ANS -- Raising Most People's Wages

Here's Robert Reich's latest short article.  He's very understandable.  It's important that you understand how economics works, in general terms, even though most of us don't want to.  We will continue to be the victims of those who do, if we don't understand it and take some control ourselves. 
Find it here:    http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/26139-raising-most-peoples-wages   
--Kim





 
Robert Reich. (photo: RADiUS-TWC)

Raising Most People's Wages

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog

29 September 14

 

 was in Seattle, Washington, recently, to congratulate union and community organizers who helped Seattle enact the first $15 per hour minimum wage in the country.

Other cities and states should follow Seattle's example.

Contrary to the dire predictions of opponents, the hike won't cost Seattle jobs. In fact, it will put more money into the hands of low-wage workers who are likely to spend almost all of it in the vicinity. That will create jobs.

Conservatives believe the economy functions better if the rich have more money and everyone else has less. But they're wrong. It's just the opposite.

The real job creators are not CEOs or corporations or wealthy investors. The job creators are members of America's vast middle class and the poor, whose purchases cause businesses to expand and invest.

America's wealthy are richer than they've ever been. Big corporations are sitting on more cash they know what to do with. Corporate profits are at record levels. CEO pay continues to soar.

But the wealthy aren't investing in new companies. Between 1980 and 2014, the rate of new business formation in the United States dropped by half, according to a Brookings study released in May.

Corporations aren't expanding production or investing in research and development. Instead, they're using their money to buy back their shares of stock.

There's no reason for them to expand or invest if customers aren't buying.

Consumer spending has grown more slowly in this recovery than in any previous one because consumers don't have enough money to buy.

All the economic gains have been going to the top.

The Commerce Department reported last Friday that the economy grew at a 4.6 percent annual rate in the second quarter of the year.

So what? The median household's income continues to drop.

Median household income is now 8 percent below what it was in 2007, adjusted for inflation. It's 11 percent below its level in 2000.

It used to be that economic expansions improved the incomes of the bottom 90 percent more than the top 10 percent.

But starting with the "Reagan" recovery of 1982 to 1990, the benefits of economic growth during expansions have gone mostly to the top 10 percent.

Since the current recovery began in 2009, all economic gains have gone to the top 10 percent. The bottom 90 percent has lost ground.

We're in the first economic upturn on record in which 90 percent of Americans have become worse off.

Why did the playing field start to tilt against the middle class in the Reagan recovery, and why has it tilted further ever since?

Don't blame globalization. Other advanced nations facing the same global competition have managed to preserve middle class wages. Germany's median wage is now higher than America's.

One factor here has been a sharp decline in union membership. In the mid 1970s, 25 percent of the private-sector workforce was unionized.

Then came the Reagan revolution. By the end of the 1980s, only 17 percent of the private workforce was unionized. Today, fewer than 7 percent of the nation's private-sector workers belong to a union.

This means most workers no longer have the bargaining power to get a share of the gains from growth.

Another structural change is the drop in the minimum wage. In 1979, it was $9.67 an hour (in 2013 dollars). By 1990, it had declined to $6.84. Today it's $7.25, well below where it was in 1979.

Given that workers are far more productive now – computers have even increased the output of retail and fast food workers ­ the minimum wage should be even higher.

By setting a floor on wages, a higher minimum helps push up other wages. It undergirds higher median household incomes.

The only way to grow the economy in a way that benefits the bottom 90 percent is to change the structure of the economy. At the least, this requires stronger unions and a higher minimum wage.

It also requires better schools for the children of the bottom 90 percent, better access to higher education, and a more progressive tax system.

GDP growth is less and less relevant to the wellbeing of most Americans. We should be paying less attention to growth and more to median household income.

If the median household's income is is heading upward, the economy is in good shape. If it's heading downward, as it's been for this entire recovery, we're all in deep trouble.

ANS -- Americans Have No Idea How Bad Inequality Is

Here is an article with really clear graphs about income and wealth inequality around the world with a comparison or actual, estimated and ideal levels.  It's fairly short. 
No one likes it, but no one wants to do anything that would fix it. 
Find it here:  http://www.businessinsider.com/americans-have-no-idea-how-bad-inequality-is-2014-9   
--Kim





MARKETSMore: Slate

Americans Have No Idea How Bad Inequality Is

• JORDAN WEISSMANN, SLATE
• SEP. 27, 2014, 9:30 AM

Robert Johnson for Business Insider

If Michael Norton's research is to be believed, Americans don't have the faintest clue how severe economic inequality has become­and if they only knew, they'd be appalled. 

Consider the Harvard Business School professor's new study examining public opinion about executive compensation, co-authored with the Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok's Sorapop Kiatpongsan. In the 1960s, the typical corporate chieftain in the U.S. earned 20 times as much as the average employee. Today, depending on whose estimate you choose, he makes anywhere from 272 to 354 times as much. According to the AFL-CIO, the average CEO takes home more than $12 million, while the average worker makes about $34,000.

In their study, Norton and Kiatpongsan asked about 55,000 people around the globe, including 1,581 participants in the U.S., how much money they thought corporate CEOs made compared with unskilled factory workers. Then they asked how much more pay they thought CEOs should make. The median American guessed that executives out-earned factory workers roughly 30-to-1­exponentially lower than the highest actual estimate of 354-to-1. They believed the ideal ratio would be about 7-to-1.

"In sum, respondents underestimate actual pay gaps, and their ideal pay gaps are even further from reality than those underestimates," the authors write.

Americans didn't answer the survey much differently from participants in other countries. Australians believed that roughly 8-to-1 would be a good ratio; the French settled on about 7-to-1; and the Germans settled on around 6-to-1. In every country, the CEO pay-gap ratio was far greater than people assumed. And though they didn't concur on precisely what would be fair, both conservatives and liberals around the world also concurred that the pay gap should be smaller. People agreed across income and education levels, as well as across age groups.

How much should CEOs earn compared with the average low-skill worker?

Researchers Sorapop Kiatpongsan and Michael I. Norton asked 55,000 people around the world how much they thought CEOs in made compared with the average low-skill factory worker, and how much they should make. Here are the estimated, ideal, and actual ratios. All ratios are to 1, so 93:1, 40:1, etc.

Slate

 

This is the second high-profile paper in which Norton has argued that Americans have a strikingly European notion of economic fairness. In 2011, he published a study with Duke University professor Dan Ariely that asked Americans how they believed wealth should be split up through society. It included two experiments. In the first, participants were shown three unlabeled pie charts: one of a totally equal wealth distribution; one of Sweden's distribution, which is highly egalitarian; and one of the U.S. distribution, which is wildly skewed toward the rich. Then, the subjects were told to pick where they would like to live, assuming they would be randomly assigned to a spot on the economic ladder. With their imaginary fate up to chance, 92 percent of Americans opted for Sweden's pie chart over the United States.

In the second experiment, Ariely and Norton asked participants to guess how wealth was distributed in the United States, and then to write how it would be divvied up in an ideal would (this, it seems, served as the template for Norton's most recent study). Americans had little idea how concentrated wealth truly was. Subjects estimated that the top 20 percent of U.S. households owned about 59 percent of the country's net worth, whereas in the real world, they owned about 84 percent of it. In their own private utopia, subjects said that the top quintile would claim just 32 percent of the wealth. In fact, the ideal looked strikingly like Sweden.

Slate

As in Norton's more recent study, responses varied a bit by age, income, and political party, but there was overall agreement that America would be better off with a smaller wealth gap.

Slate


"People drastically underestimate the current disparities in wealth and income in their societies," Norton told me in an email, "and their ideals are more equal than their estimates, which are already more equal than the actual levels. Maybe most importantly, people from all walks of life­Democrats and Republicans, rich and poor, all over the world­have a large degree of consensus in their ideals: Everyone's ideals are more equal than the way they think things are." Theoretically, Americans aren't exceptional in their views about distribution at all­they have a sense of fairness similar to that of Germans, French, and Australians, and most Americans would be offended if they actually knew the degree of economic inequality that exists in this country.

But let's say all of America woke up one morning and could cite Thomas Piketty chapter and verse. Would today's moderates suddenly demand Scandinavian tax rates and mass wealth redistribution? Would our politics become more progressive?

It's one thing to talk about fairness in the abstract; it's another to agree on policies that would address it. Gallup, for instance, has consistently found that a solid majority of Americans believe wealth should be distributed more evenly. But fewer support the idea of imposing heavy taxes on the rich in order to do it. The Pew Research Center reports that 45 percent of Republicans already believe the government should at least do something to reduce inequality. But good luck finding GOP voters who are begging for a more robust welfare state.

Americans broadly support ideas that don't require them to make an obvious personal sacrifice, like raising the minimum wage; they're less happy to make tradeoffs. Europeans have long had social democracy baked into their politics; we have a libertarian streak. Maybe that would change if more Americans knew just how dire inequality has become. But I wouldn't bank on it.




Read more: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/09/americans_have_no_idea_how_bad_inequality_is_new_harvard_business_school.html#ixzz3EgMvP9RX

ANS-- Fwd: What Would A GOP Senate Majority Mean?

Hi -  I am forwarding this short glimpse of what would happen if the Republicans get a majority in the Senate this fall.  Please, please get out and vote in November.  I have cut out the requests for money that this email had in it.  If you want to help them, go to their website. 
--Kim

 

Meet the GOP Majority

The Republicans have made big promises to their ultra-wealthy financial backers: Should they take the Senate, they promise to cut 'entitlements' and pass the savings on with more tax cuts for the 1%.

This isn't fear mongering. This is taking them at their word. Republicans have promised to raise Medicare age and cut Social Security benefits.

• Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, who would become chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, proposed legislation to raise the retirement age to 70 and supported President Bush's plans to privatize the system.
• Representative Bill Cassidy, who hopes to replace Mary Landrieu as senator from Louisiana, has pledged to raise the retirement age to 70 and turn Medicare into a voucher program.
• Senators Ron Johnson and Ted Cruz both refer to Social Security as a "Giant Ponzi Scheme." Cruz went further, going on the record with the Texas Tribune for privatization. As Texas solicitor general, he even sued the federal government to strike down Medicare's prescription benefit.
• Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona said he'd prefer "savings in entitlement programs rather than defense spending."

Campaign for America's Future has defeated similar bad ideas before. We've done it when Democrats are in charge, and we've done it when Republicans held all three branches of government.
...

In 2005, President George W. Bush thought he would spend his "political capital" on privatizing Social Security. We led the fight to torpedo a plan that would have put seniors' retirement in the hands of an already out-of-control Wall Street casino.

In 2010, Representative Paul Ryan and House Republicans tried to use their new majority in the House to raise the retirement age and cut benefits. We fought back and prevented a "Grand Bargain." Right-wing GOPers wore their folly around their necks in the 2012 election and it helped re-elect Barack Obama.

In 2015, the assault is likely to be a retirement age of 70 and yet another attempt to replace Medicare with vouchers.

We will not let them savage Americans who are vulnerable because of retirement or disability.

...

© 2013 Campaign for America's Future Inc. 1825 K Street, NW, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20006


 

ANS -- Profit Is Theft: It Sounds Absurd but Here's Why

Here is a very interesting, apparently put out by Occupy, that tells you why all the money is going to the top 1%.  In very simple, easy to understand terms. 
Find it here:   http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/profit_is_theft_it_sounds_absurd_but_heres_why/?utm_content=buffer713a6&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
--Kim



Profit Is Theft: It Sounds Absurd but Here's Why


Take a look at this info-graphic. The disparity is absurd. Though personally I don't think raising the minimum wage is the ultimate solution, as it doesn't get anywhere close to solving the root problem.



Profit is theft, in our current economy. That is the profound conclusion that must be addressed. But surely no one will agree with this on its face. It sounds equally absurd. But corporate/ceo/shareholder profit would not exist if workers were paid the full value of their work. All workers contribute to the profit or losses of a business. But in traditional capitalist practice, only the owners or shareholders receive the profits while 99% of the workers - the working class minus management usually - receives a static wage. And this wage *must* be depressed lower than the full value of their work otherwise profit could not exist.

Just to make sure this is totally clear, let's say a worker does 8 hours of work to produce $160 in value for the company. If everyone was paid the full value of their work this person would get paid $160. Instead, this worker is paid $8 an hour and receives $64, while the other $96 goes to the owners. When this wealth extraction occurs day after day after day, it's no wonder we see the rich getting richer while the poor stays poor. The working class is getting robbed by the very nature of the wage-based employee/owner system.

In a fair system, profit would no longer be the exclusive domain of a tiny ownership class. Profit would be shared among all the workers who contributed to that profit, rather than a few individuals who can potentially make one up-front investment in the beginning of a business and then never lift a finger while wealth is continually extracted from the workers every year, year after year after year...

So this is the ponzi scheme in play here. The house of cards. When wealth is continually extracted to pad the ever growing salaries and bonuses of an outrageously affluent ownership/investment class, the wealth gap eventually starts to create problems for the health of the ecosystem as a whole. The social costs of this robbery become externalized.

People struggle to pay their bills and buy food for their family, even working two or three jobs. They can't afford health insurance or the mortgage on their house, so more people default and lose their homes. As you'd expect, government is asked to step in: to pay for healthcare, food stamps, social security and other basic necessities people can't afford because every month a part of their salary is stolen from them to give a little extra to the owners.

What we have today is government subsidized robbery. The government provides just enough 'welfare' assistance so that businesses can keep ripping off their poverty-wage workers, who would be revolting in the streets without this government assistance. Meanwhile, the taxpayers pay for the burden of this subsidy while capitalists rake in the profits.

Socialized costs. Privatized gains.

It is ironic to me that so many people decry the evils of having their paycheck "robbed" in the form of a government tax, when the original robbery that created the need for this tax goes unnoticed. (Of course, this robbery-by-force, ie, tax by the government to pay for wars and the mass killing of civilians that I strongly oppose is equally detestable, but that is a subject for another time.)

If the free-market thinkers reading this have made it this far, hopefully now they can see that I recognize the free-market concept as the best part of what people tend to think of as capitalism. Yet capitalism has become a sort of propaganda today, as it boasts primarily its greatest strength (the free market) as its only virtue, while downplaying or ignoring its 2 primary flaws: private ownership of the means of production and wage slavery.

But in an alternative successor system, called Economic Democracy - which I would place between capitalism and a Resource Based Economy - the free market would still exist and be enhanced. But the flaws of capitalism would be addressed. Instead of private ownership of the means of production (profit and control held exclusively by the ownership class) and wage labor, we would have:

(A) *Social* control of investment. This would eliminate the 1% investment and ownership class (banks, CEOs, Wall Street traders etc), which act like a sort of parasite on the economy as a whole, by virtue of their ability to make money off of money - an entirely fraudulent practice in terms of generating true wealth for the earth and its people. This is a huge concept in itself but to sum it up: capital assets would be owned by society (the means of production, ie factories, equipment, land etc). In return for the use of these assets, a business would pay a capital tax, which would be used to invest further in the growth of new or existing businesses or projects. Decisions about how these investment funds are spent would be made locally by a new system of directly-democratic government. The people of a city would convene in large assemblies to decide how these investment funds should be spent. They would also negotiate a portion of these funds to be pooled with the funds of other regional cities for regional-scale investments, and on occasion would pool some of these funds into a national fund for national scale projects, which would be quite rare. By giving the power of investment to people rather than private individuals, investments would benefit society rather than this tiny minority of people. Read more about this idea here and here.

(B) Worker Self-Management, aka, workplace democracy. Workers would have a say in the business or corporation they work for. All workers would have an "ownership" share in the company and thus receive a share of its profits. These profits would likely not be equal but the disparity between the lowest paid and the highest paid would be significantly reduced from the current disparity in America (Compare 475: 1 in America versus 20:1 in Canada vs 4:1 roughly in a democratic economic system. The Mondragon Corporation provides an excellent case study of this model already in practice).

Workplace democracy, beyond enhancing economic justice, also would have profound effects on social justice. Corporations could not continue to act so brazenly if decisions were no longer made by a tiny minority concerned purely with money and other aberrant values. Could all the workers of Monsanto or British Petroleum allow their company to do what they do if they had a say over it? The rationale: "I just work here and have to do what I have to to survive" would no longer apply. Workers would have control over the decisions and policies of the corporation.

(C) As mentioned before, the Marketplace would remain an integral element of the system, but it would actually function more properly and as intended, as the marketplace we have today is not even close to "free." This subject has been heavily propagandized, and many believe our country is becoming more socialist, but in truth we are more capitalist than we ever have been. Call this "corporate capitalism" if you like, either way, it is the system we have always had since the beginning of capitalism's history in the 1500s.

Capitalism, in practice, has always been " corporate socialism," where corporations exact their influence on government to create more self-benefiting hand-outs, tax-breaks, or virtual monopolies by influencing laws and regulations. People often blame the government for creating an unfair market when it is the corporations themselves which have influenced all the laws and regulations in place to benefit and reduce competition for themselves. The Koch brothers can sing the gospel of the free market and deregulation all day, but in truth this is just propaganda speak, or code for, "we want more socialist benefits for our company and ourselves, as the richest paying tax-payers, so tax the poorest the most and strip social services so you can give more of that pie to us."

In a true market-place, laws and regulations would not be designed almost exclusively to benefit corporations and the 1%. For example, pollution regulations would actually tax polluters and revoke corporate charters if a corporation abused the land, air or water that it has access to. These elements should be considered the common heritage of the world, and should be used to benefit the world as a whole, rather than be seen as the property of a few individuals to benefit only those individuals to the detriment of everyone else. As it stands now, most environmental "regulations" only legalize a certain level of pollution and protect corporations from lawsuits and other liabilities.

In a true free and fair market-place, General Electric would not pay zero in taxes (and receive a subsidy!), nor would the biggest oil companies receive huge tax breaks. So, you get the idea. Free-market rhetoric has been used as propaganda to hide the slight-of-hand robbery that has occurred.

Because of this, in America, people either believe we have a capitalist system that is becoming more socialist (evil!), or people believe we have a system of corporate capitalism or crony capitalism, and better values and reforms are all we need to fix an overall good system. In reality, as said before, what we have is a system of corporate socialism that has always functioned in this way, and it is finally meeting its inevitable societal conclusion. And because this "state-guaranteed system of privilege" is always how capitalism has worked since its beginning, I simply like to call this "capitalism." Capitalism, but with my eyes wide open to what it actually is.

No matter what you want to call it though, the overlying capitalist mythology within our culture has convinced us that workers get what they deserve and owners get what they deserve. And so the root injustice of the system goes on unchallenged while small concessions are requested, such as a higher minimum wage, as suggested by this info-graphic. Or, people blame the government for interfering with the "purity" of the marketplace while never stopping to notice all this government interference primarily benefits a single class of people and the corporations they hold stock in. So instead we see people on the right voting for republicans who lower taxes for the rich and give subsidies to corporations, and people on the left pushing for a higher minimum wage and better government benefits, which is much like asking for prettier window-dressings to decorate the walls of our cell. So what's the difference between conservatives and liberals? One wants freedom and gets even more desolate cell conditions; the other wants better cell conditions without ever realizing they were never free.

Instead, we need to stop the robbery. We need to free ourselves from this wage slavery which robs our paychecks every month and keeps us in debt and forever on the rat wheel just to survive.

Profit should be shared among all workers, and all workers should have an ownership and a decision-making stake in the company they belong to. All workers should reap the full fruits of their labor, in other words, and have autonomy over their lives.

What we need... is Economic Democracy. And this is what we need to fight for.


Sources:
After Capitalism  By David Schweickart

The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand: Corporate Capitalism As a State-Guaranteed System of Privilege

Beyond Elections (Film)

Related Films:

The Top 10 Films that Explain Why the Occupy Movement Exists

Post-Script:
Need further proof that a great robbery of the working class has occurred? Take a look at this chart.



It shows productivity rising quite dramatically, and compensation rising roughly with productivity until 1979, and then compensation virtually stagnates up to the present day. Where did all the wealth go? It went to the top 10% - to the ownership and investment class, to capitalists, in other words. All of the massive wealth that America's working class generated during that period of tremendous productivity, sucked up and robbed from them for 40 years.
 

ANS -- The atheist libertarian lie: Ayn Rand, income inequality and the fantasy of the “free market”

Here is a nice little article exposing the lie that is Libertarianism. 
Find it here:  http://www.salon.com/2014/09/14/the_atheist_libertarian_lie_ayn_rand_income_inequality_and_the_fantasy_of_the_free_market/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow   
--Kim



ep 14, 2014 10:00 AM PST

The atheist libertarian lie: Ayn Rand, income inequality and the fantasy of the "free market"

Atheist libertarians pose as skeptics -- except when it comes to free markets and the nature of corporate power

CJ Werleman

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Topics: Atheism, libertarians, Religion, Editor's Picks, Ayn Rand, Wal-Mart, Ralph Nader, Business News, Life News
Rand Paul, Ayn Rand, Richard Dawkins (Credit: AP/Timothy D. Easley/Reuters/Chris Keane)

Why atheists are disproportionately drawn to libertarianism is a question that many liberal atheists have trouble grasping.  To believe that markets operate and exist in a state of nature is, in itself, to believe in the supernatural. The very thing atheists have spent their lives fleeing from.

According to the American Values Survey, a mere 7 percent of Americans identify as "consistently libertarian." Compared to the general population, libertarians are significantly more likely to be white (94 percent), young (62 percent under 50) and male (68 percent). You know, almost identical to the demographic makeup of atheists – white (95 percent), young (65 percent under 50) and male (67 percent). So there's your first clue.

Your second clue is that atheist libertarians are skeptical of government authority in the same way they're skeptical of religion. In their mind, the state and the pope are interchangeable, which partly explains the libertarian atheist's guttural gag reflex to what they perceive as government interference with the natural order of things, especially "free markets."

Robert Reich says that one of the most deceptive ideas embraced by the Ayn Rand-inspired libertarian movement is that the free market is natural, and exists outside and beyond government. In other words, the "free market" is a constructed supernatural myth.

There is much to cover here, but a jumping-off point is the fact that corporations are a government construct, and that fact alone refutes any case for economic libertarianism. Corporations, which are designed to protect shareholders insofar as mitigating risk beyond the amount of their investment, are created and maintained only via government action.  "Statutes, passed by the government, allow for the creation of corporations, and anyone wishing to form one must fill out the necessary government paperwork and utilize the apparatus of the state in numerous ways. Thus, the corporate entity is by definition a government-created obstruction to the free marketplace, so the entire concept should be appalling to libertarians," says David Niose, an atheist and legal director of the American Humanist Association.

In the 18th century, Adam Smith, the granddaddy of American free-market capitalism, wrote his economic tome "The Wealth of Nations." But his book has as much relevance to modern mega-corporation hyper-capitalism today as the Old Testament has to morality in the 21st century.

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Reich says rules that define the playing field of today's capitalism don't exist in nature; they are human creations. Governments don't "intrude" on free markets; governments organize and maintain them. Markets aren't "free" of rules; the rules define them. "In reality, the 'free market' is a bunch of rules about 1) what can be owned and traded (the genome? slaves? nuclear materials? babies? votes?); 2) on what terms (equal access to the Internet? the right to organize unions? corporate monopolies? the length of patent protections?); 3) under what conditions (poisonous drugs? unsafe foods? deceptive Ponzi schemes? uninsured derivatives? dangerous workplaces?); 4) what's private and what's public (police? roads? clean air and clean water? healthcare? good schools? parks and playgrounds?); 5) how to pay for what (taxes, user fees, individual pricing?). And so on."

Atheists are skeptics, but atheist libertarians evidently check their skepticism at the door when it comes to corporate power and the self-regulatory willingness of corporations to act in the interests of the common good. In the mind of an atheist libertarian, both religion and government is bad, but corporations are saintly. On what planet, where? Corporations exist for one purpose only: to derive maximum profit for their shareholders. "The corporation's legally defined mandate is to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, its own self-interest, regardless of the often harmful consequences it might cause others," writes Joel Bakan, author of "The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power."

Corporations pollute, lie, steal, oppress, manipulate and deceive, all in the name of maximizing profit. Corporations have no interest for the common good. You really believe Big Tobacco wouldn't sell cigarettes to 10-year-olds if government didn't prohibit it? Do you really think Big Oil wouldn't discharge more poisons and environmentally harmful waste into the atmosphere if government regulations didn't restrict it? Do you really believe Wal-Mart wouldn't pay its workers less than the current minimum wage if the federal government didn't prohibit it? If you answered yes to any of the above, you may be an atheist libertarian in desperate need of Jesus.

That awkward pause that inevitably follows asking a libertarian how it is that unrestricted corporate power, particularly for Big Oil, helps solve our existential crisis, climate change, is always enjoyable. "Corporations will harm you, or even kill you, if it is profitable to do so and they can get away with it … recall the infamous case of the Ford Pinto, where in the 1970s the automaker did a cost-benefit analysis and decided not to remedy a defective gas tank design because doing so would be more expensive than simply allowing the inevitable deaths and injuries to occur and then paying the anticipated settlements," warns Niose.

In the 1970s, consumer protection advocate Ralph Nader became famous for helping protect car owners from the unsafe practices of the auto industry. Corporate America, in turn, went out of its way in a coordinated effort, led by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, to destroy Nader. The documentary "Unreasonable Man" demonstrates how corporate CEOs of America's biggest corporations had Nader followed in an attempt to discredit and blackmail him. General Motors went so far as to send an attractive lady to his local supermarket in an effort to meet him, and seduce him. That's how much corporate America was fearful of having to implement pesky and costly measures designed to protect the well-being of their customers.

Today America is facing its greatest moral crisis since the civil rights movement, and its greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression: income inequality. Now, income inequality doesn't happen by accident. It happens by the political choices a country makes. Today America is the most income unequal among all developed nations, and we find ourselves here today not because of government regulation or interference, but a lack thereof. The past three decades have seen our political class become totally beholden to the armies of corporate lobbyists who fund the political campaigns of our elected officials. Today the bottom 99 percent of income earners has no influence on domestic policy whatsoever.

The unilateral control that Wall Street and mega-corporations have over economic policy is now extreme, and our corporate overlords have seen to the greatest transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich in U.S. history, while corporations contribute their lowest share of total federal tax revenue ever. The destruction of labor; serf-level minimum wage; and the deregulation, monopolization and privatization of public assets have pushed us deeper into becoming a winner-takes-all society.

In effect, America virtually exists as a libertarian state, certainly when compared to liberal democracies found in Western Europe, Canada and Australia. In these countries, there's a sense of "we are all in this together," but here the romantic idealism of the rugged individual allows corporate influence of the political class to gut public safety nets, eradicate collective bargaining, strip regulatory control of our banks, water, skies and our food.

By every measure, Australians, Scandinavians, Canadians, Germans and the Dutch are happier and more economically secure. The U.N. World Development Fund, the U.N. World Happiness Index and the Social Progress Index contain the empirical evidence atheist libertarians  should seek, and the results are conclusive: People are happier, healthier and more socially mobile where the size of the state is bigger, and taxes and regulations on corporations are greater. You know, the opposite of the libertarian dream that would turn America into a deeper nightmare.

CJ Werleman is the author of "Crucifying America" and "God Hates You. Hate Him Back." You can follow him on Twitter: @cjwerleman

ANS -- Better Identification of Viking Corpses Reveals: Half of the Warriors Were Female

This one is just a link because there's a really long but very interesting discussion attached to the fairly short article.  If you like such things I recommend it. 
The thing I thought was most important is the circular reasoning that has been used til now:  they assumed that if a body was buried with sword and shield, then it must have been male, so they didn't bother to check.  Once they started checking, they found that, in this particular group, 42% (not fifty percent) of the skeletons were female.  Were they really warriors?  Read the discussion for many perspectives on why these women were accorded a warrior's burial, if that's what it was.... 


Find it here:   http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/09/female-viking-warriors-proof-swords#470354  

Better Identification of Viking Corpses Reveals: Half of the Warriors Were Female

ANS -- Are We Approaching the End of Human History?

Here is what Noam Chomsky says about global climate change.  He thinks it will be the end of civilization.  I agree.  What do you think?
Can we develop little islands of civilization that will last when the rest of the world crashes?
Short article. 
find it here:  http://billmoyers.com/2014/09/09/noam-chomsky-are-we-approaching-the-end-of-human-history/     
--Kim




History

Are We Approaching the End of Human History?

September 9, 2014
by Noam Chomsky

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• 1.9K

Global warming has had a particularly strong impact on the Arctic, yet the effects on the region's ice have been anything but steady or predictable. Some glaciers are spitting out icebergs and draining the Greenland ice sheet at an alarming pace; others are barely moving; a few are growing thicker.(Photo: NASA/ Jefferson Beck and Maria-José Viñas/Flickr CC 2.0)

This post first appeared at In These Times.

It is not pleasant to contemplate the thoughts that must be passing through the mind of the Owl of Minerva as the dusk falls and she undertakes the task of interpreting the era of human civilization, which may now be approaching its inglorious end.
"The likely end of the era of civilization is foreshadowed in a new draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the generally conservative monitor of what is happening to the physical world."

The era opened almost 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, stretching from the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates, through Phoenicia on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean to the Nile Valley, and from there to Greece and beyond. What is happening in this region provides painful lessons on the depths to which the species can descend.

The land of the Tigris and Euphrates has been the scene of unspeakable horrors in recent years. The George W. Bush-Tony Blair aggression in 2003, which many Iraqis compared to the Mongol invasions of the 13th century, was yet another lethal blow. It destroyed much of what survived the Bill Clinton-driven UN sanctions on Iraq, condemned as "genocidal" by the distinguished diplomats Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, who administered them before resigning in protest. Halliday and von Sponeck's devastating reports received the usual treatment accorded to unwanted facts.

One dreadful consequence of the US-UK invasion is depicted in a New York Times "visual guide to the crisis in Iraq and Syria": the radical change of Baghdad from mixed neighborhoods in 2003 to today's sectarian enclaves trapped in bitter hatred. The conflicts ignited by the invasion have spread beyond and are now tearing the entire region to shreds.

Much of the Tigris-Euphrates area is in the hands of ISIS and its self-proclaimed Islamic State, a grim caricature of the extremist form of radical Islam that has its home in Saudi Arabia. Patrick Cockburn, a Middle East correspondent for The Independent and one of the best-informed analysts of ISIS, describes it as "a very horrible, in many ways fascist organization, very sectarian, kills anybody who doesn't believe in their particular rigorous brand of Islam."

Cockburn also points out the contradiction in the Western reaction to the emergence of ISIS: efforts to stem its advance in Iraq along with others to undermine the group's major opponent in Syria, the brutal Bashar Assad regime. Meanwhile a major barrier to the spread of the ISIS plague to Lebanon is Hezbollah, a hated enemy of the US and its Israeli ally. And to complicate the situation further, the US and Iran now share a justified concern about the rise of the Islamic State, as do others in this highly conflicted region.

Egypt has plunged into some of its darkest days under a military dictatorship that continues to receive US support. Egypt's fate was not written in the stars. For centuries, alternative paths have been quite feasible, and not infrequently, a heavy imperial hand has barred the way.

After the renewed horrors of the past few weeks it should be unnecessary to comment on what emanates from Jerusalem, in remote history considered a moral center.

Eighty years ago, Martin Heidegger extolled Nazi Germany as providing the best hope for rescuing the glorious civilization of the Greeks from the barbarians of the East and West. Today, German bankers are crushing Greece under an economic regime designed to maintain their wealth and power.

The likely end of the era of civilization is foreshadowed in a new draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the generally conservative monitor of what is happening to the physical world.
Putting the Freeze on Global Warming

The report concludes that increasing greenhouse gas emissions risk "severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems" over the coming decades. The world is nearing the temperature when loss of the vast ice sheet over Greenland will be unstoppable. Along with melting Antarctic ice, that could raise sea levels to inundate major cities as well as coastal plains.

The era of civilization coincides closely with the geological epoch of the Holocene, beginning over 11,000 years ago. The previous Pleistocene epoch lasted 2.5 million years. Scientists now suggest that a new epoch began about 250 years ago, the Anthropocene, the period when human activity has had a dramatic impact on the physical world. The rate of change of geological epochs is hard to ignore.

One index of human impact is the extinction of species, now estimated to be at about the same rate as it was 65 million years ago when an asteroid hit the Earth. That is the presumed cause for the ending of the age of the dinosaurs, which opened the way for small mammals to proliferate, and ultimately modern humans. Today, it is humans who are the asteroid, condemning much of life to extinction.

The IPCC report reaffirms that the "vast majority" of known fuel reserves must be left in the ground to avert intolerable risks to future generations. Meanwhile the major energy corporations make no secret of their goal of exploiting these reserves and discovering new ones.

A day before it ran a summary of the IPCC conclusions, The New York Times reported that huge Midwestern grain stocks are rotting so that the products of the North Dakota oil boom can be shipped by rail to Asia and Europe.

One of the most feared consequences of anthropogenic global warming is the thawing of permafrost regions. A study in Science magazine warns that "even slightly warmer temperatures [less than anticipated in coming years] could start melting permafrost, which in turn threatens to trigger the release of huge amounts of greenhouse gases trapped in ice," with possible "fatal consequences" for the global climate.

Arundhati Roy suggests that the "most appropriate metaphor for the insanity of our times" is the Siachen Glacier, where Indian and Pakistani soldiers have killed each other on the highest battlefield in the world. The glacier is now melting and revealing "thousands of empty artillery shells, empty fuel drums, ice axes, old boots, tents and every other kind of waste that thousands of warring human beings generate" in meaningless conflict. And as the glaciers melt, India and Pakistan face indescribable disaster.

Sad species. Poor Owl.

The views expressed in this post are the author's alone, and presented here to offer a variety of perspectives to our readers.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among his recent books are Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, Power Systems, Occupy, and Hopes and Prospects. His latest book, Masters of Mankind, will be published soon by Haymarket Books, which is also reissuing twelve of his classic books in new editions over the coming year. His website is www.chomsky.info .

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ANS -- 5 Lessons to Remember as Ferguson Fades into History

Here is Doug Muder's take on Ferguson and why it is different than all the others: it is starting to make America look at police violence as a pattern rather than unconnected incidents.  He also mentions that the escalation of police armaments may be in response to the escalation of civilian armaments.  Read it.
Find it here:  http://weeklysift.com/2014/09/01/5-lessons-to-remember-as-ferguson-fades-into-history/#comments   
--Kim

5 Lessons to Remember as Ferguson Fades into History

If you learned anything from Ferguson, how are you planning to hang on to it?

---

Remember the days right after the Newtown Massacre? For a week, maybe two, it seemed like the country had finally woken up and nothing would ever be the same. Twenty innocent children were dead, along with six adults who tried to protect them. And it was our fault. Mass shootings had been happening more and more often for years, and ­ unlike Australia, which had the same problem and solved it­ we'd done nothing. But now that was all going to change.



Be a Target(ed) shopper.

It didn't. Within months, all the vested interests that benefit from our crazy lack of gun laws had re-asserted themselves, and nothing happened. Or rather, things continued getting worse, with the momentum still on the side of the guns-everywhere movement. Instead of trying to get rid of assault rifles (or at least keep them away from the mentally ill), we're debating whether or not you can hang one over your shoulder while you shop for Oreos. (The ad to the right is a parody, but the picture is genuine.)

So now we've had Ferguson, another national trauma that has mesmerized the media and caused a number of people to see the light on some important issues. Maybe someday we'll look back and see the Michael Brown shooting and the ensuing protests as a tipping point, a moment when things started to turn around. Or maybe we have just briefly tossed in our sleep and will soon settle back down.

In part, that decision is up to all of us. Will we let the things we've learned these last few weeks slip away like the trig identities we crammed into our heads for the big math test? Or will we hang on to our new understandings and not settle back into the same old conversations? Will we demand that our news sources and our political representatives recognize these realities? Or not?

The first step in hanging on to new knowledge is spelling it out clearly. Here's my attempt to isolate five simple Ferguson lessons that we shouldn't forget or let the country forget. I admit they're not rocket science. If they were, we'd already be forgetting them.

1. Police mistreat black people. It's not a fantasy created by " the grievance industry" and it's not a few isolated incidents caused by a handful of bad apples, it's a pattern.

Some parts of the national media have finally started covering it like a pattern, and drawing attention to incidents that by themselves wouldn't usually get national attention. Just this week I ran across the following stories.

• New information the John Crawford shooting came out. On August 5, a 22-year-old black man was killed by police in a WalMart in Ohio because he was carrying an air rifle that he had picked up from a shelf. We had already heard from his girl friend, who was talking to him on the phone as he was being shot. Tuesday, we heard that the shooting was captured on WalMart's surveillance video. It has not been released (though information favorable to the police has been), but Crawford's parents and their attorney have been allowed to see it. The attorney said that Crawford was facing away from officers when they killed him, and that "John was doing nothing wrong in Walmart, nothing more, nothing less than shopping." One of the officers involved in the shooting is back on the job. (A fake news site's story of a second WalMart shooting got taken seriously by a number of people, but didn't actually happen.)
• Chris Lollie was arrested and tased by police in St. Paul while he was waiting for his kids to get out of school. He was trying to walk away from police when they got violent with him. The incident was recorded on his cellphone when it happened in January, but only became public recently after charges against Lollie were dropped and he got his phone back. St. Paul police have defended their officers' actions, which is hard to imagine as I watch the tape.
• Kametra Barbour and her four young children were pulled over in Texas, even though their car was a different color than the one police received a complaint about. The police dashcam video shows the terrified woman being forced at gunpoint to walk backwards towards the police cruiser, protesting all the while that they're making her leave her frightened children alone in the car. The confrontation doesn't end until her 6-year-old son also gets out of the car and walks toward police with his hands up. (What if he'd come out some other way?) "Do they look young to you?" one officer finally asks the other.
• A week and a half ago TV producer Charles Belk was walking back to his car from a Beverly Hills restaurant when his evening took a bad turn. "I was wrongly arrested, locked up, denied a phone call, denied explanation of charges against me, denied ever being read my rights, denied being able to speak to my lawyer for a lengthy time, and denied being told that my car had been impounded…..All because I was mis-indentified as the wrong 'tall, bald head, black male,' … 'fitting the description.' " It was six hours before his lawyer convinced police to watch the surveillance video and recognize that the bank robber's accomplice was obviously not Belk. According to his lawyer (as summarized by ThinkProgress) "many other individuals who found themselves in Belk's situation without his resources would likely have been detained at least until Monday".
• Rev. Madison T. Shockley II published similar stories from his own life, his father's, and his son's. "I fit the description. I was a black man."

What makes these stories hit home is that they're not about purse-snatchers who got roughed up a little too much. They're about people who did nothing and suffered for it.

I know blacks must look at this lesson and say, "Well, duh." But for the most part, whites ­ and the media that caters to whites ­ have refused to take it seriously until these last few weeks. Many of us came to a similar insight after Trayvon Martin, and then backslid into denial. Let's not do it again.

2. Police kill a lot of people in America. Responding to the racism charge, some conservatives put forward a bizarre police-kill-white-people-too case centered on the shooting of Dillon Taylor in Salt Lake City ­ as if that should make everybody more sanguine about Michael Brown or John Crawford. But if white deaths are what it takes to get a certain segment of the public excited about police violence, then let's publicize them. Because whether you break things down by race or not, there's a problem.

You can say policing is a tough, dangerous job ­ and it is. But somehow police in other countries manage to do that job without killing nearly so many people. No government agency totals the exact number ­ it's like we don't really want to know ­ but various available statistics point to around 400 police killings a year in the United States. Here's how that stacks up internationally.



If you want some real contrast, look at Iceland, where last December police shot and killed someone for the first time in the country's history. Admittedly, Iceland is a thousand times smaller than the U.S., but even so, at our rate you'd expect Icelandic police to shoot someone dead every two or three years, rather than oncesince World War II.



3. We need better ways to hold police accountable. One inescapable feature of the Michael Brown investigation is that the Ferguson police are an interested party, and are not simply seeking to bring the truth to light. (For example, the only detail they were willing to release from Brown's autopsy was that he tested positive for marijuana. And they released a video that they claimed was Brown stealing cigars from a convenience store, but not an incident report on his death.) It's crazy to believe that they ­ or a prosecutor who works hand-in-glove with them every day ­ will investigate Brown's death fairly and see that justice is done.

And yet, that is the standard situation whenever a citizen feels mistreated: Police will investigate themselves and find that whatever they did was justified. After police killed his white son, Michael Bell did the research:

In 129 years since police and fire commissions were created in the state of Wisconsin, we could not find a single ruling by a police department, an inquest or a police commission that a shooting was unjustified.

Police will also control ­ and distort ­ the flow of official information to the media. Reporters, in turn, depend on police leaks for their scoops, so they are often active participants in smearing victims. (It's the same pattern we saw in the lead-up to the Iraq War, when reporters whose careers depended on their relationships with Bush administration sources published whatever they were told as if it were fact.)

Civil rights attorney Norman Siegel (whose interview with Chris Hayes starts around the 14-minute mark) suggests a common-sense reform:

There should be a civilian review board in Ferguson and in every city in America. And what that means is that you can't allow the police to investigate the police. You have to have independent civilians looking at the complaint. We need a permanent special prosecutor for police misconduct so we can finally get accountability.

In April, Wisconsin passed a law requiring an outside investigation whenever someone dies in police custody. Every state should follow.

There has been some limited accountability for the most outrageous police behavior during the Ferguson protests. Dan Page, the frighteningly paranoid St. Louis officer I described last week, has been allowed to retire; he'll get full pension and benefits, but at least he's not wearing a badge any more. Ray ("I will fucking kill you") Albers was forced to resign. Matthew ("These protesters should be put down like a rabid dog the first night") Pappert was fired. Chris Hayes asks the right follow-up question:

The national media came to one (in some ways) random metro area suburb, St. Louis Country, with a hundred cameras for two weeks. And you've got at least four police officers essentially caught on camera doing really awful things, and a bunch more unnamed. It was almost a random audit. And the thing I can't help thinking is "OK. There's two ways to interpret this. Is this area particularly bad in terms of the quotient of police officers who act like this? Or is this just normal, and we just happened to have the cameras pointed there?"

What if we put the cameras right on the police? Events in Ferguson have added momentum to the notion that all police cars should have dash-cams and all officers should wear cameras on their uniforms. Private sources have donated enough body cameras for every Ferguson officer to wear one. Let's see if they do.

4. White privilege is real. Stephen Colbert advised the Ferguson protesters to learn from Cliven Bundy and his friends in the militia movement.

By the way, black people, why can't you be more like these guys? They were armed, and they dared the cops to shot them, and nothing happened. Just figure out whatever was different about them, and you'll be fine.

But being treated with more respect by police is just one aspect of white privilege, which affects everything from hailing a cab to whether your resume will get you an interview. Pre-Ferguson, most whites reacted to talk about white privilege as if it were just an Ivy League way to call them racists or tell them to STFU.

But recently more whites have started to get it and explain it to others. One of the most approachable explanations is in " What My Bike Has Taught Me About White Privilege" posted by Pastor Jeremy Dowsett on his blog A Little More Sauce.Dowsett, who is white but has non-white children, compared being black in America to his own experience riding a bicycle on the busy streets of Lansing.

[Bike riders] have the right to be on the road, and laws on the books to make it equitable, but that doesn't change the fact that they are on a bike in a world made for cars. Experiencing this when I'm on my bike in traffic has helped me to understand what privilege talk is really about.

Now most people in cars are not intentionally aggressive toward me. But even if all the jerks had their licenses revoked tomorrow, the road would still be a dangerous place for me. Because the whole transportation infrastructure privileges the automobile. It is born out of a history rooted in the auto industry that took for granted that everyone should use a car as their mode of transportation. It was not built to be convenient or economical or safe for me.

And so people in cars­nice, non-aggressive people­put me in danger all the time because they see the road from the privileged perspective of a car.

Similarly, our laws promise racial equality and not all whites are racists, but our society was built with whites in mind. Systems that seem perfectly natural and transparent if you're white are problematic if you're not.

Elaborating on Dowsett's metaphor from my biking perspective: I can't count how many times I've nearly fallen off a no-shoulder country road because car drivers have no idea how loud a "light" beep of the horn sounds to someone not enclosed in a glass-and-metal bubble. (Apparently they worry that their internal-combustion engine might "sneak up" on me because it seems so quiet to them.) Keep that in mind the next time you offer a "reasonable" criticism of the black experience.

Jon Stewart's epic response to conservative fury that blacks "make everything about race" is worth watching from the beginning, but it came down to this:

Race is there, and it is a constant. You're tired of hearing about it? Imagine how f*cking exhausting it is living it.

How are we whites going to keep this increased consciousness of privilege from fading away? Christian Lander, who writes the blog Stuff White People Like, suggests making it the next ice-bucket challenge. He observes that what whites really need to raise their awareness of (far more than any deadly disease) is what it's like to be a black teen. So he proposes the BT Challenge: Video yourself doing something that is dangerous for a black teen ­ like, say, walking to the convenience store for Skittles ­ and post it on social media.



5. We need to de-militarize our society. Americans from coast to coast were repulsed and alarmed by the images of mine-resistant military vehicles roaming American streets with camo-clad police snipers perched on top of them. It was way beyond ironic that equipment created to defend an occupying army in a guerrilla war was being deployed against American citizens protesting excessive force from police.

The militarization of police has been roundly denounced ­ most effectively by John Oliver ­ and it deserved every word of that denunciation.

That public outcry has even started to have some effect. Anchorage police have rescinded their request for military vehicles. Claire McCaskill will be chairing Senate hearings on police militarization.

But while MRAPs are obviously over the top, Ladd Everitt from the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence told Business Insider that some advanced weaponry is justified by the level of armament police might face (from someone other than mostly non-violent protesters).

 "We see this as a product of the continuing arms race between law enforcement and civilians that has been going on for decades." Everitt said the increasingly sophisticated weaponry being sold to U.S. civilians is forcing police to keep up, with both sides purchasing ever more powerful weapons. The arms race means "police officers have legitimate fears about the nature of the firepower they are confronting on a daily basis," he said.

So the problem isn't just the militarization of American police, it's the militarization of American society.

That puts a different spin on the gap in police killings between the U.S. and every other first-world nation. American police are on a hair trigger because, in a country with over 300 million firearms, the possibility that a suspect might start shooting at them is never far from their minds. Over the course of a long career, it just doesn't seem safe to take the more laid-back approach of a German or English policeman.

Bear that in mind the next time the NRA frames guns-everywhere as purely a question of personal rights. No matter how responsible and well-intentioned that gun-toting Oreo shopper might be, his presence raises the temperature in the room. All of us ­ and especially police ­ have to shorten our response times, given how fast a situation can turn deadly. So whether I choose to carry a gun or not, that raised room temperature might get me killed someday.

And that brings me full circle, back to gun control. Remember Newtown?

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By weeklysift, on September 1, 2014 at 9:53 am, under Uncategorized . Tags: race.11 Comments
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Comments

• Dave Lance On September 1, 2014 at 10:02 am
• Permalink | Reply Yes. I remember Newtown.
• David Lance On September 1, 2014 at 10:27 am
• Permalink | Reply I hear you, brother. Imagine the horror, to find yourself at the business end. I shot an AR-15 when my mom died. It was about a week between when she died, and the funeral. (Thank You God that I was there. Anyway…) An old high school friend and his kid brother took me out in the woods. Set us up a target. Black paper with a white target area as I recall. And we took turns shooting it. I was a good shot with a BB gun and a 22 when these guys knew me before. I was somewhat famous among them because we were hunting and one of those guys flicked an empty 16 gauge casing into a swift little river, and I sighted up on it with my Remington 22 single shot (I loved that gun), and sunk it. So In the woods a few years ago, holding a gun that looked like the one my brother carried in Vietnam, and I could still line up the front site in the groove with the rear sight, stil stand still and pull a trigger. I mostly hit their target. I hadn't lost my ability to shoot a weapon. It gave me the willies to think about being at the business end. The bullets were big and powerful and terrifying. I guess when you get on the business end of any gun, it is probably a lonely place. All the politics goes out of it. All the philosophy. All the right and wrong. Just you, alone, breathing, with huge and pointed missiles of led being hurled at your body. Whatever the intention.
• wgr56 On September 1, 2014 at 10:52 am
• Permalink | Reply I wonder if the number of people killed by police in the United States is tied to the lack of gun-control laws. It seems to me that police in civilized countries (i.e. those that limit gun ownership by the general population) might have less to worry about in the everyday course of their jobs than do police in the U.S. I'm not a police officer, but it seems to me that if police officers are a bit on edge about whether Joe Six Pack is going to pull out an automatic weapon and start blasting, then I can understand it, despite any training they receive on the use of deadly force. That blacks are on the receiving end of a disproportionate amount of police abuse is, of course, reprehensible.
  • phantasm129 On September 1, 2014 at 5:03 pm
  • Permalink | Reply The grievances committed by the police further encourages civilians to arm. Not only can they point to the police not being there until long after any middle-of-the-night trespasser completes whatever they've set out to do, but now any of the incredibly tiny minority of officers who decide you need to be taught who's in charge can more viciously abuse their power.
• David Lance On September 2, 2014 at 7:56 am
• Permalink | Reply Imagine what the experience is like for someone who is six years old, and is about to be shot with an AR-15. I know what you're thinking. But you or I can no longer afford THAT luxury. It is the new American standard. And maybe there is your answer. The problem is not that we now live with 300,000,000 guns and a permanently militarized police force. (Thanks Mr. Scalia. You sure know how to translate law written for a muzzle loader! Fancy words, yours.) The real thing that upsets us is, we have lowered our standard.
• David Lance On September 2, 2014 at 9:08 am
• Permalink | Reply I'm Sorry. I, of course, meant lead.
• David Lance On September 2, 2014 at 9:15 am
• Permalink | Reply I blame "Mad Max" (the movies), and "1984," (the book). Our society should stop with the dystopian future fiction. Too many of us view it as schematics.
• katykay2010 On September 4, 2014 at 3:36 am
• Permalink | Reply A must-read, pulling many elements together, perhaps a bit long for "sound-bite" minds….I hope not. My comment will be way too long, I am afraid. We have not learned so many lessons, it staggers my mind…don't know why it continues to do this, but each instance so reinforces this idea, and I become crazy wondering when many more individuals might learn, remember, see the connections to their individual lives, and get out of the stores, off their comfy TV-watching chairs and couches, or vacationing, etc to help fix this broken world. I know we all have been brainwashed, but come'on folks, not everyone is brain-dead are they? Of course, I know that, or there would not be the Weekly Sift, protesters, resistance in Ferguson, Newtown, Staten Island, Iowa, California, Gaza, Syria, etc. There are just too few, still.
  For all of the above horrors that are always on my mind, I see that so many struggles are connected, yet too often these connections are not made in the mainstream. Thankfully, we now have the Internet and Social Media.
  And, too many of us are so involved in our own lives, we "don't have time" or don't see what good one person or a group of people can do, "can't win against City Hall" attitude. I have heard that all my life. This is not true. Us "little" people are the only thing that will change it. Exempted always from my frequent critiques of "couch potatoes" are always those who are just barely surviving, working overtime, 2 or 3 jobs for their families, sometimes homeless, families or single parents, others are fleeing for their lives from guns, gangs, mortars, etc.
  The ones who really impress and amaze me with their courage are youngest immigrants from Mexico and Central America, the Ferguson folks, facing the cops who they know could kill any one of them at any time, or the resistors in Gaza, Syria, Iraq, etc. And I hope it doesn't take too much more of this level of violence and discrimination in the U.S. for us to connect the dots and become activists, as part of our daily lives.
  If we (when is perhaps the more appropriate question) were faced with guns and tanks, or mortars, how many of us would then become activists, stopping us from getting an education or job, housing or simply living, because of our religiion, culture, skin color, sexual orientation, how many would be in the streets?
  Our world is in serious need of help, and One by One we will change the world, until one day we will hear and feel the other's pain, respect others, as well as the earth, seas and air, and be on the way to heal ourselves and our world. Of course, extinction is still not the exception, but rather it is the rule, so there's that. Though an uphill struggle, it is not hopeless. History teaches us that. And, the present as well, through the people of Ferguson, Gaza and resisters all over the world who are shining the light, showing/giving the hope, teaching us if we care to stretch, asking us to care to act. Many grassroots groups are working in many communities. We are on our way.
  And, the Weekly Sift is doing important work, and I thank you, hope you continue for a very long time. I am sharing the article as widely as I can, one by one, change will come.
• katykay2010 On September 4, 2014 at 5:26 am
• Permalink | Reply PS. Just took a look back at earlier "hits" from Doug Muder, from Pericles on Daily Kos. Don't know yet if this will be my favorite of Doug Muder's articles/blogs, because I haven't read a large enough sampling yet, but it is truly brilliant. I Do read Daily Kos, infrequently, more lately, so I will read others you posted there. Love so much of your work and some great commenters on the Weekly Sift. Can't for the life of me remember how I got the link to it, but glad it did, glad it is there. Thanks.
  
  

ANS -- Limits to Growth was right. New research shows we're nearing collapse

this was recommended by Sara Robinson, though not written by her.  It's about predictions of dire events, made in 1972, that appear to be on track.  an alternative energy source could help put off collapse, but other resources are finite too.  [Watch this space for an announcement of our crowd-funding campaign for our solar electric generator.  Maybe we can help the world survive....]
We recommend setting up locally sustainable economies to insulate against the coming crash. 
Find it here: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits-to-growth-was-right-new-research-shows-were-nearing-collapse 
--Kim

Limits to Growth was right. New research shows we're nearing collapse

Four decades after the book was published, Limit to Growth's forecasts have been vindicated by new Australian research. Expect the early stages of global collapse to start appearing soon

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• theguardian.com, Monday 1 September 2014 21.15 EDT
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Piles of crushed cars at a metal recycling site in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Photograph: Alamy

The 1972 book Limits to Growth, which predicted our civilisation would probably collapse some time this century, has been criticised as doomsday fantasy since it was published. Back in 2002, self-styled environmental expert Bjorn Lomborg consigned it to the " dustbin of history".

It doesn't belong there. Research from the University of Melbourne has found the book's forecasts are accurate, 40 years on. If we continue to track in line with the book's scenario, expect the early stages of global collapse to start appearing soon.

Limits to Growth was commissioned by a think tank called the Club of Rome. Researchers working out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including husband-and-wife team Donella and Dennis Meadows, built a computer model to track the world's economy and environment. Called World3, this computer model was cutting edge.

The task was very ambitious. The team tracked industrialisation, population, food, use of resources, and pollution. They modelled data up to 1970, then developed a range of scenarios out to 2100, depending on whether humanity took serious action on environmental and resource issues. If that didn't happen, the model predicted "overshoot and collapse" – in the economy, environment and population – before 2070. This was called the "business-as-usual" scenario.

The book's central point, much criticised since, is that "the earth is finite" and the quest for unlimited growth in population, material goods etc would eventually lead to a crash.

So were they right? We decided to check in with those scenarios after 40 years. Dr Graham Turner gathered data from the UN (its department of economic and social affairs, Unesco, the food and agriculture organisation, and the UN statistics yearbook). He also checked in with the US national oceanic and atmospheric administration, the BP statistical review, and elsewhere. That data was plotted alongside the Limits to Growth scenarios.

The results show that the world is tracking pretty closely to the Limits to Growth "business-as-usual" scenario. The data doesn't match up with other scenarios.

These graphs show real-world data (first from the MIT work, then from our research), plotted in a solid line. The dotted line shows the Limits to Growth "business-as-usual" scenario out to 2100. Up to 2010, the data is strikingly similar to the book's forecasts.
Solid line: MIT, with new research in bold. Dotted line: Limits to Growth 'business-as-usual' scenario. Solid line: MIT, with new research in bold. Dotted line: Limits to Growth 'business-as-usual' scenario. Photograph: Supplied Solid line: MIT, and research in bold. Dotted line: Limits to Growth 'business-as-usual' scenario. Photograph: Supplied

As the MIT researchers explained in 1972, under the scenario, growing population and demands for material wealth would lead to more industrial output and pollution. The graphs show this is indeed happening. Resources are being used up at a rapid rate, pollution is rising, industrial output and food per capita is rising. The population is rising quickly.

So far, Limits to Growth checks out with reality. So what happens next?

According to the book, to feed the continued growth in industrial output there must be ever-increasing use of resources. But resources become more expensive to obtain as they are used up. As more and more capital goes towards resource extraction, industrial output per capita starts to fall – in the book, from about 2015.

As pollution mounts and industrial input into agriculture falls, food production per capita falls. Health and education services are cut back, and that combines to bring about a rise in the death rate from about 2020. Global population begins to fall from about 2030, by about half a billion people per decade. Living conditions fall to levels similar to the early 1900s.

It's essentially resource constraints that bring about global collapse in the book. However, Limits to Growth does factor in the fallout from increasing pollution, including climate change. The book warned carbon dioxide emissions would have a "climatological effect" via "warming the atmosphere".

As the graphs show, the University of Melbourne research has not found proof of collapse as of 2010 (although growth has already stalled in some areas). But in Limits to Growth those effects only start to bite around 2015-2030.

The first stages of decline may already have started. The Global Financial Crisis of 2007-08 and ongoing economic malaise may be a harbinger of the fallout from resource constraints. The pursuit of material wealth contributed to unsustainable levels of debt, with suddenly higher prices for food and oil contributing to defaults - and the GFC.

The issue of peak oil is critical. Many independent researchers conclude that "easy" conventional oil production has already peaked. Even the conservative International Energy Agency has warned about peak oil.

Peak oil could be the catalyst for global collapse. Some see new fossil fuel sources like shale oil, tar sands and coal seam gas as saviours, but the issue is how fast these resources can be extracted, for how long, and at what cost. If they soak up too much capital to extract the fallout would be widespread.

Our research does not indicate that collapse of the world economy, environment and population is a certainty. Nor do we claim the future will unfold exactly as the MIT researchers predicted back in 1972. Wars could break out; so could genuine global environmental leadership. Either could dramatically affect the trajectory.

But our findings should sound an alarm bell. It seems unlikely that the quest for ever-increasing growth can continue unchecked to 2100 without causing serious negative effects – and those effects might come sooner than we think.

It may be too late to convince the world's politicians and wealthy elites to chart a different course. So to the rest of us, maybe it's time to think about how we protect ourselves as we head into an uncertain future.

As Limits to Growth concluded in 1972:

If the present growth trends in world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.

So far, there's little to indicate they got that wrong.