The following excerpts are from an article that originally appeared in an article entitled "How Corporate Media Are Fueling a New Nuclear Crisis," in the July 20, 2019 issue of The PeaceWorker.
National Public Radio chimed in with its own contribution to Iran's feared nuclear "breakout" narrative on July 10, 2019, by quoting John Negroponte, a former U.S Director of National Intelligence, who had declared: "Iran's newly announced levels [of uranium enrichment] appear modest at the moment, but would become more concerning if there were further increases. Such steps would imply a willingness on Iran's part to go all the way to construction of a bomb."
"The media narrative about Iran's resuming uranium enrichment thus suggests that what Americans should be worried about primarily is not the provocative character of the Trump administration's Iran policy but the threat that Iran will move toward a 'breakout' strategy vis-a-vis its nuclear weapons capability."
"The real history of Iran's enrichment strategy shows, however, that that nation was always aimed at rolling back U.S. financial sanctions and compelling the United States to acknowledge legitimate Iranian interests in the region rather than to fuel a race for a bomb."
"Iran began enriching uranium to 20% in February 2010 for the first time to provide fuel plates for its Tehran Research Reactor, which produces isotopes for cancer treatment. But its overarching objective was to put pressure on the Obama administration, which was seeking to coerce Iran to give up its nuclear program altogether."
"In 2012, Iran began a new phase of diplomatic pressure on the Obama administration by making very large additions to its capability for enrichment at 20% while still avoiding converting these capabilities to a higher stockpile of uranium enrichment. Meanwhile, Iran's government signaled to the United States that it had the option of reversing the increase through an agreement."
Although Iran increased the number of centrifuges in the period between May and August 2012, none of the 1,440 centrifuges added were put into production, as the IAEA report showed.
"This all amounted to a clear signal to the Obama administration that Iran was ready to negotiate strict limits on its enrichment if the United States abandoned its zero-enrichment demand. 'They are creating tremendous capacity,' a senior U.S. official told The New York Times, 'but they are not using it.' The official acknowledged, moreover, that Iran's enrichment diplomacy gave it 'leverage' on U.S. policy."
"The widely accepted notion that Iran was prevented only by U.S. pressure from making a breakout bid for a nuclear weapon, and that Iran is now once again threatening to do so, is central to the present toxic political atmosphere surrounding the Iran nuclear issue."
"In fact, by mid-2012 Iran already had what was called a 'breakout' capability but chose to use it instead to induce the United States to negotiate seriously with Iran."
Friday, January 31, 2020
Thursday, January 30, 2020
Baby Food
I. Baby Food
"Most babies could use a dose of kale: a half cup of it, and more than a day's worth of Vitamin A, C, and K, The only problem is that they [babies] hate it [kale] -- or so parents and baby-food manufacturers seem to agree. On any given day, a quarter of American toddlers eat no vegetables. When they do eat them, the most popular choice is French fries." [1]
"Baby food is in the midst of a golden age. With the rise of two-income families, home delivery, and even pickier eaters, the global market has grown to nine billion dollars a year, sixteen percent of it in the United States. Nine out of ten Americans have eaten commercial food for some period of time."
"A third of baby food is now homemade, yet the baby-food industry is bigger than ever. Its new products have more vegetables and fewer additives. And sugar is the great override button for infant taste. A few drops can calm a baby's heart, releases opiates in her brain, and settle her usual activity into a pleasurable pattern."
"The rate of childhood obesity has tripled in thirty years, and one survey confirmed the reasons in sobering detail. American babies have been drinking soda as early as seven months. They ate a third too many calories, often from chips and fries. One in five ate no green vegetables daily, and one in three ate no fruit. American toddlers now eat an average of seven teaspoons of sugar a day, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- more than the recommended allowance for adults."
"Babies are weaned from jars at twelve months now, sip from powders well into their toddler years. Half of American children under the age of three use them [the powders]. There seems to be this window of opportunity between six and twenty months where they're just interested in food, and that predisposes them to healthy eating."
II. Trump's Pro-Pollution, Anti-Trees Policies
#The Trump administration's effort to speed up the approval of the Atlantic Coast, Mountain Valley, and Keystone XL pipelines is stalled by legal challenges from the Sierra Club and others.
#The Sierra Club and others sue the Trump administration for its attempts to strip California of the authority to set its own car air-pollution standards.
#The Trump administration moves to exempt Alaska's Tongass National Forest from road-building rules,opening the door to logging on 165,000 acres of old-growth forest.
#The Sierra Club's Environmental Law Program sues the SEC for failing to disclose why it prevents investors from demanding that energy and utility companies set greenhouse gas reduction targets and offer their plans for meeting those goals.
#Conservation groups successfully challenge the BLM's plan to raze 30,000 acres of pinon pines and Utah junipers within the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
#The DC Court of Appeals rules that the EPA is illegally failing to control smog that travels across state lines and pollutes the air in other regions.
#Trump offers to pardon officials who break environmental laws in order to construct his border wall. He talks about fortifying it with a trench stocked with snakes or alligators so frequently that his aides seek out a cost estimate for doing so. [2]
ADDENDUMS:
*There are nearly 3 billion fewer birds today in North America than there were in 1970 -- more than one in four have disappeared.
*An analysis of seafloor mud off the shore of Santa Barbara reveals that between 1945 and 2009, plastic levels in the ocean doubled every 15 years.
*Next year,Texas will produce more electricity from wind than from coal.
*British wind farms,solar panels, and renewable biomass plants, produce more electricity than fossil fuels for the first time since the UK's first power plant fired up in 1882.
*President Trump has repeatedly suggested using nuclear bombs to prevent hurricanes from reaching the United States.
*Almost two-thirds of Americans now believe that climate change is either a crisis or a serious problem, with a majority wanting immediate action to address it. [3]
Footnotes:
[1] Burkhard Bilger, "Open Wide," The New Yorker," November 25, 2019.
[2] Heather Smith and Paul Rauber, "TRUMP WATCH: Pro-Pollution, Anti-Trees," The Sierra, January/February 2020.
[3] Heather Smith, "Up to Speed..." The Sierra, January/February 2020.
"Most babies could use a dose of kale: a half cup of it, and more than a day's worth of Vitamin A, C, and K, The only problem is that they [babies] hate it [kale] -- or so parents and baby-food manufacturers seem to agree. On any given day, a quarter of American toddlers eat no vegetables. When they do eat them, the most popular choice is French fries." [1]
"Baby food is in the midst of a golden age. With the rise of two-income families, home delivery, and even pickier eaters, the global market has grown to nine billion dollars a year, sixteen percent of it in the United States. Nine out of ten Americans have eaten commercial food for some period of time."
"A third of baby food is now homemade, yet the baby-food industry is bigger than ever. Its new products have more vegetables and fewer additives. And sugar is the great override button for infant taste. A few drops can calm a baby's heart, releases opiates in her brain, and settle her usual activity into a pleasurable pattern."
"The rate of childhood obesity has tripled in thirty years, and one survey confirmed the reasons in sobering detail. American babies have been drinking soda as early as seven months. They ate a third too many calories, often from chips and fries. One in five ate no green vegetables daily, and one in three ate no fruit. American toddlers now eat an average of seven teaspoons of sugar a day, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- more than the recommended allowance for adults."
"Babies are weaned from jars at twelve months now, sip from powders well into their toddler years. Half of American children under the age of three use them [the powders]. There seems to be this window of opportunity between six and twenty months where they're just interested in food, and that predisposes them to healthy eating."
II. Trump's Pro-Pollution, Anti-Trees Policies
#The Trump administration's effort to speed up the approval of the Atlantic Coast, Mountain Valley, and Keystone XL pipelines is stalled by legal challenges from the Sierra Club and others.
#The Sierra Club and others sue the Trump administration for its attempts to strip California of the authority to set its own car air-pollution standards.
#The Trump administration moves to exempt Alaska's Tongass National Forest from road-building rules,opening the door to logging on 165,000 acres of old-growth forest.
#The Sierra Club's Environmental Law Program sues the SEC for failing to disclose why it prevents investors from demanding that energy and utility companies set greenhouse gas reduction targets and offer their plans for meeting those goals.
#Conservation groups successfully challenge the BLM's plan to raze 30,000 acres of pinon pines and Utah junipers within the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
#The DC Court of Appeals rules that the EPA is illegally failing to control smog that travels across state lines and pollutes the air in other regions.
#Trump offers to pardon officials who break environmental laws in order to construct his border wall. He talks about fortifying it with a trench stocked with snakes or alligators so frequently that his aides seek out a cost estimate for doing so. [2]
ADDENDUMS:
*There are nearly 3 billion fewer birds today in North America than there were in 1970 -- more than one in four have disappeared.
*An analysis of seafloor mud off the shore of Santa Barbara reveals that between 1945 and 2009, plastic levels in the ocean doubled every 15 years.
*Next year,Texas will produce more electricity from wind than from coal.
*British wind farms,solar panels, and renewable biomass plants, produce more electricity than fossil fuels for the first time since the UK's first power plant fired up in 1882.
*President Trump has repeatedly suggested using nuclear bombs to prevent hurricanes from reaching the United States.
*Almost two-thirds of Americans now believe that climate change is either a crisis or a serious problem, with a majority wanting immediate action to address it. [3]
Footnotes:
[1] Burkhard Bilger, "Open Wide," The New Yorker," November 25, 2019.
[2] Heather Smith and Paul Rauber, "TRUMP WATCH: Pro-Pollution, Anti-Trees," The Sierra, January/February 2020.
[3] Heather Smith, "Up to Speed..." The Sierra, January/February 2020.
Wednesday, January 29, 2020
Trump's Executive Order on Jewishness
I. Trump's Executive Order on Jewishness
American Jews are not and have never been a nation unto themselves. They are an ethnic group within this republic. Classifying political speech about Jews according to national origin is confusing, unclear, and really scary. Trump has very little understanding that being against a policy of the Israeli government is not de facto anti-Semitism. Nonetheless, President Trump has chosen to issue an executive order to define Jewishness.
It is easy to envision a situation in which legitimate criticism of Israel including criticism by Jews, is determined to be anti-Semitic, and could risk the funding of the very institutions needed to foster productive discourse. Colleges that do not have these conversations are likely destined to have one-sided pro-Israel conversations. The Israeli government may want American Jews to become Israeli ones, but making Jews a separate nationality doesn't help the cause. Grouping Jews as no other religious group has been treated in this country, making Jews clearly "dual citizens" raises the trope of dual loyalty.
The executive order takes indirect aim at the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement that has generated intense controversy on college campuses. Title VI bans discrimination on race, color, or national origin in programs and activities for which colleges and universities receive federal funding. Trump's executive order will extend the ban on funding to discrimination based on anti-Semitism. The left-leaning Jewish group, J-Street, said in a statement that the order "appears designed less to combat anti-Semitism than to have a chilling effect on free speech, and to crack down on campus critics of Israel. We feel it is misguided and harmful for the White House to unilaterally declare a broad range of nonviolent campus criticism of Israel to be anti-Semitic, especially at a time when the prime driver of anti-Semitism in this country is the xenophobic,white nationalist far-right."
Even James Loeffler, a professor of Jewish history at the University of Virginia, who generally supports the Trump action, says: "Everyone recognizes that Jews are a complicated amalgam of ethnicity and religion, and treating them a a kind of quasi-racial group can have negative consequences." He shares the concerns of those who believe that executive order could be used to infringe on the First Amendment rights of those who would voice controversial political speech about Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "Clearly, given the administration's political position on this issue, it's not unrealistic to see this as coming out of that context,"concludes Loeffler.
II. Trump at National Jewish Council
President Trump told the American Israeli Council: "A lot of you are in the real estate business, because I know you very well. You're brutal killers, not nice people at all, but you have to vote for me --you have no choice. You're not going to vote for Pocahontas. I can tell you that. You're not going to vote for the wealth tax. Yeah, let's take 100% of your wealth!"
III. Blood and Soil in India
"This past November,India's Prime Minister Modi announced that he was suspending Article 370 of the constitution,which grants autonomy to Kashmir, India's only Muslim-majority state. The change for Kashmir upended more than half a century of careful politics, but the Indian press reacted with nearly uniform approval." [1]
After the announcement, apart from the military presence, the streets of Kashmir were lifeless. At Khanach-e-Moula, the magnificent eighteenth-century mosque, Friday prayer were banned. Schools were closed. Cell-phone and Internet services were cut off.
"Muslim-Hindu harmony was central to the vision of India's founders, Mohandas Gandhi and Jawahabal Nehru,who laid the foundation for a secular state. India is home to all of the world's major religions; Muslims constitute about fourteen percent of India's population. The division of the subcontinent, known as Partition, inspired the largest migration in history with tens of millions of Hindus and Muslims crossing the new borders. Even though India's Muslims were typically poorer than their fellow citizens, many Hindus felt that they had been unjustly treated by the central government."
"In Gujarat, Modi had focused on big-ticket projects, wooing car manufactures and bringing electricity to villages; as Prime Minister,he introduced a sweeping reform of bankruptcy laws, and embarked on a multimillion-dollar campaign of road construction."
"The lack of journalistic scrutiny has given Modi insurance freedom to control the narrative. Many of the pro-Modi posts have turned out to be crude fabrications. Pratik Linde, of "Alt News," has pointed out that the photos claiming to depict dead Pakistani militants actually showed victims of a heat wave."
"The most notable of Modi's actions, along with revoking the special status of Kashmir residents, has been a measure to strip citizenship from as many as two million residents of the state of Assam, many of whom had crossed the border from the Muslim nation of Bangladesh decades before."
"In September, the government began constructing detention centers for residents who had become illegal overnight. Most of them were members of Bajrang Del, a branch of the R.S.S. Ostensibly a youth group, Bajrang Del has been implicated in a rash of murders of Muslims throughout the country. According to Fact Checker, an organization that tracks communal violence by surveying media reports,there has been almost three hundred hate crimes motivated by religion in the last decade -- almost all of them since Modi became Prime Minister. In many areas, any Muslim man seen with a Hindu woman risks being attacked."
"Many Kashmir residents still refuse to accept Indian sovereignty, and some recall the promises made by the United Nations in 1948, that a plebiscite would determine the future of the state. Indian authoritarian law allows security forces to detain any Kashmiri for any reason for up to two years."
Footnote:
[1] Dexter Filkins, "Blood and Soil in India," The New Yorker, December 9, 2019.
American Jews are not and have never been a nation unto themselves. They are an ethnic group within this republic. Classifying political speech about Jews according to national origin is confusing, unclear, and really scary. Trump has very little understanding that being against a policy of the Israeli government is not de facto anti-Semitism. Nonetheless, President Trump has chosen to issue an executive order to define Jewishness.
It is easy to envision a situation in which legitimate criticism of Israel including criticism by Jews, is determined to be anti-Semitic, and could risk the funding of the very institutions needed to foster productive discourse. Colleges that do not have these conversations are likely destined to have one-sided pro-Israel conversations. The Israeli government may want American Jews to become Israeli ones, but making Jews a separate nationality doesn't help the cause. Grouping Jews as no other religious group has been treated in this country, making Jews clearly "dual citizens" raises the trope of dual loyalty.
The executive order takes indirect aim at the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement that has generated intense controversy on college campuses. Title VI bans discrimination on race, color, or national origin in programs and activities for which colleges and universities receive federal funding. Trump's executive order will extend the ban on funding to discrimination based on anti-Semitism. The left-leaning Jewish group, J-Street, said in a statement that the order "appears designed less to combat anti-Semitism than to have a chilling effect on free speech, and to crack down on campus critics of Israel. We feel it is misguided and harmful for the White House to unilaterally declare a broad range of nonviolent campus criticism of Israel to be anti-Semitic, especially at a time when the prime driver of anti-Semitism in this country is the xenophobic,white nationalist far-right."
Even James Loeffler, a professor of Jewish history at the University of Virginia, who generally supports the Trump action, says: "Everyone recognizes that Jews are a complicated amalgam of ethnicity and religion, and treating them a a kind of quasi-racial group can have negative consequences." He shares the concerns of those who believe that executive order could be used to infringe on the First Amendment rights of those who would voice controversial political speech about Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "Clearly, given the administration's political position on this issue, it's not unrealistic to see this as coming out of that context,"concludes Loeffler.
II. Trump at National Jewish Council
President Trump told the American Israeli Council: "A lot of you are in the real estate business, because I know you very well. You're brutal killers, not nice people at all, but you have to vote for me --you have no choice. You're not going to vote for Pocahontas. I can tell you that. You're not going to vote for the wealth tax. Yeah, let's take 100% of your wealth!"
III. Blood and Soil in India
"This past November,India's Prime Minister Modi announced that he was suspending Article 370 of the constitution,which grants autonomy to Kashmir, India's only Muslim-majority state. The change for Kashmir upended more than half a century of careful politics, but the Indian press reacted with nearly uniform approval." [1]
After the announcement, apart from the military presence, the streets of Kashmir were lifeless. At Khanach-e-Moula, the magnificent eighteenth-century mosque, Friday prayer were banned. Schools were closed. Cell-phone and Internet services were cut off.
"Muslim-Hindu harmony was central to the vision of India's founders, Mohandas Gandhi and Jawahabal Nehru,who laid the foundation for a secular state. India is home to all of the world's major religions; Muslims constitute about fourteen percent of India's population. The division of the subcontinent, known as Partition, inspired the largest migration in history with tens of millions of Hindus and Muslims crossing the new borders. Even though India's Muslims were typically poorer than their fellow citizens, many Hindus felt that they had been unjustly treated by the central government."
"In Gujarat, Modi had focused on big-ticket projects, wooing car manufactures and bringing electricity to villages; as Prime Minister,he introduced a sweeping reform of bankruptcy laws, and embarked on a multimillion-dollar campaign of road construction."
"The lack of journalistic scrutiny has given Modi insurance freedom to control the narrative. Many of the pro-Modi posts have turned out to be crude fabrications. Pratik Linde, of "Alt News," has pointed out that the photos claiming to depict dead Pakistani militants actually showed victims of a heat wave."
"The most notable of Modi's actions, along with revoking the special status of Kashmir residents, has been a measure to strip citizenship from as many as two million residents of the state of Assam, many of whom had crossed the border from the Muslim nation of Bangladesh decades before."
"In September, the government began constructing detention centers for residents who had become illegal overnight. Most of them were members of Bajrang Del, a branch of the R.S.S. Ostensibly a youth group, Bajrang Del has been implicated in a rash of murders of Muslims throughout the country. According to Fact Checker, an organization that tracks communal violence by surveying media reports,there has been almost three hundred hate crimes motivated by religion in the last decade -- almost all of them since Modi became Prime Minister. In many areas, any Muslim man seen with a Hindu woman risks being attacked."
"Many Kashmir residents still refuse to accept Indian sovereignty, and some recall the promises made by the United Nations in 1948, that a plebiscite would determine the future of the state. Indian authoritarian law allows security forces to detain any Kashmiri for any reason for up to two years."
Footnote:
[1] Dexter Filkins, "Blood and Soil in India," The New Yorker, December 9, 2019.
Monday, January 27, 2020
Trump's Distaste for International Institutions, and More
I. Trump's Distaste for International Institutions
"Declaring a policy of nationalism, Trump launched verbal attacks on international institutions, threatening to pull out of many of them, including the more recent Paris Climate Agreement. Underlying the postwar international order was a widespread belief that the spread of democratic institutions was the best way to prevent the recurrence of war, dictatorship, and genocide that caused so much destruction between 1914 and 1945, and Trump has attacked these too. The liberal values that have held sway over the internal and external policies of many countries can no longer be taken for granted." [1]
"Democracy isn't necessarily Western, as the state democratic political systems outside the West -- from Indonesia to Tunisia --surely indicate. The decline of democracy in Europe and America, and the economic crisis that lies at its heart are part of a general crisis of democratic and economic institutions worldwide."
II. Move Impeachment to the Streets
Yale University history professor Samuel Moyn worries that there will be no way for moderate Democrats to join forces with never-Trump Republicans for a 'centrist restoration.' "Anti-Trump passion remains high, but the energy once displayed in street charts is now more likely to be channeled into intermural debates about the direction of the Democratic Party, and their choice of a 2020 presidential nominee." [2]
"Now that the Democratic Party is finally on board with impeachment, the goal of popular protest should be to force a wholesale indictment of Trump. The goal of impeachment rallies has to be to make clear to Republicans that if they cast their lot with him, they will be held accountable."
III. Baby Food
"Most babies could use a dose of kale: a half cup of it, and more than a day's worth of Vitamin A, C, and K. The only problem is that they [babies] hate it [kale] -- or so parents and baby-food manufacturers seem to agree. On every given day, a quarter of American toddlers eat no vegetables. When they do eat them, the most popular choice is French fries." [2]
"Baby food is in the midst of a golden age. With the rise of two-income families, home delivery, and even pickier eaters, the global market has grown to nine billion dollars a year, sixteen percent of it in the United States. Nine out of ten Americans have eaten commercial food for some periods of time."
"A third of baby food is now homemade, yet the baby-food industry is bigger than ever. Its new products have more vegetables and fewer additives. And sugar is the great override button for infant taste. A few drops can calm a baby's heart, release opiates in her brain, and settle her usual activity into a pleasurable pattern." "The rate of childhood obesity has tripled in thirty years, and one survey confirmed the reasons in sobering detail. American babies were drinking soda as early as seven months. They ate a third too many calories, often from chips and fries. One in five ate no green vegetables daily, and one in three ate no fruit." "American toddlers now eat an average of seven teaspoons of sugar a day, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- more than the recommended allowance for adults."
"Babies are weaned from jars at twelve months now, sip from powders well into their toddler years. Half of American children under the age of three use them [the powders]. There seems to be this window of opportunity between six and twenty months where they're just interested in food, and that predisposes them to healthy eating."
Footnotes:
[1] Richard J. Evans, "The Breakup," The Nation, December 30, 2019/January 6, 2020.
[2] Jeet Heer, "Impeachment Needs to Move to the Streets," The Nation, December 30, 2019/January 6, 2020.
[3] Burkhard Bilger, "Open Wide," The New Yorker, November 25, 2019.
"Declaring a policy of nationalism, Trump launched verbal attacks on international institutions, threatening to pull out of many of them, including the more recent Paris Climate Agreement. Underlying the postwar international order was a widespread belief that the spread of democratic institutions was the best way to prevent the recurrence of war, dictatorship, and genocide that caused so much destruction between 1914 and 1945, and Trump has attacked these too. The liberal values that have held sway over the internal and external policies of many countries can no longer be taken for granted." [1]
"Democracy isn't necessarily Western, as the state democratic political systems outside the West -- from Indonesia to Tunisia --surely indicate. The decline of democracy in Europe and America, and the economic crisis that lies at its heart are part of a general crisis of democratic and economic institutions worldwide."
II. Move Impeachment to the Streets
Yale University history professor Samuel Moyn worries that there will be no way for moderate Democrats to join forces with never-Trump Republicans for a 'centrist restoration.' "Anti-Trump passion remains high, but the energy once displayed in street charts is now more likely to be channeled into intermural debates about the direction of the Democratic Party, and their choice of a 2020 presidential nominee." [2]
"Now that the Democratic Party is finally on board with impeachment, the goal of popular protest should be to force a wholesale indictment of Trump. The goal of impeachment rallies has to be to make clear to Republicans that if they cast their lot with him, they will be held accountable."
III. Baby Food
"Most babies could use a dose of kale: a half cup of it, and more than a day's worth of Vitamin A, C, and K. The only problem is that they [babies] hate it [kale] -- or so parents and baby-food manufacturers seem to agree. On every given day, a quarter of American toddlers eat no vegetables. When they do eat them, the most popular choice is French fries." [2]
"Baby food is in the midst of a golden age. With the rise of two-income families, home delivery, and even pickier eaters, the global market has grown to nine billion dollars a year, sixteen percent of it in the United States. Nine out of ten Americans have eaten commercial food for some periods of time."
"A third of baby food is now homemade, yet the baby-food industry is bigger than ever. Its new products have more vegetables and fewer additives. And sugar is the great override button for infant taste. A few drops can calm a baby's heart, release opiates in her brain, and settle her usual activity into a pleasurable pattern." "The rate of childhood obesity has tripled in thirty years, and one survey confirmed the reasons in sobering detail. American babies were drinking soda as early as seven months. They ate a third too many calories, often from chips and fries. One in five ate no green vegetables daily, and one in three ate no fruit." "American toddlers now eat an average of seven teaspoons of sugar a day, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- more than the recommended allowance for adults."
"Babies are weaned from jars at twelve months now, sip from powders well into their toddler years. Half of American children under the age of three use them [the powders]. There seems to be this window of opportunity between six and twenty months where they're just interested in food, and that predisposes them to healthy eating."
Footnotes:
[1] Richard J. Evans, "The Breakup," The Nation, December 30, 2019/January 6, 2020.
[2] Jeet Heer, "Impeachment Needs to Move to the Streets," The Nation, December 30, 2019/January 6, 2020.
[3] Burkhard Bilger, "Open Wide," The New Yorker, November 25, 2019.
Sunday, January 26, 2020
Medicaid Expansion; SNAP Cutbacks; Worker Strikes; and Afghan Peace
I. The Medicaid Expansion Effect
"In the 37 states that have decided to take part, Medicaid coverage is open to everyone living at or below 138 percent of the federal poverty line. By March of 2018, nearly 672,000 more people were enrolled in Kentucky's Medicaid program, and Children's Health Insurance program than in 2103, most of them thanks to the expansion -- a more than 110 percent increase." [1]
"In 2018, voters in Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah approved ballot measures to expand Medicaid in their states. "Medicaid expansion has had a number of dramatic effects: one study found that it saved at least 19,200 lives from 2014 to 2017. It has increased insurance coverage, given people better coverage, given people better access to medical care, improved health, and preserved recipient's finances. Extrapolating from this research, political scientist Jake Haselente, and Jamila Michever, assistant professor of government at Cornell University, wrote a memo estimating that if the states that have refused to expand Medicaid decided to reverse course, about 1.3 million more people would vote."
"Over the last two decades, enrollment in Medicaid has more than doubled. Seventy percent of Americans now either have personal experience with Medicaid or know someone who does. Indeed, 60 percent of Americans now say it's the government's responsibility to make sure Americans have health coverage -- the highest share in a decade."
II. SNAP Cutbacks
"In early December, the Trump administration announced that the first of these changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Program (SNAP) will kick in [this coming] spring, when nearly 700,000 people will lose their SNAP benefits. If the administration goes ahead with other proposed changes -- such as removing from the rolls those with household savings or assets [over a certain amount] -- millions more will have their benefits slashed or withdrawn entirely. And nearly 1 million children will lose automatic access to free or low-cost lunches." "In a country as wealthy as the United States, the government accepts that many workers will receive paychecks so puny that the state will have to step in to help these families avoid hunger. [2]
"Last year, nearly a quarter of all adults went without medical care because they couldn't pay for it. Over 30 percent of private-sector workers don't have access to retirement benefits through their jobs." [3]
III. Striking Facts
"[But] workers have clearly continued [2018's] trend on insisting that they deserve a share of the spoils from the longest US economic expansion on record. More workers went on strike [in 2018] -- 485,200 of them -- then at anytime since 1986." "For one thing, wages have barely budged, increasing just 3 percent in [2019] -- far less than would have been expected with so many earning less than $18,000 at the median." [4]
IV. A Mixed Message on Afghan Peace
"The combination of notions Trump floated is a deal breaker for the militants who have been waging war against the Afghan government and foreign troops for nearly two decades. For starters, the Taliban aren't laying down their weapons before brokering a full withdrawal of U.S. troops. So it's hard to say who Trump was trying to reach with those new messages. In their delivery, he muddied his 2019 State of the Union pledge to end U.S. involvement in 'endless wars.' " [5]
"Current and former Afghan officials briefed on the leaders' conversations during Trump's visit said Trump promised the Afghan government a greater say in future discussions, an idea that the Taliban have long rejected."
ADDENDUMS:
*Corporations paid an average federal tax of 1.3% of their profits last year, according to a report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. 91 corporations in the Fortune 500 paid no federal tax. These 91 corporations earned a combined $101 billion in [2018]. Amazon got a tax rebate of $129 million.
*"But until paroling becomes a professional discipline, release decision will continue to be disproportionally influenced by public approval, rather than by the letter of the law. Board appointees are far too concerned about the effect of public opinion on their job security and political image." [6]
*Suggested opening offers for dealing with North Korea: 1) Offer partial sanctions relief; 2) Declare the end of the Korean War, and 3) Open a liaison office in Pyongyang.
Footnotes:
[1] Bryce Covert, "The Medicaid Expansion Effect," The Nation, December 30, 2019/January 6, 2020.
[2] Sasha Abramsky, "Trump's Hunger Games," The Nation," December 30, 2019/January 6, 2020.
[3] Bryce Covert, "Striking Facts," The Nation, December 16/23, 2019.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Kimberly Dozier, "A mixed message on Afghan peace," TIME, December 16, 2019.
[6] Barbara Henson Treen, a letter writer in the December 13, 2019 issue of The New Yorker.
"In the 37 states that have decided to take part, Medicaid coverage is open to everyone living at or below 138 percent of the federal poverty line. By March of 2018, nearly 672,000 more people were enrolled in Kentucky's Medicaid program, and Children's Health Insurance program than in 2103, most of them thanks to the expansion -- a more than 110 percent increase." [1]
"In 2018, voters in Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah approved ballot measures to expand Medicaid in their states. "Medicaid expansion has had a number of dramatic effects: one study found that it saved at least 19,200 lives from 2014 to 2017. It has increased insurance coverage, given people better coverage, given people better access to medical care, improved health, and preserved recipient's finances. Extrapolating from this research, political scientist Jake Haselente, and Jamila Michever, assistant professor of government at Cornell University, wrote a memo estimating that if the states that have refused to expand Medicaid decided to reverse course, about 1.3 million more people would vote."
"Over the last two decades, enrollment in Medicaid has more than doubled. Seventy percent of Americans now either have personal experience with Medicaid or know someone who does. Indeed, 60 percent of Americans now say it's the government's responsibility to make sure Americans have health coverage -- the highest share in a decade."
II. SNAP Cutbacks
"In early December, the Trump administration announced that the first of these changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Program (SNAP) will kick in [this coming] spring, when nearly 700,000 people will lose their SNAP benefits. If the administration goes ahead with other proposed changes -- such as removing from the rolls those with household savings or assets [over a certain amount] -- millions more will have their benefits slashed or withdrawn entirely. And nearly 1 million children will lose automatic access to free or low-cost lunches." "In a country as wealthy as the United States, the government accepts that many workers will receive paychecks so puny that the state will have to step in to help these families avoid hunger. [2]
"Last year, nearly a quarter of all adults went without medical care because they couldn't pay for it. Over 30 percent of private-sector workers don't have access to retirement benefits through their jobs." [3]
III. Striking Facts
"[But] workers have clearly continued [2018's] trend on insisting that they deserve a share of the spoils from the longest US economic expansion on record. More workers went on strike [in 2018] -- 485,200 of them -- then at anytime since 1986." "For one thing, wages have barely budged, increasing just 3 percent in [2019] -- far less than would have been expected with so many earning less than $18,000 at the median." [4]
IV. A Mixed Message on Afghan Peace
"The combination of notions Trump floated is a deal breaker for the militants who have been waging war against the Afghan government and foreign troops for nearly two decades. For starters, the Taliban aren't laying down their weapons before brokering a full withdrawal of U.S. troops. So it's hard to say who Trump was trying to reach with those new messages. In their delivery, he muddied his 2019 State of the Union pledge to end U.S. involvement in 'endless wars.' " [5]
"Current and former Afghan officials briefed on the leaders' conversations during Trump's visit said Trump promised the Afghan government a greater say in future discussions, an idea that the Taliban have long rejected."
ADDENDUMS:
*Corporations paid an average federal tax of 1.3% of their profits last year, according to a report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. 91 corporations in the Fortune 500 paid no federal tax. These 91 corporations earned a combined $101 billion in [2018]. Amazon got a tax rebate of $129 million.
*"But until paroling becomes a professional discipline, release decision will continue to be disproportionally influenced by public approval, rather than by the letter of the law. Board appointees are far too concerned about the effect of public opinion on their job security and political image." [6]
*Suggested opening offers for dealing with North Korea: 1) Offer partial sanctions relief; 2) Declare the end of the Korean War, and 3) Open a liaison office in Pyongyang.
Footnotes:
[1] Bryce Covert, "The Medicaid Expansion Effect," The Nation, December 30, 2019/January 6, 2020.
[2] Sasha Abramsky, "Trump's Hunger Games," The Nation," December 30, 2019/January 6, 2020.
[3] Bryce Covert, "Striking Facts," The Nation, December 16/23, 2019.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Kimberly Dozier, "A mixed message on Afghan peace," TIME, December 16, 2019.
[6] Barbara Henson Treen, a letter writer in the December 13, 2019 issue of The New Yorker.
Friday, January 24, 2020
Anti-Abortionists' "Immaculate Deception"
I. Anti-Abortionists' "Immaculate Deception"
"Title X is the only federal program devoted to provide family planning across the country. It serves 4 million low-income people nationwide annually on a budget of $286 million, and is estimated to prevent 800,000 unintended pregnancies every year." "Planned Parenthood was squeezed out, as the White House has been pushing to redirect Title X and other federal funds to anti-abortion organizations." [1]
"Abstinence-only activists now control key posts at HHS, and are driving policies that force their views about contraception onto the vast majority of Americans. CPCs have a long, well-documented record of using high-pressure tactics on unsuspecting women, and peddling misinformation, like the myths that abortion causes breast cancer, infertility and suicide. In 2015, a Massachusetts-based firm set up virtual 'fences' around family planning clinics to target abortion-minded women, according to the Massachusetts attorney general."
"As a licensed community clinic, the California-based organization named Obria is required to provide the state with annual data about services and clients. In 2018, the Obria clinic in Long Beach reported seeing only 628 patients ,fewer than two per day. Planned Parenthood's Long Beach clinic saw twice as many patients than all of Obria's licensed California's clinics combined, which reported serving fewer than 4,000 patients in 2018."
Women with choices perhaps are't all that interested in what Obria is selling. That's no surprise; according to the federal Office of Population Affairs,just 1 in 200 patients in the Title X program use natural family as their primary form of contraception. The issue is whether it's legal for Obria to take federal money for family planning and STI prevention, but refuses to provide contraception and condoms or referrals for them. "The conservative Christians in Trump's administration would like to push low-income women to use places like Obria for family planning or reproductive health care, and ultimately, that's no choice at all.
II. Codifying Roe Into Statute
"The vast majority of American adults, 77 percent -- according to a 2019 NPR Newshour/Marist poll -- support legal access to abortion,an increase from last year." "The crisis requires a health care plan that includes coverage of comprehensive reproductive care, like the one purposed by Bernie Sanders." "The next president must push to codify Roe into statute; repeal the Hyde Amendment permanently: remove the global gag rule, which bars giving federal funds to any foreign health organization that provides abortions or even discusses it as an option; and reinstate Title X finding for Planned Parenthood and other full-service reproductive health care providers." "This president and the anti-choice movement that put him over the top in 2016 see our personal agency as something to gleefully extinguish." [2]
III. Job Loss and Information Chaos
"Over the past three decades,newspapers workers have lost their jobs faster than coal miners, and now digital properties are shedding staff too." [3]
"Less real news, more viral context. This is what experts call 'information chaos'. Russia has been capitalizing on it whit its 'firehose of falsehood' propaganda, confusing people with outlandish claims until they despair of figuring out what's real."
ADDENDUMS:
*"As corporate meat-packers have expanded, small ranchers have been getting squeezed. In 1970, they earned about 70 cents for every dollar that consumers spent on beef; today, small ranchers get less than 40 cents." "The Trump administration has killed Obama-era rules that leveled the playing field, and, as one consequence,farm bankruptcies are surging." [4]
*"Polls have found that gun violence was the number one issue for Virginia voters,who showed bipartisan support for passing universal background checks and removing guns from people deemed to present a safety risk." [5]
Footnotes:
[1] Stephanie Mencimer, "Immaculate Deception," Mother Jones, January/February 2020.
[2] Ilyse Hogue, "How to Undo Trump's Damage," The Nation, December 16/23, 2019.
[3] Monika Bauerlein, "Bullies United," Mother Jones, January/February 2020.
[4] Tom Philpott, "The Last Roundup," Mother Jones, January/February 2020.
[5] Matt Cohen, "Ballots vs. Bullets," Mother Jones, January/February 2020.
"Title X is the only federal program devoted to provide family planning across the country. It serves 4 million low-income people nationwide annually on a budget of $286 million, and is estimated to prevent 800,000 unintended pregnancies every year." "Planned Parenthood was squeezed out, as the White House has been pushing to redirect Title X and other federal funds to anti-abortion organizations." [1]
"Abstinence-only activists now control key posts at HHS, and are driving policies that force their views about contraception onto the vast majority of Americans. CPCs have a long, well-documented record of using high-pressure tactics on unsuspecting women, and peddling misinformation, like the myths that abortion causes breast cancer, infertility and suicide. In 2015, a Massachusetts-based firm set up virtual 'fences' around family planning clinics to target abortion-minded women, according to the Massachusetts attorney general."
"As a licensed community clinic, the California-based organization named Obria is required to provide the state with annual data about services and clients. In 2018, the Obria clinic in Long Beach reported seeing only 628 patients ,fewer than two per day. Planned Parenthood's Long Beach clinic saw twice as many patients than all of Obria's licensed California's clinics combined, which reported serving fewer than 4,000 patients in 2018."
Women with choices perhaps are't all that interested in what Obria is selling. That's no surprise; according to the federal Office of Population Affairs,just 1 in 200 patients in the Title X program use natural family as their primary form of contraception. The issue is whether it's legal for Obria to take federal money for family planning and STI prevention, but refuses to provide contraception and condoms or referrals for them. "The conservative Christians in Trump's administration would like to push low-income women to use places like Obria for family planning or reproductive health care, and ultimately, that's no choice at all.
II. Codifying Roe Into Statute
"The vast majority of American adults, 77 percent -- according to a 2019 NPR Newshour/Marist poll -- support legal access to abortion,an increase from last year." "The crisis requires a health care plan that includes coverage of comprehensive reproductive care, like the one purposed by Bernie Sanders." "The next president must push to codify Roe into statute; repeal the Hyde Amendment permanently: remove the global gag rule, which bars giving federal funds to any foreign health organization that provides abortions or even discusses it as an option; and reinstate Title X finding for Planned Parenthood and other full-service reproductive health care providers." "This president and the anti-choice movement that put him over the top in 2016 see our personal agency as something to gleefully extinguish." [2]
III. Job Loss and Information Chaos
"Over the past three decades,newspapers workers have lost their jobs faster than coal miners, and now digital properties are shedding staff too." [3]
"Less real news, more viral context. This is what experts call 'information chaos'. Russia has been capitalizing on it whit its 'firehose of falsehood' propaganda, confusing people with outlandish claims until they despair of figuring out what's real."
ADDENDUMS:
*"As corporate meat-packers have expanded, small ranchers have been getting squeezed. In 1970, they earned about 70 cents for every dollar that consumers spent on beef; today, small ranchers get less than 40 cents." "The Trump administration has killed Obama-era rules that leveled the playing field, and, as one consequence,farm bankruptcies are surging." [4]
*"Polls have found that gun violence was the number one issue for Virginia voters,who showed bipartisan support for passing universal background checks and removing guns from people deemed to present a safety risk." [5]
Footnotes:
[1] Stephanie Mencimer, "Immaculate Deception," Mother Jones, January/February 2020.
[2] Ilyse Hogue, "How to Undo Trump's Damage," The Nation, December 16/23, 2019.
[3] Monika Bauerlein, "Bullies United," Mother Jones, January/February 2020.
[4] Tom Philpott, "The Last Roundup," Mother Jones, January/February 2020.
[5] Matt Cohen, "Ballots vs. Bullets," Mother Jones, January/February 2020.
Thursday, January 23, 2020
Pence and GOP in the Docket and New York's Parole Board
I. Pence and GOP in the Docket
Vice President Mike Pence told reporters that the military aid was held up due to "great concern" that he and President Trump had about "issues of corruption." but he offered no specifics. Pence had said publicly that the delay had nothing to do with Trump's reelection bid. The U. S. ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland's testimony to Congress was that he "mentioned" to Pence in Warsaw that he had concerns that the delay in aid had become tied to the investigations"into Trump's
domestic opponents.
"The Republican Party, because of its capitulation to Trump, is headed for a moral and political accounting. President Trump's racketeering scheme for Ukraine is likely to inflict lasting damage on the reputations of all of those at high levels in his administration who had participated or stood by mutely." ]1]
II. The New York Parole Board
The official mission of New York's parole board is to "ensure public safety by granting parole when appropriate." New York's prison's hold some forty-six thousand people. Almost twenty percent are lifers," which means they are serving a prison sentence with "life" on the backs of their uniforms, like twenty years to life. The process called Parole Prep works only with "lifers." In the past five years, Parole Prep volunteers have helped a hundred and forty-nine people get out of prison, twelve of whom were women. [2]
A two-hundred page report, published in 1975, declared that New York's parole system had "failed dramatically," and was "beyond reform." The board's decision-making process, which was "based on an assessment of an inmate's rehabilitation," rested on "faulty theory," the report said. A major statement in the report was that: "The Board's practices exemplify nationwide criminal justice policies that are rooted in retribution and racism and result in extreme punishment."
New York currently has sixteen parole board members, who conduct some twelve thousand parole interviews a year. Although the cost of imprisonment is higher in New York than in any other state -- $20,000 a year per person and often considerably more if the individual is elderly or ill -- parole board members are not required to justify the financial impact of their decisions.
One of the mantras of the Police Benevolent Association is that there shall be "no" parole for "cop killers." The union keeps a list of people on its Web site who are in prison for the murder of police officers.
III. GOP Gerrymandering
"Drawing legislative districts based on eligible voters instead of total population would be a huge win for Republicans, who tend to represent areas with fewer noncitizens. Democrats currently hold all of the 5 state House seats with the highest percentage of foreign-born noncitizen residents. Using the voting-eligible proportion as the metric for reapportionment cold lead to half of all state legislative districts in the country being redrawn. Those new districts would exclude up to 55 percent of Latinos, 45 percent of Asian Americans, and 30 percent of African Americans from being counted as constituents --compared to 21 percent of white people, according to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights." [3]
Democrats need only nine seats to regain control of the Texas House of Representatives for the first time since 2002, but redrawing districts based on eligible voters would keep the state solidly in red, shifting eight or more seats back to the GOP, according to an analysis by Andrew Beveridge, a professor of sociology at Queens College in New York.
A leaked Census Bureau document estimates that the agency already has accurate citizen information for 90 percent of people in the country. The aborted voter purge is seen in Texas as a preview of how a redistricting map based on citizenship would unfairly target Latinos. While the census is constitutionally required to count every person in America regardless of citizenship status, the 2018 Texas Republican platform called for "an accurate count of United States citizens only."
IV. One True Johnson Scandal
"But there was only one true [President Andrew] scandal just as there is only one true Trump scandal, and though the particulars are very different -- the former class resentment was the inverse of the latter class resentment --they share a common element an open hostility to democratic ideals. Successive generations of historians flipping the script on Reconstruction, framing white Southerners as victims of a tyrannical Northern regime. Reconstruction governments were painted as hopelessly corrupt." As historian Eric Foner put it: "Andrew Johnson was impeached over violating a fairly minor act of Congress, whereas his real crime was trying to deprive 4 million American citizens of their rights." [4]
ADDENDUMS:
*According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, productivity growth has averaged just 1.3 percent annually over the last 14 years. That compares with 3.0 percent annually in the long golden age from 1947 to 1973, and again from 1995 to 2005. The high-productivity-growth years from 1947 to 1973 were ones of rapid wage gains and low unemployment.
*The Air Force plans to use expanded airspace to fly no fewer than 10,000 sorties annually, while dropping 15,360 magnesium flares and 15,360 bundles of metallic chaff on areas containing critical habitat for threatened species and innumerable sacred Native American sites. [5]
*"In 2017, US schools spent at least $2.7 billion on security systems, on top of the money spent by individuals on things like bulletproof backpacks, the IHS Market consulting firm reported." "There have been more than 380 mass shootings -- in which at least four people other than the shooter were injured or killed -- so far this year om the U.S., according to the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive."
Footnotes:
[1] Steve Coll, "In the Loop,"The New Yorker, December 2, 2019.
[2] Jennifer Gounerman, "The Interview," The New Yorker, December 2, 2019.
[3] Ari Berman, "Count Me Out," Mother Jones, January/February 2020.
[4] Tim Murphy, "Trump's Not Richard Nixon. He's Andrew Johnson," Mother Jones, January/February 2020.
[5] John E. Wilks, "Public blasts Air Force..." Sierran, January/February/March 2020.
Wednesday, January 22, 2020
Kashmir and Imprisonment by the Numbers
I. Kashmir by the Numbers
12.5M - Population of Kashmir in 2011.
67% - Percentage of Kashmiris who are Muslim.
70K - Estimated number of lives lost in the last 30 years of conflict in Kashmir.
4K - Estimated number of politicians, activists, and students detained since India revoked Kashmir's special status on August 5.
600K - Estimated number of troops in Kashmir.
10K - Number of Kashmiris who protested in early August. (Source: Molly Minta, The Nation, January 13/20, 2020.)
II. U.S. Imprisonment by the Numbers
$338K - Cost per year to house an inmate in New York City's jails.
161% - Increase in the annual cost to jail a person in New York City over the past decade.
42% - Increase in use-or-force incidents and allegations in New York City's jails this fiscal year.
1.44M - Total state and federal prison population in the United States in 2017.
162K - Number of prisoners in the U.S. serving if sentences in 2016; in 1984 that number was 34,000.
6x - Estimated incarceration rate in the U.S. for black men born in 2001 compared with white men born the same year.
O - Number of countries that incarcerate people at a higher rate than the U.S. does. Source: Shirley Nwanbwa, The Nation, December 30, 2019/January 6, 2020.)
III. The Free College Try
Public college should be free because we have the money. The total cost of public college tuition and fees in 2017 was $76 billion. Federal spending on college financial aid in 2017 was $160 billion.
We just spend it on wealthier students, as tax breaks are the biggest subsidy, after student loans. Tax-based aid going to undergraduates in 2013, based on the lowest to highest quartiles is as follows: $3.3 million --- $7.3 million --- $9.3 million --- $9.8 million. (Department of Education; Congressional Budget Office; Consortium for Higher Education Tax Reform; and The Nation, January 13/20, 2020.)
Mike Konczal has crunched the numbers and found that just 1 percent of students at public institutions hail from the wealthiest 1 percent.
ADDENDUMS:
*An analysis of seafloor mud off the shore of Santa Barbara reveals that between 1945 and 2009 plastic levels in the ocean doubled every 15 years.
*Next year Texas will produce more electricity from wind than from coal.
*British wind farms, solar panels, and renewable biomass plants produce more electricity than fossil fuels for the first time since the UK's first power plant fired up in 1882.
*Investing $1. trillion in climate mitigation and adaptation over the next decade could yield $7.1 trillion in social and environmental benefits, according to the Global Commission on Adaptation.
*Climate change could push more than 120 million people into poverty by 2030 and undo the past 50 years of progress in global health, says the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.
12.5M - Population of Kashmir in 2011.
67% - Percentage of Kashmiris who are Muslim.
70K - Estimated number of lives lost in the last 30 years of conflict in Kashmir.
4K - Estimated number of politicians, activists, and students detained since India revoked Kashmir's special status on August 5.
600K - Estimated number of troops in Kashmir.
10K - Number of Kashmiris who protested in early August. (Source: Molly Minta, The Nation, January 13/20, 2020.)
II. U.S. Imprisonment by the Numbers
$338K - Cost per year to house an inmate in New York City's jails.
161% - Increase in the annual cost to jail a person in New York City over the past decade.
42% - Increase in use-or-force incidents and allegations in New York City's jails this fiscal year.
1.44M - Total state and federal prison population in the United States in 2017.
162K - Number of prisoners in the U.S. serving if sentences in 2016; in 1984 that number was 34,000.
6x - Estimated incarceration rate in the U.S. for black men born in 2001 compared with white men born the same year.
O - Number of countries that incarcerate people at a higher rate than the U.S. does. Source: Shirley Nwanbwa, The Nation, December 30, 2019/January 6, 2020.)
III. The Free College Try
Public college should be free because we have the money. The total cost of public college tuition and fees in 2017 was $76 billion. Federal spending on college financial aid in 2017 was $160 billion.
We just spend it on wealthier students, as tax breaks are the biggest subsidy, after student loans. Tax-based aid going to undergraduates in 2013, based on the lowest to highest quartiles is as follows: $3.3 million --- $7.3 million --- $9.3 million --- $9.8 million. (Department of Education; Congressional Budget Office; Consortium for Higher Education Tax Reform; and The Nation, January 13/20, 2020.)
Mike Konczal has crunched the numbers and found that just 1 percent of students at public institutions hail from the wealthiest 1 percent.
ADDENDUMS:
*An analysis of seafloor mud off the shore of Santa Barbara reveals that between 1945 and 2009 plastic levels in the ocean doubled every 15 years.
*Next year Texas will produce more electricity from wind than from coal.
*British wind farms, solar panels, and renewable biomass plants produce more electricity than fossil fuels for the first time since the UK's first power plant fired up in 1882.
*Investing $1. trillion in climate mitigation and adaptation over the next decade could yield $7.1 trillion in social and environmental benefits, according to the Global Commission on Adaptation.
*Climate change could push more than 120 million people into poverty by 2030 and undo the past 50 years of progress in global health, says the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.
Tuesday, January 21, 2020
A Massive War on Global Warming
I. A Massive War on Global Warming
"Since the start of the Industrial Revolution the U.S. has dumped more than 500 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere and an additional 10 billion tons are accumulated each year. Renewals are a major way out of this problem, especially wind power -- offshore wind being the most promising. This means that broad-based efforts to build solar and wind infrastructure, along with a commitment to replace much of the world's fossil fuels with electricity, would go petty far toward reducing global carbon emissions. How far? Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that by 2050, wind and solar can satisfy 80 percent of electricity demand in most advanced countries." [1]
"Only about half of Americans are willing to pay $1 per month to fight climate change. Only about a quarter are willing to pay $10 a month. And a paltry 16 percent said they'd be willing to pay a climate tax of $8-$40 per month."
"The International Energy Agency estimates that the world spends about $22 billion per year on clean energy innovation. The U.S.share of that is $7 billion --that's about 0.03 percent of the U.S. economy. We built an enormous war machine: 89,000 tanks, 300,000 aircraft, 1,200 navy combat ships, 4,500 landing craft, 2.7 million machine guns, and 42.6 trillion worth of munitions in today's dollars."
II. Only Science Can Save Us
"Over the past 40 years, the price of delivering one watt of solar power has dropped from about $100 to $1. In the last 10 years, the United States has committed $678 million to new nuclear technologies, and boosting this amount could produce commercial reactors virtually immune to meltdowns within a few years." [2]
"According to the International Energy Agency, governments around the world set aside $28 billion for carbon capture projects over the past decade; but spent only $4 billion. We've given up when we should be doubling down. The Energy Future Initiative, a think tank, recommends that the United States commit $120.7 billion over the next 10 years for carbon capture R & D."
III. The Global Warming Effect on Plant Quality
"Of all the insults that greenhouse gases hurl at our food supply -- a warming climate that triggers more severe droughts and floods in key agriculture regions like the Midwest and California, declining yields of staple crops -- the most insidious may involve the deterioration of the nutritional quality of plants we eat. Rather than sound the alarm about the deterioration of a crucial stable crop, the USDA declined to publicize it and tried to convince the University of Washington not to do either, as Politico's Helena Bottewiller Evich reported in June. In Trump's USDA, there's an 'implicit directive not to promote agriculture research related to climate change.' " [3]
Footnotes:
[1] Kevin Drum, "We Need a Massive War Effort," Mother Jones, January/February 2020.
[2] Kevin Drum, "Only Science Can Save Us," Mother Jones, January/February 2020.
[3] Tom Philpott, "The Fault," Mother Jones, January/February 2020.
"Since the start of the Industrial Revolution the U.S. has dumped more than 500 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere and an additional 10 billion tons are accumulated each year. Renewals are a major way out of this problem, especially wind power -- offshore wind being the most promising. This means that broad-based efforts to build solar and wind infrastructure, along with a commitment to replace much of the world's fossil fuels with electricity, would go petty far toward reducing global carbon emissions. How far? Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that by 2050, wind and solar can satisfy 80 percent of electricity demand in most advanced countries." [1]
"Only about half of Americans are willing to pay $1 per month to fight climate change. Only about a quarter are willing to pay $10 a month. And a paltry 16 percent said they'd be willing to pay a climate tax of $8-$40 per month."
"The International Energy Agency estimates that the world spends about $22 billion per year on clean energy innovation. The U.S.share of that is $7 billion --that's about 0.03 percent of the U.S. economy. We built an enormous war machine: 89,000 tanks, 300,000 aircraft, 1,200 navy combat ships, 4,500 landing craft, 2.7 million machine guns, and 42.6 trillion worth of munitions in today's dollars."
II. Only Science Can Save Us
"Over the past 40 years, the price of delivering one watt of solar power has dropped from about $100 to $1. In the last 10 years, the United States has committed $678 million to new nuclear technologies, and boosting this amount could produce commercial reactors virtually immune to meltdowns within a few years." [2]
"According to the International Energy Agency, governments around the world set aside $28 billion for carbon capture projects over the past decade; but spent only $4 billion. We've given up when we should be doubling down. The Energy Future Initiative, a think tank, recommends that the United States commit $120.7 billion over the next 10 years for carbon capture R & D."
III. The Global Warming Effect on Plant Quality
"Of all the insults that greenhouse gases hurl at our food supply -- a warming climate that triggers more severe droughts and floods in key agriculture regions like the Midwest and California, declining yields of staple crops -- the most insidious may involve the deterioration of the nutritional quality of plants we eat. Rather than sound the alarm about the deterioration of a crucial stable crop, the USDA declined to publicize it and tried to convince the University of Washington not to do either, as Politico's Helena Bottewiller Evich reported in June. In Trump's USDA, there's an 'implicit directive not to promote agriculture research related to climate change.' " [3]
Footnotes:
[1] Kevin Drum, "We Need a Massive War Effort," Mother Jones, January/February 2020.
[2] Kevin Drum, "Only Science Can Save Us," Mother Jones, January/February 2020.
[3] Tom Philpott, "The Fault," Mother Jones, January/February 2020.
Monday, January 20, 2020
Orwellism and Trump
I. Dorian Lynskey, "The Ministry of Truth," Doubleday, 2019.
p. 261 - "Donald Trump is no Big Brother. Nor, despite his revival of such toxic phrases as 'America First' and 'enemy of the people,' is he simply a throwback to the 1930s. He has the cruelty and power hunger of a dictator but not the discipline , intellect or ideology. A more apt comparison from the real world is Joseph McCarthy, and a similarly uncanny ability to make journalists dance to his tune even as they loathed him."
"During Trump's campaign against Hilary Clinton it was hard to watch the candidate whipping supporters into a cry of 'Lock her up!' without being reminded of the 'Two Minute Hate' and Orwell's description of the Party mindset: 'continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories and self-abasement of the Party.' Trump's slogan, ' Make America Great Again,' calls to mind Orwell's reference to a hundred percent Americanism. The president meets most of the criteria of Orwell's 1944 definition of fascism: something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class... almost any English person would accept 'bully' as a synonym for 'Fascist.' "
"Orwell contended that such men can only rise to the top when the status quo has failed to satisfy citizens' need for justice, security and self-worth, but Trump's victory required one more special ingredient. He did not seize power through a revolution or coup. He was not potentialed (sic) by a recession or a terrorist atrocity, let alone a nuclear war or a fertility crisis. His route to the White House passed through America's Versionland."
"The consequences of so many Americans' abdication from reality has been disastrous, During the 2016 election campaign, the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm, flooded social media with fake news stories designed to generate confusion, cynicism and division. One of the memes read: 'The People Believe What the Media Tells Them They Believe: George Orwell.' "
p. 263 - "America's epistemological crisis was Trump's golden opportunity. He could only win the 2016 election because a significant number of Americas were effectively living in a parallel reality."
p. 264 - "It is truly Orwellian that the phrase 'fake news' has been turned on its head by Trump and his fellow authoritarians to describe real news that is not to his liking, while flagrant lies become 'alternative facts.' " "Trump creates his own reality and measures his power by the number of people who subscribe to it: the cruder the lie, the more power its success demonstrates. Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani accidentally provided a crude motto for Versionland USA when he snapped at an interviewer, 'Truth isn't truth!' " "During a speech in July 2018, Trump himself said: 'What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening.' Another line from 'Ninety Eighty-Four' went viral -- a real one this time: 'The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.' "
p. 265 - "At the end of Trump's first week in office, the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik apologized for previously thinking that Orwell's warning was too crude for the modern world: 'One is reminded of what Orwell got right about this kind of brute authoritarianism -- and that it was essential that it rests on lies told so often and so repeatedly, that fighting the lie becomes not simply more dangerous, but more exhausting then repeating it... People aren't meant to believe it; they're meant to be intimidated by it. The lie is not a claim about specific facts; the lunacy is a deliberate challenge to the whole larger slice of sanity.' "
II. Trump's Executive Order On Jewishness
American Jews are not and have never been a nation unto themselves. They are an ethnic group within this republic. Classifying political speech about Jews according to national origin is confusing, unclear, and really scary. Trump has very little understanding that being against a policy of the Israeli government is not de facto anti-Semitism.
It is easy to envision a situation in which legitimate criticism of Israel,including criticism by Jews, is determined to be anti-Semitic, and could risk the funding of the very institutions we need in order to foster productive discourse. Colleges that do have these conversations are likely destined to become Israeli ones, but making Jews a separate nationality doesn't help the cause. Grouping Jews as no other religious group has been in this country, making Jews clearly "dual citizens," raises the trope of dual loyalty.
The executive order takes indirect aim at the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement that has generated intense controversy on college campuses. Title VI bans discrimination on race, color or national origin in programs and activities for which colleges and universities receive federal funding. Trump's executive order will extend the ban on funding to discrimination based on anti-Semitism.
The left-leaning Jewish group, J-Street, said in a statement that the order "appears less designed to combat anti-Semitism than to have a chilling effect on free speech and to crack own on campus critics of Israel. We feel it is misguided and harmful for the White House to unilaterally declare a broad range of nonviolent campus criticism of Israel to be anti-Semitic, especially at a time when the prime driver of anti-Semitism in this country is the xenophobic, white nationalist far-right."
Even James Loeffler, a professor of Jewish history at the University of Virginia, who generally supports the Trump action, says: "Everyone recognizes that Jews are a complicated amalgam of ethnicity and religion, and treating them as a kind of quasi-racial group can have negative consequences." Professor Loeffler shares the concerns of those who believe the executive order could be used to infringe on the First Amendment rights of those who would voice controversial political speech about Israel and the Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He says: "Clearly, given the administration's political position on this issue, it's not unrealistic to see this as coming out of that context."
ADDENDUM:
*President Trump told the American Israeli Council: "A lot of you are in the real estate business, because I know you very well. You're brutal killers, not nice people at all, but you have to vote for me -- you have no choice. You're not going to vote for Pocahontas. I can tell you that. You're not gonna vote for the wealth tax. Yeah, let's take 100% of your wealth away!"
p. 261 - "Donald Trump is no Big Brother. Nor, despite his revival of such toxic phrases as 'America First' and 'enemy of the people,' is he simply a throwback to the 1930s. He has the cruelty and power hunger of a dictator but not the discipline , intellect or ideology. A more apt comparison from the real world is Joseph McCarthy, and a similarly uncanny ability to make journalists dance to his tune even as they loathed him."
"During Trump's campaign against Hilary Clinton it was hard to watch the candidate whipping supporters into a cry of 'Lock her up!' without being reminded of the 'Two Minute Hate' and Orwell's description of the Party mindset: 'continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories and self-abasement of the Party.' Trump's slogan, ' Make America Great Again,' calls to mind Orwell's reference to a hundred percent Americanism. The president meets most of the criteria of Orwell's 1944 definition of fascism: something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class... almost any English person would accept 'bully' as a synonym for 'Fascist.' "
"Orwell contended that such men can only rise to the top when the status quo has failed to satisfy citizens' need for justice, security and self-worth, but Trump's victory required one more special ingredient. He did not seize power through a revolution or coup. He was not potentialed (sic) by a recession or a terrorist atrocity, let alone a nuclear war or a fertility crisis. His route to the White House passed through America's Versionland."
"The consequences of so many Americans' abdication from reality has been disastrous, During the 2016 election campaign, the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm, flooded social media with fake news stories designed to generate confusion, cynicism and division. One of the memes read: 'The People Believe What the Media Tells Them They Believe: George Orwell.' "
p. 263 - "America's epistemological crisis was Trump's golden opportunity. He could only win the 2016 election because a significant number of Americas were effectively living in a parallel reality."
p. 264 - "It is truly Orwellian that the phrase 'fake news' has been turned on its head by Trump and his fellow authoritarians to describe real news that is not to his liking, while flagrant lies become 'alternative facts.' " "Trump creates his own reality and measures his power by the number of people who subscribe to it: the cruder the lie, the more power its success demonstrates. Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani accidentally provided a crude motto for Versionland USA when he snapped at an interviewer, 'Truth isn't truth!' " "During a speech in July 2018, Trump himself said: 'What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening.' Another line from 'Ninety Eighty-Four' went viral -- a real one this time: 'The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.' "
p. 265 - "At the end of Trump's first week in office, the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik apologized for previously thinking that Orwell's warning was too crude for the modern world: 'One is reminded of what Orwell got right about this kind of brute authoritarianism -- and that it was essential that it rests on lies told so often and so repeatedly, that fighting the lie becomes not simply more dangerous, but more exhausting then repeating it... People aren't meant to believe it; they're meant to be intimidated by it. The lie is not a claim about specific facts; the lunacy is a deliberate challenge to the whole larger slice of sanity.' "
II. Trump's Executive Order On Jewishness
American Jews are not and have never been a nation unto themselves. They are an ethnic group within this republic. Classifying political speech about Jews according to national origin is confusing, unclear, and really scary. Trump has very little understanding that being against a policy of the Israeli government is not de facto anti-Semitism.
It is easy to envision a situation in which legitimate criticism of Israel,including criticism by Jews, is determined to be anti-Semitic, and could risk the funding of the very institutions we need in order to foster productive discourse. Colleges that do have these conversations are likely destined to become Israeli ones, but making Jews a separate nationality doesn't help the cause. Grouping Jews as no other religious group has been in this country, making Jews clearly "dual citizens," raises the trope of dual loyalty.
The executive order takes indirect aim at the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement that has generated intense controversy on college campuses. Title VI bans discrimination on race, color or national origin in programs and activities for which colleges and universities receive federal funding. Trump's executive order will extend the ban on funding to discrimination based on anti-Semitism.
The left-leaning Jewish group, J-Street, said in a statement that the order "appears less designed to combat anti-Semitism than to have a chilling effect on free speech and to crack own on campus critics of Israel. We feel it is misguided and harmful for the White House to unilaterally declare a broad range of nonviolent campus criticism of Israel to be anti-Semitic, especially at a time when the prime driver of anti-Semitism in this country is the xenophobic, white nationalist far-right."
Even James Loeffler, a professor of Jewish history at the University of Virginia, who generally supports the Trump action, says: "Everyone recognizes that Jews are a complicated amalgam of ethnicity and religion, and treating them as a kind of quasi-racial group can have negative consequences." Professor Loeffler shares the concerns of those who believe the executive order could be used to infringe on the First Amendment rights of those who would voice controversial political speech about Israel and the Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He says: "Clearly, given the administration's political position on this issue, it's not unrealistic to see this as coming out of that context."
ADDENDUM:
*President Trump told the American Israeli Council: "A lot of you are in the real estate business, because I know you very well. You're brutal killers, not nice people at all, but you have to vote for me -- you have no choice. You're not going to vote for Pocahontas. I can tell you that. You're not gonna vote for the wealth tax. Yeah, let's take 100% of your wealth away!"
Sunday, January 19, 2020
Observations on the Impeachment Saga
#What the GOP is saying is that impeachment can't be considered serious or fair without direct fact witnesses and there can be no direct fact witnesses because President Trump contends he has every right to deny their appearance.
#Article I, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution and the Senate rules state that every senator is mandated to "swear or affirm" an oath to do "impartial justice" in every impeachment hearing, So far, senators Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell have said they will ignore their required oaths. Senator McConnell has said""Every thing I do during this, I'm coordinating with White House counsel" "There will be no difference between the President's position, and our position as to how to handle this to the extent that we can." McConnell also said that he will not be "impartial" in the proceedings because impeachment is a political matter. Senator Graham has said, in regard to impeachment, that his aim is to ensure that the impeachment matter "dies quickly." "I'm not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here." In 1999, Graham said every senator must keep an "open mind"; also, he stressed the need to have witnesses in the Clinton impeachment.
#Trump';s six-page letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a boiling mix of fury, self-pity and mendacity. In one section he wrote: "Fortunately, there was a transcript of the conversation taken, and you know from the transcript (which was immediately made public) that paragraph in question was perfect." Another section reads: "You know full well that Vice President Biden used his office and $1 billion dollars to coerce Ukraine into firing the prosecutor who was digging into the economy, and paying his son millions of dollars."
#Contrary to what Trump has claimed about the Ukraine prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, going after Joe Biden's son, Hunter, a more credible account in that Shokin let the investigations of Burisma and others to go dormant, and the United States and its allies decided he was not effective in his job, and, in fact, let corruption flourish. Western allies and nongovernmental organizations, such as the Wolrd Bank and the IMF, wanted Shokin gone.
#A common claim being made by the GOP is that Trump was interested in rooting out corruption in Ukraine. President Trump did not mention rooting out corruption in the two calls he made to President Zelensky.
#GOP lawmakers have made the charge that closed hearings are unfair, and deprive the public of needed information. The opening statements of witnesses were made public on the day they were delivered, and the witness transcripts were later publicly released after classified information was erased. As for being unfair, committee hearings are run on the basis of assigning equal time for asking questions of witnesses, and the questioning alternates between the two parties. If the staff of one political party gets a chunk of time to ask questions, the staff of the other party gets equal time. And as for hiding information from the public, it is President Trump's stonewalling on providing witnesses and documents that is, by far, the main reason that information is not being made available.
#When the GOP got the public hearings they were demanding, they unanimously voted against having them... . They said, in effect, it was "too little, too late." The GOP claim that the Democrats were being unfair to Trump should have been washed away by the fact that the rules put into effect on October 31, were essentially adopted from the GOP rules established in 2015. The charge of unfair to Trump is ludicrous when one considers the law-breaking he has been allowed to get away with, the democratic norms he has trampled, and the severe damage he has done to the checks and balances structure of the U.S. government by stonewalling on witnesses and documents.
#Article I, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution and the Senate rules state that every senator is mandated to "swear or affirm" an oath to do "impartial justice" in every impeachment hearing, So far, senators Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell have said they will ignore their required oaths. Senator McConnell has said""Every thing I do during this, I'm coordinating with White House counsel" "There will be no difference between the President's position, and our position as to how to handle this to the extent that we can." McConnell also said that he will not be "impartial" in the proceedings because impeachment is a political matter. Senator Graham has said, in regard to impeachment, that his aim is to ensure that the impeachment matter "dies quickly." "I'm not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here." In 1999, Graham said every senator must keep an "open mind"; also, he stressed the need to have witnesses in the Clinton impeachment.
#Trump';s six-page letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a boiling mix of fury, self-pity and mendacity. In one section he wrote: "Fortunately, there was a transcript of the conversation taken, and you know from the transcript (which was immediately made public) that paragraph in question was perfect." Another section reads: "You know full well that Vice President Biden used his office and $1 billion dollars to coerce Ukraine into firing the prosecutor who was digging into the economy, and paying his son millions of dollars."
#Contrary to what Trump has claimed about the Ukraine prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, going after Joe Biden's son, Hunter, a more credible account in that Shokin let the investigations of Burisma and others to go dormant, and the United States and its allies decided he was not effective in his job, and, in fact, let corruption flourish. Western allies and nongovernmental organizations, such as the Wolrd Bank and the IMF, wanted Shokin gone.
#A common claim being made by the GOP is that Trump was interested in rooting out corruption in Ukraine. President Trump did not mention rooting out corruption in the two calls he made to President Zelensky.
#GOP lawmakers have made the charge that closed hearings are unfair, and deprive the public of needed information. The opening statements of witnesses were made public on the day they were delivered, and the witness transcripts were later publicly released after classified information was erased. As for being unfair, committee hearings are run on the basis of assigning equal time for asking questions of witnesses, and the questioning alternates between the two parties. If the staff of one political party gets a chunk of time to ask questions, the staff of the other party gets equal time. And as for hiding information from the public, it is President Trump's stonewalling on providing witnesses and documents that is, by far, the main reason that information is not being made available.
#When the GOP got the public hearings they were demanding, they unanimously voted against having them... . They said, in effect, it was "too little, too late." The GOP claim that the Democrats were being unfair to Trump should have been washed away by the fact that the rules put into effect on October 31, were essentially adopted from the GOP rules established in 2015. The charge of unfair to Trump is ludicrous when one considers the law-breaking he has been allowed to get away with, the democratic norms he has trampled, and the severe damage he has done to the checks and balances structure of the U.S. government by stonewalling on witnesses and documents.
Thursday, January 16, 2020
Inequality and the City, and Other Matters of Deep Concern
Eric Alterman,"Inequality and the City," The Nation, December 30/2019/January 6, 2020.
New York's biggest problem is affordable housing. Every year during his [Michael Bloomberg's] tenure, the city lost thousands of rent-stabilized apartments to market rates that were often double what tenants had been paying. Bloomberg's solution was to encourage the building and purchase of luxury housing -- often by people who couldn't be bothered to show up at their luxury investment properties. From 2000 to 2012, the number of housing units in New York City rose by less than six percent, a rate below all three of the 22 largest cities with growing populations.
Atosa Araxia Abrahamian, "Fact: Sh*t Happens," The Nation, November 25, 2019.
"A second Trump term would derail any efforts toward a green equitable, and fair 21st century. Corporate power will continue to swell; more plant and animal species will die off; people will suffer hotter summers colder winters, longer [work] hours,worse benefits, less pay; and minorities will feel their pain compounded by the weight of marginalization." "That brings us to where we are today, with a veneer of economic prosperity but few guarantees for working people in the future."
Jamie Ducharme, "The puzzle of lung cancer," TIME, November, 25, 2019.
"A 2018 study in the 'New England Journal of Medicine,' showed that rates of lung cancer incidence actually rose over the past 20 years born among women born in the period from 1950-1960; in younger women diagnoses fell, but as much as among men." "The U.S. smoking rates have been higher among men than women,and continuing to the present day." As of 2017, almost 16 percent of adult men smoked, compared with about 12 percent of women, according to federal data.
Margaret Talbot, "Out of Frame," The New Yorker, November 4, 2019.
"In the early years of the twentieth century, women worked in virtually every aspect of silent-film-making, as directors, producers, editors, and even camera operators." "Some scholars estimate that half of all film scenarios in the silent era were written by women, and contemporaries made the case, sometimes with old stereotypes, sometimes with fresh and canny arguments, that women were especially suited to motion picture story-telling." "In Hollywood, script supervisors, who have historically been women, were once known as 'continuity girls.' "
Sarah Lenard, "A Recovery for the Whole Family," The Nation, November 25, 2019.
"Consider that federal public investment today stands at the lowest level since 1947. Advocates for social services have been losing ground for decades." "At the same time, real wages have fallen since the 1970s, burdening workers even more."
According to the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, the average cost of licensed infant child care is $1,230 per month, which is almost a fifth of the U.S. family monthly income. In the past decade, the cost of child care has increased by nearly 25 percent, while real wages have roughly stayed the same. What's more, there are about 2 million domestic workers in the United States, the majority of them immigrant women and women of color, and 1.2 million child care workers.
Amy Davidson Sorkin, "Next Steps," The New Yorker, December 9, 2019.
"Defending Trump has required Republicans to become increasingly comfortable with the conspiratorial; these days they barely seem persuadable. One way to counter the President's complaints about being denied 'due process' would be to give him room to make whatever case he has; based on all that we know this would only expose his weaknesses. In a series of tweets last week, Trump said that he would 'love to have his aides testify but he is fighting the subpoenas because future Presidents should in no way be compromised.' " My Comment: Based on the historical record, it is highly unlikely that future presidents will be fighting impeachment proceedings, and the multitude of investigations being conducted of Trump's behavior and actions. In a more real world, presidents should not be permitted to use executive privilege to shield them from investigations of illegal behavior or abuses of power.
Impeachment-Related Matters
#David Remnick, "Impeachment Whirlwind," The New Yorker, November 25, 2019.
"Only willful [opposition] to fact can obscure the reality that Trump, with the help of his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and various others, tried to exert a vulnerable ally in order to gain an advantage in the 2020 election campaign. How could a President engage in such brazen self-dealing? How could he play games with the security needs of a state that had been invaded by Russia, first in Crimea and then in the Donbass?"
#Republican members of the Intelligence Committee, led by Jim Jordan of Ohio, and Devin Nunes of California made every attempt to confound voters with misdirection and conspiracy theories.
#Roger Stone on Trump: "Try to impeach him. Just try it. You will have a spasm of violence in this country like you've never seen. Both sides are armed, my friends. This is not 1984. The people will not stand for impeachment. A politician who votes for it would be endangering their own lives."
#On December 19, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said: "Let's be clear: the House's vote yesterday was not some neutral judgment... . It was the predetermined end of a partisan crusade." He called the effect "slapdash," and the "most rushed, least thought through and most unfair treatment inquiry in modern history." He also called it the "first purely partisan presidential impeachment since the wake of the civil war." Not content with that, he called it "partisan rage" and a "rigged inquiry."
New York's biggest problem is affordable housing. Every year during his [Michael Bloomberg's] tenure, the city lost thousands of rent-stabilized apartments to market rates that were often double what tenants had been paying. Bloomberg's solution was to encourage the building and purchase of luxury housing -- often by people who couldn't be bothered to show up at their luxury investment properties. From 2000 to 2012, the number of housing units in New York City rose by less than six percent, a rate below all three of the 22 largest cities with growing populations.
Atosa Araxia Abrahamian, "Fact: Sh*t Happens," The Nation, November 25, 2019.
"A second Trump term would derail any efforts toward a green equitable, and fair 21st century. Corporate power will continue to swell; more plant and animal species will die off; people will suffer hotter summers colder winters, longer [work] hours,worse benefits, less pay; and minorities will feel their pain compounded by the weight of marginalization." "That brings us to where we are today, with a veneer of economic prosperity but few guarantees for working people in the future."
Jamie Ducharme, "The puzzle of lung cancer," TIME, November, 25, 2019.
"A 2018 study in the 'New England Journal of Medicine,' showed that rates of lung cancer incidence actually rose over the past 20 years born among women born in the period from 1950-1960; in younger women diagnoses fell, but as much as among men." "The U.S. smoking rates have been higher among men than women,and continuing to the present day." As of 2017, almost 16 percent of adult men smoked, compared with about 12 percent of women, according to federal data.
Margaret Talbot, "Out of Frame," The New Yorker, November 4, 2019.
"In the early years of the twentieth century, women worked in virtually every aspect of silent-film-making, as directors, producers, editors, and even camera operators." "Some scholars estimate that half of all film scenarios in the silent era were written by women, and contemporaries made the case, sometimes with old stereotypes, sometimes with fresh and canny arguments, that women were especially suited to motion picture story-telling." "In Hollywood, script supervisors, who have historically been women, were once known as 'continuity girls.' "
Sarah Lenard, "A Recovery for the Whole Family," The Nation, November 25, 2019.
"Consider that federal public investment today stands at the lowest level since 1947. Advocates for social services have been losing ground for decades." "At the same time, real wages have fallen since the 1970s, burdening workers even more."
According to the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, the average cost of licensed infant child care is $1,230 per month, which is almost a fifth of the U.S. family monthly income. In the past decade, the cost of child care has increased by nearly 25 percent, while real wages have roughly stayed the same. What's more, there are about 2 million domestic workers in the United States, the majority of them immigrant women and women of color, and 1.2 million child care workers.
Amy Davidson Sorkin, "Next Steps," The New Yorker, December 9, 2019.
"Defending Trump has required Republicans to become increasingly comfortable with the conspiratorial; these days they barely seem persuadable. One way to counter the President's complaints about being denied 'due process' would be to give him room to make whatever case he has; based on all that we know this would only expose his weaknesses. In a series of tweets last week, Trump said that he would 'love to have his aides testify but he is fighting the subpoenas because future Presidents should in no way be compromised.' " My Comment: Based on the historical record, it is highly unlikely that future presidents will be fighting impeachment proceedings, and the multitude of investigations being conducted of Trump's behavior and actions. In a more real world, presidents should not be permitted to use executive privilege to shield them from investigations of illegal behavior or abuses of power.
Impeachment-Related Matters
#David Remnick, "Impeachment Whirlwind," The New Yorker, November 25, 2019.
"Only willful [opposition] to fact can obscure the reality that Trump, with the help of his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and various others, tried to exert a vulnerable ally in order to gain an advantage in the 2020 election campaign. How could a President engage in such brazen self-dealing? How could he play games with the security needs of a state that had been invaded by Russia, first in Crimea and then in the Donbass?"
#Republican members of the Intelligence Committee, led by Jim Jordan of Ohio, and Devin Nunes of California made every attempt to confound voters with misdirection and conspiracy theories.
#Roger Stone on Trump: "Try to impeach him. Just try it. You will have a spasm of violence in this country like you've never seen. Both sides are armed, my friends. This is not 1984. The people will not stand for impeachment. A politician who votes for it would be endangering their own lives."
#On December 19, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said: "Let's be clear: the House's vote yesterday was not some neutral judgment... . It was the predetermined end of a partisan crusade." He called the effect "slapdash," and the "most rushed, least thought through and most unfair treatment inquiry in modern history." He also called it the "first purely partisan presidential impeachment since the wake of the civil war." Not content with that, he called it "partisan rage" and a "rigged inquiry."
Monday, January 13, 2020
Green New Deal for Nuclear Weapons
The Green New Deal is a progressive response to climate change, because it's a solution commensurate with the scale of the problem. It also has a coherent vision for its implementation that is equal parts optimistic and realistic. Meanwhile, the arms control community is largely trapped in damage-control mode, valiantly resisting President Trump's efforts to build dangerous new nuclear weapons and withdraw from critical nuclear agreements. Environmentalists are playing offense, while the nuclear community is playing defense.
Most progressives would argue that the answer is global zero -- a nuclear-free world. However, that is a long-term solution. Just as the Green New Deal does not immediately see a fossil-fuel-free world, a progressive nuclear policy cannot immediately see a nuclear-free one.
This does not mean, however, that progressives should be satisfied with occasional and incremental nuclear policy tweaks. By applying core principles of the Green New Deal -- international cooperation, reductions, transparency, and justice -- to nuclear weapons, progressives can begin to craft a plan that seeks to ambitiously and coherently restructure U.S. nuclear policy.
The Green New Deal aims to make the United States "the international leader on climate change." In similar fashion, a progressive nuclear policy should seek to place the United States at the forefront of global disarmament efforts -- acting as an international leader in nuclear transparency, diplomacy, and reductions.
President Trump has foolishly undone earlier diplomatic successes by killing off successful arms control treaties -- including the Iran nuclear deal and the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which banned an entire missile class -- and threatening to terminate President Barack Obama's New START, the treaty that caps U.S. and Russian deployed strategic nuclear arsenals. Nevertheless, a progressive nuclear policy should begin by emulating and expanding upon specific policies from not only the Obama era, but also from the Trump administration.
In a similar vein, the United States should immediately end its bellicose rhetoric toward Iran and attempt to pick up the shattered pieces of the Iran nuclear deal. These efforts might require targeted sanctions relief and economic inducements to convince participating countries to return to the table in good faith.
With regard to other nuclear powers -- particularly Russia and China -- the Trump administration has embraced great-power competition and gung-ho militaristic policies that will drag the world deeper into a renewed arms race. Instead, the United States should engage with Russia to reconstruct the INF Treaty, with both countries returning to compliance; immediately extend- and try to expand New START; pursue arrangements to reduce military tension, draw up a long-term plan to include China and other nuclear-armed states in the arms-control process; and finally ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
The Green New Deal suggests the U.S. technological expertise can be leveraged to help other countries achieve Green New Deals of their own.
"Since 2016, JP Morgan Chase --which received $25 billion in TARP funds -- poured $196 billion into coal, oil, gas projects around the world. Wells Fargo was given the same amount and has invested in new fossil fuel infrastructure to the tune of $153 billion over the same period." [1]
"Any bank that wants a check from the federal government, for example, should have to stop financing the companies wrecking the earth. Bailout recipients should be subject to a strict carbon audit that examines the lifetime emissions of projects they finance." "As of 2018, over ten [of the] largest insurers in the United States were holding just over $50 billion in fossil fuel investments. Just two of these companies disclosed that they considered climate change when making investment strategies."
"New procurement standards mandating zero-carbon fleets see unionized workers building tons of thousands of electric vehicles for agencies like the US postal services. That massive purchasing power will continue to swell; more plant and animal species will die off ; people will suffer hotter summers, colder winters, longer hours, worse benefits, less pay, and minorities will feel their pain compounded by the weight of marginalization." "That brings us to where we are today, with a veneer of economic prosperity, but few guarantees for working people in the future."
Footnote"
[1] Kate Aronoff, "A Green Bailout for the People," The Nation, November 25, 2019.
Most progressives would argue that the answer is global zero -- a nuclear-free world. However, that is a long-term solution. Just as the Green New Deal does not immediately see a fossil-fuel-free world, a progressive nuclear policy cannot immediately see a nuclear-free one.
This does not mean, however, that progressives should be satisfied with occasional and incremental nuclear policy tweaks. By applying core principles of the Green New Deal -- international cooperation, reductions, transparency, and justice -- to nuclear weapons, progressives can begin to craft a plan that seeks to ambitiously and coherently restructure U.S. nuclear policy.
The Green New Deal aims to make the United States "the international leader on climate change." In similar fashion, a progressive nuclear policy should seek to place the United States at the forefront of global disarmament efforts -- acting as an international leader in nuclear transparency, diplomacy, and reductions.
President Trump has foolishly undone earlier diplomatic successes by killing off successful arms control treaties -- including the Iran nuclear deal and the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which banned an entire missile class -- and threatening to terminate President Barack Obama's New START, the treaty that caps U.S. and Russian deployed strategic nuclear arsenals. Nevertheless, a progressive nuclear policy should begin by emulating and expanding upon specific policies from not only the Obama era, but also from the Trump administration.
In a similar vein, the United States should immediately end its bellicose rhetoric toward Iran and attempt to pick up the shattered pieces of the Iran nuclear deal. These efforts might require targeted sanctions relief and economic inducements to convince participating countries to return to the table in good faith.
With regard to other nuclear powers -- particularly Russia and China -- the Trump administration has embraced great-power competition and gung-ho militaristic policies that will drag the world deeper into a renewed arms race. Instead, the United States should engage with Russia to reconstruct the INF Treaty, with both countries returning to compliance; immediately extend- and try to expand New START; pursue arrangements to reduce military tension, draw up a long-term plan to include China and other nuclear-armed states in the arms-control process; and finally ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
The Green New Deal suggests the U.S. technological expertise can be leveraged to help other countries achieve Green New Deals of their own.
"Since 2016, JP Morgan Chase --which received $25 billion in TARP funds -- poured $196 billion into coal, oil, gas projects around the world. Wells Fargo was given the same amount and has invested in new fossil fuel infrastructure to the tune of $153 billion over the same period." [1]
"Any bank that wants a check from the federal government, for example, should have to stop financing the companies wrecking the earth. Bailout recipients should be subject to a strict carbon audit that examines the lifetime emissions of projects they finance." "As of 2018, over ten [of the] largest insurers in the United States were holding just over $50 billion in fossil fuel investments. Just two of these companies disclosed that they considered climate change when making investment strategies."
"New procurement standards mandating zero-carbon fleets see unionized workers building tons of thousands of electric vehicles for agencies like the US postal services. That massive purchasing power will continue to swell; more plant and animal species will die off ; people will suffer hotter summers, colder winters, longer hours, worse benefits, less pay, and minorities will feel their pain compounded by the weight of marginalization." "That brings us to where we are today, with a veneer of economic prosperity, but few guarantees for working people in the future."
Footnote"
[1] Kate Aronoff, "A Green Bailout for the People," The Nation, November 25, 2019.
Wednesday, January 8, 2020
Moral Power of Fiction
Jesse McCarthy, "Finding the Other," The Nation, December 30/2019/January 6, 2020. - Virginia Woolf''s faith in the moral power of fiction allowed her to say that the lived quality of a black person's experience, however dimly appreciated, was not ultimately divorced from the deepest self-understandings of white people. Woolf, in other words, dared to insist that there are "other" people in our midst; all around us (and within us) are different facets of humanity. Part of this invisibility is our collective responsibility to make us safe from the objective of living in a society built on the foundations of violence and stratification, we assure ourselves that such a status belongs to a well-defined stranger.
Toni Morrison is a dispassionate social theorist, a moral anthropologist, someone who offers acute and even scathing readings of America's contemporary malaise, civic and moral decline in an age defined by the mindless boosterism of laissez-faire capitalism. [She sees a] "warped projection of our fears of homelessness" and "our own rapidly disintegrating sense of belonging, reflecting the anxieties produced by the privatization of public goods and commons, and the erosion of face-to-face association." Everything comes "together around a set of core concerns about the degradation and coarsening of our politics as we cast one another as 'others,' and how this process often manifests itself through language." "Journalists," she insisted, "must take up the cause of [using] language against cultivated ignorance, enforced silence, and metastaizing lies."
Eric Alterman, "Inequality and the City," The Nation, December 30/2019/January 6, 2020. - New York's biggest problem is affordable housing. Every year during his [Michael Bloomberg's] tenure, the city lost thousands of rent-stabilized apartments to market rates that were often double what tenants had been paying. Bloomberg's solution was to encourage the building and purchase of luxury housing --often by people who could't be bothered to show up at their luxury investment properties. From 2000 to 2012, the number of housing units in New York City rose by less than six percent, a rate below all but three of the 22 largest cities in the United States, and by far the lowest among cities with growing populations.
Laura Wolf-Powers, an urban studies professor at Hunter College, has said: "While Bloomberg's ambitious five-borough development program created new destinations and boosted job growth in some sectors, it also imposed high costs on low-and moderate-income neighbor residents and small businesses. The result was that according to the Women's Center for Education and Career Advancement, fully 42 percent of New Yorkers lived in households whose incomes could not cover the cost of housing, food, transportation, health care, and other basic necessities.
Atossa Araxia Abraham, "Offshoring Asylum," The Nation, December 30/2019/January 6, 2020. - What the agreement to force asylum seekers to register in another Latin American country does is to make it virtually impossible for them to gain asylum in the United States, thereby reducing legal immigration to the bare minimum. Powerful countries can essentially strong-arm weaker states into doing the things they would rather avoid on their own turf. The U.S. ropes Honduras or El Salvador into fulfilling international obligations, and those countries don't have the resources or the clout to say "no." And people seeking a safe place to live (for reasons linked to politics, war, climate change,or personal circumstances) will be shunted to nations unable and often unwilling to give them the support they need to survive, let alone have a good life.
Toni Morrison is a dispassionate social theorist, a moral anthropologist, someone who offers acute and even scathing readings of America's contemporary malaise, civic and moral decline in an age defined by the mindless boosterism of laissez-faire capitalism. [She sees a] "warped projection of our fears of homelessness" and "our own rapidly disintegrating sense of belonging, reflecting the anxieties produced by the privatization of public goods and commons, and the erosion of face-to-face association." Everything comes "together around a set of core concerns about the degradation and coarsening of our politics as we cast one another as 'others,' and how this process often manifests itself through language." "Journalists," she insisted, "must take up the cause of [using] language against cultivated ignorance, enforced silence, and metastaizing lies."
Eric Alterman, "Inequality and the City," The Nation, December 30/2019/January 6, 2020. - New York's biggest problem is affordable housing. Every year during his [Michael Bloomberg's] tenure, the city lost thousands of rent-stabilized apartments to market rates that were often double what tenants had been paying. Bloomberg's solution was to encourage the building and purchase of luxury housing --often by people who could't be bothered to show up at their luxury investment properties. From 2000 to 2012, the number of housing units in New York City rose by less than six percent, a rate below all but three of the 22 largest cities in the United States, and by far the lowest among cities with growing populations.
Laura Wolf-Powers, an urban studies professor at Hunter College, has said: "While Bloomberg's ambitious five-borough development program created new destinations and boosted job growth in some sectors, it also imposed high costs on low-and moderate-income neighbor residents and small businesses. The result was that according to the Women's Center for Education and Career Advancement, fully 42 percent of New Yorkers lived in households whose incomes could not cover the cost of housing, food, transportation, health care, and other basic necessities.
Atossa Araxia Abraham, "Offshoring Asylum," The Nation, December 30/2019/January 6, 2020. - What the agreement to force asylum seekers to register in another Latin American country does is to make it virtually impossible for them to gain asylum in the United States, thereby reducing legal immigration to the bare minimum. Powerful countries can essentially strong-arm weaker states into doing the things they would rather avoid on their own turf. The U.S. ropes Honduras or El Salvador into fulfilling international obligations, and those countries don't have the resources or the clout to say "no." And people seeking a safe place to live (for reasons linked to politics, war, climate change,or personal circumstances) will be shunted to nations unable and often unwilling to give them the support they need to survive, let alone have a good life.
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