California Free Press

Break Up Facebook (and, While We’re At It, Google, Apple, and Amazon)

by Robert Reich

Wednesday, November 21, 2018

The New York Times revealed last week that Facebook executives withheld evidence of Russian activity on the Facebook platform far longer than previously disclosed. They also employed a political opposition research firm to discredit critics.

There’s a larger story here.

America’s Gilded Age of the late 19th century began with a raft of innovations — railroads, steel production, oil extraction — but culminated in mammoth trusts owned by “robber barons” who used their wealth and power to drive out competitors and corrupt American politics.

We’re now in a second Gilded Age — ushered in by semiconductors, software and the internet — that has spawned a handful of giant high-tech companies.

Facebook and Google dominate advertising. They’re the first stops for many Americans seeking news. Apple dominates smartphones and laptop computers. Amazon is now the first stop for a third of all American consumers seeking to buy anything.

This consolidation at the heart of the American economy creates two big problems.

First, it stifles innovation. Contrary to the conventional view of a U.S. economy bubbling with inventive small companies, the rate at which new job-creating businesses have formed in the United States has been halved since 2004, according to the census.

A major culprit: Big tech’s sweeping patents, data, growing networks, and dominant platforms have become formidable barriers to new entrants.

The second problem is political. These enormous concentrations of economic power generate political clout that’s easily abused, as the New York Times investigation of Facebook reveals. How long will it be before Facebook uses its own data and platform against critics? Or before potential critics are silenced even by the possibility?

America responded to the Gilded Age’s abuses of corporate power with antitrust laws that allowed the government to break up the largest concentrations.

President Teddy Roosevelt went after the Northern Securities Company, a giant railroad trust financed by J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, the nation’s two most powerful businessmen. The U.S. Supreme Court backed Roosevelt and ordered the company dismantled.

In 1911, President William Howard Taft broke up Rockefeller’s sprawling Standard Oil empire.

It is time to use antitrust again. We should break up the high-tech behemoths, or at least require that they make their proprietary technology and data publicly available and share their platforms with smaller competitors.

There would be little cost to the economy, because these giant firms rely on innovation rather than economies of scale — and, as noted, they’re likely to be impeding innovation overall.

Is this politically feasible? Unlike the Teddy Roosevelt Republicans, Trump and his enablers in Congress have shown little appetite for antitrust enforcement.

But Democrats have shown no greater appetite — especially when it comes to Big Tech.

In 2012, the staff of the Federal Trade Commission’s bureau of competition submitted to the commissioners a 160-page analysis of Google’s dominance in the search and related advertising markets, and recommended suing Google for conduct that “has resulted — and will result — in real harm to consumers and to innovation.” But the commissioners, most of them Democratic appointees, chose not to pursue the case.

The Democrats’ new “better deal” platform, which they unveiled a few months before the midterm elections, included a proposal to attack corporate monopolies in industries as wide-ranging as airlines, eyeglasses and beer. But, notably, the proposal didn’t mention Big Tech.

Maybe the Democrats are reluctant to attack Big Tech because the industry has directed so much political funding to Democrats. In the 2018 midterms, the largest recipient of Big Tech’s largesse, ActBlue, a fundraising platform for progressive candidates, collected nearly $1 billion, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

As the Times investigation of Facebook makes clear, political power can’t be separated from economic power. Both are prone to abuse.

One of the original goals of antitrust law was to prevent such abuses.

“The enterprises of the country are aggregating vast corporate combinations of unexampled capital, boldly marching, not for economical conquests only, but for political power,” warned Edward G. Ryan, chief justice of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, in 1873.

Antitrust law was viewed as a means of preventing giant corporations from undermining democracy.

“If we will not endure a king as a political power,” thundered Ohio Sen. John Sherman, the sponsor of the nation’s first antitrust law in 1890, “we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale” of what the nation produced.

We are now in a second Gilded Age, similar to the first when Congress enacted Sherman’s law. As then, giant firms at the center of the American economy are distorting the market and our politics.

We must resurrect antitrust.

Something Else Besides

Dear friends,

There is the world and all it’s beauty and there is Something Else. There is change and chaos and upheaval and there is Something Else. There is you and your life with its joys and sorrows and there is Something Else, ever present, behind it all, running through it all. The beginning place of all life is rooted in it.   Where would it be found if not at the beginning place of awareness? If not within our own deeper mind, where could it possibly be?

It was in us when we emerged into the world of form. We carried it into this personalized experience. We are its vehicle, so to speak. My life and your life are the opportunities for the Something Else to become seen and known in time and space. In religious language it sounds like “In the beginning there was God and God is all there is, appearing to be everything else!”

Matthew Fox, the author of ‘The Coming of the Cosmic Christ’ suggests the beginning point of self-discovery and the return of the Christ is within our own Being.   He teaches the way in to it is meditation. Through the avenue of silence and stillness, we feel the Presence. That is all it takes for us to experience the “happy for no reason” state of mind that is so beneficial to the body, to our relationships, to our work, to our world. The mystics of ancient days, like Rumi, knew it intimately. He sang about the realization of his own awakening with these words: “I didn’t know I was all you.”

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes  

www.centerforspirituallivingbakersfield.com

Thank you Maren Elwood for creating our beautiful new website!

www.californiafreepress.net

Off the Top of My Head

Too Much Technology?

by John Lawrence, November 30, 2018

The Lion Air plane crash that killed 189 people was caused by a tug of war between the plane's two pilots and a computer. Due to faulty readings from one of the plane's sensors, the computer pointed the plane's nose downward while the pilots tried to keep the plane either level or ascending. Before planes were so highly computerized this never would have happened. Even with computers onboard, the pilots taking manual control of the plane should have overridden the computers. This is a design flaw incorporating too much technology. Evidently, there was a procedure to override the computers, but it was far from intuitive.

I got my private pilot's license many years ago, but haven't flown recently. However, I know enough about the essentials of flying an airplane to know that this accident never would have happened on a plane that the pilots actually were responsible for flying and not the computers.

Think of a car's cruise control system. When you put a car on cruise control, it is essentially being run by a computer at least as far as the car's speed is concerned. The computer keeps the car at a constant speed. However, the driver at any time can put his foot on the brakes or accelerator and immediately override the cruise control. This should have been the case on the Boeing 737 MAX 8 plane as well. As soon as the pilot took the wheel, the plane's automated system should have been overridden. Since it was not, this is a design flaw in the plane.

CNN reported:

Former US National Transportation Safety Board air crash investigator and CNN aviation analyst Peter Goelz told CNN the data clearly showed issues with both the speed and altitude of the plane.

 

"There is something obviously wrong in both the air speed and the altitude which would point to the flight control systems," he said. "These are fly-by-wire systems -- highly automated -- and pilots may not be able to troubleshoot failures in a timely manner."

 

This is exactly the problem: the planes are too highly automated. There's no reason why a human pilot relying on simple instruments like an altimeter, airspeed indicator and attitude indicator shouldn't be able to take off and land a plane. These basic instruments are fail safe. Even if these instruments did fail, the pilot should be able to take a look out the window in "normal weather" as was the case that day and control his attitude with the "stick". Since the weather was normal that day, the pilots could have done everything manually.

 

Boeing is putting too much technology into planes making the pilots not only redundant, but unable to take over flying the plane when the technology fails. Of course, this penchant for too much technology makes it possible for Boeing to charge a lot more for the plane. The more technology, the more the price goes up. Sometimes, the simpler, the better. A plane's computers should be easily disabled the same way a car's cruise control is disabled - by a slight pressure on the control wheel.

 

The pilot's control wheel is called a yoke. The pilot uses the yoke to control the attitude of the plane, usually in both pitch and roll. Rotating the control wheel controls the ailerons and the roll axis. Fore and aft movement of the control column controls the elevator and the pitch axis. When the yoke is pulled back the nose of the aircraft rises. When the yoke is pushed forward the nose is lowered. When the yoke is turned left the plane rolls to the left and when it is turned to the right the plane rolls to the right.

 

The plane's automated systems - also called "fly-by-wire" - need to be automatically disabled as soon as the pilot touches the yoke. If they had been, this horrific accident could have been averted.

Why the Migrant Caravan Story Is a Climate Change Story

Published on Thursday, November 29, 2018 by YES! Magazine

Drought, crop failure, storms, and land disputes pit the rich against the poor, and Central America is ground zero for climate change

by Todd Miller

 

1 Comments

A child sits in an area affected by a drought in the southern outskirts of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, in 2016. In the same area this September, the Honduran government declared a state of emergency because of drought as 290 municipalities are on the verge of running out of food. (Photo by Orlando Sierra/Stringer/Getty Images)

Less than a mile south of the U.S.-Mexico border, in Sasabe, Mexico, a Guatemalan man named Giovanni (whose first name is used to protect his undocumented status) propped up his feet while an EMT applied antibiotic ointment to his feet in the shade of a cottonwood. Giovanni left his home country because of a catastrophic drought and was attempting to unite with his brothers who were already in Dallas. After trying to cross the border into the Arizona desert, his feet were ravaged: discolored, covered in gashes and tender red blisters. One toenail had been ripped off. Across the arroyo, or dry wash, were about 30 more prospective border crossers, primarily Guatemalan, some awaiting a similar medical checkup, others stocking up on water and food.

It was July, and several days before in a 110-degree heat wave, he had crossed the border with a small group of about five other people from Guatemala. After 14 hours, they ran out of water. After 21 hours, Giovanni gave up and turned back alone. He had no water, no food, and quickly lost his orientation, but he made it back to Sasabe.

Giovanni is part of a Central American exodus of people that has been increasing for decades. The recent caravans are the most recent chapter. And while there are complex and compounding reasons for the massive displacements and migrations—especially rising violence (in places like Honduras, for example, after the 2009 military coup) and systemic poverty—there is another driver behind the movement of people seeking refuge in the U.S.: climate change.

“Families and communities have already started to suffer from disasters and the consequences of climate change.”

As the EMT tenderly wrapped an adhesive bandage around Giovanni’s feet, Giovanni told me about the droughts back in his home of San Cristobal Frontera. It hadn’t rained for “40 days and 40 nights,” he said. The crops in the milpas—subsistence farm plots of corn, beans, and squash—were wilting, and the harvests failing. The cattle were skinny and dying of starvation. Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador lie in the trajectory of the so-called “dry corridor” of Central America that stretches from Southern Mexico to Panama. This epithet is a recently adopted description of the region, to describe the droughts that have risen in intensity and frequency over the last 10 years.

Most members of the human caravans are from these three “dry corridor” countries.

According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, “Families and communities have already started to suffer from disasters and the consequences of climate change.” From 2008 to 2015, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre reported that at least 22.5 million had been displaced per year because of climate-related-events, the equivalent of 62,000 people per day. Over this time, environmental forces uprooted more people than war. And in 2017 alone, disasters displaced 4.5 million people in the Americas.

In September, the World Food Programme essentially confirmed what Giovanni had told me earlier that summer in Sasabe. According to reporting by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the WFP said, “Poor harvests caused by drought in Central America could leave more than two million people hungry” and “climate change was creating drier conditions in the region.” In July, El Salvador declared a red alert as the drought affected 77,000 corn farmers, and Honduras reported that as much as 80 percent of its maize and bean crops were lost. The accumulated losses of these crops exceeded 694,366 acres in Guatemala and El Salvador. This summer’s devastating losses came after other recent, hard-hitting dry spells, particularly from 2014 to 2016, that had already left millions on the brink of hunger.

As climate scientist Chris Castro told me in 2017, Central America is ground zero for climate change in the Americas. Among the thousands of people caravanning north are climate refugees.

Climate change is a force in Central America. As one Honduran subsistence farmer named Guillermo told me in 2015 in an interview published in my book Storming the Wall: The weather is changing. And that is affecting food supply. Guillermo’s first name is used because of safety concerns.

“We used to have a place—a warehouse—to store the community’s food,” Guillermo said. But now, he said, that storage house was empty, and he described how the first rains of the season—which used to be so reliable—had become unpredictable.

People would be forced to cross in places so desolate and dangerous that the environment itself became a weapon.

Guillermo’s small coastal community of Vallecito is one of about 46 Garífuna communities in Honduras. The Garífuna people are descendants of Caribbean Native Arawak as well as Central and Western African people forcibly brought to this hemisphere by White enslavers. Coastal Garífuna communities are subject to storm surges and hurricanes (such as Hurricane Mitch, which killed more than 7,000 people in Honduras in 1998) and are at the center of land disputes over ever-expanding African Palm plantations, tourism, and other development projects, some U.S.-backed, which Garífuna community members have called a “systematic eviction” from their land by corporate and state forces.

Drought, crop failure, storms, and land disputes pit the rich versus the poor: All of these things have displaced people in Vallecito and other north coast communities, some of whom have moved to increasingly volatile cities—like San Pedro Sula, which has one of the highest homicide rates in the world—in search of work.

According to the 2017 Global Climate Risk Index, both Guatemala and Honduras are among the countries most affected by climate change. From 1996 to 2015, Honduras had 61 extreme climate events and an average of 301 climate related deaths per year. Guatemala had 75 events and an average 97 deaths per year. According to the report, over the last couple decades, Central America has experienced a temperature rise between 0.7 and 1 degree Celsius.

Meanwhile, there are increased and increasing border controls in Central America, Mexico, and, of course, the United States. In April 2016, Miriam Miranda, the coordinator of the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras, a Garífuna rights organization, told teleSUR English that rather than truly address global warming, world leaders were instead “preparing to avoid and control human displacement as a result of catastrophes” through “ramped-up militarization and the so-called war on drugs in indigenous territories.”

According to the border strategy known as Prevention Through Deterrence, by effectively making the urban borderlands impassable, people would be forced to cross in places such as Sasabe, areas so desolate and dangerous that the environment itself became a weapon.

This was what Giovanni experienced when he had to turn back to Sasabe, Mexico. Indeed when Giovanni turned around to try to get back to Sasabe, he was walking through a place where thousands of bodies of other crossers have been found in one of the least discussed humanitarian crises in the United States.

The harshest impacts of climate change are reserved specifically for people like Giovanni: the poor, the marginalized, the displaced, and in this case, the unauthorized.

Historically, U.S. foreign policy has often contributed to increased Central American displacement. When tens of thousands of Guatemalans and Salvadorans crossed into the United States in the 1980s, they were fleeing wars by military dictatorships financed, armed, and trained by the United States. These are the same places where U.S.-based corporate oligarchies—such as the United Fruit Company—have profited at the expense of locals living in poverty or extreme poverty.

And now there’s climate change. The United States leads in greenhouse gas emissions, having produced 27 percent of the world’s emissions since 1850. The European Union follows with 25 percent, China 11 percent, Russia 8 percent. And U.S. emissions (314,772.1 millions of metric tons of CO2) dwarf those of Guatemala (213.4), Honduras (115.5), and El Salvador (135.2). In other words, the U.S. has contaminated the atmosphere with 678 times more CO2 than the three countries whose people are in the caravan.

The harshest impacts of climate change are reserved specifically for the poor, the marginalized, the displaced, and in this case, the unauthorized.

Countries, like the U.S., that have emitted the most CO2 are fortifying their borders against people from countries who have emitted the least. And these are countries where people, like Giovanni and Guillermo, are feeling the effects of climate change. In the future, projections for climate displacement are staggering, and range from 25 million to 1 billion by 2050. One estimate from the World Bank says that climate change will displace 17 million Latin Americans by 2050. Another forecast projects that one in 10 Mexicans between 15 and 65 will be displaced.

Yet, instead of any sort of reckoning with the human displacement caused by climate change, Washington only deploys more armed agents, builds more walls, and deploys active duty troops authorized to use lethal force to stop caravans of refugees. Among these are refugees who recently tried to cross the border from Tijuana and were held back with tear gas fired by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents. These border crossers were primarily from Honduras; it’s likely some were from communities like Guillermo’s. And elsewhere, it’s almost certain that Giovanni—or people from his community—are among those arriving at the border every day.

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This article was written for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas and practical actions. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

A Belated Thanksgiving Message

Dear friends,

Part of a lyric of an old song: “if you’re worried and cannot sleep, count your blessings instead of sheep, and you’ll fall asleep, counting your blessings…”

What blesses you today? Gratitude is the emotion of feeling blessed.

Today I am grateful for artists, musicians, and writers. They give us beauty and rhythm and glorious sounds and words that take us into other worlds. I am grateful for scientists and inventors and architects. They discover, enlighten us, bring meaning into our lives, build structure and provide shelter. I am grateful for doctors, nurses, first responders. They serve to protect us from disease, discomfort, pain and loss.

I am grateful for teachers and librarians, publishers, filmmakers. They insure the future with information and motivation through the avenue of story. I am grateful for the great thinkers of the past who are no longer alive but whose work is our legacy. People like Jesus, Buddha, Einstein, Jobs, Helen Keller, Meister Eckhart, Tesla, Madame Currie and Lincoln . Thousands of lives have been dedicated to the betterment of humanity. I am grateful for my immediate family and the extension of it through dear friends. I am grateful today for my own passion to bring New Thought spirituality into the mainstream of our collective perception. I am grateful for my Center where we celebrate the possible, heal the past and awaken our hearts to our own wholeness.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone,

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes  

www.cslbakersfield.com (launching Dec 2)

www.carol-carnes.com  

www.californiafreepress.net

Off the Top of My Head

Will the Border Be Open Today?

by John Lawrence, November 29, 2018

Today I go to Tijuana, and it's raining. I will pass through the same Port of Entry where the "caravan" is waiting to get into the US. I go there frequently because that's where my dentist is - Dr. Garcia at Baja Oral Center. I've had 2 root canals, a crown and an implant lately so I've been down there a lot. Today is the last visit for a while at least as Dr. Garcia will do the permanent fillings on the root canals. More and more people are going to Tijuana for medical and dental work. Why? The professionals there are just as good as those in the US or even possibly better and they don't charge you and arm and a leg ... only an arm. Ha. Ha. No, dental work in San Diego is outrageously expensive if you need anything other than a routine cleaning.

The broader point is that there is a lot of transborder business that goes on every single day. San Ysidro is the busiest Port of Entry in the world. I take people to and from the border as an Uber driver. Some people live in Tijuana and work in the US. Why? Rents and home ownership is cheaper  down there. They are building a lot of luxury high rise condos along the border. As Americans get priced out of home ownership in San Diego, it is wiser to buy a condo there and commute. San Ysidro is only about a 15 minute freeway drive from downtown San Diego.

The US better get its act together on immigration because the lack of an actual, workable policy regarding refugees, asylum seekers and everything else is affecting thansborder business. San Ysidro businessmen lost millions just because the border was shut down last Sunday for a few hours, and Trump is threatening to close the border permanently? That would be a disaster beyond measure. I just hope it doesn't get shut down while I'm down there today so I can't get back home.

But my potential suffering doesn't compare to the suffering of poor people from Honduras and Guatemala who just want a better life for themselves and their families. There are approximately 6000 of them holed up in a sports stadium in Tijuana. Some have given up and returned home despite the evident threats to their lives by the "gangs." Central and South America are in bad shape and their people are suffering. An American medical ship is giving help to Venezualans offshore that they can't get in Venezuela. If the US spent as much money on helping real people in its own hemisphere as it does on its military-industrial complex, there wouldn't have to be the drama of desperate people trying to get to the US for a better life for themselves and their families. Oh well, I guess the task of helping people in Central and South America will be left to China which is picking up the ball and running with it.

The Game-Changing Promise of a Green New Deal

Published on Tuesday, November 27, 2018 by The Intercept

This possibility is simply too important, and time is just too short, to allow it to be shut down by the usual forces of political inertia

by Naomi Klein

 

24 Comments

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks to activists with the Sunrise Movement protesting in the offices of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi in Washington D.C., on Nov. 13, 2018. (Photo: Sarah Silbiger/The New York Times via Redux)

Like so many others, I’ve been energized by the bold moral leadership coming from newly elected members of Congress like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley in the face of the spiraling climate crisis and the outrageous attacks on unarmed migrants at the border. It has me thinking about the crucial difference between leadership that acts and leadership that talks about acting.

I’ll get to the Green New Deal and why we need to hold tight to that lifeline for all we’re worth. But before that, bear with me for a visit to the grandstanding of climate politics past.

It was March 2009 and capes were still fluttering in the White House after Barack Obama’s historic hope-and-change electoral victory. Todd Stern, the newly appointed chief climate envoy, told a gathering on Capitol Hill that he and his fellow negotiators needed to embrace their inner superheroes, saving the planet from existential danger in the nick of time.

As climate justice organizations have been arguing for many years now, when the people with the most to gain lead the movement, they fight to win.

 

Climate change, he said, called for some of “that old comic book sensibility of uniting in the face of a common danger threatening the earth. Because that’s what we have here. It’s not a meteor or a space invader, but the damage to our planet, to our community, to our children, and their children will be just as great. There is no time to lose.”

Eight months later, at the fateful United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, all pretense to superheroism from the Obama Administration had been unceremoniously abandoned. Stern stalked the hallways of the convention center like the Grim Reaper, pulling his scythe through every proposal that would have resulted in a transformative agreement. The U.S. insisted on a target that would allow temperatures to rise by 2 degrees Celsius, despite passionate objections from many African and Pacific islander delegates who said the goal amounted to a “genocide” and would lead millions to die on land or in leaky boats. It shot down all attempts to make the deal legally binding, opting for unenforceable voluntary targets instead (as it would in Paris five years later).

Stern categorically rejected the argument that wealthy developed countries owe compensation to poor ones for knowingly pumping earth-warming carbon into the atmosphere, instead using much-needed funds for climate change protection as a bludgeon to force those countries to fall in line.

As I wrote at the time, the Copenhagen deal — cooked up behind closed doors with the most vulnerable countries locked out — amounted to a “grubby pact between the world’s biggest emitters: I’ll pretend that you are doing something about climate change if you pretend that I am too. Deal? Deal.”

Read the full article here.

© 2018 The Intercept / First Look Media

Let’s Get Creative About Our Own Lives

Dear friends,

Ernest Holmes: ‘we each have immediate access to the Intelligence of the Universe.’   He was clarifying the statement “we have the mind of Christ.” He went on to say we give it outlet through inspiration or through bitter experience. The Intelligence of the Universe knows only to replicate what has our attention and mental energy.

In the coming days, as we move toward a New Year, let’s make it more of an intentional journey. First, let’s reflect on this past year. Was there a kind of theme to it? Would you want it to continue into 2019? Is it something to build on or is it better to release it right now? When we let something go, we replace it. Most often, we do not give the new idea enough care and feeding to set it as an intention.

Let’s spend some time each day until the New Year dawns, boldly stating what we desire, expect and are willing to be changed by, in 2019. If our idea is not something that requires any change in us, then we are likely going to repeat last year. If the new idea for living does not scare us a bit, it is not new!   It is only the ego, the habituated thinker, that is frightened. That is a good sign. It means we have stepped up a level in our perception and the old ideas are being uprooted. There could be a little resistance!

However, as Ernest Holmes wrote “Spiritual thought force has power over all material resistance.” Let’s get creative about our own life. Let’s trust the Universal Intelligence to respond to our best new ideas.

p.s. This Sunday Dec 2, I will be speaking about “Name Your Year.” If you are not local, it will be on You Tube next week.

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes  

www.centerforspirituallivingbakersfield.com

www.carol-carnes.com

www.californiafreepress.net

Off the Top of My Head

Disorder at the Border

by John Lawrence, November 27, 2018

Immigration should not be a political football stoking Trump's base and causing cries of shame among the Left. Now in addition to crying children separated from their parents, we have the visual of young children being tear gassed at San Ysidro. Let's get real, folks. Trump has a point and the Democrats should address that point. You can't have thousands of people charging the border to get across and seek asylum. There needs to be an orderly process for asylum seekers and getting into the US illegally and then asking for asylum is not it.

The asylum laws need to be changed for one thing. People should apply for asylum while remaining in their home country or they should apply for a visa, come here and then apply for asylum. Visa holders need to be tracked so they don't just simply overstay their visas like a lot do. Trump is right that the "catch and release" method of processing asylum seekers is a lost cause. People coming in illegally, then being caught, given a court date and then released doesn't work because many never show up for their court date. They just disappear into the vast sea of society.

The refugee crisis is a world wide event. As the earth shrinks in terms of habitable area due to climate change and as people from poorer countries gain access to the internet and realize how people live in rich countries and as continual wars wreak havoc and destruction, people from poorer countries and war ravaged nations want to get in. Europe has been relatively lenient in letting refugees in from war torn areas of the Middle East and Africa, many of whom are fleeing US caused wars and the results of those wars. Now Europe has a big problem with the rise of fascism because the local citizenry is rebelling against this policy of letting huge numbers of people in. It is creating real problems for them among which terrorism is probably the least.

The US has been relatively unscathed in the refugee problem so far, at least from Middle Eastern refugees. But let's give credit where credit is do. Trump has articulated a real problem for the US. Millions want to come here from Central America because we have a land border with Mexico and they want a better life regardless of the threat from gangs in their home country. Although I give Trump credit for recognizing this problem, I don't give him credit for politicizing it and uasing it as campaign fodder. But Democrats need to come to grip with this problem; Congress needs to come to grips with this problem. A real solution needs to be developed that doen't include building a wall or tear gassing babies. On the other hand you just can't let them all in. That would lead to the same social upheaval that Europe is experiencing.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which ended the Mexican-American war in 1848 did not give Mexicans living in Mexico the right to move to the US. It gave Mexicans living in the territories ceded to the US (mainly Texas and the whole southwestern US) the right to remain and become American citizens although they had to declare their intentions within a year.

What the US should do is to give assistance to the peoples of Central America so they feel secure and safe in their own countries and do something to alleviate poverty there. Will the US do it? Not with Trump's attitude of "you're on your own, baby."

 

We Have Boundless Possibilities

Dear friends,

     Forgiveness is always a good idea. It tends to affect the forgiver in the most positive ways, clearing our path forward.   We simply cannot make good progress in our emotional life while dragging along the dead weight of resentments. At this time of the year we often mistakenly think the New Year will bring wonderful experiences to us, simply because it is new! But no, consciousness is what goes into our tomorrows and it is the predictor of the quality of our life.

     We do spring cleaning of our homes, so why not a winter cleansing of our interior life?   What is lurking around in our mind that really has no good use, other than to keep anger alive? Perhaps it is sadness or regret? The error is to assume we have no power over it. But of course it is powerful only because it is ignored. If we have the intention to be clear of past hurts so that our life can reflect our true nature, then we can look at those less than beautiful thoughts and determine for ourselves if they are beneficial or not. Once we decide to let them go, healthier ideas will begin to surface.

     Self-reflection is a high spiritual practice. It is always about removing what is covering our inner light, as it were. There is a joyful, playful, loving, creative core self that is never disturbed, damaged, nor diminished by the pain we may have known. He or she is perfectly intact, ready to take the lead in our unavoidable expression of who we think we are. Are we a victim of ignorance, or are we a self-aware, self-actualizing being of boundless possibility?

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes

www.centerforspirituallivingbakersfield.com

www.carol-carnes.com

www.californiafreepress.net

Off the Top of My Head

Trump is the Culmination of Ayn Rand's Penchant for Selfishness

by John Lawrence, November 27, 2018

Trump's egotism and narcissim, verging on solipsism, come right out of an Ayn Rand novel. In addition to writing The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand wrote The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. She championed the totally selfish person who only looked out for himself or herself. She had a cult following including Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman under Ronald Reagan who was also a fan of Rand's. Trump is the archtypical Rand hero: the builder (real estate), the man who takes want he wants, ("you can grab them by the pussy if you're a star"). House Speaker Paul Ryan is also a big fan.

Wikipedia reports:

The Randian hero is a ubiquitous figure in the fiction of 20th-century novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, most famously in the figures of The Fountainhead's Howard Roark and Atlas Shrugged's John Galt. Rand's self-declared purpose in writing fiction was to project an "ideal man"—a man who perseveres to achieve his values, even when his ability and independence leads to conflict with others.

Ayn Rand eschewed Christianity, a religion that emphasized responsibility to others especially the poor. Is it any wonder that contemporary America is characterized by selfish, narcissistic people who elected one like themselves President? Is it any wonder that they don't give a hoot about the fate of the earth in 2100. It is almost risible that the Federal government released a report supposedly alarming people about what is going to happen in 2100 due to global warming. Most Americans don't give a shit about 2100 when they'll all be dead. They want it all, and they want it now. They don't want to sacrifice their pickups and sports cars for a lousy Tesla.

Trump wants more industry - smokestack industry. The more smokestacks and car exhaust the better. As he points out, China has a worse air quality problem from car exhaust than does the US. Ronald Reagan sealed the deal to end the influence of the New Left that flourished throughout the sixties and seventies that emphasized economic democracy, the same values Bernie Sanders espouses. When Reagan was elected in 1980 (he brought Greenspan in in 1987), he dedicated himself to championing the rich and putting down poor hippies. In true Randian hero style, he told people it was alright to be selfish. In 1992, then-Governor Clinton repeatedly denounced “The Reagan-Bush years” for ushering “in a gilded age of greed, selfishness, irresponsibility, excess, and neglect.”

The Nation reported:

Yet During his two terms in the White House (1981–89), Reagan presided over a widening gap between the rich and everyone else, declining wages and living standards for working families, an assault on labor unions as a vehicle to lift Americans into the middle class, a dramatic increase in poverty and homelessness, and the consolidation and deregulation of the financial industry that led to the current mortgage meltdown, foreclosure epidemic and lingering recession.

These trends were not caused by inevitable social and economic forces. They resulted from Reagan’s policy and political choices based on an underlying “you’re on your own” ideology.

After 9/11 George Bush just told people to "go out and shop." In other words indulge yourself, be selfish, don't think about others. The Ayn Rand transformation of American society more or less started by Reagan has seen its culmination in Donald Trump, the ultimate Randian hero. Along the way a huge and growing underclass of homeless people has been created. Denizens of Christianity, ever willing to twist Jesus' teachings to include their own selfishness, have embraced the ultimate anti-Christian hero.

Here's another article on how Ayn Rand helped turn the US into a selfish and greedy nation.

Here's how Ayn Rand helped turn the US into a selfish and greedy nation

The 'Atlas Shrugged' author made selfishness heroic and caring about others weakness.

 

By Bruce E. Levine / AlterNet

November 26, 2018, 1:01 AM GMT

 

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612 COMMENTS

 

Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society....To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.— Gore Vidal, 1961

Only rarely in U.S. history do writers transform us to become a more caring or less caring nation. In the 1850s, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was a strong force in making the United States a more humane nation, one that would abolish slavery of African Americans. A century later, Ayn Rand (1905-1982) helped make the United States into one of the most uncaring nations in the industrialized world, a neo-Dickensian society where healthcare is only for those who can afford it, and where young people are coerced into huge student-loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

Rand’s impact has been widespread and deep. At the iceberg’s visible tip is the influence she’s had over major political figures who have shaped American society. In the 1950s, Ayn Rand read aloud drafts of what was later to become Atlas Shrugged to her “Collective,” Rand’s ironic nickname for her inner circle of young individualists, which included Alan Greenspan, who would serve as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board from 1987 to 2006.

In 1966, Ronald Reagan wrote in a personal letter, “Am an admirer of Ayn Rand.” Today, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) credits Rand for inspiring him to go into politics, and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) calls Atlas Shrugged his “foundation book.” Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) says Ayn Rand had a major influence on him, and his son Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is an even bigger fan. A short list of other Rand fans includes Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; Christopher Cox, chairman of the Security and Exchange Commission in George W. Bush’s second administration; and former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford.

But Rand’s impact on U.S. society and culture goes even deeper.

The Seduction of Nathan Blumenthal

Ayn Rand’s books such as The Virtue of Selfishness and her philosophy that celebrates self-interest and disdains altruism may well be, as Vidal assessed, “nearly perfect in its immorality.” But is Vidal right about evil? Charles Manson, who himself did not kill anyone, is the personification of evil for many of us because of his psychological success at exploiting the vulnerabilities of young people and seducing them to murder. What should we call Ayn Rand’s psychological ability to exploit the vulnerabilities of millions of young people so as to influence them not to care about anyone besides themselves?

While Greenspan (tagged “A.G.” by Rand) was the most famous name that would emerge from Rand’s Collective, the second most well-known name to emerge from the Collective was Nathaniel Branden, psychotherapist, author and “self-esteem” advocate. Before he was Nathaniel Branden, he was Nathan Blumenthal, a 14-year-old who read Rand’s The Fountainhead again and again. He later would say, “I felt hypnotized.” He describes how Rand gave him a sense that he could be powerful, that he could be a hero. He wrote one letter to his idol Rand, then a second. To his amazement, she telephoned him, and at age 20, Nathan received an invitation to Ayn Rand’s home. Shortly after, Nathan Blumenthal announced to the world that he was incorporating Rand in his new name: Nathaniel Branden. And in 1955, with Rand approaching her 50th birthday and Branden his 25th, and both in dissatisfying marriages, Ayn bedded Nathaniel.

What followed sounds straight out of Hollywood, but Rand was straight out of Hollywood, having worked for Cecil B. DeMille. Rand convened a meeting with Nathaniel, his wife Barbara (also a Collective member), and Rand’s own husband Frank. To Branden's astonishment, Rand convinced both spouses that a time-structured affair—she and Branden were to have one afternoon and one evening a week together—was “reasonable.” Within the Collective, Rand is purported to have never lost an argument. On his trysts at Rand’s New York City apartment, Branden would sometimes shake hands with Frank before he exited. Later, all discovered that Rand’s sweet but passive husband would leave for a bar, where he began his self-destructive affair with alcohol.

By 1964, the 34-year-old Nathaniel Branden had grown tired of the now 59-year-old Ayn Rand. Still sexually dissatisfied in his marriage to Barbara and afraid to end his affair with Rand, Branden began sleeping with a married 24-year-old model, Patrecia Scott. Rand, now “the woman scorned,” called Branden to appear before the Collective, whose nickname had by now lost its irony for both Barbara and Branden. Rand’s justice was swift. She humiliated Branden and then put a curse on him: “If you have one ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health—you'll be impotent for the next 20 years! And if you achieve potency sooner, you'll know it’s a sign of still worse moral degradation!”

Rand completed the evening with two welt-producing slaps across Branden’s face. Finally, in a move that Stalin and Hitler would have admired, Rand also expelled poor Barbara from the Collective, declaring her treasonous because Barbara, preoccupied by her own extramarital affair, had neglected to fill Rand in soon enough on Branden's extra-extra-marital betrayal. (If anyone doubts Alan Greenspan’s political savvy, keep in mind that he somehow stayed in Rand’s good graces even though he, fixed up by Branden with Patrecia’s twin sister, had double-dated with the outlaws.)

After being banished by Rand, Nathaniel Branden was worried that he might be assassinated by other members of the Collective, so he moved from New York to Los Angeles, where Rand fans were less fanatical. Branden established a lucrative psychotherapy practice and authored approximately 20 books, 10 of them with either “Self” or “Self-Esteem” in the title. Rand and Branden never reconciled, but he remained an admirer of her philosophy of self-interest until his recent death in December 2014.

Ayn Rand’s personal life was consistent with her philosophy of not giving a shit about anybody but herself. Rand was an ardent two-pack-a-day smoker, and when questioned about the dangers of smoking, she loved to light up with a defiant flourish and then scold her young questioners on the “unscientific and irrational nature of the statistical evidence.” After an x-ray showed that she had lung cancer, Rand quit smoking and had surgery for her cancer. Collective members explained to her that many people still smoked because they respected her and her assessment of the evidence; and that since she no longer smoked, she ought to tell them. They told her that she needn’t mention her lung cancer, that she could simply say she had reconsidered the evidence. Rand refused.

Keep Yourself in Optimal Well-Being

Dear friends,

   There is a bit of a lull between Thanksgiving and the Holidays. Most people will fill it with shopping. What if we used this time to pause and reflect on 2018 and all that we created for ourselves this past year? Are we pleased with what we have allowed into our experience? If not, what can we do right now to make 2019 what we truly desire?

   One of the requirements of any business at the end of the year is to take an inventory of products as yet unsold. Can we do something similar by checking in with our own mind to see what is still there that may be old and outdated? The most powerful thing we can do is to claim our recent experience as the product of our mind. I know, sometimes we cannot make that link, but just assume it is true that consciousness produced it all. Just for now, own it.

     When we claim the power of our mind, we have ceased to be the victim of the times, the past or the collective belief system. We are not shaped by the world, rather, our world is shaped by us. There is a deeper or higher mind within us that sometimes takes the lead and assists us in maintaining our wholeness. That is when we cannot see how we had anything to do with what is current in our life, but we trust it is for our Good. There is no Power that teaches us lessons. There is only the universal Life Force coming through us to be shaped by us in order to keep us in optimal well-being. That would include our health, our prosperity, our love, our peace, our joy and our creativity.

     It is possible that all we need right now to make our world a better place are some new ideas!

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes

www.carol-carnes.com

www.cslbakersfield.com

www.californiafreepress.net

Off the Top of My Head

Jane Fonda and the Campaign for Economic Democracy

by John Lawrence, November 26, 2018

There was a very interesting show on HBO recently: Jane Fonda in Five Acts. It was basically a biography of her life narrated by Jane herself. It made me recall the days of the New Left when Fonda was married to Tom Hayden and they both were very involved in the activist movement. The interesting thing though was that they started this "Campaign for Economic Democracy", and to fund it Jane did an exercise video. That video became the biggest selling video of all time so what happened to the Campaign for Economic Democracy?

It turns out that most of the money made from the videos went to support Hayden's political efforts. He mounted a losing campaign for California Senator. But as Wikileaks reports: "He and Fonda later initiated the Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED), which formed a close alliance with then Governor Jerry Brown and promoted solar energy, environmental protection and renters' rights policies, as well as candidates for local office throughout California, more than 50 of whom would go on to be elected." Hayden later served in the California State Assembly and Senate.

The New York Times reported:

Perhaps unknown to many of [the buyers of the video], they are helping finance the operations of a New Left political organization in California, the Campaign for Economic Democracy. Indirectly, they are helping the efforts of the campaign's founder, Tom Hayden, to win election in a state legislative district here that has become a kind of battleground between conservatives and the New Left.

Mr. Hayden, who was one of the most prominent of the campus radicals of the 1960's, is seeking the Democratic nomination for the 44th State Assembly District. The district includes much of West Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Malibu and adjacent coastal areas.

In an interview, Mr. Hayden, who is married to Miss Fonda, said that his efforts to win public office stem from what he sees as a need ''to respond to Reaganomics and the need to reform and revitalize the Democratic Party.''

It seems that Hayden's political career was the major recipient of the funds generated by Fonda's exercise videos. Perhaps that's OK as Hayden went on to be a progressive voice for the rest of his life including his academic career. He is the author of 19 books and died in 2016. He and Fonda were divorced in 1990. Fonda went on to marry billionaire Ted Turner although she remained politically active for progressive causes.

The New Left fizzled out in the 1970s probably because the war in Vietnam ended. Ronald Reagan put the finishing touches on the fizzle out of the New Left which at one point had been a force to behold. Hayden and Fonda in their own ways were probably smart to adapt their politics to a more mainstream position. Jane Fonda is still active and still making movies. Her movie "9 to 5" publicized the efforts of working women to gain respect in the marketplace. It stared Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton as three working women who live out their fantasies of getting even with, and their overthrow of, the company's autocratic, "sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot" boss, played by Dabney Coleman.

Life Is For Us, Never Against Us

Dear friends,

The great comedian, W.C. Fields said “a dead fish will float downstream, but it takes a live one to swim upstream.”

     What is the level of our aliveness today? Are we able to meet the challenges and see opportunity? Do we claim the unseen help that is always available once we engage it? Have we forgotten that this life is not trying to hurt us, but is always supportive of our higher inclinations? Our degree of aliveness is determined by how much we believe in the power we hold within our own mind, and if we know our mind is a personification of a universal Mind.

     Recently, a group of scientists announced their certainty that the universe itself is conscious.   Perhaps that is what we have been calling God. There is a responsiveness to our own aliveness from the Source of it.   What we determine to be ours to do or to create is metaphorically pushing us upstream, into success and fulfillment.   As long as we are swimming, the current carries us forward.

     There is a real joy in the experience of being helped by an invisible power. It seems magical, sometimes, how facts appear to support our truth. There are dazzling synchronicities and unexpected turns of events that we could not have predicted, but which are perfect for our particular journey. Ernest Holmes always said “Life is for us, never against us.” That is the one principle we need to remember no matter what is our current situation. It is as true of humanity as it is individuals. We are headed upstream. We are being pushed. We will arrive together.

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes

www.cslbakersfield.com   www.carol-carnes.com

www.californiafreepress.net

Trump’s Assault on the Rule of Law

by Robert Reich

Thursday, November 22, 2018

The “rule of law” distinguishes democracies from dictatorships. It’s based on three fundamental principles. Trump is violating every one of them.

The first is that no person is above the law, not even a president. Which means a president cannot stop an investigation into his alleged illegal acts.

Yet in recent weeks Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who at least had possessed enough integrity to recuse himself from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s possible collusion with Russia in the 2016 election. Trump replaced Sessions with an inexperienced loyalist hack, Matthew G. Whitaker, whose only distinction to date has been loud and public condemnation of that investigation. As a conservative legal commentator on CNN, Whitaker even suggested that a clever attorney general could secretly starve the investigation of funds.

There’s no question why Trump appointed Whitaker. When asked by the Daily Caller, Trump made it clear: “As far as I’m concerned this is an investigation that should have never been brought. It should have never been had…. It’s an illegal investigation.”

The second principle of the rule of law is that a president cannot prosecute political opponents or critics. Decisions about whom to prosecute for alleged criminal wrongdoing must be made by prosecutors who are independent of politics.

Yet Trump has repeatedly pushed the Justice Department to bring charges against Hillary Clinton, his 2016 rival, for using a private email server when she was Secretary of State, in alleged violation of the Presidential Records Act.

During his campaign, Trump led crowds in chanting “lock her up,” called Clinton “crooked Hillary,” and threatened to prosecute her if he was elected president.

After taking office, according to the New York Times, Trump told White House counsel Donald McGahn he wanted the Justice Department to prosecute Clinton. McGahn responded that Trump didn’t have the authority to do so, and such action might even lead to impeachment.

Yet Trump has continued to press Justice Department officials – including Whitaker, when he served as Sessions’s chief of staff – about the status of Clinton-related investigations.

Never mind that Trump’s senior adviser and daughter, Ivanka Trump sent hundreds of messages on her private email server to government employees and aides that detailed government business, policies, and proposals. Or that other Trump officials have used their private email to conduct official business as well.

Breaking the rule of law doesn’t require consistency. It requires only a thirst for power at whatever cost. 

The third principle of the rule of law is that a president must be respectful of the independence of the judiciary.

Yet Trump has done the opposite, openly ridiculing judges who disagree with him in order to fuel public distrust of them – as he did when he called the judge who issued the first federal ruling against his travel ban a “so-called” judge.

Last week Trump referred derisively to the judge who put a hold on Trump’s plan for refusing to consider asylum applications an “Obama judge,” and railed against the entire ninth circuit. "You go the 9th Circuit and it’s a disgrace,” he said. He also issued a subtle threat: “It’s not going to happen like this anymore.“

In an unprecedented public rebuke of a sitting president, John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, condemned Trump’s attack. “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts said. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

Trump immediately shot back: “Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’ and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country.” This was followed by another Trump threat: “Much talk over dividing up the 9th Circuit into 2 or 3 Circuits. Too big!”

Almost a half-century ago, another president violated these three basic principles of the rule of law, although not as blatantly as Trump. Richard Nixon tried to obstruct the Watergate investigation, pushed the Justice Department to prosecute his political enemies, and took on the judiciary. 

But America wouldn’t allow it. The nation rose up in outrage. Nixon resigned before Congress impeached him.

The question is whether this generation of Americans will have the strength and wisdom to do the same. 

Off the Top of My Head

The World's Biggest Hypocrite

by John Lawrence, November 24, 2018

The CIA has traced the murder of Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, directly to the door steps of one Mohammed bin Salman the Crown Prince of the dictatorship of Saudi Arabia. Some call it a "kingdom," but that is a total euphemism. They even have a tape of Khashoggi being tortured and murdered which Trump refuses to listen to. Why? Because it might ruin his appetite? He doesn't want to hear the cries and screams? He doesn't want to hear those of the children of Yemen either as he continues to support the Saudis' war there which is creating a humanitarian crisis.

So while there is a direct link to Mohammed bin Salman in Khashoggi's murder, there is no evidence whatsoever that Vladimir Putin is responsible for the attempted murder of the Skripals in the UK. Yet the US establishment has pinned the blame squarely on Putin. The US is always accusing other countries and leaders of human rights violations like we're so pure. We'll slap sanctions on them without an iota of proof. Yet when an ally does it, why there is not a peep out of Trump. There are others to be fair that have stood up and said that Saudi Arabia committed a human rights violation. People like Lindsay Graham, bless his heart. There are still a few honest, unconflicted people in Washington, thank God. But the President of the United States is not one of them.

Trump brazenly says that his non condemnation of Saudi Arabia and Salman in particular is all about money. Yes, if there is money involved, it even justifies murder. It even justifies human rights violations. We wouldn't want to take jobs away from the weapons manufacturers. Killing innocents is their job, and it is very lucrative. Thank God, there are at least some decent people in Washington who want to stop the US supported war in Yemen. Isn't it enough that we have slaughtered over a million people throughout the Middle East?

With Statement Equal Parts 'Dangerous' and 'Imbecilic,' Trump Smears Khashoggi and Vows to Back Murderous Saudis

Published on Tuesday, November 20, 2018 by Common Dreams

"This Donald Trump statement—simultaneously pledging never-ending support for Saudi Arabia and blaming Iran for every Middle East problem—reads like a 6th grader's school report."

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

67 Comments

President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media prior to his departure from the White House November 20, 2018 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

In a bizarre, exclamation point-riddled statement on Tuesday that one critic said reads more "like a 6th grader's school report" than an official White House press release, President Donald Trump shrugged at the CIA's conclusion that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) ordered the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi—"maybe he did and maybe he didn't!"—and declared that the U.S. will continue to back Saudi Arabia because it is one of the world's largest oil producers, a major purchaser of American arms, and an ally in the "fight against Iran."

"This is, without a doubt, the most uninformed, imbecilic, toady, poorly-written, categorically untrue statement I have ever seen from a president of the United States."
—Joe Cirincione, Ploughshares Fund

Speaking to reporters on the White House lawn just hours after his statement went public, Trump said Khashoggi's murder "is a very complex situation, it's a shame, but it is what it is."

"It's all about America first. We're not going to give up hundreds of billions of dollars in [weapons] orders and let Russia, China, and everybody else have them," the president added. "Saudi Arabia, if we broke with them, I think your oil prices would go through the roof. I've kept them down, they've helped me keep them down."

 

 

The Joy of Serving the Higher Idea

Dear friends,

     The more we try to normalize negativity, the more we feel we can do nothing about it.   That is what we do when we blame anything in our lives on other people. “well, if only they would behave differently…then I could…….” Worse is the perception “that’s just the way it is with humans.” Or the ever-popular “what did you expect ?” In a sense we have given up on possibility, on love, on peace, on prosperity.   We have accepted the current experience as the last word on the subject. It never is.

     Actually, what we believe now is the first word on the subject and is the start of a series of effects. Our word is Cause to our experience. But we are not talking about an idle thought; we are speaking of a dynamic faith in the hidden potential in every one of us. Our word leads to our actions, to our way of being in the world. It becomes an alive energy and it is portable. Wherever we may be, our deeper beliefs are present. This is what we bring to the world; nothing but our perception of who we are and what is possible.

     Think well of our fellow humans. Judge not by the ignorance they may be operating under; know there is an open door in every mind that is the exit point for all we want for our world.  In New Thought spirituality, we are about calling out the truer nature of ourselves and each other through the awakening of the intellect to the principle of co-creation, and by healing the heart of its sense of woundedness. This is true social activism. What we do is then charged with cheerful expectancy and the joy of serving the higher idea.

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes www.cslbakersfield.com (launch date Dec 2, 2018)

www.carol-carnes.com

www.californiafreepress.net

Off the Top of My Head

Small World Isn't It

by John Lawrence, November 21, 2018

As an Uber and Lyft driver, I have people from all over the world in my car. In particular, as I'm writing quite a bit about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and the Saudis' bombing of Yemen, I recently had a Saudi pilot in my car. He was over here for some "training." He practically begged me not to judge him. "We are just human," he said. Sure, and if you're a Saudi pilot, you do what you're told ... or else. I don't judge him. He is just doing his job.

I do judge Trump and his henchmen though. It's becoming quite obvious that US foreign policy is not based on "traditional American values" but on far darker motives like money and profit. The hatred of Iran is not because Iran is the worst actor in the Middle East. It's based on the US dollar and oil and profits from selling the Saudis weapons so they can kill their neighbors.

The totally botched killing of Khashoggi and the ridiculous attempts to cover it up make it obvious that the Saudis should not be allies of the US. You tell them Lindsay Graham. He won't do business with them again. Now MBS, as they call him, wants to kill five of the guys he ordered to kill Khashoggi as a form of ... penitence?

Bottom line: The US should get out of the Middle East except for diplomacy to ease the situation there that the US has been inflaming for years. And the US should rebuild what it has destroyed. But there's no way to bring back the million or more who have been killed.

George W. Bush Started an Immoral War. Now He's Getting the Liberty Medal

Published on Sunday, November 11, 2018 by Philly.com

"Donald Trump's narcissistic embrace of racism, crudeness, and blatant lying is too easy to brand as un-American and 'not who we are.' But George W. Bush's militarism, empire-building, and hypocrisy in pursuit of those goals was maybe a little too American."

by Will Bunch

 

114 Comments

Former President George W. Bush was awarded the Liberty Medal in Philadelphia last week. (Photo: The Washington Post/Youtube)

At least the timing is exquisite. Former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, are coming to Philadelphia on Sunday night to receive the National Constitution Center's much-ballyhooed Liberty Medal, which is supposed to be earmarked for leaders "who have strived to secure the blessings of liberty to people around the globe."

This Veterans Day also marks the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I — the massive and utterly pointless global conflagration that killed tens of millions and alienated an entire generation for reasons that historians are still struggling to explain a century later. The immoral similarities between "The War to End All Wars" and George W. Bush's 2003 lie-and-propaganda-laden push to bring the "blessings of liberty" to Iraq at the tip of a Tomahawk missile are almost beyond parody.

In announcing in July that the Bushes would be receiving the same Liberty Medal that's been draped around actual freedom fighters like Nelson Mandela, Malala Yousafzai, and Rep. John Lewis, the Constitution Center cited the couple's work with returning soldiers through George W. Bush's Military Service Initiative, which helps them cope with "the invisible wounds" of a disastrous war of choice that was launched by the 43rd president; his No. 2, Dick Cheney; and their posse.

Helping our veterans is a very good thing, and, yeah, it's a better way for the ex-president to spend his retirement years than devoting every waking moment to lucrative speeches on the hedge-fund-billionaire rubber-chicken circuit. But let's be honest: W.'s post-presidential good deeds are a kind of a mandatory community-service sentence after an administration that was essentially a criminal enterprise that caused America's standing in the world to plummet (not for the last time, unfortunately).

It's a pretty safe bet that no one on the Constitution Center's panel that selected the Bushes for the now-tarnished Liberty Medal consulted with the Iraq-born novelist Sinan Antoon, who wrote in the New York Times in March that "Fifteen Years Ago, America Destroyed My Country" and noted that estimates of as many as one million dead mean the war "is often spoken of in the United States as a 'blunder,' or even a 'colossal mistake,' " but, he writes, "It was a crime."

Nor did the panel likely investigate the "blessings" that America under Bush's leadership bestowed upon Lakhdar Boumediene, a Bosnian national scooped up in 2001 by U.S. intelligence on baseless allegations and flown to the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, where during nine years of imprisonment he said he was kept awake for days at a time, forced into uncomfortably painful positions, and brutally force-fed during a hunger strike. "These are things I do not want to write about," he wrote. "I want only to forget."

Apparently America only wants to forget the Bush years as well. (The Iraqi Antoon complained of our "mostly amnesiac citizenry" after watching Bush do a happy dance with liberal TV host Ellen DeGeneres.) The very different kind of awfulness of Donald Trump's presidency and the arrival of a new generation of voters make it important now to do something that wouldn't have been necessary just a decade ago — to remind everybody how the George W. Bush presidency wasn't just flawed but a moral low point in American history.

Leading a nation whose citizens felt a mix of unbridled patriotism and raw fear after 9/11, Bush, Cheney, and their crowd abused those sentiments to gin up fervor for a war against a country that had zero connection to the 2001 attacks. Not unlike World War I, Americans have never been given an understandable rationale for a war that had something to do with Machiavellian machinations in a region rich with oil — an abstract exercise of American power that killed more than 4,000 very real Americans on top of those hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, many of them innocent women and children.

We do know this: To make their splendid little war happen, Bush and his minions lied again and again — about "ticking time bombs" that had been unplugged years earlier, about weapons of mass destruction that did not exist, and about ties between Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda that never were. The Iraq war has destabilized the Middle East to this day and paved the way for the rise of a new anti-American group called ISIS that remains a murderous scourge. And it made the world safe for oil, right at the moment when the planet's survival depends on moving away from fossil fuels.

The Iraq war alone should be disqualifying, but there's so much more to this sordid story. Team Bush also manipulated the post-9/11 mood to bring back waterboarding and other forms of torture that are clearly illegal, thanks to a 1988 treaty enacted and praised by conservative icon Ronald Reagan. Detainees who were mostly innocent — rounded up by bounty hunters seeking easy cash — were both abused and held for years without charges at the Guantanamo prison camp, in a stunning betrayal of American values, while others were whisked to CIA black sites around the world or tortured at notorious prisons like Afghanistan's Bagram or Iraq's Abu Ghraib.

The Bush administration also shredded the Fourth Amendment with its large-scale illegal wiretapping and surveillance of everyday Americans — which makes Sunday's celebration of all things Bush by a center that honors the U.S. Constitution all the more bizarre. Of course, some of Bush's unpopularity when he left the White House in January 2009 was the result of things — the inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 economic collapse — that merely made W. a very bad president. But what happened in Iraq, Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib made him a very bad person.

The sad truth is that George W., Laura, their kids, and the next 20 generations of Bushes can (and should) help veterans find jobs or cope with post-traumatic stress disorder, but it won't bring back the dead from Mosul or the hollers of West Virginia, nor can it expunge the crimes that were committed during those years. Writing Bush's name alongside the Dalai Lama, Lech Walesa, and Thurgood Marshall on the roll of Liberty Medal winners is an embarrassment to Philadelphia. And the National Constitution Center — which told me that its head, Jeffrey Rosen, was too busy traveling for an interview and steered me to its materials touting the Bushes' award — should be ashamed.

But the Constitution Center's action is merely the exclamation point on this much broader amnesia, a dangerous blind spot in the American soul. What are we to make at the explosion of nostalgia for the once deeply unpopular 43rd president at a time when a majority of Americans are so disgusted by the antics of the 45th president? Donald Trump's narcissistic embrace of racism, crudeness, and blatant lying is too easy to brand as un-American and "not who we are." But George W. Bush's militarism, empire-building, and hypocrisy in pursuit of those goals was maybe a little too American — an inevitable tragedy in a country that is not very exceptional, with dark places we'd rather not confront in the mirror.

The reason you see Democrats like former vice president and 2020 White House aspirant Joe Biden — who'll be handing the Bushes their medals on Sunday — aiding in the restoration of W.'s reputation is because too many of us so desperately cling to notions that American Exceptionalism makes it impossible to have a criminally bad president — and that a few acts of elite humanitarianism can bring redemption for a "colossal mistake" that was actually a war crime.

Until Donald Trump took a sledgehammer to our state of denial.

What we need to understand is that America's failure in not confronting the massive sins of the Bush years — powerful proof that there is zero accountability for elites in this country — is exactly what created the climate for Trump's warped presidency. A medal for George W. Bush means that nothing matters anymore — and that's a recipe for American autocracy. That a place calling itself the National Constitution Center rewards and enables all of this is infuriating.

© 2018 philly.com

Look for the Good and Praise it

Dear friends,

Marcus Aurelius: “take care that you don’t treat humanity the way it treats human beings.”

     It is incredulous to me that human beings, the expression of the Spirit, are daily maligned, slaughtered, robbed, starved and more by other human beings, usually acting as “humanity” or some version of superiority. The cultish behavior of so many, the willingness to surrender one’s better self, the mob mentality, is running rampant in this world. Yet, we must have faith in humanity to awaken to its higher inclinations; to love, to unite with, to bless, to prosper together, to celebrate this Life we are living.

     We must be the champions of human potential; insist on it, speak about it, stand up for it and act as if it were so. Always, the spiritual approach to lasting change is to begin with oneself. How are we representing humanity, the expression of the Spirit? Are we railing against what we see or are we seeing through it to the greater possibility within it?

     Look for the Good and Praise it. That is from long ago but very apt today. Be for humanity, not against it. Be for freedom and peace, not merely against war. Be for equality and justice, not simply angry about the inequality and injustice we can identify. Our attention must be on what we know is possible and to call it out with our own behavior. We model what we wish to increase in our world. How else could it happen? To paraphrase another old saying “consciousness is contagious.”

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes

www.carol-carnes.com

www.cslbakersfield.com  

www.californiafreepress.net

Off the Top of My Head

Why is George W Bush Being Honored?

by John Lawrence, November 20, 2018

Bush started the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which have killed over a million people and now Joe Biden of all people presented him with the Liberty Medal on the hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I? Bush should have paid for his criminal acts, and instead he's being rewarded. He blatantly lied to the American people because he wanted to be a "war time President." Even the war in Afghanistan was ill conceived because Osama bin Laden was a Saudi living in Pakistan. What did Afghanistan have to do with it? Obama was duped too, by the way, into thinking that Afghanistan was responsible for 9/11. He continued that fruitless war.

If anyone other than bin Laden himself was responsible, it was our ally, Saudi Arabia, who contributed 15 of the 19 hijackers. But Trump wants to be friends with the Saudis even now after their leader has committed one of the most egregious human rights violations in human history by offing Jamal Khashoggi. Trump's rationale: they buy our weapons to kill Yemeni women and children and thereby create American jobs producing those weapons. Trump is all about creating American jobs even if they kill people.

Common Dreams put it this way:

We do know this: To make their splendid little war happen, Bush and his minions lied again and again — about "ticking time bombs" that had been unplugged years earlier, about weapons of mass destruction that did not exist, and about ties between Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda that never were. The Iraq war has destabilized the Middle East to this day and paved the way for the rise of a new anti-American group called ISIS that remains a murderous scourge. And it made the world safe for oil, right at the moment when the planet's survival depends on moving away from fossil fuels.

Has this guy no shame? Has this country no shame? Bush represented a new low in American politics until Trump came along who is even lower. Trump wants to stay friends with a murderer because he buys lots of weapons from the US, and Trump thinks he's protecting the jobs of the weapons makers. The US has sunk to a new moral low point when its economy depends on selling weapons to murderers.

So now even the Democrats want to rehabilitate George W Bush. He's one of us former Presidents - welcome to the club, by the way - so we can't let his reputation fall too low. He spends his time helping veterans and painting pictures. What's not to like? It turns out a lot. The destabilization of the Middle East. The destruction of billions of dollars worth of real estate. The killing of a million people. And that's just for starters. A fit tribute to George W Bush would be to send him to Guantanamo and let him linger there for the rest of his life being waterboarded from time to time.

Trump Said Considering Extradition of Turkish Cleric to Quiet Erdogan on Khashoggi Murder

Published on Friday, November 16, 2018 by Informed Comment

A stronger phrase than abject shamelessness needs to be coined in order fully to characterize the cheapness of what the White House is apparently considering

by Juan Cole

 

13 Comments

Trump’s desperate ploy, finally to shut Erdogan up about the crown prince and let the whole controversy die down if possible, so as to preserve Bin Salman as quarterback of the White House Middle East game. (Photo: Screenshot)

NBC News maintains that four sources in US government agencies (probably the FBI and the State Department) told its reporters that the Trump White House is seeking ways to expel Turkish religious leader Fethullah Gulen. But the kicker is that Trump apparently is exploring the extradition as a bribe to shut Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan up about the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi on the orders of crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman. The Saudis are now trying to pin the blame on lower-level operatives, whom they have sentenced to death. But Erdogan has been like a bulldog, insisting that Bin Salman ordered the hit (which is the only logical).

NBC says that career officials were absolutely furious when they figured out what was behind the White House requests. It is of course the ultimate in shamelessness for Trump to have a US green card holder sent to the gallows in Turkey in order to cover up the murder of another US green card holder murdered in the Saudi consulate.

Turkey maintains that Gulen’s Hizmet Movement is a front for terrorist activities and was behind the failed 2016 military coup attempt against Tayyip Erdogan. I think there is evidence that the group is a cult and that it did attempt to infiltrate key Turkish government institutions, in the way of the old Stalinist covert cells. But that all Gulenists are terrorists is pretty hard to believe; the group runs schools and universities and those institutions haven’t been violent (they have been shut down in Turkey proper). That the upper echelons of the leadership have been involved in shady goings-on is plausible (just as it is possible with regard to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which is being treated by the al-Sisi government the way Ankara is now treating the Gulenists).

The US government has repeatedly denied such Turkish requests, and disputes that the evidence the Turkish government has provided to the FBI is sufficient to warrant Gulen’s extradition. (This datum in the NBC reporting is itself significant, since it means that Turkey has not been able to provide convincing documentation on the origins of the 2016 coup to US authorities.)

Erdogan’s campaign to unseat the crown prince has been extremely inconvenient for Trump. Trump has said that Saudi purchases of billions in US weaponry cannot be put in jeopardy over Khashoggi’s murder. Bin Salman is also the linchpin of the Trump administration’s anti-Iran coalition, and to the extent that he is permanently weakened by the fallout over Khashoggi, Iran is strengthened. Bin Salman only had part of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates) with him on boycotting Iran. Oman and Qatar have refused to join in, and even Kuwait is soft on this issue. Egypt, Jordan and Morocco were aboard, but offered little practical support, and both Egypt and Jordan want improved relations with the pro-Iran government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. With Bin Salman being ridiculed as “The Sawman” (Abu Minshar), like a cartoon villain, it is hard to see how he can lead a charge against Iran.

In fact, the strategy of flooding the market with extra oil has already backfired, harming the Saudi and other Arab producers’ bottom line, and Saudi Arabia has announced cutbacks for next month (cutbacks that will help Iran withstand the boycott, since it may sell less oil but get more per barrel).

Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon are pro-Iran and Qatar has correct relations with Tehran, plus Russia and China are with Iran. The European Union is trying to protect Iran and keep the 2015 nuclear deal. The US-backed Bin Salman’s success in the anti-Iran push was already in doubt before the murder of Khashoggi. Now it is in severe doubt.

Hence Trump’s desperate ploy, finally to shut Erdogan up about the crown prince and let the whole controversy die down if possible, so as to preserve Bin Salman as quarterback of the White House Middle East game.

A stronger phrase than abject shamelessness needs to be coined in order fully to characterize the cheapness of what the White House is apparently considering. (Note that the White House denies the NBC story; but four sources are pretty damning).

© 2018 Juan Cole

We are Responsible for the Quality of Life Here on our Little Planet

Dear friends,

     This is late today because I have been having computer problems all morning. It turned out to be a connection problem.   Isn’t that always the case? If it is not properly drawing current, nothing works!   The same is true for us as well.   We “plug in” through the right use of mind. It all begins with the declaration of our unity in the field of possibility. A religious person might say our oneness with God.

     How to stay connected? It has to do with a spiritual practice that is regular and intentional. Next is paying attention to how we react to the experience we are having, which would include the images on television. Do we make an effort to see through the appearance and to judge it righteously? By that I mean, can we see the bigger picture, place the event in the context of a larger something happening?

     As terrible as the suffering of humanity is right now, I do believe something more is coming through. We are experiencing the effects of our past ignorance and our refusal to consider that we are responsible for the quality of life here on our little planet, and in fact, the planet itself. We have dumbed down our relationship to the Whole and thereby we have caused the suffering we see right now. It is up to us to make the changes necessary to put things to rights. It is not too late but it is a right now project.   Let’s stay connected to the Source and claim our power!

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes

www.cslbakersfield.com (web launch on Dec 2, 2018)

www.californiafreepress.net

Off the Top of My Head

Beyond Shamelessness...Beyond Hypocrisy

by John Lawrence, November 18, 2018

First you have the murder of a US based Saudi journalist who was critical of the dictator of Saudi Arabia - Mohammed bin Salman. Then you have the Saudi attempts to cover it up. Now even the CIA is convinced that the order came from Salman who plans to kill five of the hatchetmen involved as a way of assuaging international opinion, apparently, that they were really the ones responsible, not him. But then you have Trump, on behalf of the holier-than-thou United States when it comes to murders like this, saying that we have to go along with Saudi Arabia and Salman on this because, otherwise, it might cost American jobs. Sure, and if all wars were stopped immediately, it would cost thousands of American jobs. So that is what this is all about - the perpetuation of war because it might cost American jobs?

Morality and ethics have been totally thrown out the window by the US in the conduct of international relations. Any careful consideration would conclude that Iran, although far from perfect, is a more moral and ethical country than Saudi Arabia. Yet we have to hate Iran and sanction Iran and try to bring Iran's economy to its knees because Saudi Arabia hates Iran and they are our ally? This whole thing is ridiculous. Trump is trying to preserve Saudi Arabia as an American ally because Nixon made a deal with the Saudis to sell oil only for dollars thus making the dollar the world's reserve currency. The Saudis off people in the public square for hardly any reason at all. Their religion, Wahhabism, preaches death to the West and to Jews. Usama bin Laden was a Saudi as were 15 of the nineteen 9/11 highjackers. The Saudis are just using the US and vice versa.

On moral and ethical grounds, we shouldn't be allies with Saudi Arabia. On moral and ethical grounds concerning the welfare of our grandchildren who will be getting the worst effects of climate change brought about by the usage of oil, we shouldn't be friends with Saudi Arabia. I don't say we have to be enemies with them either. Just take a step back and treat them as you would any other country. Don't alienate them, but don't consider them total allies either. The US should operate so as to bring peace to the world, not to side with one set of nations against another set. In other words diplomacy rather than outright support and alliances. Only then will America have the moral and ethical high ground.

We shouldn't be basing American jobs on support for an immoral dictator, who shamelessly tries to cover up the fact that he had a journalist brutally murdered by murdering five of the guys he ordered to do it. When Trump is hopefully defeated in 2020, the US should get back into the Iran deal which Trump pulled out of and which the Europeans have tried to uphold, and we should sanction Saudi Arabia over the murder of Khashoggi, let the chips fall where they may. Only then can the US redeem itself as a moral and ethical nation.

We Draw From the Well of Abundance

Dear friends,

     Meister Eckhart of the 11^th century said “God is a great underground river that no one can dam up and no one can stop.” It is a lovely image which connotes movement and energy. Perhaps it is like molten lava out of which new worlds are built. The river of Spirit flows within our own Being to be directed by us as we tap into its resources and express them.

     In other words, there is, as one example, a river of Love moving in us. If we would allow it, it would take us somewhere we have never been; perhaps into compassion and unconditional acceptance of difference. It might act as cause to how we care-take the planet. There is a river of supply, as well, to be used by us to facilitate our expression. We draw from the well of abundance when we have passion and a willingness to work to achieve our goals.

     Meditation is a way to move into the river of possibility and to float in it. Done regularly, we develop a sense of being one with something that enlivens greater love and peace in us. Spiritual practice is never about getting things, it is always a way in to what is already ours by definition of our unity with Source. We discover the resources within and begin to reveal them in our daily activities. Life gets better because we have claimed our truer identity.

     Sit still. Go down into the river. See what comes back with you.

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes  

www.carol-carnes.com (note the hyphen)

www.californiafreepress.net

THE NEXT CRASH

 by Robert Reich

 

Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Sorry to deliver the news, but it’s time to worry about the next crash.

The combination of stagnant wages with most economic gains going to the top is once again endangering the economy. 

Most Americans are still living in the shadow of the Great Recession that started in December 2007 and officially ended in June 2009. More have jobs, to be sure. But they haven’t seen any rise in their wages, adjusted for inflation.

Many are worse off due to the escalating costs of housing, healthcare, and education. And the value of whatever assets they own is less than in 2007.Which suggests we’re careening toward the same sort of crash we had then, and possibly as bad as 1929.

Clear away the financial rubble from those two former crashes and you’d see they both followed upon widening imbalances between the capacity of most people to buy, and what they as workers could produce. Each of these imbalances finally tipped the economy over.

The same imbalance has been growing again. The richest 1 percent of Americans now takes home about 20 percent of total income, and owns over 40 percent of the nation’s wealth.

These are close to the peaks of 1928 and 2007.

The underlying problem isn’t that Americans have been living beyond their means. It’s that their means haven’t been keeping up with the growing economy. Most gains have gone to the top.

But the rich only spend a small fraction of what they earn. The economy depends on the spending of middle and working class families.

By the first quarter of this year, household debt was at an all-time high of $13.2 trillion. Almost 80 percent of Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck.

It was similar in the years leading up to the crash of 2007. Between 1983 and 2007, household debt soared while most economic gains went to the top. If the majority of households had taken home a larger share, they wouldn’t have needed to go so deeply into debt.

Similarly, between 1913 and 1928, the ratio of personal debt to the total national economy nearly doubled. After the 1929 crash, the government invented new ways to boost wages – Social Security, unemployment insurance, overtime pay, a minimum wage, the requirement that employers bargain with labor unions, and, finally, a full-employment program called World War II.

After the 2007 crash, the government bailed out the banks and pumped enough money into the economy to contain the slide. But apart from the Affordable Care Act, nothing was done to address the underlying problem of stagnant wages.

Trump and his Republican enablers are now reversing regulations put in place to stop Wall Street’s excessively risky lending.

But Trump’s real contributions to the next crash are his sabotage of the Affordable Care Act, rollback of overtime pay, burdens on labor organizing, tax reductions for corporations and the wealthy but not for most workers, cuts in programs for the poor, and proposed cuts in Medicare and Medicaid – all of which put more stress on the paychecks of most Americans.

Ten years after the start of the Great Recession, it’s important to understand that the real root of the collapse wasn’t a banking crisis. It was the growing imbalance between consumer spending and total output – brought on by stagnant wages and widening inequality.

That imbalance is back. Watch your wallets.

Off the Top of My Head

Elderly Workers Paying into Social Security But Getting Less in Their Monthly Social Security Check

by John Lawrence, November 17, 2018

At the ripe old age of 77, I'm still working. Fortunately, I have good health and am still able to do so. I actually get pleasure at being a functioning, productive member of society. However, my monthly social security check, which I started receiving at the age of 62, gets less with each passing year despite the fact that I still pay into social security due to a self-employment tax of 15.3%. Because I am self-employed as an Uber and Lyft driver, I pay the employer's and the employee's share of social security tax. The social security tax is 12.4% and I also pay 2.9% Medicare tax despite the fact that I pay a Medicare premium each month for health insurance. So old people working get screwed six ways to Sunday.

In 2016 I received a monthly social security benefit of $735.90. My Medicare monthly premium was $104.90. So the amount that the Social Security Administration deposited in my checking account each month was $631. Now despite the fact that I'm still working and paid $430. self employment tax in 2017, which should have given me an increase in my monthly social security check because the amount you get depends on the total amount paid in and I'm still paying in, the amount deposited in my account each month has gone down to $618. How could this be possible, you might ask? The answer is simple. I was given a paltry $1 a month increase in social security based on the fact that I paid $430 into it so the government made $418 off me in self employment tax for 2017. However, my monthly Medicare premium went up to $134. So my Medicare premiums are going up much more than the paltry amounts the government thinks I should get because I'm still working and paying in to social security. In short I'm getting ripped off as an elderly person who still works.

You know the government likes to screw the old and the poor. It announced in my annual letter the following: "Your Social Security benefits will increase by 2.0% in 2018 because of a rise in the cost of living." So despite the fact that I'm still paying into social security and despite the fact that I got an increase in my benefits due to a "rise in the cost of living" my monthly social security check which is deposited directly into my checking account went down by $13! How's that for a screw job?

Meanwhile, the rich got a huge tax break due to Trump's giveaway to the rich. Inequality grew even greater. The gap between the rich and the poor widened. The ranks of the homeless increased. You can't even rent a room for $618. much less buy food or medicine. The government will give much more in a monthly social security check to millionaires who don't even need it than it will to poor people that have paid into it for 60 years or more.

I am fortunate. I have other sources of income than my monthly social security check, and I'm still in good health so I can still work. I only work part time so I still get to take a 4 hour break in my work as an Uber and Lyft driver each day during which I swim, have lunch and take a nap. So I'm still able to do everything I want to do in retirement. But, if this government gave a hoot about old people, they wouldn't require them to keep paying into social social security after retirement age despite the fact they might be still working. That would have saved me $430. last year.

As WaPo Accuses Trump of 'Abetting Saudi Coverup,' Crown Prince Shielded While Khashoggi 'Murder Team' Members Face Execution

Published on Friday, November 16, 2018 by Common Dreams

"It's not surprising at all, but there is something extra evil about ordering the death of a bunch of people who tortured and murdered a dissident on your orders while you pretend you had nothing to do with it."

by Jon Queally, staff writer

 

2 Comments

A protester dressed as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman and another dressed as U.S. President Donald Trump stand outside the White House in the wake of the disappearance of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi on Oct. 19. (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

"It's not surprising at all, but there is something extra evil about ordering the death of a bunch of people who tortured and murdered a dissident on your orders while you pretend you had nothing to do with it."

That was the sharp reaction from MSNBC's Chris Hayes after news emerged Thursday that while Saudi Arabia would continue to shield Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman from responsiblity, the nation's top court prosecutor would seek the death penalty against five members of the "murder team" that assassinated, and then dismembered, journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, Turkey last month.

While a full and transparent investigation has yet to be conducted—and the video and audio evidence the Turkish government possesses yet to be made public—reports have strongly suggested the likelihood that the crown prince was directly responsible for ordering the mission and knew the murder of Khashoggi was its goal or a likely outcome:

It's not surprising at all, but there is something extra evil about ordering the death of a bunch of people who tortured and murdered a dissident on your orders while you pretend you had nothing to do with it.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) November 15, 2018

Responding to the latest statement by the Saudis on Thursday, Turkey's foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, called it completely insufficient in terms of admitting guilt and said it betrayed the facts and earlier statements acknowledging the murder had been premeditated. "The necessary equipment and people were previously brought in to kill and later dismember him," he said.

Speaking with The Independent, a Turkish source familiar with the thinking in Ankara described the statement by the Saudi prosecutor as "a great work of fiction" that nobody in the Turkish government is buying. The Saudis, the source said, "wants the world to believe that a group of goons just felt like killing the most prominent non-royal Saudi in the world."

Meanwhile, in an editorial published late in the day Thursday, the Washington Post, where Khashoggi was employed as a contributor, the newspaper condemned the Saudis' latest story about the murder as well as the Trump administration's continued willingness to play along with it:

By offering up this incredible account, the Saudi regime is baldly defying all those, including leading members of Congress, who called for full disclosure and accountability. Yet the Trump administration appears ready to accept its stonewalling. On Thursday, it announced sanctions against 17 people implicated by the Saudis — leaving untouched both the crown prince and top intelligence officials in Riyadh. 

Accepting the Saudi story means ignoring a number of well-established facts. An audio recording of Mr. Khashoggi’s last moments, which Turkish officials shared with CIA Director Gina Haspel, indicates he was attacked and strangled immediately after entering the consulate. The Saudi version claims he died only after a quarrel and a struggle that prompted the head of the "negotiation team" to decide to murder him by injecting him with drugs.

The Post continued by saying the Saudi's "all-too-transparent tissue of lies only underlines the need for a genuinely independent international investigation led by the United Nations" and castigating the Trump administration for "abetting the Saudi coverup" with the toothless sanctions annnounced by the Treasury Department on Thursday.  

"Congress should not allow this travesty to continue. It should suspend all military sales and cooperation with Saudi Arabia until a credible international investigation of the Khashoggi killing is completed," the editorial concluded. "The Saudi cover story is just one more instance of Mohammed bin Salman’s arrogant and reckless behavior. The true murderers of Jamal Khashoggi must be named and punished."

---

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Science and Religion Shall Walk Hand in Hand

Dear friends,

     We have heard from spiritual teachers that “the day will come when science and religion shall walk hand in hand.” However, the religion that science will partner with is not the religion of the West, but the mystical traditions of Eastern philosophies. Last night I awoke in the wee hours and feeling wide awake began to scan my bookshelf. I took out The Tao Of Physics which I haven’t read in 25 years. By Fritjof Capra, this is the definitive statement on the topic.

     The New physics demands the inclusion of the Feminine in our very masculine world view. We have been operating with only half of our natural being! It is crucial in these times that we stem the tide of rampant toxic masculinity. It is not about men and women (although we are each affected) as much as it is about the direct experience of our own spiritual wholeness, and the science that supports it. The Feminine values that have been almost completely ignored by western religion and old paradigm science are desperately needed in our perception of reality and our relationship to the universe.

   What Quantum physics and Eastern Philosophy have in common is the “unity of all things” viewpoint. From the cosmic to the atomic, everything is one something particularizing itself. It is in deep meditation that we begin to feel the truth of that astonishing truth. ( We knew it before we learned to talk and before we were talked out of it!) What this does to the thinking mind is to enliven our love, our sense of unconditional acceptance of difference. We know that we are one with Nature and our decisions must be in accord with her well-being. We perceive that we are immersed in Cause and all that it can do must come through us if we are to experience its Presence . We know that our personhood is both masculine and feminine and each one is necessary for the full expression of our true nature. Imagine how different the world would be if that were a shared perception by all of humanity.

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes

www.carol-carnes.com

www.californiafreepress.net

Off the Top of My Head

The Luck of the Draw

by John Lawrence, November 16, 2018

I don't like to gamble especially if there's a possibility that I might lose money. That's why I love the game I'm now participating in. It's a game of chance wherein I always win. It's just a question of how much. I'm an Uber and Lyft driver. On any given day it's possible that there are no riders, no one requesting rides or there are too many Uber and Lyft drivers in the same vicinity I'm in so that none of us get that many rides. However, I've found to my amazement that the financial results are quite consistent depending on how many hours I put in. Some days are better than others, of course, but on nine out of ten days I make almost exactly the same amount per unit time.

Some people are pissed that Uber and Lyft drivers are self-employed contractors, and as such don't have the "protections" that employees have. Well, I've been self-employed for most of my life, and the freedom that comes with it more than offsets any "protections" employees who have to work a straight eight hour shift day after day may have. When you're an Uber and Lyft driver you're never late for work, and you can turn off the apps and take a break any time your little heart desires.

You get to know where all the supermarkets and Starbucks are located because having to pee occasionally is one of the hazards of the road. Starbucks now has a corporate policy of letting anyone use the bathroom without even having to purchase anything. I buy Starbucks some times, but never when I have to pee. After the two black guys in a Philadelphia Starbucks had the police called on them because they hadn't bought anything and wanted to use the bathroom, there was a big brou ha ha over that and Starbucks announced the official policy of letting anyone use the bathroom no questions asked.

But I digress from my main point - that Uber and Lyft driving is a game of chance in which I always win, and the winnings are pretty much fairly consistent. You learn that certain times of day and certain days of the week are better than others. For instance, weekends are the best because you don't have to deal with any rush hour traffic. I enjoy giving tourists travel tips and answering their questions. You meet some interesting people and pick up some interesting tidbits of information that you wouldn't have known otherwise. At the end of the week, Uber and Lyft deposit the money directly into your account, and that's nice. You can even get paid sooner than that, but I've never needed to do that.

So the luck of the draw works for me. I've got a great car that's a pleasure to drive. I've seen some incredible sunsets. I see my beautiful city in all kinds of lights. I've got a great audio system tuned to several jazz internet channels that I listen to all day. I see people out and about enjoying themselves. I'm a fly on the wall to some interesting conversations. Yeah, to some extent, I live vicariously, but all in all I love my job. It's based on the luck of the draw, but I always win. The only way I could lose is if I were to be involved in an accident so cautious driving is paramount.

TIME FOR MEDICARE FOR ALL

 by Robert Reich

 

 Tuesday, November 13, 2018

In the midterm elections, most Democrats who were elected or reelected to the House supported Medicare for All.

As Trump and Republicans in Congress try to undermine the Affordable Care Act and raise the costs of health care, the American people continue to push back.

Over 70% of Americans–and even 52% of Republicans–now support Medicare for All, a single-payer plan that builds on Medicare and would cover everyone at far lower cost than the current system.

Here are the facts:

Medicare for All is the cheapest and best direction for the country. Private for-profit insurers spend a fortune trying to attract healthy people while avoiding sick people, filling out paperwork from hospitals and providers, paying top executives, and rewarding shareholders.

And for-profit insurers are trying to merge like mad, in order to make even more money. This is why private for-profit health insurance is becoming so expensive, and why almost every other advanced nation–including our neighbor to the north–has adopted a single-payer system at less cost per person and with better health outcomes.

Administering Medicare is only 1.1 percent of its total costs; the rest goes directly into care. Even including Medicare Advantage, which involves private plans, total administrative costs are just 7 percent.

But private insurers spend about 12 percent of total costs on administration. Or put another way, Medicare’s 2016 administrative costs came to about $156 per person compared to over $594 per person with private insurance.

Medicare saves so much money for three simple reasons:

First, it has economies of scale. The more enrollees, the lower the cost per enrollee. Medicare for All would have even larger economies of scale, presumably lowering the per-person costs further.  

Second, Medicare spends almost nothing on marketing and advertising, while for-profit insurers spend a fortune.

Third, Medicare doesn’t have to earn profits.

Most Americans support expanding access to quality, affordable care through Medicare for All. Yet Trump and the Republicans continue to try to gut the Affordable Care Act and take away care from tens of millions.

The American public has a real choice here: expensive health care for the few or quality, affordable health care for the many. It’s time for Medicare for All.

Evoking the Connection with Boundless Possibility.

Dear friends

     Rupert Sheldrake, the scientist who is known for his work with Morphic Resonance said, in a talk with Matthew Fox, “because the mind is not localized in the brain” but exists in a field, intentional thoughts could have definite effects on the course of Nature. Including positive thinking, he was also referring to real prayer, which declares the existence of a higher presence that is in some way responsive to our intentions. That is an apt description of what 21^st century prayer is all about. In modern New Thought we call it spiritual mind treatment. We are giving our own mind a treatment of spiritual truth, in order to dispel limited ideas which commonly occur as we look at the world as it appears to be.

     It stands to reason that a higher presence would co-respond to higher ideas that speak of its nature and our unity in it. Our prayers are not always answered because we are assuming we must earn the favor of a remote power that sits in judgement of our request. Science is telling us a different story of the cosmos, one which New Thought has been telling for decades and others told in the ancient world. Our minds are the extension of pure intelligence and absolute love. We are the way the extension continues into time and space and therefore, becomes personal experience.

     The New Science and spirituality are actually one thing. They direct us to think above our experience, to declare what we intend over what already is. The Higher presence does not fix anything.   It re-creates the original image and likeness of wholeness that precedes all form. When we sit down to commune with our Source, we are evoking from within our own mind the connection with boundless possibility. Let’s be very intentional about what we drop into the Field of co-creation.

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes

www.cslbakersfield.com (being recreated !)

www.californiafreepress.net

Off the Top of My Head

The Hundredth Anniversary of the Great War

by John Lawrence, September 14, 2018

A few days ago we celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the end of the Great War, otherwise known as the First World War. The armistice was signed in Paris on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. Too bad the war didn't end in 1911, but it hadn't started yet. Armistice Day was transformed into Veterans' Day as wars piled up in the ensuing years, and you just couldn't have a holiday for every war that was fought subsequently.

World War I exemplified the folly of war. There was no real reason for it. It was just everyone wanted a war. So the Archduke of some obscure country was assassinated. Big Deal. That was just an excuse to have what everyone - mainly men - wanted. They hoped to cover themselves in glory and prove their manhood. Instead they died miserable deaths stuck in barbed wire or in muddy trenches having inhaled nerve gas and fighting for their breath. So much for glory.

World War I was also called the War to End All Wars because humanity had finally learned its lesson, so it was thought, and war was just a cause for death and destruction. It proved nothing. It accomplished nothing. People thought we as human beings had finally learned our lesson. But no, how wrong they were. Human beings went on to fight other wars sowing death and destruction down the millennia. World War II was a direct outgrowth of World War I, as the armistice proscribed onerous reparations on Germany as the loser of the war. This created bitterness among Germans who were then fodder for the machinations of one Adolf Hitler. He exploited German bitterness over reparations, and the rest is history.

But Europeans and Americans eventually got smart. Instead of slaughtering each other (after all they were the most advanced cultures on earth in science, technology and the arts), they went on to slaughter poor people in backward countries like Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East. These wars have led to bitterness towards Americans, primarily, as Europe seems to have partially learned the lessons of war: it's not worth it. America assumed the mantle of chief warmonger of the world after the Second World War when Europe was too devastated to fight any longer.

But the legacy of war continues and that legacy amounts to revenge against the chief protagonist of the war similar to the situation in which German resentment at the "peace" settlement of WW I led to WW II. Now its the Middle East that has it in for the US and wants revenge. War lays the ground for future wars as it creates future enemies. What saved Europe after WW II was the Marshall plan wherein Germany was accepted back into the community of nations instead of being burdened with reparations and considered a pariah which was the outcome of WW I.

Maybe there is a lesson here. Help the Middle East rebuild itself. Institute a Marshall plan for the Middle East. Then perhaps there will not be so much resentment that will tend to perpetuate the human proclivity for war. Shovels instead of guns. Infrastructure is good. War is bad. It's as simple as that. But there's no money for that; there's only money for war. Ask the American military-industrial complex. Ask Lockheed Martin. Ask Raytheon. Ask Boeing. Ask Trump who famously said he didn't want to alienate Saudi Arabia because then the US would lose a lucrative arms deal, and Americans would lose jobs. Too much money is at stake so wars must continue.

California wildfires: Camp fire becomes state's deadliest with 42 people killed

 From the Guardian:

 

As more than 8,000 fire crews battle the Camp and Woolsey fires and hotels fill in Chico, residents find refuge in unofficial shelters

Play Video

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 California wildfires: rescuers search for victims as winds fuel flames – video

 The Camp fire has become the most destructive wildfire in California history, incinerating the town of Paradise in the northern part of the state. It is also among the deadliest, with at least 29 killed, and it has displaced more than 50,000 people.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said on Monday the fire had grown by three sq miles to 177 sq miles and was 25% contained.

Two people have also died in the Woolsey fire, a major blaze around Los Angeles, bringing total deaths in the state to 31. On Monday officials said that fire had burned 91,572 acres and destroyed 370 structures. It was 20% contained. On Sunday evening, some neighborhoods allowed evacuees back in and the US 101 highway west of LA was reopened.

Statewide, 150,000 people have been displaced and more than 8,000 fire crews are deployed. Authorities have said 228 people are unaccounted for. High winds and dry conditions threaten more areas through the rest of the week, fire officials warned.

Around Paradise, about 1,300 people have found refuge at evacuation shelters, according to a Cal Fire spokesman, Steve Kaufman, a total which includes several shelters in Butte county and some in Sutter, Glenn and Plumas counties. But that’s only a fraction of the total displaced from Paradise, Magalia, Concow and other towns in the Sierra foothills.

Many converged on Chico, a city of about 90,000 just 20 minutes from Paradise. Hotels in Chico are at capacity with fire evacuees and some, but not all, shelters are full. Others stayed with friends and family or even in their cars, eager to remain close enough to return home at a moment’s notice, even though that could be months away.

A Walmart in Chico has become an unofficial refugee camp for those displaced by the blaze. On Sunday, more than a dozen tents lined an empty field next to the store, while the parking lot was filled day and night with trailers and cars stuffed with belongings – toys, pillows and family photos.

Though without some of the comforts of a traditional shelter, the fire refugees in the parking lot were not forgotten. Local food truck owners were there to provide free food and church groups from around the state cooked and distributed meals. Chico residents provided clothes, toys and gear, free of charge.

Evacuees said they couldn’t find space at a nearby shelter, didn’t want to part from their animals or didn’t feel comfortable at a shelter.

At this unofficial evacuation center, tales of generosity by those most affected emerged. Tammy Mezera and her friend Daryl Merritt spent three nights sleeping in a tent outside the store after the fire forced them to run for their lives. When they found out a neighbor, Matthew Flanagan, had slept under a taco truck, they gave him the extra space in their tent.

“It’s like an instant family,” Mezera said, petting her dog. “We’re all taking care of each other.”

The three made friends with strangers like Andrew Duran, who sleeps just outside their tent in a sleeping bag. And despite the darkness and loss, they showed endless generosity toward one another. Eating breakfast together on Sunday morning, they shared a few laughs, dancing to Bill Withers’ Lean on Me.

It’s the kind of coming together the community will need, Mezera said, after more than 6,400 homes were lost.

Meanwhile, as firefighters and law enforcement seek to protect the town and its citizens from the deadly blaze, they faced the loss of their own homes. The fire destroyed the homes of 17 Paradise police officers, Chief Eric Reinbold said. None of the officers missed a day of work since the fire began, he added.

At least 38 firefighters battling the blaze lost their homes, said Tim Aboudara, the International Association of Fire Fighters state service representative. That number was expected to grow.

The association was working with the CDF Firefighters Benevolent Foundation and the California Professional Firefighters and to assist those firefighters and their families. Several had already been placed into temporary housing, Aboudara said.

Along with the loss of their own homes, many firefighters are devastated they were unable to stop the rapid spread of the fire before it overtook the town of Paradise, Aboudara said.

“Our job is to put the fire out and we couldn’t stop that,” Aboudara said. “There was nothing we could do.”

No long-term plans to house evacuees, who may not be allowed to return home for months, have been announced, but Congressman Doug LaMalfa said on Sunday he expects a federal disaster declaration from the White House within the coming days, the subject of appeals by the governor, Jerry Brown.

“This is truly a tragedy that all Californians can understand and respond to,” Brown told reporters on Sunday. “It’s a time to pull together and work through these tragedies.”

Once federal aid is approved, Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) will come to the area to begin working with local residents and business owners on recovery.

Let Your Spirit Encompass All the Children of the World

Dear friends,

     It has become impossible for me to do a Spiritual Mind Treatment for myself or my children without including all the children of the world and all of humanity. If there is one aspect of the chaos we are experiencing that is useful, it is our understanding that we are all in this together; that we are the way and the means through which Spirit expresses and we have everything we need to turn things around.

     There is great power in numbers. It has been proven that when 1% of any population is meditating regularly, the crime rate drops and a greater peace permeates the environment. That is one thing we could be doing together that would have a direct impact in our own neighborhood. It has to be regular, though, or the benefits are not measurable.

     Spiritual self-reliance is not a selfish ego-driven state of mind. It is the awareness that what we think, feel, allow or promote have effects in the world. Our power is great and must be managed. The great problem in the world today is that those despots do not know what internal power they possess; they fight for external power, and that is the way oppression and violence begins.

     Do not underestimate how much your internal state of mind affects the world in which you live. Let’s make a concerted effort, together, to stabilize our own inner life and to continue to know the truth about humanity, its origins and what is possible. It is never too late to start an evolution!

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes  

www.cslbakersfield.com (launch date Dec 2, 2018)

www.californiafreepress.net

Off the Top of My Head

The Dumbing Down of America

by John Lawrence, November 13, 2018

People need to start wrapping their heads around two facts: (1) Climate change is directly responsible for weather disasters like the Paradise fire which killed at least 31 people and destroyed over 7000 houses and (2) the proliferation of guns is directly responsible for the mass murders that are happening on a daily basis. In general businesses and corporations are responsible for the despoliation of the environment because its more profitable for them to dump their waste products in the environment than to dispose of them in a responsible manner. These are called externalities. An externality is a side effect or consequence of an industrial or commercial activity that affects other parties without this being reflected in the cost of the goods or services involved.

Whoever thought it was a good idea to use gasoline to power cars and dump its waste product, carbon dioxide into the environment? People should have thought of the consequences of this from the very beginning of automobile production. Henry Ford was a smart guy, but he had no clue that his brainchild would be responsible for altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere and this would lead to sinking cities in New York, Miami, Tokyo and London among other places. He had no idea that his invention would cause massive hurricanes and tornadoes as well as giant rainstorms which would cause flash flooding wiping out towns and cities in a single event.

So today, echoing George W Bush's exhortation to "just go shopping" after the 9/11 tragedy, we have Trump's denial of climate change and as much as saying 'just go out and buy another gas guzzler'. Who cares about the consequences to the environment? We want to live the way our Grandpappy lived and not worry about the environment the way he didn't have to worry about the environment. Americans just want their stuff, and they want it now. They don't worry about their grandchildren.

The educational system is failing if its not concerning itself with two things: global warming or climate change and the consequences of the proliferation of guns which cause about as many deaths each year as do car accidents. Does anyone in America check out the way they do business in other advanced countries where they have recognized climate change and gun proliferation as problems? These societies have gotten much better results not to mention the single payer systems for health care. From the Washington Post:

"For the first time in more than  60 years, firearms and automobiles are killing Americans at an identical rate, according to new mortality data released this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In 2014, the age-adjusted death rate for both firearms (including homicides, suicides and accidental deaths) and motor vehicle events (car crashes, collisions between cars and pedestrians, etc) stood at 10.3 deaths per 100,000 people."

Life Demands That We Get Back in the Game

Dear friends,

     It is always difficult when we blame others for our own experience. We miss the opportunity to grow beyond whatever produced the situation in which we find ourselves. It is never about anyone else, not really. How we react to anything comes from deep within our own self-identity.   It might seem that the other person has triggered our reaction but really, we were just waiting for an opportunity to let it out!

     Forgiveness is the act of taking self-responsibility for what is happening in the moment. After all, we are the only one who is always present in our personal experience. Bless the thing and move on. Call it a blessing and get going in a new direction. It is not easy to do when there is a real tragedy involved. When we lose a loved one to violence, do these spiritual principles prevail? As hard as it is to see, the answer is yes. The day will come when we simply must forgive and let go. The grieving process is necessary for most of us and is to be honored. But it cannot go on forever.

     Life demands that we get back in the game, as it were. Our gifts and our love and our compassion are needed in this world.  We are at our best when we allow them to take the lead and direct our actions. Real positive change comes, not from anger, but from a deep belief in the ultimate Good in all people. We find ways to bring it out, see it in everyone, but begin with ourselves.

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes

www.cslbakersfield.com

www.californiafreepress.net

Off the Top of My Head

Should Europe Provide Its Own Military?

by John Lawrence

Trump has said that the US is a sucker to provide military protection for Europe at our own expense. He wants Europe to pay for its own defense. That could mean an European army as French President Macron has suggested. Or that could mean payments to the US to provide protection similar to the way the Pope pays the Swiss guards for protection. So what's wrong with this idea? The US could cut its defense budget by a third at least if Europe provided for its own protection. After all they are the main ones being protected by NATO. You wouldn't need NATO any more. All you would need is an alliance of some sort.

But the US military-industrial complex is not going along with this idea because, first of all, they would be losing a lot of money. Secondly, they would be losing a lot of money. Those huge defense contracts, which keep the US economy humming and provide jobs at all levels, would go away. However, if the money was spent instead for peaceful purposes like building infrastructure, there is no need for the jobs to go away. They would just take a different form. Lockheed Martin would just pivot from being a defense contractor to being a peace contractor. The peace-industrial complex would take the place of the military-industrial complex. Instead of all the folks in the military bearing arms, they would be bearing shovels. It might not be as sexy as firing off rounds, but it would provide for the defense of the country in another way. Instead of a third class infrastructure, the US would regain once again a first class infrastructure.

California Shooting Victim's Mother Issues Powerful Demand for Action: "I Don't Want Prayers. I Don't Want Thoughts. I Want Gun Control."

Published on Friday, November 09, 2018 by Common Dreams

"I have two words: gun control. Now, now, now, now."

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

  

32 Comments

"I have two words: gun control," Susan Orfanos said in an interview with BuzzFeed on Thursday. "Now, now, now, now. No more NRA. No more money. Gun control now." (Photo: ABC7/Screengrab)

"I don't want prayers. I don't want thoughts. I want gun control."

That was the powerful emotional demand from Susan Orfanos after her 27-year-old son Telemachus was killed in the mass shooting Wednesday night in Thousand Oaks, California that left more than a dozen dead and many more wounded.

Offering a horrifying illustration of just how pervasive gun violence is in America, Susan Orfanos said her son survived the Las Vegas festival shooting last October that left over 50 people dead—making it the deadlist mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

"My son was in Las Vegas with a lot of his friends and he came home," Orfanos said in an interview with ABC7. "He didn't come home last night."

"I have two words: gun control," Orfanos added in an interview with BuzzFeed on Thursday. "Now, now, now, now. No more NRA. No more money. Gun control now."

“I hope to God no one sends me anymore prayers. I want gun control. No more guns!” - mother of shooting victim Telemachus Orfanos. She says he survived the #LasVegasShooting but did not survive the #ThousandOaksMassacre. @ABC7 @ABCNewsLive pic.twitter.com/UMqTY1RATK

— Veronica Miracle (@ABC7Veronica) November 8, 2018

Echoing Orfanos' plea for action from U.S. lawmakers who have for far too long allowed the gun lobby to restrain meaningful steps against America's uniquely deadly gun problem, one woman from Thousand Oaks asked a question on the mind of every concerned citizen: "How many more times is this going to happen?"

“How many more times is this going to happen?" a woman in Thousand Oaks asks on behalf of every American.

Our lawmakers have the power to stop this. Demand it.

pic.twitter.com/n5X2ZZ3dJB

— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) November 9, 2018

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

Fires Destroy Lives and Property in Tony California Neighborhoods

Devastation in Paradise A fast-moving wildfire ravaged Paradise, a Northern California community of 27,000 people. Officials said at least nine people died and more than 6,700 homes and commercial buildings were lost — making it the most destructive fire to property in state history. Los Angeles Times

Watch out: this is the destruction global warming causes. It will only get worse until the world leaders start taking it seriously and doing something about it.

Off the Top of My Head

Doctors Take on the NRA Over Gun Control

by John Lawrence, November 10, 2018

Now doctors fed up with mass killings are expressing the fact that they are tired of treating victims of gun violence. One doctor said she was tired of pulling bullets out of corpses. The NRA said words to the effect that doctors should tend to their own business and not say anything about a subject - guns - that they know nothing about. They told doctors "stay in your own lane." According to the NRA, doctors shouldn't speak out on a subject they know nothing about. As if the NRA knew everything there was to know about guns.

The Daily Beast reported:

Immediately after 12 people were killed in a mass shooting in  Thousand Oaks, California on Thursday, doctors and medical professionals posted on social media their experiences treating victims of gun violence.

It continued a trend that started the night before after a tweet by the NRA mocked the medical community’s call for the reduction of firearms, telling “anti-gun doctors to stay in their own lane.”

Here is what the NRA's tweet said:

"Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane. Half of the articles in Annals of Internal Medicine are pushing for gun control. Most upsetting, however, the medical community seems to have consulted NO ONE but themselves."

Here is what Jay W Lee, MD tweeted back:

"@NRA We’ll give you our 1st amendment right to discuss gun safety with our patients and the communities we serve when you pry it from our cold, dead hands.#TrustUs #WeAreAmericasDoctors #MakeHealthPrimary #GunViolence #PublicHealth #SwimmingInOurLane #FMRevolution"

Dana Bussing, MD tweeted:

"After treating countless patients with life altering spinal cord injuries and brain injuries secondary to gun shot wounds, I would have to say this is my lane."

David Gorski, MD, PhD tweeted:

"Firearms take a similar number of lives per year as automobile crashes (guns: ~32,000/yr; cars: ~35,000 to 40,000/yr) and are thus a huge public health problem. Doctors and public health officials are obligated to try to reduce the death toll from such causes."

So the point is that you don't have a Constitutional right to drive a car. Why should you have one to own a gun? You have to be licensed to drive a car. Why shouldn't you have to be licensed to shoot a gun? The problem is that gun rights freaks are too dumb to consider statistics that show that gun violence in other civilized countries where they do have gun control is way down compared to the US. Americans have more to fear from domestic mass murderers than they do from terrorists. One lady whose son was killed in the latest mass murder in California said, "I don't want any more of your damn prayers. I want gun control." Amen to that!

 

Insist on the Higher Nature of Humanity

Dear friends,

     We are each born into a collective “soul”, that is, the shared beliefs of our group.   We come into a family, a culture, perhaps a religion, a country, a world that has already decided what is reality.   We are quite influenced by them as children and might take the tribal beliefs into adulthood, or we rebel against them. The important aspect of collective beliefs is that they are always subject to creativity.   It usually only takes one mind who perceives a new way of describing reality, and will not be silenced, to get the group to shift.

     Called revolution, it is an evolution of possibility. Two events may occur in the midst of us trying to awaken our loved ones to new ideas. They could reject us and we may feel ostracized in a deeply spiritual way, as if we do not belong with them, or we might realize we can still love them, think differently, but need to move on, regardless. In extreme cases revolutionaries are threatened with violence or banished forever. Common examples are the mistreatment of adult children who “come out” to their parents with devastating results. Being homosexual simply is outside of the reality of such people, although with time, and as the culture shifts, they may see things differently.

     In the early days of American culture, women and black people were not considered full humans. They were known as creatures. We could not own property or vote. Of course the African Americans were actual slaves and that was commonly seen as acceptable. Today it is a horrifying idea! Yet, in some parts of the world women still suffer at the hands of men who deem them objects to be done with as they desire. People of color are yet the recipients of mass prejudice.  

     Having said all that, we can change things for the better. But we need to speak up, act out, vote and make our voices heard. Everything we detest about society today is nothing but a cluster of ideas that began in fear. Think up!   Affirm! Declare! We must use our minds to envision and insist on the higher nature of humanity. It’s in everyone of us.

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes

www.cslbakrersfield.com

www.californiafreepress.net

LA Ballot Measure for a Public Bank

Hi, I've gotten inquiries on the outcome of the Los Angeles ballot measure to approve a city-owned bank , so thought I would send a quick update. Unfortunately it did not pass, but it did get 42 percent of the vote. It was a remarkable outcome considering that the dynamic young Public Bank LA advocacy group effectively only had a month to educate 4 million voters on what a public bank is and why passing the measure was a good idea. If they had had another month, the bill could well have passed.

The City Council took supporters by surprise when it put the charter amendment on the ballot in July, leaving only four months to promote it. Passing a ballot measure typically takes a campaign war chest of $750,000 or more, and the all-volunteer PBLA group began with no funding and no formal group. The first challenge was clearing the legal requirement of forming a campaign committee, which itself takes funding and some expertise. The committee only began amassing campaign funds a month before the November 6 vote, after which it managed to bring in $60,000.

Most of the campaign, however, was conducted with sheer people power. According to PBLA political director Ben Hauck, in that short time the all-volunteer team managed to gain endorsements from over 100 organizations and community leaders, text message 350,000 voters, hand out over 50,000 flyers, reach over 500,000 voters through social media campaigns, get included in three mailers reaching over 1,200,000 voters, put up hundreds of yard signs and banners across L.A., talk with thousands of voters at events, universities, rallies and gatherings across the city, get featured in dozens of major news stories, articles and TV coverage, manage their own paid social media campaign, drive over 150,000 video views on a YouTube campaign, contact 200,000 voters via a robocall from the Chairman of the California Democratic Party, put on several significant campaign events, get featured in a press event with senatorial candidate Kevin de León and City Council President Herb Wesson, and create several featured videos, dozens of ads, and countless pieces of written content.

The PBLA team is pressing on undaunted. Leader Trinity Tran wrote after the vote, "Over a quarter million Angelenos voted in support of Measure B and the conversation on public banking has now been amplified across the country. This is just the beginning of the national movement. And it's a fight we are certain will be won."
 
We’re hugely proud of the PBLA team! Their dramatic achievements in a very short time are a testament to the power of a committed group of volunteers working together at the local level for a cause they feel strongly about.
 
If you would like to follow the progress of the public banking movement across the country, please sign up for the Public Banking Institute newsletter, linked here. 
 
Best wishes,
Ellen 
http://EllenBrown.com
http://PublicBankingInstitute.org

Off the Top of My Head

Gun Violence in America: "I Wonder When This Will Ever End"

by John Lawrence, November 9, 2018

NBC news anchor Luther Holt said something like this at the end of his newscast last night. I've got news for you Mr. Holt, IT AIN'T NEVER GOING TO END as long as there is a gun culture in America. You want to get to the root cause of this problem? It's simple: GUNS. No need to keep wondering. No need to check the shooter's social media and try to figure out what his motive was. As long as there is a proliferation of guns, there will be gun violence.

The militarization of the US also contributes to the gun culture. The California shooter was a retired Marine. No thank you for your service, sir. This meme that, if you could only find out what is bothering these shooters and then correct that, we would all be free of gun violence and free to enjoy our Second Amendment rights. Sorry, but that is not the solution. All these mass shooters have purchased their guns legally, and very few have criminal records that amount to anything.

Mental health is certainly an issue, but what is the good old USA doing about mental health? Why making any kind of health care including mental health care prohibitively expensive, that's what. All these shooters had preexisting conditions, preexisting conditions of anger and rage. Nobody seems to give a damn until they go out and shoot somebody or a lot of somebodies. Those shooters that survive the shootings themselves go on to bask in tons of media and legal attention, go to jail, get 3 squares a day and an hour of exercise plus in some cases marriage proposals from infatuous women who never gave them the time of day before they shot up some joint. Guys caught redhanded in the act of shooting people should just be taken out and shot themselves without further ado like they would probably do in most countries in the world. Why waste legal resources on them? Why waste prison resources which purportedly cost $60K per inmate on them?

The other source of American violence is that condoned and glamorized by movies and television. You can't even channel surf without seeing someone draw a gun and shoot someone. No wonder English sitcoms are gaining in popularity. They don't have the gun violence that American sitcoms do, and not every American wants to sit there and watch people murdering each other and the glorification of criminality. Some impressionable souls who hate their fellow man, have no morals or scruples and hate themselves figure they have nothing to lose in engaging in suicide in the course of mass murdering others. This is a product of American culture and will continue unabated until the culture changes.

There have been over 300 mass murders this year alone, a little over one a day. Why is anyone surprised any more? This is a mundane, prosaic feature of American life at this time. Wasting time on it on the evening news sucks all the oxygen out of the room for more important matters like what the US is doing to Yemeni women and children. In case you haven't heard, in a nutshell, bombing them and starving them to death.

Wallethub Report on Corporate Taxes

With 2017’s tax overhaul permanently reducing the federal corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, the personal-finance website WalletHub today released its latest Corporate Tax Rate Report. The report provides an in-depth analysis of the 2017 federal, state and international tax rates paid by the S&P 100 companies, the largest and most established businesses in the U.S.   Companies Paying the Highest Taxes (Overall Tax Rate)   Companies Paying the Lowest Taxes (Overall Tax Rate) 1 American International Group Inc. (513.4%)   1 Charter Communications Inc. (-883.9%) 2 Halliburton Co. (165.8%)   2 The Kraft Heinz Co. (-98.7%) 3 Citigroup Inc. (129.1%)   3 AT&T Inc. (-97.2%) 4 Eli Lilly and Co. (109.3%)   4 Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (-90.3%) 5 General Motors Co. (97.2%)   5 Pfizer Inc. (-73.5%) 6 Johnson & Johnson (92.6%)   6 Comcast Corp. (-49.5%) 7 Kinder Morgan Inc. (89.7%)   7 Verizon Communications Inc.  (-48.3%) 8 Abbott Laboratories (84.2%)   8 MetLife Inc. (-41.6%) 9 The Coca-Cola Co. (82.5%)   9 Union Pacific Corp. (-40.4%) 10 Caterpillar Inc. (81.8%)   10 DowDuPont Inc. (-39.9%)   Key Stats The overall tax rate that S&P 100 companies pay is around 39 percent.   S&P 100 companies pay roughly 65 percent lower rates on international taxes than U.S. taxes.   Tech companies, including Facebook Inc., Apple Inc. and Cisco System Inc., are still paying more than 15 percent lower rates abroad, continuing the trend from 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016.   More than ten S&P 100 companies are actually paying a negative overall tax rate and are therefore due a discrete net tax benefit: Charter Communications Inc., The Kraft Heinz Co., AT&T Inc., Berkshire Hathaway Inc., Pfizer Inc., Comcast Corp., Verizon Communications Inc., MetLife Inc., Union Pacific Corp., DowDuPont Inc., Netflix Inc., NextEra Energy Inc., Exxon Mobil Corp., Altria Group Inc., Exelon Corp. and Chevron Corp.   The average S&P 100 company pays a 77 percent higher tax rate than the top 1 percent of consumers.   For the full S&P 100 Tax Rate report, please visit: https://wallethub.com/edu/corporate-tax-rates/28330/

 

America Rejects Trumpism

by Robert Reich

Wednesday, November 7, 2018

Make no mistake: America has rejected Trumpism.

No one seriously expected the Senate to flip, because Democrats had to defend 26 seats in that chamber, compared with only nine held by Republicans.

The real battleground was the House, where Democrats had to achieve a net gain of 23 seats to get the 218 needed for a majority.

They did.

Trump wasn’t on the ballot but he made the election into a referendum on himself.

So Americans turned against House Republicans, who should have acted as a check on him but did nothing – in many cases magnifying his vileness.

The nation has repudiated Trump, but do not believe for a moment that our national nightmare is over.

Trump still occupies the White House and in all likelihood will be there for two more years.

The Republican Party remains in control of the Senate.

Fox News is still Trump’s propaganda ministry. (The line between Fox and Trump, already blurred, vanished completely at his last pre-election rally when Fox hosts Sean Hannity and Jeannine Pirro joined him on stage.)

The American people will be subject to more of Trump’s lies and hate, as amplified by Senate Republicans and Fox News.

Trump can be expected to scapegoat House Democrats for anything that goes wrong. American politics will almost certainly become even meaner, coarser, and uglier. We will remain deeply and angrily divided.

Most worrisome, America still won’t respond to real threats that continue to grow, which Trump and his enablers have worsened – climate change; the suppression of votes, and foreign intrusions into our elections; the most expensive and least efficient healthcare system in the world; and, not least, widening inequalities of income, wealth, and political power.

America will eventually overcome and reverse Trumpism. The harder challenge will be to reverse the reasons Trump and his Republican lapdogs gained power in the first place.

Some blame racism and nativism. But these toxins have poisoned America since the founding of the Republic.

What’s new has been the interaction between them and the long economic slide of tens of millions of working Americans, most of them white and lacking college degrees.

They used to be the bedrock of the Democratic Party, many of them members of trade unions whose strength in numbers gave them an increasing share of the gains from economic growth.

Their long economic slide has generated the kind of frustrations that demagogues throughout history have twisted into rage at “them.”

Meanwhile, most economic gains have gone to the top 1 percent, whose wealth is now greater than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent – giving them enough political muscle to demand and get tax cuts, Wall Street bailouts, corporate subsidies, and regulatory rollbacks. These in turn have created even more wealth at the top.

All were trends before Trump. Yet Democrats failed to reverse them, even though Democrats occupied the White House most of these years (and during four of them controlled both houses of Congress).

Trump has worsened them by slashing taxes on the wealthy and corporations, whittling back the Affordable Care Act, and loosening restrictions on Wall Street.

Jobs may be back but they pay squat, especially compared with the rising costs of housing, healthcare, and education. And they’re less secure than ever. One in five is now held by a worker under contract without any unemployment insurance, sick leave, or retirement savings.

Which presumably is why Trump decided to focus the midterms on hate and fear rather than the economy.

He thereby created a large opening for Democrats aiming for 2020. They can become the party of the bottom 90 percent by creating a multi-racial, multi-ethnic coalition to wrest back control of our economy and democracy.

They would focus on two big things: First, raise the purchasing power of the bottom 90 percent through stronger unions, a larger wage subsidy (starting with a bigger Earned Income Tax Credit), and Medicare for All.

Second, get big money out of politics through public financing of elections, full disclosure of all sources of political funding, an end to the revolving door between business and government.

Democrats shouldn’t try moving to the “center.” The center no longer exists because most Americans are no longer on the traditional “right” or “left.”

The vast majority of Americans are now anti-establishment, and understandably so.

The practical choice is either Trump’s authoritarian populism backed by the moneyed interests, or a new democratic populism backed by the rest of us.

The direction couldn’t be clearer. It should be the Democrat’s hour.

Get in Sync with Mother Nature

Dear friends,

     The one thing about humans that keeps hope alive is our innate capacity for changing our ways. It was evident in the abolishment of slavery; women granted the right to vote; the legalization of same-sex marriage; passing of laws that guaranteed reproductive rights; conservation of national parks; the end of child labor. We have changed our ways innumerable times for the betterment of our shared reality. But we are a bit overdue right now for some major shifts in our collective perception of what is acceptable human behavior.

     It is election day in America. We will, hopefully, vote for those who seem to be on board with a higher vision for what we must and can change right now to turn the momentum away from self-destruction into loving respect for all life and what that means in our policies and decisions. It applies to each of us as well. What are we voting for in our behaviors? Are we living up to what we demand in our leaders? Are we modelling the very things we say must happen?

     Our daily choices are, metaphorically, a vote for something. What we praise, we tend to protect. Do we praise the air, the water, the sun and the rain? Do we praise the animals and the land and the rivers and plains? Seriously, how removed from the natural world have we, ourselves, become. Let’s get in sync with Mother Nature; praise her, love her, support her, protect her. Vote for her with our actions. We know what we need to do. Let’s go out and vote.

Stay tuned in,

Carol Carnes

www.cslbakersfield.com

www.californiafreepress.net 

Off the Top of My Head

The Ingenious Way the Ruling Class Has Found to Keep the Economy Humming

by John Lawrence

In short: GIVE MONEY TO RICH PEOPLE.

Yes, remember the 2008 banking crisis when Hank Paulson with his hair on fire demanded that Congress give the banks a bailout of $700 billion? Then after that the Federal Reserve gave $29 trillion to the big banks (rich people), and they continued to this day with quantitative easing (ultra low interest rates and no interest for savings accounts). The $700 billion was a taxpayer commitment, but the $29 trillion was just money the Fed printed, in other words fiat money. The euphemistic term is they "took it on their balance sheet".

But wait that's not all. One more thing. Trump's tax cuts gave even more money to rich people and a smidgeon to the hoi polloi. And the economy is going great. Full employment. Asset prices like the stock market and real estate are up fantastically. All those with 401(k)s couldn't be happier. So what's not to like about this solution to an economy which never has a downturn ... in perpetuity?

Some have suggested that all this money flooding the economy (going mainly to rich people) is a sugar high. Inevitably there will be a crash. The stock market will crater. There will be a ton of foreclosures. Student loans will all go into default Unemployment will reach all time highs. The national debt will have to be paid off instead of added to on an annual basis. But in the meantime the economy has enjoyed the largest bull market for the longest period of time in history. Why couldn't this continue forever? As long as the Fed can print money, it can go on forever.

The game is that, even though the Federal government runs a deficit every year which is added to the national debt ($21 trillion at latest count), the US Treasury continues to sell bonds to investors. If you reach the point where there are no investors willing to buy any more Treasury bonds, the Fed just prints the money, gives it to the big banks and THEY buy the Treasury bonds. Ipso facto, the US government can go on running up huge debts forever and give more tax breaks to rich people.

However, there are some downsides. Hundreds of thousands of homeless people who can't afford outrageously high rents. People who are dying because they can't afford the cost of health care and prescription drugs. Gun violence that causes multiple mass shootings on a daily basis. Just today 12 people killed in a California bar. An infrastructure that is falling apart. But these are minor problems. As far as the homeless, the victims of mass shootings and other gun violence and the people dying for lack of health care and prescription drugs, they are all minorities, and minorities don't count in a majoritarian society. They don't have enough votes to matter so they can be treated with benign neglect. Thoughts and prayers should suffice.