who casts himself as the “Omnipotent One” backed by “His” people as the “Only One” who can save the republic – civility, conflicts of interest, rule of law be damned. Trump is essentially the symptomatic reflection of the last 40 year step-by-step disintegration of the reasonably balanced, reflective, give-and-take in our political-societal communications and policy making.

As summed up by one observer, we now have a current situation where everything is a hyped-up display of whacky bravado and arrogance, empty of a modicum of honesty, sincerity or genuinely stable leadership. We now have a “government by tweets”, with off-the-cuff, ridiculous, scary intimidating utterances or thinking that is only intensifying feelings of a hostile, nihilistic political environment where demeaning, hateful language to rebuke critics, grab headlines, to shock and divert attention is culturally alive and seemingly becoming normal.

A Higher Law Regulates Events

Dear friends,

Emerson: “a little consideration of what takes place around us every day would show us that a higher law than that of our will regulates events.”

     He speaks of a stream of power and if we would put ourselves in accord with it, our lives could be so much easier.   What goes on around us is Nature or the natural flow of growth, which he said was to teach us faith. He also meant that a higher intelligence, that same brilliance that is behind the universe and everything in it, is still and forever projecting its perfect knowing into visible effects. It is another way of saying “God is still in business.”

          This, of course, does not mean that we do nothing or that we have no desires or ideas of our own. I think he was trying to show how unnecessary is struggle; how effort is effortless if it is grounded in faith; how integral each life is to the evolution of the whole and therefore, we have the ability to place ourselves in that stream of power. The image that comes to mind is of one standing with arms outstretched and palms open to the heavens, saying “Use me, let me be the vehicle for your love, your joy, your constant supply, your vitality and peace.” This is not a plea to an outer God, but a recognition of our inseparable place in it and our part in the revelation of its Nature.

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes

www.carolcarnes.com or www.mvcsl.org

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