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.
Wednesday, January 22, 2020
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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