California Free Press

Report Sheds Light on What Triggered Collusion Probe Amid Concerns Trump Will Fire Robert Mueller

Published on Saturday, December 30, 2017

The New York Times reveals the investigation into collusion allegations was prompted by a Trump campaign adviser bragging to an Australian diplomat that he knew about Russia acquiring political dirt on Hillary Clinton

by Jessica Corbett, staff writer

 

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George Papadopoulos, a former adviser for President Donald Trump's campaign, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI during its investigation into allegations that the campaign colluded with the Russian government. (Photo: LinkedIn)

A report by the New York Times published Saturday provides new insight into the investigation of potential collusion between President Donald Trump's campaign and Russian officials, and the role of George Papadopoulos, a former foreign policy adviser to the campaign who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contact with individuals who had ties to the Russian government.

The Times—citing interviews and recently obtained documents—reveals that the FBI's probe reportedly was not prompted by the dossier compiled by a former British spy, as Trump and others have alleged, but rather because in May of 2016 Papadopoulos drunkenly bragged to Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat based in Britian, that "Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton," in the form of thousands of stolen emails.

"The information that Mr. Papadopoulos gave to the Australians, answers one of the lingering mysteries of the past year: What so alarmed American officials to provoke the F.B.I. to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign months before the presidential election?" the Times reports. "It was firsthand information from one of America's closest intelligence allies."  

"Australian officials passed the information about Mr. Papadopoulos to their American counterparts, according to four current and former American and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the Australians' role," the Times explains—albeit, two months after receiving the tip. Still, the Times concludes, "the hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign may have had inside information about it were driving factors that led the FBI to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia's attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump's associates conspired." 

What remains unclear from the Times report is why the Australians waited two months to alert the FBI (the Australian Embassy in D.C. declined to comment) and whether Papadopoulos alerted other members of the Trump campaign when he was told that Russians were in possession of "thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton." While the documents obtained by the Times "show no evidence that Mr. Papadopoulos discussed the stolen messages with the campaign," the paper points out that it was mere weeks before "he opened up to Mr. Downer, the Australian diplomat, about his contacts with the Russians."

After news broke earlier this year that Papadopoulos had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and was reportedly cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller, who is now leading the investigation into allegations of collusion, the president and those around him tried to downplay the influence of the former foreign policy adviser, with Trump campaign adviser Michael Caputo even dismissing him as a "coffee boy."

"He was hardly central to the daily running of the Trump campaign, yet Mr. Papadopoulos continuously found ways to make himself useful to senior Trump advisers," and "interviews and new documents show that he stayed influential throughout the campaign," the Times notes. "Two months before the election, for instance, he helped arrange a New York meeting between Mr. Trump and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt."

So far, Mueller has charged four former Trump officials, including Papadopoulos: in October, Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort and his associate Rick Gates were indicted on federal charges that were uncovered as part of the probe but are unrelated to collusion (they've pleaded not guilty to all charges); however, at the beginning of December, Trump's former national security adviser Ret. Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contact with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

The Times report comes amid mounting concerns that Trump may fire Mueller as the investigation intensifies, even as the White House continues to deny any plans to do so. Earlier this week, Trump said he had an"absolute right" to do what he wants with the Justice Department, which critics characterized as a "veiled threat" against the special counsel. The American public has promised mass protests if the president dismisses Mueller before the probe concludes, and continues to closely follow the story—which this week NPR readers selected as the top political story of 2017.

Foreign policy analysts, legal experts, and reporters flooded social media with takeaways from the Times report on Saturday. Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor, tweeted: "it will be hard for the Trump team to continue to portray Papadopoulos as a low-level volunteer who had limited access. But given that he's on Mueller's team, they will continue to do so."

Off the Top of My Head

What are the Requirements for a Psychopath?

by John Lawrence

National Geographical had a recent article about empathy and how the presence or lack of it can determine whether a person is capable of altruistic acts or downright evil acts such as mass murder. If a person can put themselves in the other person's shoes and identify with that person's feelings, then the person will not perform a horrible act on the other person. This was the argument. On the other hand one who has no feelings of empathy for another is capable of horrific acts against them.

National Geographic reported:

Extreme altruists and psychopaths exemplify our best and worst instincts. On one end of the moral spectrum, sacrifice, generosity, and other ennobling traits that we recognize as good; on the other end, selfishness, violence, and destructive impulses that we see as evil. At the root of both types of behaviors, researchers say, is our evolutionary past. They hypothesize that humans—and many other species, to a lesser degree—evolved the desire to help one another because cooperation within large social groups was essential to survival. But because groups had to compete for resources, the willingness to maim and possibly kill opponents was also crucial. “We are the most social species on Earth, and we are also the most violent species on Earth,” says Jean Decety, a social neurologist at the University of Chicago. “We have two faces because these two faces were important to survival.”

For centuries the question of how good and evil originate and manifest in us was a matter of philosophical or religious debate. But in recent decades researchers have made significant advances toward understanding the science of what drives good and evil. Both seem to be linked to a key emotional trait: empathy, which is an intrinsic ability of the brain to experience how another person is feeling. Researchers have found that empathy is the kindling that fires compassion in our hearts, impelling us to help others in distress. Studies also have traced violent, psychopathic, and antisocial behaviors to a lack of empathy, which appears to stem from impaired neural circuits. These new insights are laying the foundation for training regimens and treatment programs that aim to enhance the brain’s empathic response.

The article goes on to say that those who have no empathy can fake it to get what they want. While empathy is important, what the article doesn't mention is that some code of conduct or standard of behavior is also important. Even in the absence of empathy, people may still do the right thing because they know the difference between right and wrong whether or not they are actually feeling empathy towards another at the time. In other words there is an intellectual component as well as a feeling component to behavior.

The other thing that enters into it in any given situation is selfishness. It's easy to do the right thing if a person has no selfish interest in the outcome. But acting out of selfishness determines in many cases whether the act will be a good or evil one. Selfishness can override empathy and it can override any moral code. But what about evil acts for which there is no obvious selfish component such as the raining of bullets on a crowd attending a concert as happened in Las Vegas or a thrill killing? These people obviously lack empathy or adherence to any moral or ethical code. They have descended into an abyss of anger and hatred. They were sick puppies.

Mental health or lack thereof can determine whether a person has empathy for another or can even treat them with some sort of compassion. At least as a minimum if one can take a "first do no harm" approach to others, they are exhibiting the vestiges of a moral code. People who actively help others obviously feel empathy towards them. People who are extremely selfish may harm others in the process of getting what they want, but it's not for lack of empathy. People who are extremely selfish and lack empathy can do bad things, but not as bad as those whose mental health has deteriorated to the point that they don't care about themselves or others.

 

Jeff Sessions Takes a Stand for Debtors’ Prisons

Published on Friday, December 29, 2017 by Speak Freely / ACLU

There is no place in this country for a justice system that lets rich people buy their freedom while poor people are locked up or lose their driver’s licenses because they can’t afford to pay money to courts. 

by Nusrat Choudhury

 

19 Comments

"Jeff Sessions’ action makes clear that he and his Justice Department are unconcerned by courts trampling on the rights of poor people." (Photo: AP/Jay LaPrete, archivo)

During the holiday season, many of us think about what we can do to help people struggling with poverty. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, on the other hand, decided just before Christmas to rescind a guidance meant to protect low-income Americans.

The 2016 guidance, issued by former President Obama’s Justice Department, urged state and local courts nationwide to abide by constitutional principles prohibiting the jailing of poor people who cannot afford to pay court fines and fees. Jeff Sessions’ action makes clear that he and his Justice Department are unconcerned by courts trampling on the rights of poor people.

The Obama Justice Department issued the 2016 letter after reports and lawsuits by the ACLU and other groups revealed how modern-day debtors’ prisons function in more than a dozen states, despite the fact that the U.S. two centuries ago formally outlawed jailing people simply because they have unpaid debts.

These efforts revealed that poor people were being locked up in Georgia, Washington, Mississippi, and elsewhere without court hearings or legal representation when they could not pay fines and fees for traffic tickets or other civil infractions or criminal offenses. These efforts also show that modern-day debtors’ prisons result from state laws allowing or requiring the suspension of driver’s licenses for unpaid court fines or fees without first requiring confirmation that the person could actually pay.

Third Parties, Your Time Is Now

From Truthdig, December 29, 2017

by Lark Lo

 

Not My President's Day Rally in Washington, D.C., in February 2017. (Lorie Shaull / CC BY-SA 2.0)

For third parties in this country, educational campaigns and working within the Democratic Party has to stop.

There is this idea among some that it is too soon to build third-party candidates and a formidable campaign by 2020, but we have been building third parties for over 150 years.

We are ready now for a true choice.

A third party will never be built to reform the Democratic Party. The very notion has always been the fatal mistake of every third party. The Democratic Party cannot be reformed. The Democratic Party is not broken. It is doing what it is supposed to do.

The Democratic Party decided who it wanted to be in the 1940s in the choice of Harry Truman over Henry Wallace to lead it. The party decided it wanted to be pro-business warmongers.

If you live in Los Angeles or New York, think about your life right now under a Democratic everything. Is this what you want the end of Donald Trump to look like? When Trump is gone, do you want to see a cool coffee shop owned by trust funders on every corner, $5,000 rents with five roommates, steadily looking for work in a gig economy where you can’t save and you have to work for Uber on the weekends, teach yoga at night, float from contract job to contract job—even though you have a master’s degree?

How about wars in the Middle East and Africa? Or, notice the exploitation of people without papers, because they are not white.

Off the Top of My Head

Homelessness is the Contradiction Capitalism Can't Deal With

by John Lawrence

Karl Marx proposed that history developed in such a way that the status quo represented what he called the thesis. The antithesis was whatever system was opposed to the thesis, and the synthesis  represented a transformation that integrated the two concepts. So if the thesis is capitalism in which everyone fends for themselves and there is no welfare or economic rights of any kind, and socialism is the antithesis in which economic rights and welfare are guaranteed, then what would the synthesis look like?

The US is a country in which political rights but not economic rights are guaranteed by the Constitution. In his 1941 State of the Union address, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed four freedoms. Freedom of speech and freedom of worship are already guaranteed by the Constitution. However, Freedom from Want went way beyond the Constitution. It constituted and economic right which is similar to what you have in a socialistic system. Economic rights are anathema to Republicans who want a society totally devoid of them. Their current plan espoused by Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House, is to roll back social security, medicare and medicaid on the grounds that there is no money for these social programs. After giving a one and a half trillion tax break to the rich, his argument is somewhat plausible.

According to Marx' theory the synthesis is triggered by a contradiction in the status quo or thesis which the system (capitalism) can't deal with or absorb. Such a contradiction is homelessness. First off it seems ridiculous that in the so-called world's richest nation hundreds of thousands of people should be living on the streets with nowhere to call home. Slaves had it better because at least they were taken care of to a certain extent because the slave owner needed to protect his investment. Secondly, the homeless represent a threat to the rest of the public because the lack of sanitation is leading to public health epidemics of which the spread of Hepatitis A in San Diego and Los Angeles is only the beginning.

So there is a contradiction between a city which caters to tourism and presents itself as "America's Finest City and thousands living on the streets with no adequate sanitation. It is clear this situation can't continue indefinitely although it has been treated for the most part by city authorities with "benign neglect." Cities have tried not to trample on the rights of the homeless as American citizens while not providing the economic wherewithal to get them all adequately taken care of. Tokenism has been part and parcel of the benign neglect strategy so that some few have been given adequate housing.

To guarantee adequate housing for those who cannot afford it would be an economic right which means that rich people would have to pay for housing for poor people. In other words their taxes would have to go up. This conservatives and Republicans want to avoid like the plague, but they may either have to accept the plague of higher taxes or they may have to accept the actual plague as it spreads from the homeless population into the general population.

So there is a contradiction here which is only getting worse with each passing year of fewer and fewer good paying jobs, rising debt and rising rents. The 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights (which the US doesn't accept) calls for a right to adequate housing, food, sanitation etc. Many countries including Russia guarantee these things in their Constitutions whether or not they actually live up to them. The US can't go on forever ignoring the plight of an ever increasing homeless population. Either the American mindset has to change about the well off helping the not so well off or there will be a complete societal collapse. Out of the ruins, hopefully, will come a more humane society in which FDR's Freedom from Want is realized.

New Year’s Update for Trump Voters

by Robert Reich

Thursday, December 28, 2017

Almost one year in, it’s time for another update for Trump voters on his election promises:

1. He told you he’d cut your taxes, and that the super-rich like him would pay more. You bought it. But his new tax law does the opposite. By 2027, according several nonpartisan analyses, the richest 1 percent will have got 83 percent of the tax cut and the richest 0.1 percent, 60 percent of it. As Trump told his wealthy friends at Mar-a-Lago just days after the tax bill became law, “You all just got a lot richer.”

2. He promised to close “special interest loopholes that have been so good for Wall Street investors but unfair to American workers,” especially the notorious “carried interest” loophole for private-equity, hedge fund, and real estate partners. You bought it. But the new tax law keeps the “carried interest” loophole.

3. He told you he’d repeal Obamacare and replace it with something “beautiful.” You bought it. But he didn’t repeal and he didn’t replace. (Just as well: His plan would have knocked at least 23 million off health insurance, including many of you.) Instead, he’s doing what he can to cut it back and replace it with nothing. The new tax law will result in 13 million people losing health coverage, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

4. He told you he’d invest $1 trillion in our nation’ crumbling infrastructure. You bought it. But after his giant tax cut for corporations and millionaires, there’s no money left for infrastructure.

5. He said he’d clean the Washington swamp. You bought it. But he’s brought into his administration more billionaires, CEOs, and Wall Street moguls than in any administration in history, to make laws that will enrich their businesses, and he’s filled departments and agencies with former lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who are crafting new policies for the same industries they recently worked for.

6. He said he’d use his business experience to whip the White House into shape. You bought it. But he has created the most dysfunctional, back-stabbing White House in modern history, and has already fired and replaced so many assistants (one of them hired and fired in a little more than a week) that people there barely know who’s in charge of what.

7. He told you he’d “bring down drug prices” by making deals with drug companies. You bought it. But now the White House says that promise is “inoperative.”

8. He promised “a complete ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for American elections.” You bought it. But foreign lobbyists are still raising money for American elections.

9. He told you “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.” You bought it. But he and House Speaker Paul Ryan are already planning such cuts in order to deal with the ballooning deficit created, in part, by the new tax law for corporations and the rich.

10. He promised “six weeks of paid maternity leave to any mother with a newborn child whose employer does not provide the benefit.” You bought it. But the giant tax cut for corporations and the rich doesn’t leave any money for this.

11. He said that on Day One he’d label China a “currency manipulator.” You bought it. But then he met with China’s president Xi Jinping and declared “China is not a currency manipulator.” Ever since then, Trump has been cozying up to Xi.

12. He said he wouldn’t bomb Syria. You bought it. But then he bombed Syria.

13. He said he’d build a “wall” across the southern border. You believed him. But there’s no money for that, either. Chief of staff John Kelly says it is “unlikely that we will build a wall, a physical barrier, from sea to shining sea.”

14. He promised that the many women who accused him of sexual misconduct “will be sued after the election is over.” You bought it. He hasn’t sued them, presumably because he doesn’t want the truth to come out. 

15. He said he would not be a president who took vacations. “I would not be a president that takes time off,” he promised, and he called Barack Obama “the vacationer-in-Chief.” You bought it. But since becoming President he has spent nearly 25 percent of his days at one of his golf properties for some portion of the day, according to Golf News Network, at a cost to taxpayers of over $77 million. That’s already more taxpayer money on vacations than Obama cost in the first 3 years of his presidency. Not to mention all the money taxpayers are spending protecting his family, including his two sons who travel all over the world on Trump business.

16. He said he’d force companies to keep jobs in America, and that there would be “consequences” for companies that shipped jobs abroad. You believed him. But despite their promises, Carrier, Ford, GM, and the rest have continued to ship jobs to Mexico and China. Carrier (a division of United Technologies) has moved ahead with plans to send 1,000 jobs at its Indiana plant to Mexico. Notwithstanding, the federal government has rewarded United Technologies with 15 new contracts since Trump’s inauguration. Last year, Microsoft opened a new factory in Wilsonville, Oregon, that was supposed to herald a new era in domestic tech manufacturing. But in July, the company announced it was closing the plant. More than 100 workers and contractors will lose their jobs when production shifts to China. GE is sending jobs to Canada. IBM is sending them to Costa Rica, Egypt, Argentina, and Brazil. There have been no “consequences” for sending all these jobs overseas.

17. He promised to revive the struggling coal industry and “bring back thousands” of lost mining jobs. You bought it. But coal jobs continue to disappear. Since Trump’s victory, at least 6 plants that relied on coal have closed or announced they will close. Another 40 are projected to close during the president’s four-year term. Utilities continue to switch to natural gas instead of coal.

18. He promised to protect steel workers. But according to the American Iron and Steel Institute, which tracks shipments, steel imports were 19.4 percent higher in the first 10 months of 2017 than in the same period last year. That import surge has hurt American steel workers, who were already struggling against a glut of cheap Chinese steel. For example, ArcelorMittal just announced it will soon lay off 150 of its 207 steel workers at its plant in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania.

19. He said he’d make America safer. You believed him. But according to Mass Shooting Tracker, there have been 377 mass shootings so far this year, including 58 people killed and hundreds injured at a concert in Las Vegas, and 26 churchgoers killed and 20 injured at a church in Texas. Trump refuses to consider any gun controls.

20. He said he’d release his taxes. “I’m under a routine audit and it’ll be released, and as soon as the audit is finished it will be released,“ he promised during the campaign. He hasn’t released his taxes.

Let 2018 Be a New Beginning

Dear friends,

     Here we are at the end of one year, about to begin again! At least that is one way of thinking about the cross over into 2018, as a new beginning. We might as well see it that way. It is far healthier than thinking we are dragging remnants of last year with us. Time plays tricks on our perception. It seems to go swiftly or to barely move, depending on how active we are. There is so much information coming at us that we feel busier than we are, making it seem like this past year has raced by, as if it had someplace to be.

     We hear it said this is a time of reflection. Yes, but don’t spend too much time there. We want to be like race horses at the gate. Ready to leap up into 2018 as if we are new ourselves, bringing with us only those qualities and ideas that truly serve us. It is assumed that by this time, we have learned what we needed to learn in 2017 and now we are wiser and better prepared for success!

     It is a challenge to live in the realm of time, in the land of before and after.  Our best moments are when we are present in the ever-lasting NOW. We must deal with time and yet, it is more of a device than a reality. We can learn to manipulate it to our liking by practicing slowing the mind and therefore being more in the HERE and NOW. Consider how much energy we expend dealing with “too late, too soon, too young, too old, too fast, too slow.” All are related to the passage of time. We are either racing to get somewhere or regretting what has happened.  

     We are rarely HERE where there is no passage of time. There is only being and awareness. The daily practice of meditation seems to stop time, keeping us cheerful and optimistic. Isn’t that what we are wanting to feel this new year, anyway? Wouldn’t cheerful and optimistic be a wonderful way to experience the flow of NOW?

Carol Carnes

www.carolcarnes.com www.mvcsl.org

Living Consciously is !   watch it on You Tube or in las Cruces, channel 98

Check out www.californiafreepress.net

Off the Top of My Head

WannaCry Cryptoworm Ransomware Cost US Victims Billions

by John Lawrence

The internet is far from benign. Who needs nuclear weapons when you can shut down a whole country with a computer virus? In May 0f 2017 the WannaCry virus was unleashed on an unsuspecting public. Calls to Superman were of no avail. What was needed now was Superhackerman. The virus encrypted computer files in hospitals, schools and other places of business like Wall Street. America ground to a halt, and it was just a dry run!

In December 2017, US intelligence services concluded that North Korea was behind the attack. So while American politicians are getting all excited about "little Rocket man" and his missiles and weapons, it turns out that he has a more sophisticated and potent weapon up his sleeve - the internet! Isn't it wonderful that now we are all globally connected?

Payments were demanded in the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. That way the money could not be traced. The funny thing is that the NSA already knew about the possibility of this kind of worm being developed, but rather than report it to Microsoft who could fix it, they went on the attack themselves developing their own offensive capabilities. But it seems that Kim Il Jong got there first. Now any two bit, tinhorn dictator can bring the United States to its knees, thanks to the internet. What an amazing invention!

The WannaCry virus propagated through EternalBlue, an exploit in older Windows systems released by The Shadow Brokers a few months prior to the attack. While Microsoft had released patches previously to close the exploit, much of WannaCry's spread was from organizations that had not applied these, or were using older Windows systems that were past their end-of-life. WannaCry also took advantage of installing backdoors onto infected systems. Boo hoo for them. They didn't keep up to date with the latest technology as recommended by Microsoft so were sitting ducks for the Shadow Brokers. I hope they've learned their lesson.

This computer worm automatically spreads itself. It includes a "transport" mechanism which scans for vulnerable systems, then uses the EternalBlue exploit to gain access, and the DoublePulsar tool to install and execute a copy of itself. There is a whole bag of previously developed tools so that present day hackers don't have to go back and reinvent the wheel, so to speak. As with other modern ransomware, the payload displays a message informing the user that files have been encrypted, and demands a payment of around $300 in bitcoin within three days, or $600 within seven days. Three hardcoded bitcoin addresses, or "wallets", are used to receive the payments of victims. As with all such wallets, their transactions and balances are publicly accessible even though the cryptocurrency wallet owners remain unknown.

Oh, what fools these mortals be. And what tangled webs we weave. Something that was supposed to make us one big happy interconnected global family is used for evil purposes and to exploit victims. People will do anything for money. No need for actual war any more. The internet provides the tools to end civilization as we know it.

Death in an Amazon dumpster

From the Guardian, December 28, 2017

When his body was found in a dumpster outside an Amazon warehouse, the homeless man’s death was a mystery. The search to uncover his past exposes the dangers of a life spent scavenging

The day before last year’s presidential election, a hungry homeless man named Jonathan Manley stopped at a dumpster outside a warehouse in San Francisco. Unmarked on the outside, the building was occupied by Amazon.

For those able to tolerate the grime and the smell, and who have no other choice but to risk eating expired or rotting food, the large dumpsters stationed there can be bountiful. Visitors say they have found ice cream, bananas, strawberries, grapes and frozen pizzas, not to mention cans and packaging that can be sold for pennies at recycling centers.

The lid was too high and too heavy for Manley to flip open from the sidewalk, so he climbed the side, pulled the lid back and dropped into the trash. It was full of things to eat.

“That’s when I noticed him,” Manley said.

At the front, on all fours as if he was struggling to stand up, was a middle-aged man wearing a T-shirt, pants and boots. He had a graying mustache and beard, his hands were caked with dirt and there was blood around his nose.

Outside in America: learn more about our ongoing homelessness project

 

 

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Manley tried to wake him but could not. He tried to lift him, but the man weighed too much and was too stiff. Poking his head out of the dumpster, Manley saw two passersby walking a dog across the street and yelled for them to call 911. When the paramedics arrived, they determined that the man was beyond resuscitation.

•••

Dumpsters can be life-sustaining for people surviving on the streets. But a Guardian investigation has found that they are also implicated in dozens of homeless deaths.

This has added resonance in San Francisco, where the economy hinges on the noncorporeal – algorithms, the cloud and the flows of venture capital – yet some 4,500 people sleeping outdoors still struggle each night for the basic physical necessities of existence. They subsist in the interstices of the new paradigm, or in some cases off its waste.

Just inside the Amazon warehouse, visitors are confronted by shelves stacked with food, everything from peanut butter to tabasco sauce, Oreos, teabags and jello.

• The dumpsters outside of an Amazon warehouse in San Francisco, where the homeless man’s body was found. Photo: Talia Herman for the Guardian

• The inside of a dumpster outside the Amazon warehouse. Photo: Talia Herman for the Guardian. 

In another room, staff hurriedly prepare bags of shopping. When they are ready, delivery people dispatch this abundance to the inhabitants of San Francisco.

The garbage receptacles outside are not the first tech dumpsters to have attracted the attention of homeless locals. A few years ago, they responded with wonder and bemusement to a dumpster by a nearby Google warehouse.

Bussed out: how America moves thousands of homeless people around the country

 

 

Read more

It “had every kind of food you can imagine”, said a resident named Michael Mundy. “They just threw it away, thousands of dollars’ worth.”

But the warehouse closed down, and people had to look elsewhere. “All of a sudden,” said a woman who only gave her first name, Renee, “they started talking about Amazon”.

•••

For about a week after stumbling on the body, Manley went through the encampments of south-eastern San Francisco, trying to find somebody who was missing someone. Thousands of homeless people die in American cities each year to little fanfare, and the Amazon incident barely made the news. Neither the man’s name nor the occupant of the warehouse appear to have ever been reported.

At an encampment underneath a highway, he came across a woman who had strung up dried flowers around her tent and cultivated succulents. Cheryl Iversen, 49, had riotous, flaming orange hair, a personality to match and, fittingly, went by the name of Tygrr, pronounced “Tiger”. Manley told her what he had discovered, and she felt the burden of not knowing what had happened to Frank Ryan lifted.

“I said ‘thank you’,” she recalled. “He held me when I cried.”

As Wealthiest Amass Another $1 Trillion in 2017, Calls for a 'Strike Back' Against Oligarchy

Published on Wednesday, December 27, 2017 by Common Dreams

"We can have a world where everyone has a decent home, the chance for an education, and access to healthcare. Or we can have billionaires. We can't have both."

by Julia Conley, staff writer

 

54 Comments

The 500 richest people in the world became $1 trillion richer in 2017, adding to concerns over a global wealth gap that shows no signs of narrowing. (Photo: Paulann Egelhoff/Flickr/cc)

As the gap between the world's richest and poorest people has widened to an extreme not seen since the Gilded Age, the 500 wealthiest people have gotten $1 trillion richer in 2017, according to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index.

The richest people in the world have been able to amass huge wealth this year thanks to a booming stock market, as billions of poor and working people around the world have seen little if any benefit from strong markets. Even in the world's major economies, including Japan, the U.K., and the U.S., workers have seen their wages stagnate or decline in recent years.

Efforts by the very rich to contribute to the lower classes through charity, while commendable, have also done little to halt the growing wealth gap in a global economy in which the world's five richest people control $425 billion, or one-sixth of the U.K.'s gross domestic product.

More than 170 of the richest people have signed the Giving Pledge, created in 2010 by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett to encourage the rich to give at least half of their wealth to charity. But since the pledge was established, according to Oxfam, the wealth of the poorest half of the world's population has fallen by a trillion dollars—suggesting that good intentions among the rich are no match for a worldwide economy with such an extreme consolidation of wealth.

The wealth gap has grown large enough to leave some advisers of the rich wary of a potential sea change in the coming years, as the degree of inequality becomes unsustainable and leaders take action to stop markets from favoring the wealthy few—similar to how monopolies were broken up in the U.S. in the early 20th century.

"We're at an inflection point," Josef Stadler, the lead author of a recent report by UBS/Pricewaterhouse Coopers on the world's billionaires, told the Guardian. "Wealth concentration is as high as in 1905, this is something billionaires are concerned about...The question is to what extent is that sustainable and at what point will society intervene and strike back?"

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

Competition is Overvalued

Dear friends,

Making a salad the other night reminded me of the reality of plurality in our world and how competition is overrated as a necessary component of life. The avocado is as valuable as the tomato or the romaine. The sunflower seeds give crunch while the Feta cheese adds flavor. None of the parts makes up the whole by itself, but the whole exists because of the parts. In some way our relationship with one another and to our shared experience is like that.

The idea of being better than others came from school. We were put on teams and our goal was to “beat” the other team. We were given special privileges if we won or out-played them. There was reward only in winning. I am always struck by how, in any level of sport, the “losers” hang their heads and leave the field in disgrace. It is really ridiculous. They played the game! They ought to be celebrated just for being there. But no, only the “winners” get to feel joy. This is a very masculine invention. If the feminine were included, everyone would be honored for their efforts. One trophy might be bigger than the other, but no one would be shamed.

We are trained to compete, when we ought to be encouraged to express. Our own unique talents have a place in the world and success has nothing to do with besting others. Thinking that competition encourages good work is a false belief. There is an element in us that longs to be seen and known for who we really are. That does not require anything but our willingness to reveal our authentic self. We do not have to make someone else “less than” to be seen. The most successful people are those who gave no attention to what anyone else was doing. As Emerson said “do your thing and I shall know you.” We each have a part to play.

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes

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

Watch our tv show on LCCchannel98 on Saturday at 11:30 or on You Tube

www.californiafreepress.net for informed views on everything

 

Hepatitis A Forced City Leaders to Act, But Big Homeless Issues Persist

From Voice of San Diego

Workers power-wash a sidewalk near the Midway area. / Photo by Adriana Heldiz

San Diego’s reputation as a nice tourist destination was tarnished this year when an historic hepatitis A outbreak made international news.

The city’s homelessness crisis fueled the spread of the disease, and while city and county leaders had been holding meetings, writing memos and making plans to house the growing number of people sleeping on our streets, little was being done until San Diego’s hep A problem made its way into headlines.

In her latest story, Lisa Halverstadt revisits how hep A forced city officials to set aside their usual bureaucratic processes and try to get people off the streets.

New shelter tents have gone up, but it’s unclear what will happen next for the folks who move into them — or for the hundreds of others who chose not to.

A handful of potential ballot measures to pay for permanent housing and homeless services may make their way onto the 2018 ballot. There’s also a new regional strategy to tackle homelessness, but leaders will need to maintain momentum now that the hep A crisis is calming and the pressure subsides.

“The question is whether San Diego leaders and perhaps voters will continue to demand results and make the tough decisions they’ve resisted for years,” Halverstadt writes.

Off the Top of My Head

Were Slaves Better Off Than Today's Homeless?

by John Lawrence

Slaves were considered property, and, therefore, an investment. Slaveowners had to properly care for their investment or else it could deteriorate in value, and they didn't want that. It's for the same reason that you take care of your car or your house. You don't want your investments to deteriorate. So the slaveowner had to see to it that his slaves had enough to eat, a roof over their heads and medical attention if they needed it. Education wasn't a priority at least for those slaves working in the fields. It didn't take too much education to learn how to pick cotton.

Slaves working in the house, on the other hand, might have had to learn to read if they needed to get a recipe out of a cookbook or read a story to the slaveowner's children. The whole purpose of owning slaves is so that they could do some productive work. In return they were properly cared for ... up to a point.

Homeless on the other hand do not have to do any productive work so nobody has an interest in them as an investment. Society doesn't really have any use for them whatsoever. They are not productive in any sense unless you count scavaging for cans and bottles which are then recycled for a few dollars. Since society doesn't have any use for homeless people, they are left to deteriorate in a way that a slaveowner would never let his investment in slaves deteriorate. The slave owner did not take care of his slaves out of the goodness of his heart. He took care of them because they were his property.

So who is better off? A slave that is taken care of to a minimal extent but has to work or a homeless person who isn't taken care of at all and doesn't have to work. People decry slavery because slaves had to work, but work gives life meaning even under slave conditions while homeless languish not even having any meaningful work. Slaves were not equivalent to prisoners of war who were forced to work till they dropped. Slaves were kept in good condition so that they could be more productive. Maybe some who performed well were even rewarded as an additional incentive. Work is ennobling; sloth is not. Homelessness amounts to enforced sloth.

In today's world slavery has been outlawed. However, debt slavery has not. People can be forced to work just in order to pay off debts. The average student loan debtor will be working the rest of their lives just to be able to pay off their student loan debts. Just think ...  from chattel slavery to debt slavery in three generations, maybe four! Those holding student loan debt are mostly poor black people whose parents could not afford to send them to college like white parents can. Now through the magic of the marketplace they are in the position of being the first in their families to graduate from collage and assume a massive amount of debt. And if they miss a payment or default, huge penalties await them so that that debt grows, not diminishes, over a lifetime.

Those fortunate enough to receive social security in their later years will find that it will be taken away from them to pay on their student loan debt. Nobody will take care of them. Actually slaves were better off.

Student Debt Slavery: Bankrolling Financiers on the Backs of the Young

Posted on December 26, 2017 by Ellen Brown

Higher education has been financialized, transformed from a public service into a lucrative cash cow for private investors.

The advantages of slavery by debt over “chattel” slavery – ownership of humans as a property right – were set out in an infamous document called the Hazard Circular, reportedly circulated by British banking interests among their American banking counterparts during the American Civil War. It read in part:

Slavery is likely to be abolished by the war power and chattel slavery destroyed. This, I and my European friends are glad of, for slavery is but the owning of labor and carries with it the care of the laborers, while the European plan, led by England, is that capital shall control labor by controlling wages.

Slaves had to be housed, fed and cared for. “Free” men housed and fed themselves. For the more dangerous jobs, such as mining, Irish immigrants were used rather than black slaves, because the Irish were expendable. Free men could be kept enslaved by debt, by paying them wages that were insufficient to meet their costs of living. On how to control wages, the Hazard Circular went on:

This can be done by controlling the money. The great debt that capitalists will see to it is made out of the war, must be used as a means to control the volume of money. . . . It will not do to allow the greenback, as it is called, to circulate as money any length of time, as we cannot control that.

The government, too, had to be enslaved by debt. It could not be allowed to simply issue the money it needed to meet its budget, as Lincoln’s government did with its greenbacks (government-issued US Notes). The greenback program was terminated after the war, forcing the government to borrow from banks – banks that created the money themselves, just as the government had been doing. Only about 10% of the “banknotes” then issued by banks were actually backed by gold. The rest were effectively counterfeit. The difference between government-created and bank-created money was that the government issued it and spent it on the federal budget, creating demand and stimulating the economy. Banks issued money and lent it, at interest. More had to be paid back than was lent, keeping the supply of money tight and keeping both workers and the government in debt.

 

Has Christianity Lost Its Revolutionary Quality?

by Dr. Carol Carnes

In the early part of the 20^th century there lived a woman named Dorothee Soelle; raised in Nazi Germany, she later became a professor of theology and wrote many books, but is best known for her radical views on religion and Christianity in particular. Here are three quotes from her.

• “the third world is a permanent Auschwitz.”
• “every theological statement must be a political statement as well.”
• “God has no hands except from our hands.”

She called fundamentalists  Christo-fascists

She thought Christianity had lost its revolutionary quality which Jesus embodied. He was a revolutionary but, in her view, his life and teachings have been so distorted that Christianity is more about idolatry than a teaching to follow.

Jesus was the great teacher of love and forgiveness. Before him, the rule of the day was “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

We can see in our world that his teachings have proven too difficult for so many. It is easier to worship him than to do as he did. But not for everyone. There are millions of people doing loving things who are not Christians, but who follow the revolutionary idea that love is the power that makes all things new. New Thought is the revolution carried into the 21^st century.

Stay tuned in,

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

Watch my tv show on You Tube or locally Channel 98

Check out www.californiafreepress.net

Off the Top of My Head

The US Created ISIS, Then Armed Them

by John Lawrence

There is no end to American ingenuity when it comes to creating enemies. The US invasion of Iraq under George W Bush created the space and the vacuum for ISIS to form. But wait a minute. What would they do for weapons? No problem. The US will provide them. Barack Obama wanted to get rid of Assad in Syria so badly that he invited ISIS to come in and overthrow him. By purchasing “large numbers” of European arms and ammunition and then diverting them to nonstate actors in Syria without notifying the sellers, the U.S. reportedly “violated the terms of sale and export agreed between weapon exporters...and recipients."

The Syrian army discovered warehouses filled with US weapons left behind by ISIS as they retreated. The US didn't know how to extricate itself after Obama drew a "red line in the sand" and dared Assad to cross over it. Obama's stupidity rivaled even that of George W Bush who went to war with Iraq based on a lie. The various branches of government including the CIA totally supported Bush in that decision. Then along comes Obama and Hillary who wanted to prove their hawkish mettle by removing dictators from Egypt, Syria and Libya. The sole accomplishment of Obama's soaring rhetoric was to further mire the US in the Middle East and lead to the destruction of young lives and dreams of people who wanted nothing more than to live like their perception of European and American lives.

"The strategy that we are using now -- airstrikes, (U.S.) Special Forces and working with local forces who are fighting to regain control of their own country -- that is how we'll achieve a more sustainable victory," Obama said in a 2015 speech . "And it won't require us sending a new generation of Americans overseas to fight and die for another decade on foreign soil." Obama and Hillary had staked their reputations on getting rid of Assad. It was sort of a prerequisite for Hillary's 2016 Presidential campaign. They were in the business of spreading freedom and democracy in the Middle East. Well, at least, she came, saw and conquered Gaddafi.

However, the Middle East didn't want their damn freedom and democracy, especially when it was being imposed on them by America. They couldn't not thank us enough. The US should have just stayed out of their business. But that's not what meddlesome US Presidents and Secretarys of State do. They have to prove they are tough, and besides what else are you going to do with trillions of dollars of US armaments and war making materials? Let it rust? No, American Presidents have to get some use out of it.

Fancying themselves to be the world's policeman and a beacon of freedom and democracy, the US goes to war to bring about peace. A good war will hallow any cause, Nietzsche said, and the cause is freedom and democracy. We Americans think we know better how Middle Easterners should live, under what conditions they should live and who their benefactors shall be ...(us). Bush and Obama thought that they would thank us some day for our bravery in getting involved in their affairs. NOT.

Trump Told His Wealthy Mar-a-Lago Pals 'You All Just Got a Lot Richer' Thanks to GOP Tax Plan: Report

Published on

Sunday, December 24, 2017

by

Common Dreams

 

 

"Trump said his tax bill was terrible for his rich friends. Now he's bragging about giving them a big tax cut."

 

by

Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

 40 Comments

President Donald Trump speaks about tax reform during a bicameral meeting on December 13, 2017 at the White House in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Chris Kleponis - Pool/Getty Images)

In what was described as a rare moment of honesty, President Donald Trump reportedly told his wealthy friends dining at Mar-a-Lago Friday night that "you all just got a lot richer."

"At least Trump is finally telling the truth about his tax bill." 
—Sen. Bernie Sanders

The comments—first reported by CBS News on Sunday—came just hours after Trump signed the $1.5 trillion Republican tax bill into law.

According to two of Trump's friends who described the Friday-night event to CBS, the president "directed those comments to friends dining nearby at the exclusive club." Given that the Mar-a-Lago initiation cost is $200,000 and annual dues are $14,000, it's safe to assume that those "friends" are "some of the most affluent members of society."

As Common Dreams has reported, Trump has been increasingly open about the central objectives of the GOP tax bill since it passed both houses of Congress. On Friday, Trump bragged that "corporations are literally going wild" about the legislation, comments that came a few days after Trump described the bill's corporate rate cut as "probably the most important factor."

Polls have consistently found that Americans did not buy the GOP's attempt to present their tax bill as a boon for the middle class. A CBS News poll published earlier this month found that 76 percent of Americans believe the Republican tax bill will benefit large corporations, while only 31 percent said they believe it will help the middle class.

Independent analyses have shown this view of the bill to be correct. According tothe nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, 80 percent of the bill's benefits will go to the top one percent by 2027, while millions of middle class Americans will see their taxes rise.

On social media, critics of the president noted that—at least in private—"Trump is finally telling the truth about his tax bill."

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One Year Ends. Another Begins

Dear friends,

     We have come to that place in time that ends one year and begins another. The continuation of what has been up until now is a choice. We can set something new in motion if we choose to think in a new way.   That will be impossible if we carry into tomorrow what we resisted yesterday. It is time for a deep cleansing of the mind and heart.

     This last week of 2017 is ripe with meaning if we take advantage of it. Instead of thinking of something ending, let’s consider this a launch week. We are setting a new consciousness in motion and it will have its effects in time and space. Resolutions are meaningless unless they are intentions. So let’s establish some, such as:

I intend to realize my true potential this year

I intend to spread the word of New Thought in greater ways than ever before

I intend to prosper mightily and to share my good joyfully

I intend to feel and express real love

I intend to revitalize my health with wise choices

     Spend a little time this week setting some intentions. Write them out and place them where you can see them.  It is all about keeping in mind what we want to have in our life.

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes

www.carolcarnes.com or www.mvcsl.org

Our tv show is on You Tube “living Consciously with Carol Carnes”

Check out www.californiafreepress.net

$180 Billion Investment in Plastic Factories Feeds Global Packaging Binge

From the Guardian:

Colossal funding in manufacturing plants by fossil fuel companies will increase plastic production by 40%, risking permanent pollution of the earth

 One million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute, with most ending up in landfill or in the sea. Photograph: Zakir Chowdhury/Barcroft Images

Matthew Taylor

Tue 26 Dec ‘17 02.00 ESTLast modified on Tue 26 Dec ‘17 04.24 EST

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The global plastic binge which is already causing widespread damage to oceans, habitats and food chains, is set to increase dramatically over the next 10 years after multibillion dollar investments in a new generation of plastics plants in the US.

Fossil fuel companies are among those who have ploughed more than $180bn since 2010 into new “cracking” facilities that will produce the raw material for everyday plastics from packaging to bottles, trays and cartons.

The new facilities – being built by corporations like Exxon Mobile Chemical and Shell Chemical – will help fuel a 40% rise in plastic production in the next decade, according to experts, exacerbating the plastic pollution crisis that scientist warn already risks “near permanent pollution of the earth.”

Coastal communities dumping 8m tonnes of plastic in oceans every year

 

 

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“We could be locking in decades of expanded plastics production at precisely the time the world is realising we should use far less of it,” said Carroll Muffett, president of the US Center for International Environmental Law, which has analysed the plastic industry.

“Around 99% of the feedstock for plastics is fossil fuels, so we are looking at the same companies, like Exxon and Shell, that have helped create the climate crisis. There is a deep and pervasive relationship between oil and gas companies and plastics.”

Greenpeace UK’s senior oceans campaigner Louise Edge said any increase in the amount of plastic ending up in the oceans would have a disastrous impact.

“We are already producing more disposable plastic than we can deal with, more in the last decade than in the entire twentieth century, and millions of tonnes of it are ending up in our oceans.”

The huge investment in plastic production has been driven by the shale gas boom in the US. This has resulted in one of the raw materials used to produce plastic resin – natural gas liquids – dropping dramatically in price.

The American Chemistry Council says that since 2010 this has led to $186bn dollars being invested in 318 new projects. Almost half of them are already under construction or have been completed. The rest are at the planning stage.

“I can summarise [the boom in plastics facilities] in two words,” Kevin Swift, chief economist at the ACC, told the Guardian. “Shale gas.”

He added: “There has been a revolution in the US with the shale gas technologies, with the fracking, the horizontal drilling. The cost of our raw material base has gone down by roughly two thirds.”

The findings come amid growing concern about the scale of plastics pollution around the world. Earlier this year scientists warned that it risked near permanent contamination of the planet and at a UN environment conference in Kenya this month the scale of plastic in the sea was described as an “ocean armageddon”.

Continue reading ...

Off the Top of My Head

No More Homeless Menus at McDonald's

by John Lawrence

McDonald's use to have a Dollar menu where you could get several items for a dollar or two. No more. The cheapest sandwich you can get now will cost more than $5.00. They've upgraded their menus so that now they're electronic and change among rotating pictures and information. I guess there were too many homeless people hanging around and they wanted to get rid of them by uping their prices and going upscale.

Somebody posted on reddit:

I remember when McChickens & McDoubles were in the $1.30 ish-$1.60+ range, price slowly increasing as time goes on. I went tonite and now they are priced $1.99 each or $2 basically, WTF. why the big price jump? This is in Southern California. It has to deal with the rising minimum wage that goes up every new year? For the new year SoCal is at $10.50 minimum wage in my region. In a few years, some states will have it up to $15 minimum wage gradually as time goes on.

Also he told me they have a un-advertised deal 2 McDoubles for $2.50. I took that instead. How much higher are prices going? geez. We lost the dollar menu. Within no time, sounds like we'll lose the value menu too?

The Dollar menus was always positioned as a loss leader. It wasn't meant for somebody who never ordered off the regular menu, but it was great for the homeless. You couldn't get cheaper food. Not that it was that nutritious, but it filled the belly. $5.00 for a Sausage McMuffin is just a little too much for the homeless budget. Where are they going to get cheap food now?

Huffington Post reported:

McDonald’s popular $1 McDouble cheeseburger, which has lured customers to the Golden Arches since 2008, is getting hard to sustain as rising beef prices threaten the company’s profit margin.

The world’s biggest restaurant chain launched a competing $1 Grilled Onion Cheddar Burger in December. It also made the new sandwich - with one beef patty rather than the McDouble’s two - a star of current television commercials, a status it shares with the McDouble.

The dilemma for McDonald’s Corp restaurant operators is that the McDouble has the highest ingredient costs on the Dollar Menu, making it a bad financial proposition unless customers add high-margin sides such as french fries or soda.

“If the McDouble is all the customer buys, you lose money,” said Richard Adams, a former franchisee who now advises the chain’s restaurant operators. “Depending on what happens to beef prices, McDonald’s management should be open to taking the McDouble off the Dollar Menu.”

The decision would be a significant one. McDonald’s gets 10 to 15 percent of its sales from the Dollar Menu and experts say the McDouble is one of the most popular items on it.

I guess McDonald's wants to appeal to a more upscale clientele now. There were probably too many shopping carts parked outside McDonald's, and they had to clean the bathrooms more often. Too much loitering.Strike another blow to living on the street.

They sure were busy Christmas day. Many people were eating their Christmas dinner at McDonald's. They're even offering lattes now. A small McCafe goes for $2.00. You can't beat that. So they are competing with Starbucks? WTF!

Off the Top of My Head

Peace on Earth. Good Will Towards Men, Women, Children and Animals

From Matthew 25:

And He will set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on His right hand, ‘Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in; I was naked and you clothed Me; I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me.’

 “Then the righteous will answer Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You drink? When did we see You a stranger and take You in, or naked and clothe You? Or when did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?’ And the King will answer and say to them, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.’

by John Lawrence

Let's work towards a world where everyone is well fed, well housed and well cared for, a world where the US national budget goes for universal health care, public education from pre-school to graduate school, a world where the $1,000,000,000,000 dollar defense (really offense) budget is cut by a factor of 1,000,000 and the money spent to promote peace, a world where there are no enemies, only diplomacy, a world where the military is replaced by the Peace Corps, a world where taking care of the environment and Mother Earth has the highest priority and a world where the production of bombs, nuclear weapons, warplanes and warships has the lowest priority.

Are you with me?

Sanders Slams Trump for 'Bragging' About Millions of Americans Losing Healthcare

Published on Sunday, December 24, 2017 by Common Dreams

The Vermont senator was referring to a provision in GOP tax bill that repeals ACA individual mandate, potentially throwing 13 million Americans off their health insurance

by Common Dreams staff

 

36 Comments

"Instead of bragging about more Americans without health insurance, we should join every other major country on Earth, guarantee healthcare for all people, and end the absurdity of paying twice as much per capita for healthcare, as every other major nation," Sanders said. (Photo: CNN/Screengrab)

In an interview on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) slammed President Donald Trump for "bragging" about a provision in the GOP tax bill that could throw 13 million Americans off their health insurance and argued that the U.S. should instead be working toward guaranteeing healthcare to all Americans as a right.

"Instead of bragging about more Americans without health insurance, we should join every other major country on Earth, guarantee healthcare for all people, and end the absurdity of paying twice as much per capita for healthcare as every other major nation," the Vermont senator said.

Sanders was reacting Trump's recent comments on the GOP tax bill's repeal of the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate. Trump claimed that the provision "essentially" repeals Obamacare, and insisted that he "will come up with something better."

The Republican Party's previous healthcare push, Sanders was quick to note, resulted in a bill that would have thrown more than 20 million Americans off their health insurance.

Sanders' remarks came in a wide-ranging interview in which he also denounced Trump for lying about who benefits from his tax plan and said Republicans should be "very" worried about their 2018 electoral prospects, given the deep unpopularity of their tax legislation.

"What we're seeing in Alabama, what we're seeing in Virginia, New Jersey and in states all across this country, are large voter turnouts, are people standing up and fighting back and demanding that we have a government that represents all of us, not just the one percent."

The Vermont senator also denounced Congress's lack of action to protect dreamers, calling it a "moral outrage."

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Off the Top of My Head

Security Robots are Being Used to Ward off San Francisco’s Homeless Population

by John Lawrence

The San Francisco SPCA rolled out the use of a robot unit dubbed K9 from security startup Knightscope in order to chase away homeless people and deter them from setting up camp outside their facilities. The robot is a lot cheaper to operate than hiring a full time security guard who costs $16. an hour. However, the robot has had its problems too. It has been vandalized several times. One time BBQ sauce was spread over its sensors Another time the 400 pound robot was toppled.

Techcrunch reports:

But putting permits and public use of sidewalks aside, it seems the robot could do more than just discourage homeless camps. It could keep an eye on the surrounding area and report crimes, yes, but it could also possibly be used to alert police and social workers to areas where homelessness seems to have increased or look for anyone who may be facing violence or a psychotic episode and in need of intervention.

The Knightscope bots are equipped with four cameras able to read more than 300 license plates per minute. They can move about and keep tabs on an area, noting anyone on a list of those who shouldn’t be there.

Already the S.F. SPCA said it has experienced a drop in crime when using the bot cop. The same might be said if it had increased the use of human security guards but humans, as mentioned above, cost more. They also can’t monitor 24/7 or immediately upload what they see to the cloud.

Further, robots aren’t going away. While it isn’t clear what solution San Francisco’s city council will come up with to handle the increase of these types of bots on our sidewalks in the future, it’s inevitable we’re going to see more of them.

It’s an age-old human vs. machine argument. But machines usually win.

Of course the city could take measures to deal with the homeless population in a compassionate manner, but that would be against the tenets of capitalism which say that individuals are solely responsible for their living situations. Do I see a contradiction arising? On the one hand America is the land of the free and people can't be imprisoned just for being poor who have not committed a crime. On the other hand the growing homeless population is interfering with the rest of the population which just wants to get on with their daily business. In a city like San Diego which has been dubbed "America's Finest City" it's disconcerting for tourists with Disneyland fantasies dancing in their heads to see a huge number of tents and tarps and people pushing homeless carts around. Then diseases like Hep A caused by the lack of sanitation are spreading to the locals so a public health epidemic is happening.

America is at a crossroads. It can't imprison them and it can't tolerate them. Will robot K9 patrols solve the homeless problem? I don't think so.

How to Restore Our Relationship to Earth

Published on Friday, December 22, 2017 by YES! Magazine

We must reduce our burden on Earth’s regenerative systems by approximately 40 percent.

by David Korten

  

0 Comments

According to the Ecological Footprint Network, humans currently consume at a rate 1.7 times what Earth’s generative capacity can sustain—and the gap is growing. (Photo by Lee Scott on Unsplash.)

To have a viable human future on this overstressed planet, it is essential that we build a solidarity economy that seeks material sufficiency and spiritual abundance for all in balance with a living Earth. We must join in common cause to build local relationships of caring and equitable sharing across the lines of race, religion, and class. Strong and healthy local relationships, however, are only one element of the larger economic transformation required to rebalance our relationship to Earth and achieve a radical redistribution of access to and control of the essentials of living.

Three key statistics reveal the current grim reality:

1. According to the Ecological Footprint Network, we humans currently consume at a rate 1.7 times what Earth’s generative capacity can sustain—and the gap is growing. Consumption at a rate above one further depletes Earth’s capacity to support life.

2. According to Oxfam International, the financial assets of the world’s eight richest individuals now exceed those of the poorest half of humanity, 3.8 billion people. These eight people have ever-growing power to engage in obscene displays of self-indulgent consumption, dictate political outcomes that favor their further enrichment, undermine the legitimacy and credibility of governing institutions, and deprive billions of respect and essential means of living.

3. Our current population of 7.5 billion people is expected to stabilize at 11.2 billion in 2100—a 50 percent increase. All will need food, water, shelter, energy, and other essentials, further intensifying competition for Earth’s dwindling resources and condemning additional billions to lives of desperation.

A Respite From the World of Form

Dear friends,

     Actors on Broadway often comment on “good or bad” audiences.  Sometimes they refer to them as a “hard sell” or, if positive, as “right there with us.”  But the audience is a temporary configuration.  When the show is over the audience disappears as an entity.  What is it the actors felt?  It must have been a vibration in the room, made up of the collective feeling of the individuals.  Not that everyone in the room was negative in the case of the “bad” audience; but that the overriding energy won out.  Perhaps the news that day was difficult; the stock market plummeted, or the weather turned suddenly into bad road conditions.  There was enough resistance to life that it resulted in resistance to the moment.

     Sometimes the actors can win over an audience.  They will charm them out of their negativity.  For the time they are in the theater, they forget all about the outer world.  That is one of the reasons for churches and temples.  They were meant to be a respite from the world of form and experience.  The vibration of previous chanting, prayer and worship is palpable in some of these sanctuaries.  When one walks in, an immediate shift takes place and we feel “at home.” 

     At least that was the intention.  Sometimes the opposite happens.  There are plenty of negative emotions about church to create a resistance to being there.  What we have discovered in the West, is the ancient technique of entering the inner sanctuary of our own Being.  There we are the only one in the audience, so to speak.  We have immediate access to the whole scene; the past, the present and the future.  It is in the present that we recover from the world and its insistence on strife and struggle.  We reclaim our wholeness; our self-identity rises to meet any challenge.  We step back into the fray ready to be the actor in our own unfolding drama, or romantic comedy, or thriller, however we choose to name it. Equally observer and participant, we are our own best audience.

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes 

www.carolcarnes.com or www.mvcsl.org  

We are on tv weekly on Las Cruces Cable Channel 98 on Saturdays at 11:30 am and 1:00 pm  

Not local?  See our show on You Tube  “Living Consciously with Carol Carnes”

Check out www.californiafreepress.net

Off the Top of My Head

Einstein's Thoughts on Male Aggression

by John Lawrence

From the book, Einstein, His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson:

In November, Einstein published a three-page essay titled "My Opinion of the [First World] War" that skirted the border of what was permissible, even for a great scientist, to say in Germany. He speculated that there existed "a biologically determined feature of the male character" that was one of the causes of wars. When the article was published by the Goethe League that month, a few passages were deleted for safety's sake, including an attack on patriotism as potentially containing ""the moral requisites for bestial hatred and mass murder." 

The idea that war had a biological basis in male aggression was a topic Einstein also explored in a letter to his friend in Zurich, Heinrich Zangger. "What drives people to kill and maim each other so savagely?" Einstein asked. "I think it is the sexual character of the male that leads to such wild explosions."

The only method of containing such aggression, he argued, was a world organization that had the power to police member nations. It was a theme he would pick up again eighteen years later, in the final throes of his pure pacifism, when he engaged in a public exchange of letters with Sigmund Freud on both male psychology and the need for world government.

Also see The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich.

World Repudiates US Over Jerusalem Despite Haley's Pre-Vote Bullying and 'Temper Tantrum' on UN Stage

Published on Thursday, December 21, 2017 by Common Dreams

Despite U.S. threats, the U.N. voted 128-9 to declare Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israeli capital "null and void"

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

102 Comments

Nikki Haley, United States Ambassador to the United Nations, speaks on the floor of the General Assembly on December 21, 2017 in New York City. (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

In a speech one critic likened to "a bully throwing a temper tantrum on the world stage," U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley on Thursday slammed U.N. member states for refusing to line up in support of President Donald Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and threatened to withdraw funding if America continues to be "disrespected."

"The United States will remember this day in which it was singled out for attack in the General Assembly for the very act of exercising our right as a sovereign nation," Haley declared in a speech at U.N. headquarters in New York. "When a nation is singled out for attack in this organization that nation is disrespected. What's more, that nation is asked to pay for the privilege of being disrespected. In the case of the U.S. we are asked to pay more than anyone else for that dubious privilege."

Despite Haley's threats—and her complaint that the U.S. isn't seeing sufficient return on its "investment"—the U.N. General Assembly voted 128-9 to declare Trump's Jerusalem move "null and void." Guatemala, Togo, Honduras, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, and Palau voted with the U.S and Israel against the resolution. Canada was among the 35 nations that abstentions.

The General Assembly's overwhelming rebuke of the Trump administration came just a day after Haley warned in a Facebook post that "yes, the U.S. will be taking names" during the vote.

128 countries (out of 172) cast UN vote demanding US withdraw recognition of Jerusalem

If @NikkiHaley is taking names, that’s a lot of ‘em.

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) December 21, 2017

 

In a statement following Thursday's vote, Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, applauded the 128 nations that "stood up to U.S. pressure, which could not obscure the urgency of speaking out against the recklessness and injustice of declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel."

Nikki Haley misrepresenting what the people of the US want in a UN speech that sounds like it was written by Tony Soprano. JVP statement to follow soon. pic.twitter.com/AO8E5EGRDO

— JewishVoiceForPeace (@jvplive) December 21, 2017

"Despite threats from the Trump administration, the U.N. General Assembly vote today showed once again that the U.S. and Israel are increasingly isolated from the global consensus regarding Israel’s appalling disregard for Palestinian rights," Vilkomerson concluded.

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Are Humans Entitled to Destroy the Planet?

Dear friends,

     If the entire history of planet earth were condensed into one year, humans would have arrived on December 31 at 11 p.m. We are newbies. That ought to make us realize the animals are far more adapted to life here than we are.   They must be looking at us wondering who these intruders are and why don’t they calm down and enjoy the glorious paradise this is?

     Why, indeed? The problems we have allowed to emerge are the results of a misplaced use of the natural urge to create, an arrogant attitude based on a hidden inferiority complex and the ridiculous religious beliefs that caused it all. We have been living under the rules of crime and punishment instead of love and benefits that could have been our guiding principle if we had not invented that bad-ass man in the sky.  

     Humans have had such a low self-esteem that we have been abusing ourselves for eons. Tearing up the atmosphere, decimating the land, polluting the oceans. We act like a bunch of unruly teenagers who throw a party and trash the house while their parents are away. We act as if we own this planet and therefore can do whatever we choose to it. That is the entitlement of those who lack an authentic sense of self-worth.

     God is real but not what we thought. It is in us, giving us our very breath, It is the intelligence of nature, the immensity of the universe. God is the livingness in everything, the revealing of its pure intelligence. God is the best of us, the rest of us, the not yet expressed of us. January 1 will soon be here. Wouldn’t it be grand if we all woke up to our real power and used it with reverence and deep gratitude.    

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes

www.carolcarnes.com and www.mvcsl.org

Buy my book “The Way In” on lulu.com or Amazon

Watch our tv show on LCC Channel 98 or You Tube

THE BIG PICTURE OF HOW WE GOT INTO THIS MESS (OF TRUMP) AND HOW WE GET OUT OF IT

Thursday, December 21, 2017

by Robert Reich

There’s too much yelling these days, so we made this a silent video. (The only casualty was my arm, which ached for days afterward.) Hope you find it helpful. Best wishes for a 2018 that’s better for America than 2017 was. 

Off the Top of My Head

The Republican Leadership Has Gotten Trump's Number

by John Lawrence

They can't control Trump's tweeting, but they can control everything else because they hold the purse strings. They control the money. They got their tax breaks for the rich which of course Trump was in favor of also all the while trying to make a case that this was really "tax reform" that would help the middle class. Then they had a celebration in which Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan kowtowed to the Donald telling him how great he was. They wanted him to take full credit for something he had nothing to do with because ... well, they've got his number. Praise the hell out of him, let him spout off and blowhard all he wants. When it comes right down to it, they're in control. Trump is their useful idiot who will rubber stamp what they want, but take all the credit.

Other than that Trump is essentially reduced to issuing executive orders which was all Obama could do. So Trump now has the distinct pleasure of undoing all Obama's executive orders. The Generals will see to it that Trump doesn't do anything really stupid like start a nuclear war. They want to rev up old rivalries, but they don't want all out war. Just enough war to justify humongous defense budgets. That suits them perfectly. God forbid that peace should break out. There goes their money.

Trump's Russia connection will probably boil down to nothing more than a potential real estate deal or other business interests that would benefit the Trump empire. The business of America is business, and the business of the Trump administration is business that benefits the Trump administration. Much ado about nothing because the Mitch McConnells and Paul Ryans of the world have his back.

The best the Democrats can do is to keep harping on the fact that Trump and his fellow Republicans are not really in the business of helping the middle class. What they are doing and want to do more of is to help their own class - the rich. But Trump can spout off all he wants about creating jobs. The economy is not really in his hands, but he can put the best spin on economic events as they happen. Expect a big hole in the deficit similar to the one that occurred after the Reagan tax cuts. Then Reagan in a panic raised taxes. This bunch will probably revert to the "deficits don't matter" mantra. Well, they don't if the Fed can just print money.

Love Makes the World Go Round

Dear friends,

     Do what you love but do it with love. Love is the only variable in predicting results. The more love we put into our actions, the better we feel, the happier we are and, incidentally, we have helped make the world a more enjoyable place for others. The Love we are speaking of is not valentine romance love. It is the spiritual awareness of being one with that gives us the feeling of love. What is the Love feeling if not oneness? It is when we feel separate from Life in all its forms and possibilities that we are unhappy.

     Can we be in love with our work? In the sense that we love our SELF, it will show in how we do anything. Taken a step further, if we are in love with BEING, it kind of doesn’t matter what we are doing. However, it is more likely we will find a way to express our SELF that is perfect for our personality and talents. Love leads the way in everything that turns out well in our estimation.

     It is almost impossible to love others if we do not love our very BEING first. In a cosmic sense, others are part of us, or we could say part of our quantum tribe. Starting with who we are, the natural effect is felt at the quantum level by everyone who resonates at the same vibration. As Thaddeus Golas asked himself in a moment of illumination “well just who was it you thought needed to be loved?”

Stay tuned in,

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

Watch me on Las Cruces channel 98 or on You Tube

www.californiafreepress.net

Three Administrations, One Standard Playbook

From Truthdig:

by Maj. Danny Sjursen, December 19, 2017

President Trump has lunch with troops while visiting MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. (D. Myles Cullen / DoD)

 

I remember the day President Obama let me down.

It was December 1, 2009, and as soon as the young president took the podium at West Point and — calm and cool as ever — announced a new troop surge in Afghanistan, I knew. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind. In that instant, George W. Bush’s wars had become Barack Obama’s.

But where Bush had seemed, however foolishly, to believe his own rhetoric about America’s glorious military mission in the world, you always sensed that Obama’s heart just wasn’t in it. He’d been steamrolled by ambitious generals who pioneered generational warfare and hawkish cabinet members like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Bush-holdover Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Then again, what choice did he have, given the way he’d run his presidential campaign on the idea that Afghanistan was a Defense Robert Gates. Then again, what choice did he have, given the way he’d run his presidential campaign on the idea that Afghanistan was a Now he was stuck with that landlocked, inhospitable little war, come what may. As we all know (and as I had little doubt then), it didn’t work out. Not at all.

Like many other idealistic Americans, I’d bet big on Obama.  The madness and futility of my own 15 months in Iraq as a scout platoon leader — you know, one of those “warriors” you’re obligated to thank endlessly for his service — had forever soured me on nation-building crusades in faraway lands. And the young, inspiring senator from Illinois seemed to have some authentic anti-war chops. Unlike Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden, he was untarnished by the October 2002 Iraq War resolution vote that gave the Bush administration the right to shock and awe the hell out of Saddam Hussein. Looking back, I suppose I should have known better. Obama had only been a state senator with an essentially nonexistent record on foreign policy when he first criticized Operation Iraqi Freedom. Still, after so many years of Bush’s messianic adventures, anyone seemed preferable.

That was more than eight years ago and somehow the United States military is still slogging along in Iraq and Afghanistan. What’s more, Bush’s wars have only expanded in breadth, if not in depth, to Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and Niger, among other places. Yes, ISIS as a “caliphate” has been defeated. As a now-global franchise, however, anything but, and victory — whatever that might mean at this point — couldn’t be further off as our next president, Donald Trump, approaches his one year mark in office and he and “his” military only ratchet up those wars further.

10 Financial Resolutions for 2018

From Wallethub:

Roughly 45% of Americans make New Year’s Resolutions each January, and since money is our top stressor, it’s clear that many of them will be financial in nature. In recognition of that, WalletHub today announced its 10 Financial Resolutions for 2018 to help as many people as possible reach top financial fitness in the new year. This report comes on the heels of WalletHub’s 8 Financial Predictions for 2018, helping to provide a roadmap for financial improvement after the ball drops.

Below you can find a quick rundown of our resolutions, which are based in part on conversations with a panel of leading finance and consumer psychology experts.

1. Sign Up for Credit Monitoring
2. Pay Bills Right After Receiving Your Paycheck
3. Repay 20% of Your Credit Card Debt
4. Use Different Credit Cards for Everyday Purchases & Debt
5. Add One Month’s Pay to Your Emergency Fund
6. Improve Your Credit Score by 20 Points
7. Get an A in WalletLiteracy
8. Focus on Your Physical Health
9. Make a Realistic Budget & Stick to It
10. Look for a Better Job

For additional context and advice related to each resolution, plus a complete Q&A with our panel of experts, please visit:  https://wallethub.com/blog/financial-new-years-resolutions/9202/

Off the Top of My Head

Now That Republicans Have "Reformed" Taxes, They're Getting Ready to "Reform" Entitlements

by John Lawrence

Republicans are ecstatic about the fact that they have reformed the tax code giving huge tax breaks to the rich and very modest tax breaks to the middle class while running up the deficit by $1.6 trillion. But deficits don't matter do they as Dick Cheney once said. Yes they don't matter when it comes to war and reducing taxes on the rich. They do matter, however, when it comes to doing anything for the middle class and the poor. They do matter when the Democrats are in power and want to do anything constructive.

Deficits didn't matter either when it came to bailing out Wall Street after they totally made a mess of the economy in 2008. They were helped out by the Fed which took trillions of dollars of Wall Street's debts on its own balance sheet and then lowered the interest rates that Wall Street paid to zero while not doing a thing to lower the interest rates the general public paid on their mortgages or car payments. Wouldn't it be great if the Fed lowered rates to zero on mortgages, car payments or student loan debt? All of a sudden homeowners would see their payments cut in half. Most of mortgage payments are interest anyway.

But Wall Street makes its money off of consumer debt. If people paid cash for everything, it would put Wall Street out of business. The US economy runs on consumer debt and the war machine, of course. What if the Fed took consumer debt onto its balance sheet the way it took Wall Street's debt onto its balance sheet? You'd think that, since Wall Street can borrow money at zero interest, American consumers should be able to do that also. Or at least banks could afford to pay some interest on savings accounts. No, it doesn't work that way. When the interest rate goes up, then Wall Street will pay some interest on savings accounts because they need the money. When they can borrow at zero interest from the Fed, they don't need people's savings accounts so they pay no interest. Even though they pay no interest they sure do charge interest though. The spread is extremely profitable.

The Fed is flooding the economy with money with its quantitative easing policy. You'd think there would be a little to go around for infrastructure or for entitlement programs. But no, most of that money goes to already rich people who just use it to buy assets like stocks and real estate. This creates asset bubbles in those two markets so that housing prices are going out of sight for the average consumer. In the long run the Fed will have just forced the cost of housing to astronomical heights by giving free money to rich people. But that's how the American economy is set up. They print money for the rich, but they won't print money for the poor or take the debts of the poor onto the Fed's balance sheet.

'Government for Sale': In Dead of Night, Senate GOP Passes Tax Bill Only Their Donors Can Love

Published on Wednesday, December 20, 2017 by Common Dreams

"Plainly speaking: a vote for this bill is a vote to inflict harm on millions of hardworking families to please corporate campaign donors and the six thousand lobbyists who pushed for it."

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

6 Comments

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senate Finance Committee chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) arrive at the press conference after the senate vote of the tax reform bill on December 20, 2017 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

Following months of relentless lobbying, backroom scheming, self-dealing, and brazen lying, Senate Republicans finally rammed through their $1.5 trillion tax bill by a party-line vote of 51-48 in the dead of night Wednesday, all but clearing the legislation's path to President Donald Trump's desk.

"The bill that the Republicans jammed through the Senate tonight isn't tax reform. Let's call this out for what it is: Government for sale."
—Sen. Elizabeth Warren

While Republicans held fast to the long-debunked narrative that their bill is tailored toward middle class Americans and small businesses, progressives were quick to characterize the legislation as "highway robbery"—a "heist" carried out at the behest of the donor class and the largest corporations.

"The bill that the Republicans jammed through the Senate tonight isn't tax reform," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in a statement following the GOP's after-midnight vote. "Let's call this out for what it is: Government for sale."

Warren's characterization of the Republicans' 500-page bill—which was largely negotiated in secret and is deeply unpopular among the public—was echoed by a large coalition of advocacy groups that has worked for months to raise awareness and rally opposition to the GOP's legislative "monstrosity."

"Plainly speaking: a vote for this bill is a vote to inflict harm on millions of hardworking families to please corporate campaign donors and the six thousand lobbyists who pushed for it," Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, said in a statement following the Senate's vote. "It's a money grab by the richest one percent and the wealthiest corporations, period."

According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center (TPC), 80 percent of the bill's benefits will go to the top one percent by 2027. And while many Americans will see their taxes decline next year, the benefits will be paltry compared to those reaped by the wealthy. In an analysis published Monday, TPC found that in 2018, Americans earning less than $25,000 a year will see an average tax cut of $60, while those earning more than $733,000 will see a cut of $51,140.

To officially send their bill to Trump's desk, House Republicans have to vote once more Wednesday, as several provisions—and even the legislation's title—were deemed in violation of Senate rules.

Despite the narrow procedural process Republicans had to follow in order to pass their bill without Democratic support, the GOP tax bill has a scope that reaches far beyond tax policy.

In addition to tilting the American tax code even further toward the rich by slashing the corporate and top marginal rates, the Republican plan also opens Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling and repeals the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate—potentially throwing 13 million Americans off health insurance.

And Republicans have no plans of stopping there, warned Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in a speech following Wednesday's vote.

"They are coming back to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs desperately needed by the middle class," Sanders said, a message bolstered by the recent statements of numerous Republicans, including House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Trump himself.

BREAKING: Bernie Sanders Kills Tax Bill! Forces Revote https://t.co/LNvnowFu3b #WednesdayWisdom #HERO

— Unspokenbond (@unspokenbond) December 20, 2017

While the passage of the tax bill represents a temporary defeat for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have rallied against the plan over the last several months with phone calls, sit-ins, and mass demonstrations, advocacy groups vowed Wednesday to do everything they can to ensure that the GOP's victory is short-lived.

"Americans won't forget. They'll remember who swindled them to give tax breaks to billionaires and corporations that ship jobs offshore. They'll remember who is taking away healthcare from 13 million people while lowering taxes for Donald Trump and his heirs," Clemente of Americans for Tax Fairness concluded. "This measure and its long-term effects will take away from those who are most in need and most deserving and give to those who are the most comfortable and well-off. That's not the ‘best Christmas present of all.' It's a disgrace."

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Love Resides in Every One of Us

Dear friends,

     Acceptance of how things are right now is a deep realization of the possibility for change. It is only when we deny and resist what is currently manifesting, that we get mired in it.  For example, if we walk around like Mr. Magoo, oblivious to the world we are in, we become susceptible to its violence. We will “not be sufficiently aware of violence to avoid it.” (Thaddeus Golas) At the same time, if we do not deny its existence but accept it as a temporary level of mass consciousness, we are then available to access the polar opposite that is Love.

     This is a bit tricky. We do not become passive when we accept everything as it is, as some might fear. On the contrary, we so deeply believe in the opposite of what is now apparent, that we become activists. We promote the better idea, we practice the higher vibration, we attempt to draw it out in others, we insist that humans are better than their current behavior. How could anything change if we resist what is so now? That would be like nailing something down and expecting it to move.

     We are either in the field of possibility or we are in the density of form, as far as our focus is concerned. A bit of daily withdrawal from the density into the field of wholeness will help us to maintain a more relaxed view of our personal and collective experience. We will see through the appearance and judge it righteously, as the Masters have suggested we do. To be in the world but not of it, is not to deny it, but to be fully involved, all the while knowing there is more, there is better, there is immediate release, there is power, there is intelligence, there is wholeness, there is love and it all resides in every one of us.

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes

www.carolcarnes.com and www.mvcsl.org

Our tv show is on local channel 98 in Las Cruces on Satudays at 11:30 and 1:00 pm

www.californiafreepress.net

Off the Top of My Head

Why Didn't Positive Train Control Kick In?

by John Lawrence

The Amtrak train was going 80 mph in a 30 mph zone. It was engineer error (similar to pilot error for planes) that caused the crash. Positive Train Control (PTC) could have prevented the crash just as it could have prevented the crash in Philadelphia that killed eight. In both cases the train was going too fast around a curve. PTC had been mandated by Congress in 2008, but so far it has been little implemented due to cost. It was supposed to be fully implemented by 2015. If it had been, 3 more people would be alive today. It had been built into the stretch of track the train was traveling on but was not yet operational. So far only 24% of passenger tracks have PTC and 41% of locomotives. For freight systems the percentages are even less.

A few hours after the crash, Donald Trump cited it as a reason to support his infrastructure plan, tweeting: “The train accident that just occurred in DuPont, WA shows more than ever why our soon to be submitted infrastructure plan must be approved quickly. Seven trillion dollars spent in the Middle East while our roads, bridges, tunnels, railways (and more) crumble! Not for long!” I don't agree with much of what Trump says, but I couldn't agree more about the money wasted in the Middle East while American infrastructure crumbles. However, there is no money for infrastructure after Congress passed a tax bill running the government another $1.5 trillion in debt. So Trump at some point will probably just declare that, thanks to him, "America has the best infrastructure in the world." Yeah, right.

As long as America wastes a trillion dollars each year on the war machine, there will be no improvement in infrastructure, nor will there be any improvement in the living standards of the average American. The Republicans already have plans to strip money out of every social program they can get their hands on including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Let's hope they're voted out of power next year.

Calvin Coolidge famously said, "The business of America is business." Trump has carried this to a whole new level. As far as he's concerned the business of America is the enrichment of the US President. Everything else will follow or trickle down from that. The political class will get rich. Defense contractors will get rich. Wall Street will get rich. The only ones not getting rich are those Joe Six Pack types whose jobs will soon be replaced by robots.

As Votes Loom, Opponents Make Final Push to Defeat Deeply Unpopular #GOPTaxScam

Published on Tuesday, December 19, 2017 by Common Dreams

Despite Republicans' efforts to portray bill as beneficial to average Americans, more than two-thirds in recent poll say the tax plan is best for the wealthy

by Julia Conley, staff writer

 

1 Comments

Protesters risked arrest on Capitol Hill on Monday as they joined the final push by resistance groups to convince Republican legislators to vote against the Party's unpopular tax bill. (Photo: @NYJusticeLeague/Twitter)

Hours ahead of expected votes in the House and Senate on the Republican tax plan, a new poll released Tuesday by CNN shows that President Donald Trump's last hope at passing a major agenda item in 2017 will likely award him few points with voters. Sixty-six percent of those surveyed view the bill as mainly benefiting the wealthy.

Opposition to the bill—officially the "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act" but denounced as the "GOP Tax Scam" by critics—has gone up in the past month, with 55 percent saying they disapprove of the plan. Republicans including President Donald Trump have tried to push the narrative that the bill will lift middle class Americans, but it appears few voters are convinced—which makes sense given that nearly every independent analysis shows the benefits are wildly skewed to corporations and the rich.

As Congress headed for expected votes, constituents nationwide and advocacy groups kept up their momentum at protests directed at Republicans, several of whom are expected to receive their very own real estate tax breaks as a result of the legislation.

The House will vote on the #GOPTaxScam TODAY! This is the final chance to tell your Rep how this tax scam gives the rich & large corps massive tax cuts & makes tens of millions of working families pay the bill.

Call your Rep NOW and tell them to vote NO. 1-877-795-7862 pic.twitter.com/0TirVIL5c7

— For Tax Fairness (@4TaxFairness) December 19, 2017

Protests were planned at the offices of Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who announced Monday that she planned to support the bill, and on Wall Street, while People's Action urged supporters to continue calling their representatives to voice their opposition:

We have to make calls and tell every member of Congress that our lives are truly on the line. Our survival and that of our children are at risk.

We have to make sure they know that a vote for this tax plan is a vote against the people. There’s still time to stop this bill, but it’s not going to be easy. And that’s exactly why we need all hands on deck.

Contact your Senators and Representatives using the Capitol switchboard by dialing 202-224-3121 NOW.

Several analyses by tax policy groups have shown that the bill would offer short-term, relatively minor benefits to the majority of Americans, while disproportionately benefiting corporations and the wealthiest households with permanent tax cuts.

The Tax Policy Center's latest analysis shows that under the bill, "higher income households receive larger average tax cuts as a percentage of after-tax income" and while average tax bills would go down for all income groups in 2018, millions of lower- and middle-class working families would actually see their taxes go up within a decade.

Americans for Tax Fairness reached similar conclusions in their analysis last month, reporting that 53 percent of the bill's tax cuts go to corporations and the rich, and that those cuts are largely paid for by taking away healthcare from working families.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) spoke on a radio show Monday about "entitlement reform"—slashes to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security—in order to tackle the national debt, which is expected to soar by $1.5 trillion as a result of the tax bill.

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As We Flow Through Time

Dear friends,

     This is the time of the year when we look back and look forward with equal interest. What did we learn this year that will serve us in the new one? What will we leave behind in the “dead” past? What shines brightly in our mind as a vision for the future? Is looking forward more important than looking back? They each have their place, but the past must become an educational tool, nothing more. Regrets and resentments have no place in tomorrow.

     The Light of personal vision is the power that makes all things new. It is usually a picture of how we want to live, a feeling, an enthusiasm. Maintaining it is paramount in its becoming a physical reality, as real as it is in our mind. Each new day quickly becomes yesterday as we flow through time. Our goal is to keep the flame of cheerful expectation alive. It inspires and motivates us to reach out, to serve, to initiate new ways of being in the world.

     With the conscious appreciation of this now moment and the next, we become increasingly aware that there is no such thing as the past or the future. There is only a continuance of awareness.  Ah! That is the secret. It is our choice as to what we will keep alive in our personal awareness. That is a reliable predictor of experience. Let us make some decisions today about the now moments of 2018. How will I live? What will I love? What will I support and foster? Who belongs with me? Where do I choose to be? You will have your own questions and you will be the only one with the right answers.

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes

www.carolcarnes.com and www.mvcsl.com  donate via pay pal

See out tv show on You Tube, new ones weekly

www.californiafreepress.net

Off the Top of My Head

Google Needs to Ban All Terrorist Related Material

by John Lawrence

Did you know you can google "how to make a bomb" and get an instruction manual on how to do so? ISIS propaganda videos are available on YouTube. Why is the internet a convenient place to learn how to carry out a terrorist attack? This stuff has to go even if Google has to eat into some of its profits.

This is from the Guardian:

[British Prime Minister] Theresa May is to urge internet companies to take down extremist content being shared by terrorist groups within two hours, during a summit with the French president and the Italian prime minister.

May is meeting senior executives from Google, Facebook and Microsoft on the sidelines of the UN in New York on Wednesday alongside her French and Italian counterparts, Emmanuel Macron and Paul Gentiloni.

The meeting comes amid growing concerns that groups such as Islamic State are able to produce and distribute videos and online magazines too readily.

Home Office analysis shows that Isis shared 27,000 links to extremist content in the first five months of the 2017 and, once shared, the material remained available online for an average of 36 hours.

The government would like that reduced to two hours, and ultimately they are urging companies to develop technology to spot material early and prevent it being shared in the first place.

The prime minister will tell Wednesday’s event that Isis material is still available on the internet for “too long” after being posted. This can include links to videos glorifying terrorism and material encouraging converts to commit acts of the kind that were carried out in Westminster and Barcelona earlier this year, involving vehicles or knives.

May will say: “Terrorist groups are aware that links to their propaganda are being removed more quickly, and are placing a greater emphasis on disseminating content at speed in order to stay ahead.

“Industry needs to go further and faster in automating the detection and removal of terrorist content online, and developing technological solutions that prevent it being uploaded in the first place.”

The Big 3 Web corporations need to eliminate material glorifying gun violence and right wing terrorism as well. Nazi propaganda needs to be removed. They are not under any compunction as pertains to "free speech." Only the US government supposedly cannot limit free speech. A private corporation can do whatever it wants in that regard. It can limit free speech all it wants. For instance, you cannot distribute literature in a shopping mall. That is private property and the owners of the mall won't allow it. It is not a public town square.

In addition to removing links to terrorist material,  ISPs should ban terrorist websites in the first place. I would like to see them banning sites which glorify guns as well. They do not have to adhere to the Second Amendment. They are not the US government. Again guns can be banned on private property. The internet is private property. They can ban whatever they want. Why do they cater to terrorist material or gun related material? If they are moral and ethical actors, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and YouTube should do more to monitor the kind of material that they purvey and get rid of any and all offensive material. The internet should not be a place where anybody can advocate or purvey anything.

The Triumph of the Oligarchs

by Robert Reich

Sunday, December 17, 2017

The Republican tax plan to be voted on this week is likely to pass. “The American people have waited 31 long years to see our broken tax code overhauled,” the leaders of the Koch’s political network insisted in a letter to members of Congress, urging swift approval.

They added that the time had come to put “more money in the pockets of American families.”

Please. The Koch network doesn’t care a fig about the pockets of American families. It cares about the pockets of the Koch network. 

It has poured money into almost every state in an effort to convince Americans that the tax cut will be good for them. Yet most Americans don’t believe it. 

Polls shows only about a third of Americans favor the tax plan. The vast majority feel it’s heavily skewed to the rich and big businesses – which it is.  

In counties that Trump won but Obama carried in 2012, only 17 percent say they expect to pay less in taxes, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Another 25 percent say they expected their family would actually pay higher taxes.

Most Americans know that the tax plan is payback for major Republican donors. Gary Cohn, Trump’s lead economic advisor, even conceded in an interview that “the most excited group out there are big CEOs, about our tax plan.”

Republican Rep. Chris Collins admitted “my donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again.’” Senator Lindsey Graham warned that if Republicans failed to pass the tax plan, “the financial contributions will stop.”

By passing it, Republican donors will save billions – paying a lower top tax rate, doubling the amount their heirs can receive tax-free, and treating themselves as “pass-through” businesses able to deduct 20 percent of their income (effectively allowing Trump to cut his tax rate in half, if and when he pays taxes).

They’ll make billions more as their stock portfolios soar because corporate taxes are slashed.

The biggest winners by far will be American oligarchs such as the Koch brothers; Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor; Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino magnate; Woody Johnson, owner of the New York Jets football team and heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune; and Carl Icahn, the activist investor.

The oligarchs are the richest of the richest 1 percent. They’ve poured hundreds of millions into the GOP and Trump. Half of all contributions to the first phase of the 2016 election came from just 158 families, along with the companies they own or control.

The giant tax cut has been their core demand from the start. They also want to slash regulations, repeal the Affordable Care Act, and cut everything else government does except for defense – including Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.

In return, they have agreed to finance Trump and the GOP, and mount expensive public relations campaigns that magnify their lies.

Trump has fulfilled his end of the bargain. He’s blinded much of his white working-class base to the reality of what’s happening by means of his racist, xenophobic rants and policies. 

The American oligarchs couldn’t care less about what all this will cost America. 

Within their gated estates and private jets, they’re well insulated from the hatefulness and divisiveness, 

They don’t worry about whether Social Security or Medicare will be there for them in their retirement because they’ve put away huge fortunes.

Climate change doesn’t concern them because their estates are fully insured against hurricanes, floods, and wildfires.

They don’t care about public schools because their families don’t attend them. They don’t care about public transportation because they don’t use it. They don’t care about the poor because they don’t see them. 

They don’t worry about the rising budget deficit because they borrow directly from global capital markets. 

Truth to tell, they don’t even care that much about America because their personal and financial interests are global.

They are living in their own separate society, and they want Congress and the President to represent them, not the rest of us.

The Republican Party is their vehicle. Fox News is their voice. Trump is their champion. The new tax plan is their triumph.

But if polls showing most Americans against the tax cut are any guide, that triumph may be short lived. Americans are catching on. 

The recent electoral results in Virginia and Alabama offer further evidence. 

A tidal wave of public loathing is growing across the land – toward Trump, the GOP, and the oligarchs they serve; and to the deception, the wealth, and the power that underlies them.  

That wave could crash in the midterm elections of 2018. If so, the current triumph of the oligarchs will be the start of their undoing.

Redemption of a White Supremicist

Dear friends,

     There was an inspiring story on 60 minutes last evening. It was a clear depiction of what can happen when a person decides to change their belief system. It begins in the poorer section of a major US city. A young boy with immigrant parents was bullied and made fun of in school. His hurt turned into hopelessness and anger, making him ripe for a gang leader to recruit. This particular gang leader was a white supremacist.

     Drawn into a culture of power and purpose, it was easy for him to buy into their lies and rhetoric about people who were not white, anglo saxon, male. A natural leader, he became a recruiter himself. After years of violence he began to shift one day when he and his friends were severely beating a young black man. The victim caught his eye and they made a connection. This had never happened to him before and it deeply affected him. It was the first step into freedom from hate and anger.  He never used violence on another person again. It took some time before he extricated himself from that world, but he did it.

     He is now a well known “healer” of men who have become entangled in that underworld of violence and hate. He helps them come back to themselves, an inner place where the anger and hate never truly existed. They were created by others who seemed to be “family.” All of the men in the white supremacist movement that he knew had come from similar backgrounds of rejection, never fitting in, sometimes no father figure, poverty and a sense of powerlessness, or having been indoctrinated from early childhood by relatives. It is truly the definition of a vicious cycle.

     It was such an example of what our beliefs can do to us, even when they are not true!  It is all rooted in self-identity.   If we feel worthless, we will find a way to be worthier than someone or some people. This now mature man is showing that a reframing of one’s self worth is the key to unlocking the higher nature. It is still there.

Stay tuned in,

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

You can see my tv show on LCCchannel98 in Las Cruces or on You Tube

www.californiafreepress.net

Off the Top of My Head

McKesson Corporation: Supplying America With Heroin as a Pill

by John Lawrence

Ah yes, as long as heroin can be produced chemically and not gotten from a poppy in Afghanistan, it is perfectly legal and legitimate and profitable when sold by a duly established corporation like McKesson which makes $100 million a week in profits. The Washington Post and 60 Minutes have called out McKesson for selling pills to criminal syndicates and supplying small town pharmacies with supplies way out of proportion with the actual number of people who inhabit them. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headed by Trump appointee Scott Pruitt had hoped to slap a huge fine on McKesson and put one of its executives in jail for flagrantly violating its responsibility to check on where its opioid pills were going. Instead they just sold them to all comers fueling the opioid epidemic.

According to the Washington Post:

The investigators were ready to come down hard on the fifth-largest public corporation in America, according to a joint investigation by The Washington Post and “60 Minutes.”

“This is the best case we’ve ever had against a major distributor in the history of the Drug Enforcement Administration,” said [David] Schiller, who recently retired as assistant special agent in charge of DEA’s Denver field division after a 30-year career with the agency. “ I said, ‘How do we not go after the number one organization?’ ”

But it didn’t work out that way.

Instead, top attorneys at the DEA and the Justice Department struck a deal earlier this year with the corporation and its powerful lawyers, an agreement that was far more lenient than the field division wanted, according to interviews and internal government documents. Although the agents and investigators said they had plenty of evidence and wanted criminal charges, they were unable to convince the U.S. attorney in Denver that they had enough to bring a case.

What do you expect from an agency headed by Scott Pruitt? According to the New York Times:

The current administrator of the E.P.A., Scott Pruitt, built his political career by attacking clean-air and clean-water rules. Now in charge of the agency, he is tearing down those protections, dismantling the E.P.A., appointing or nominating industry insiders to oversee their former businesses and blocking scientific input.

So what else is new? Why did Schiller even think he could go after McKesson when the EPA was headed by Scott Pruitt who as Oklahoma's attorney general had repeatedly sued the EPA? In fact he sued the EPA 13 times. Obviously, Trump appointees are rabidly pro-business at the expense of the environment so why would the EPA even think it could go after McKesson's profits? Pruitt is a climate change denier; he doesn't believe in global warming. The Trump administration puts profits over everything else. They're against any regulations that protect people or the environment.

Trump appointees are determined to tear down the agencies they have been appointed to lead. There is no more egregious example of this than Scott Pruitt. Schiller thought he could b ring down McKesson, the fifth largest corporation in the US, but his legal team was intimidated by the lawyers at McKesson who had all graduated from Harvard and Yale. The EPA's lawyers who had graduated from places like Tom Dick University and Sonoma State were no match. So justice comes down to who has the best legal team? High power lawyers versus lawyers from Podunk State who were no match and they knew it?

So the EPA settled for a slap on the wrist - a $150 million fine - about a week and a half's profits for McKesson.

Scott Pruitt can live with that. Heroin in pill form can be distributed to as many people who want it by a legitimate and duly licensed corporation instead of by some criminal gang which distributes the real stuff.

A Guide to Why the Trump-Republican Tax Plan is a Disgrace (for When you Confront Your Republican Uncle Bob During the Holidays)

by Robert Reich

Saturday, December 16, 2017

Here are the 3 main Republican arguments in favor of the Republican tax plan, followed by the truth.

1. It will make American corporations competitive with foreign corporations, which are taxed at a lower rate.

Rubbish.

(1) American corporations now pay an effective rate (after taking deductions and tax credits) that’s just about the same as most foreign based corporations pay.

(2) Most of these other countries also impose a “Value Added Tax” on top of the corporate tax.

(3) When we cut our corporate rate from 35% to 20%, other nations will cut their corporate rates in order to be competitive with us – so we gain nothing anyway.

(4) Most big American corporations who benefit most from the Republican tax plan aren’t even “American.” Over 35 percent of their shareholders are foreign (which means that by cutting corporate taxes we’re giving a big tax cut to those foreign shareholders). 20 percent of their employees are foreign, while many Americans work for foreign-based corporations.

(5) The “competitiveness” of America depends on American workers, not on “American” corporations. But this tax plan will make it harder to finance public investments in education, health, and infrastructure, on which the future competitiveness of American workers depends.

(6) American corporations already have more money than they know what to do with. Their profits are at record levels. They’re using them to buy back their shares of stock, and raise executive pay. That’s what they’ll do with the additional $1 trillion they’ll receive in this tax cut.

***

2. With the tax cut, big corporations and the rich will invest and create more jobs.

Baloney.

(1) Job creation doesn’t trickle down. After Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush cut taxes on the top, few jobs and little growth resulted. America cut taxes on corporations in 2004 in an attempt to get them to bring their profits home from abroad, and what happened? They didn’t invest. They just bought up more shares of their own stock, and increased executive pay.

(2) Companies expand and create jobs when there’s more demand for their goods and services. That demand comes from customers who have the money to buy what companies sell. Those customers are primarily the middle class and poor, who spend far more of their incomes than the rich. But this tax bill mostly benefits the rich.

(3) At a time when the richest 1 percent already have 40 percent of all the wealth in the country, it’s immoral to give them even more – especially when financed partly by 13 million low-income Americans who will lose their health coverage as a result of this tax plan (according to the Congressional Budget Office), and by subsequent cuts in safety-net programs necessitated by increasing the deficit by $1.5 trillion.

***

3. It will give small businesses an incentive to invest and create more jobs.

Untrue.

(1) At least 85 percent of small businesses earn so little they already pay the lowest corporate tax rate, which this plan doesn’t change.

(2) In fact, because the tax plan bestows much larger rewards on big businesses, they’ll have more ability to use predatory tactics to squeeze small firms and force them out of business.

***

Don’t let your Uncle Bob be fooled: Republicans are voting for this because their wealthy patrons demand it. Their tax plan will weaken our economy for years – reducing demand, widening inequality, and increasing the national debt by at least $1.5 trillion over the next decade. 

Shame on the greedy Republican backers who have engineered this. Shame on Trump and the Republicans who have lied to the public about its consequences.

Off the Top of My Head

Third World Diseases Creeping Back Into America

by John Lawrence

One of the places that Professor Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, recently visited was Lowndes County Alabama. There there is an endemic crisis of hookworm, a disease that has been eliminated from most advanced industrialized countries, but not from Alabama. Loundes County is in the "black belt", a terminology that once referred to the black soil that forms a crescent through the state because it was so fertile. It was a great place to grow cotton in the slavery days, and many of the descendants are still there. Today the term is just as apt as a reference to them.

The Guardian reports:

Trump’s undermining of human rights, combined with the Republican threat to pare back welfare programs next year in order to pay for some of the tax cuts for the rich they are rushing through Congress, will hurt African Americans disproportionately.

Black people are 13% of the US population, but 23% of those officially in poverty and 39% of the homeless.

The racial element of America’s poverty crisis is seen nowhere more clearly than in the Deep South, where the open wounds of slavery continue to bleed.

It seems that in this Black Belt many families don't have access to adequate sanitation. Thousands of families live amid open sewers of the kind so common in the underdeveloped world, and, therefore, a disease of the developing world is thriving in the world’s richest country. Lowndes County is a majority black county that was the epicenter of the civil rights movement having been the setting of Martin Luther King’s Selma to Montgomery voting rights march in 1965. Despite its proud history, 70% of households in the area either “straight pipe” their waste directly onto open ground, or have defective septic tanks incapable of dealing with heavy rains.

The septic tanks back up into toilets and sinks when it rains, an unpleasant and unhealthy situation to say the least. Open sewage in Alabama. Homeless urinating and defecating on the streets of San Diego, LA and San Francisco. Hookworm, Hep A. Soon more once eradicated diseases will make their presence felt. Climate change wreaking havoc in Houston and Puerto Rico. It seems there is plenty of money for the war machine, but none for infrastructure, or health care. The health care system and infrastructure will have to wait because there is more killing to do in Third World countries while America becomes one of them itself.

Bernie Sanders: Trump tax cuts a barely disguised reward for billionaire donors

From the Guardian:

The Vermont senator tells the Guardian why the tax bill – which could become law next week – is the result of 40 years’ scheming by the Kochs and others

 

 Bernie Sanders in Washington on Friday in protest against the tax bill. ‘It is based on the fraudulent theory of trickle-down economics that never worked, never will work.’ Photograph: Alex Edelman/AFP/Getty Images

Ed Pilkington in Washington

 

 

Saturday 16 December 2017 06.00 ESTLast modified on Saturday 16 December 2017 06.01 EST

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Bernie Sanders has accused Donald Trump and Republican party leaders of capitulating to the demands of the Koch brothers and other wealthy rightwing donors in railroading $1.5tn tax cuts through Congress.

A journey through a land of extreme poverty: welcome to America

 

 

Read more

In an interview with the Guardian, the independent US senator from Vermont denounced the tax bill as payback for the billions of dollars that donors have invested in conservative politicians over decades. “What this is all about is nothing more than the Republican party very generously rewarding their wealthy campaign contributors,” he said.

The former presidential challenger said the reform of the tax code, which could clear both the House and the Senate and be signed into law by the the US president as early as next week, was based on the “rightwing extremist ideology of the Koch brothers. You can read it in what they were saying 40 years ago. What they want is an oligarchic form of society in which government plays virtually no role in public education, healthcare or addressing the needs of middle-class and working families.”

The end game, Sanders said, was that “you are on your own. You are 80 years old and you have cancer – good luck to you. Government is not there for you.”

The legislation, which has now been merged to form a single version from earlier Senate and House bills, marks the most substantial redrawing of taxation in America since Ronald Reagan’s 1986 tax cuts. It would slash the tax burden on corporations from 35% to 21%, and the top level of individual taxes from 39.6% to 37%.

The tax package is just another Trump lie. Many millions of middle-class Americans will pay more in taxes

Bernie Sanders

But while the bonus to corporations is permanently set in stone, benefits to working families would expire after a number of years. That would leave millions of middle-class families – 83 million, Sanders said – eventually paying more in taxes under the changes, while the most wealthy Americans would continue to cash in.

“This is nothing more than an effort to make the very rich richer,” Sanders told the Guardian. “It is based on the fraudulent theory of trickle-down economics that never worked, never will work.”

Sanders warned of a double blow to working people in which the vast increase in the deficit caused by the tax cuts would subsequently be used by Republicans to justify an assault on welfare benefits. Paul Ryan, the GOP Speaker of the House, has announcedthat he intends to turn to healthcare and anti-poverty programs next year to reduce spending, and conservatives continue to harbor ambitions of destroying Barack Obama’s signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

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 Paul Ryan looks set to reduce welfare programs to limit spending. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

Sanders said that “after running up a $1.4tn deficit over 10 years they are going to offset that deficit by making massive cuts to social security, Medicare and Medicaid. That is clearly the intention.”

The senator ran Hillary Clinton to a close second place in the 2016 race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Since then he has become arguably the most prominent critic of America’s growing income and wealth inequality and the plight of the working poor.

His attack on the Republicans’ tax plans came a day after the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, issued a withering report that denounced growing in equality in the US. Alston’s initial findings, released on Friday, criticized the tax bill currently going through Congress for hugely increasing already large disparities between rich and poor.

Sanders’ claim that the tax cuts are a thinly disguised reward to billionaire extreme rightwing donors is supported by the statements of some Republican politicians themselves. Chris Collins, a New York congressman, told reporters that pressure from donors made the reform essential.

Trump turning US into 'world champion of extreme inequality', UN envoy warns

 

 

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“My donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again,’” he said.

Last month the leader of the powerful conservative Super Pac the Congressional Leadership Fund, made it clear to the Washington Post that lawmakers who stood in the way of the tax cuts in the House should not expect to receive any of the $100m the body expected to spend on candidates in next year’s midterm elections.

David and Charles Koch have leveraged their own vast wealth – they own Koch Industries, the second largest private company in the US, and are valued by Forbes at $49bn each – by creating a network of other similarly minded wealthy conservatives that runs parallel to the Republican party. In the 2016 election cycle it spent about $250m on candidates who followed their anti-government creed, and the plan for next year is to increase that investment to $400m.

The Koch network has thrown its muscle behind the tax cuts this year. One of its periodic retreats for super-rich donors in New York in October was devoted to the subject of tax reform and attended by the vice-president, Mike Pence.

The brothers first entered the political arena in the 1970s when they began agitating for a bonfire of restrictions on spending by rich individuals and companies on political campaigns. They have consistently fought against government regulations and social programs helping low-income families, in ways that have been advantageous to their business interests that include oil and other energy concerns.

“Anyone who has looked at the Koch brothers and folks like them who have contributed over the years probably billions of dollars in right-wing efforts should not be surprised at the policies coming from Paul Ryan and Donald Trump,” Sanders said.

The senator lamented the unprecedented speed with which the tax plans have been rushed through Congress, and the consequent lack of public debate. As a result, he said, many details of the legislation were still so sketchy they were impossible to understand.

One area that Sanders is especially wary of in the unfolding bill are provisions that would benefit hedge fund managers based on tax havens such as the Virgin Islands. “We believe the provision will apply to probably fewer than 10, maybe even as few as three, hedge fund managers that will result in some $600m in tax breaks over 10 years.”

He added that he had raised the issue on the floor of the US Senate, asking for an explanation from the Republican group, “but we have not been given one”.

Sanders said the tax cuts were particularly punishing for those working Americans who had voted for Trump last November partly on the expectation that his promised tax cuts would ease their financial burdens.

“The tax package is just another Trump lie. Many millions of middle-class Americans will pay more in taxes and if Republicans get their way – and we are going to fight them tooth and nail on this – there will be cuts to social programs that many of Trump’s supporters have depended on for years.”

Trump Just Accidentally Told Millions of Working Class Families the Truth About GOP Tax Plan

Published on Friday, December 15, 2017  by Common Dreams

Trump slipped up and (correctly) called the GOP plan the "biggest tax increase" in American history.

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

26 Comments

President Donald Trump speaks to members of the White House Press Corps prior to his Marine One departure from the South Lawn of the White House December 15, 2017 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

President Donald Trump lies a lot—especially about the Republican tax plan—but during a Friday morning scrum with reporters on the White House lawn, Trump accidentally told the truth.

Asked about the GOP tax bill, which is expected to hit the floor of the House and Senate for a final vote early next week, Trump said: "I think we're doing very well, it's something that's going to be monumental. It will be the biggest tax increase—or tax cut—in the history of our country."

Watch:

Trump slips, just now, says that his tax bill is the biggest tax INCREASE...

— Jeffrey Evan Gold (@jeffgoldesq) December 15, 2017

Even if it was just a slip of the tongue, Trump's characterization of the GOP tax bill as the "biggest tax increase" in American history is accurate, according to some analysts.

As The Intercept's Ryan Grim noted in an analysis earlier this month, the GOP tax bill is "routinely referred to as a $1.5 trillion tax cut. And, in some ways, that's true: On net, it would reduce the amount of taxes collected by the Treasury by about $1.5 trillion over 10 years."

However, "that figure masks the eye-popping scale and audacity of the GOP's rushed restructuring of the economy," Grim adds. "[The bill,] properly described, is two things: the largest tax cut—and also the biggest tax increase—in American history."

This tax increase, as research by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) has found, would primarily be shouldered by low-income and middle class Americans. Additionally, while the GOP bill would give corporations permanent tax cuts, many of the cuts for middle class and low-income Americans would expire after a decade.

As Common Dreams reported on Wednesday, House and Senate Republicans reached a backroom "deal" that tilts the benefits of their bill even further toward the wealthiest Americans by reducing the top marginal tax rate from from 39.6 percent to 37 percent.

"Overall, in 2027—when only the corporate tax cuts, slower inflation measure, and individual mandate repeal would remain in place—the Senate bill would, on average, raise taxes or reduce federal expenditures for households with incomes below $75,000 by about $60 billion—while still giving large tax reductions (through its corporate tax cuts) to those at the top," noted CBPP's Chuck Marr.

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The Meaning of Doug Jones’s Upset Victory

by Robert Reich

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Common sense and decency have prevailed in Alabama. It was a vote not just against sexual abuse but also against racism and against those who would ride roughshod over our democratic institutions.

Yes, the margin was small, and Roy Moore was the worst candidate Republicans could possibly have dredged up. But remember, this is Alabama – where Democrats are hated, where minority votes are suppressed, where Trump won overwhelmingly last November.

In the most Trumpian of all states, Trump has been delivered the most powerful repudiation to date. First it was Virginia; now, Alabama. I’d like to think this is a precursor of what’s to come next November – the beginning of the end of the nightmare.

Today Alabama demonstrated that America is better than Trump, and better than House and Senate Republicans who have jumped into the swamp Trump has created. Congratulations, Doug Jones. Congratulations, Alabama. Congratulations, America.

Off the Top of My Head

Trump: The Ultimate Con Man, the Grinch Who Stole Christmas

by John Lawrence

America has elected a con man for its President. White male voters and their allegiant wives fell for his con garbage that he was a friend of the working man and his goal was to create more jobs. Then when elected he's turned out to be the biggest friend of the wealthy the US has ever seen. The tax bill, which is a mind boggling transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, is about to be enacted. Social programs which help the poor and middle class are being destroyed. The paradigm for this onslaught on humanity is Trump University which bilked unsuspecting students hoping to get rich out of tens of thousands of dollars. They sued and won. Small solace.

Meanwhile, 41 million Americans live in poverty. 9 million have no cash income whatsoever according to a new study by the UN. Three Americans, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffet own as much wealth as half of the American people. The homeless situation has reached crisis proportions. Yet the only "solutions" come about as a result of its impact on the rest of the population.

The report stated:

LA authorities have promised to provide more access to toilets, a critical issue given the deadly outbreak of Hepatitis A that began in San Diego and is spreading on the west coast claiming 21 lives mainly through lack of sanitation in homeless encampments. At night local parks and amenities are closed specifically to keep homeless people out.

Skid Row has had the use of nine toilets at night for 1,800 street-faring people. That’s a ratio well below that mandated by the UN in its camps for Syrian refugees.

American homeless treated worse than refugees? It's nothing new. The rich budget for drugs does not threaten their well being in other aspects of their lives. For the poor a drug habit means they live on the street. You can't do drugs if you're poor and maintain a residence also.

The worse President ever in a pantheon of not so impressive recent Presidents, Trump has demeaned the office and the US place in the world while maintaining the war machine at full capacity. I suppose many that voted for him are experiencing buyer's remorse, but some dumb clucks continue to cheer at him for everything he does even while he is cutting their own throats. When he's done screwing the American public, 41 million Americans living in poverty will seem like a bygone Golden Age. There will probably be100 million living in poverty then.

The streets of LA are filling up with homeless. Ditto for the streets of San Diego, San Francisco and Seattle. The midwest rust belt is getting even rustier. But Professor Philip Alston, an Australian academic with a formal title: UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, who conducted the study did find one ray of hope at Saint Boniface Catholic church in San Francisco:

About 70 homeless people were quietly sleeping in pews at the back of the church, as they are allowed to do every weekday morning, with worshipers praying harmoniously in front of them. The church welcomes them in as part of the Catholic concept of extending the helping hand.

“I found the church surprisingly uplifting,” Alston said. “It was such a simple scene and such an obvious idea. It struck me – Christianity, what the hell is it about if it’s not this?”

It was a rare drop of altruism on the west coast, competing against a sea of hostility. More than 500 anti-homeless laws have been passed in Californian cities in recent years. At a federal level, Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon who Donald Trump appointed US housing secretary, is decimating government spending on affordable housing.

Perhaps the most telling detail: apart from St Boniface and its sister church, no other place of worship in San Francisco welcomes homeless people. In fact, many have begun, even at this season of goodwill, to lock their doors to all comers simply so as to exclude homeless people.

For most Americans Christmas is a glut of consumerism. A season for helping the poor get out of their miserable circumstances? Why that would go against the American grain of just desserts - getting what you deserve, pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. Treating the homeless as Prodigal sons which were taken in by their fathers when they came back home, which is what Jesus preached, is foreign to the American spirit. It's giving people something they don't deserve. If Christianity has any meaning or substance left in it whatsoever, the homeless should be treated by society as wayward prodigal sons and given whatever it takes to get them back on the straight and narrow road. Otherwise, America is well on the road to becoming a society of misfits - both rich and poor.

A Disease that Must Be Healed for the Good of Our Shared Reality

Dear friends,

     There are spiritual teachings in just about everything we see; movies, billboards, greeting cards, scenes in the supermarket. That is because everything we see is the effect of beliefs and ideas which have been made visible. If we look through the behavior or product we can discern the belief that allowed it to be. For example, politics and the actions of those in office, reflect a certain mindset. Those who are elected are the by-product, if you will, of our shared convictions. We believe that person will do the right thing by our vote. If we are wrong, we must look at the beliefs that we held to make them our choice. Such as “he/she is the answer to all our problems” is sure to result in disappointment.

     The collective disappointment that many feel today because of the actions of men in power is part of a long-held mindset that told us to be silent; that good would result if we looked the other way. That is like ignoring your child’s drug addiction and hoping they will grow out of it.  Pretending never creates anything we really want. The discoveries we are making today are being uncovered because they are a hidden addiction, a disease, that must be healed for the good of our shared reality, for the future of humanity.

     We will not achieve, or even tap into our real potential, by ignoring the Feminine Power in Being that we all share but which has been dismissed as something to be laughed at to be exploited. This is a time of “revealed to be healed.” We need to hang together, speak up, hold the vision of a world that works for everyone and we will come through this stronger and more enlightened.

Stay tuned in,

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

Watch us on You Tube and LCC channel 98 in Las Cruces

www.californiafreepress.net