November 24, 2015

Gate A-4 By Naomi Shihab Nye A STORY FOR THANKSGIVING

http://davidkanigan.com/2014/11/16/gate-a-4/


Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement: “If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.” Well— one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. “Help,” said the flight agent. “Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.”

I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly. “Shu-dow-a, shu-bid-uck, habibti? Stani schway, min fadlick, shu-bit-se-wee?” The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day. I said, “No, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late, who is picking you up? Let’s call him.”

We called her son, I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her? This all took up two hours...She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies— little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts— from her bag and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single traveler declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo— we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie. Then the airline broke out free apple juice and two little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they were covered with powdered sugar too. And I noticed my new best friend— by now we were holding hands— had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, This is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that gate— once the crying of confusion stopped— seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too.

This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

November 23, 2015

Which Presidential Candidates Are Winning the Money Race?

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/election-2016-campaign-money-race.html?_r=0

GO SEE THE LINK--I CAN'T COPY THE CHARTS. IT'S INFORMATIVE!

November 22, 2015

Do Not Ask Western Leadership to Fix Anything IAN WELSH

http://www.ianwelsh.net/do-not-ask-western-leadership-to-fix-anything/

Why are people calling for Western leaders to “fight terrorism”?



Those attacks mostly weren’t hitting the West. Now, a tiny fraction are.

Next.



Understand this: Widespread global terrorism exists because of the US’s actions specifically and the West’s generally.

Let us turn now to economics. Inequality has been increasing since the 1970s. It has become worse every decade, with only minor reversals. After the financial crisis, it became so bad that more than all the productivity gains in the environment went to the top three percent. This happened in large part due to various financial, economic, and legislative “reforms.” It was deliberate, in other words. Inequality is a result of deliberate action by US leadership. Austerity is, likewise, the result of deliberate action by Western elites, generally. They decided to deliberately impoverish their citizens and have done so.

This is not unique to the West. India claims much economic progress, but the average number of calories eaten per capita has gone down over the last thirty years. The average Indian is worse off than they were when India was run on frankly socialist principles.

The leadership classes are chosen for their ability and desire to become leaders. If that overlaps with an ability and desire to make their society good for the majority of the population, that’s great, but in most countries right now, that’s not how or why they are selected. These people are selected by oligarchs, for oligarchs, and their skillset is pleasing oligarchs. This is done through a system that selects candidates before they get to voters, even primary voters or the equivalent. In most cases, you do not get a choice of a leader who will put ordinary people’s interests first... the job of modern politicians was to wrangle the masses for oligarchs... That is what they do. They are good at manipulating enough of the population, and they are good at giving money and power to those who already have both. They are not good at anything else, and expecting them to do anything else is insane.

You do not want Hollande, Obama, and Cameron (let alone Erdogan) trying to fix the Middle East. You do not want the people who report to them trying to do so. You do not want western militaries trying to do so.

At least not if you want a reduction, rather than an increase, in terrorism.

The first rule of holes applies...If you live in the West, the great danger to your life, health, and prosperity is your leadership. It is how your society is run. This is cold, hard, and true.

MORE AT LINK

November 22, 2015

Saudi Arabia, an ISIS That Has Made It

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/21/opinion/saudi-arabia-an-isis-that-has-made-it.html?_r=0

Black Daesh, white Daesh. The former slits throats, kills, stones, cuts off hands, destroys humanity’s common heritage and despises archaeology, women and non-Muslims. The latter is better dressed and neater but does the same things. The Islamic State; Saudi Arabia. In its struggle against terrorism, the West wages war on one, but shakes hands with the other. This is a mechanism of denial, and denial has a price: preserving the famous strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia at the risk of forgetting that the kingdom also relies on an alliance with a religious clergy that produces, legitimizes, spreads, preaches and defends Wahhabism, the ultra-puritanical form of Islam that Daesh feeds on.

Wahhabism, a messianic radicalism that arose in the 18th century, hopes to restore a fantasized caliphate centered on a desert, a sacred book, and two holy sites, Mecca and Medina. Born in massacre and blood, it manifests itself in a surreal relationship with women, a prohibition against non-Muslims treading on sacred territory, and ferocious religious laws. That translates into an obsessive hatred of imagery and representation and therefore art, but also of the body, nakedness and freedom. Saudi Arabia is a Daesh that has made it.

The West’s denial regarding Saudi Arabia is striking: It salutes the theocracy as its ally but pretends not to notice that it is the world’s chief ideological sponsor of Islamist culture. The younger generations of radicals in the so-called Arab world were not born jihadists. They were suckled in the bosom of Fatwa Valley, a kind of Islamist Vatican with a vast industry that produces theologians, religious laws, books, and aggressive editorial policies and media campaigns.

One might counter: Isn’t Saudi Arabia itself a possible target of Daesh? Yes, but to focus on that would be to overlook the strength of the ties between the reigning family and the clergy that accounts for its stability — and also, increasingly, for its precariousness. The Saudi royals are caught in a perfect trap: Weakened by succession laws that encourage turnover, they cling to ancestral ties between king and preacher. The Saudi clergy produces Islamism, which both threatens the country and gives legitimacy to the regime...

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November 22, 2015

Soak The Rich by Atrios

http://www.eschatonblog.com/2015/11/soak-rich.html

Denying government benefits to rich people just makes it that much harder for less than rich people to qualify. You know, eligibility, forms, a bureaucracy to determine that eligibility, etc. The way to not give Donald Trump's kids free college involves increasing his taxes. Then give the kids "free college." Democrats really need to get rid of their obsession with means testing everything. There's a simple way to means test everything: increase taxes on rich people. It isn't welfare. It's what the government provides, to everyone, and the price of that is taxes.

We're gonna get President Trump if the Clinton campaign doesn't stop talking to itself. I'm sure they all thought this was a true zinger. It isn't. Echoes of 2008 are still there. Get better.

November 22, 2015

I have the plot for a great historical novel

based on the story of a man in his 70's, fed up with politics declining into the sport of billionaires, who decides to run for President, if only to slow down the juggernaut of history that is destroying the nation he loves and torturing the people who live there.

He is surprised by the enthusiasm with which his campaign is greeted. He is stunned by the building momentum. He comes to the point where he must either fish or cut bait, and he decides he's in it for real, all the way.

And that's just the prologue....

November 22, 2015

Wikileaks releases audiotapes allegedly showing fraud in Obama and Bush administrations

Source: The Telegraph (UK)


Tapes reportedly provide evidence that a programme intended to encourage the hiring of disabled people was mired in corruption...appointees of the Bush and Obama administrations corruptly misappropriated funds intended to encourage the hiring of disabled people.

The tapes are intended to provide evidence that billions of dollars meant for disabled people went instead to defence contractors and other major corporations without large proportions of disabled employees.

The accusations centre on a government programme called AbilityOne, which awards about $3 billion annually in government contracts. Most of that money is distributed by SourceAmerica, a non-profit.

It is intended for companies in which at least 75 per cent of work is performed by blind or otherwise disabled people, as a tool to get more such people into the workforce.

Read more: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/11998922/Wikileaks-releases-audiotapes-allegedly-showing-fraud-in-Obama-and-Bush-administrations.html

November 22, 2015

Bernie Sanders’s New Deal Socialism By Jedediah Purdy / The New Yorker magazine

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/bernie-sanderss-new-deal-socialism?mbid=nl_151120_Daily&CNDID=26139401&spMailingID=8275985&spUserID=MzkxMjA1MjAwODQS1&spJobID=802002852&spReportId=ODAyMDAyODUyS0

Now we finally know what Bernie Sanders means by “democratic socialism.” Speaking on his political philosophy at Georgetown yesterday, the Vermont senator and Democratic Presidential candidate opened with a long invocation of Franklin Roosevelt and the social protections that the New Deal created: minimum wages, retirement benefits, banking regulation, the forty-hour workweek. Roosevelt’s opponents attacked all these good things as “socialism,” Sanders reminded his listeners...Curiously, Sanders seemed to agree with them, taking his definition of “socialism” from its nineteen-thirties opponents, the people Roosevelt called “economic royalists.” “Let me define for you, simply and straightforwardly, what democratic socialism means to me,” Sanders said. “It builds on what Franklin Delano Roosevelt said when he fought for guaranteed economic rights for all Americans.”

This isn’t the first time Sanders has defined his position from the right flank of history. Pressed in the most recent Democratic debate to say how high he would take the marginal income tax, Sanders answered that it would be less than the ninety (actually ninety-two) per-cent level under the Eisenhower Administration. He added, to cheers and laughter, “I’m not that much of a socialist compared to Eisenhower.” But, of course, both Roosevelt and Eisenhower distinguished themselves vigorously from “socialism,” which they understood to be a revolutionary program of extreme equality, committed to centralized control of the economy, and a cat’s paw of Soviet power. Accusations of “socialism” trailed liberals for decades after Roosevelt parried his opponents, from Ronald Reagan’s attacks on Medicare to the Republicans’ refrain against Obamacare. Democrats, like Roosevelt, have furiously defended themselves against the charges. But now a candidate whose ideal American economy does in fact look a lot like Eisenhower’s—strong unions, secure employment, affordable college—is waving the red flag, and finding favor with large numbers of Democratic voters. The new eagerness to embrace the word reflects the climate that a Pew poll captured, in 2011, when more respondents between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine reported a positive view of “socialism” (forty-nine per cent) than “capitalism” (forty-six per cent). (Gallup polls regularly find that a slim majority of Democrats express a positive view of socialism, but an overwhelming majority supports “free enterprise,” suggesting, charitably, some ideological flexibility.) Those under-thirty respondents are, of course, the first voters of the post-Soviet era, whose formative experiences are of a not very heroic unipolar world of American power and market-oriented ideas. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire put the word “socialism” up for grabs again: it may have landed in the dustbin of history at first, but that left it free for scavenging and repurposing.

A decade before the Wall fell, the United States saw the quieter but also momentous collapse of the pro-government consensus that dominated the middle of the twentieth century. The Eisenhower paradox—that he was a big-government, welfarist conservative—is no paradox at all: he led the center-right at a time when the center was deeply welfarist and big-government. American politics after the Second World War was founded on the core idea of the earlier Progressive movement, which both F.D.R. and his cousin Theodore championed: the old ideals of personal liberty, economic opportunity, and civic equality could not survive in a laissez-faire industrial economy. Values once associated with small government now needed big government—the regulatory state—to preserve them. So, in 1937, F.D.R. urged that government should “solve for the individual the ever-rising problems of a complex civilization,” and, in 1965, L.B.J. echoed him, warning that “change and growth seem to tower beyond the control and even the judgment of men.” Strong government was the answer: a counter-power to wealth and to economic crisis. Their world was also Dwight Eisenhower’s.

Ronald Reagan’s declaration, in his 1981 inaugural address, that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem” announced a new era. Government did not in fact shrink, thanks largely to military spending and retirement benefits, but the willingness to say that it could provide what F.D.R. had called “a permanently safe order of things,” let alone F.D.R.’s economic “Second Bill of Rights,” was almost forgotten. The market was the new all-purpose solution, even before the Soviet collapse and the subsequent elevation of disruption, innovation, and self-branding as the language of emancipation. So, between roughly 1979 and 1989, two figures went into the wilderness: the long-dominant American idea that strong government was necessary to humanize a market economy, and the word “socialism” as a name for a different kind of society. Exiled as opponents, they returned as friends. Bernie Sanders’s socialism is Eisenhower’s and F.D.R.’s world if Reagan had never happened: economic security updated by the continuing revolutions in gender, cultural pluralism, and the struggle for racial justice. In a word, Denmark; but also America with a counterfactual history of the last forty years... Sanders isn’t much of a socialist compared to F.D.R., either. At the heart of Roosevelt’s program was the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which greatly strengthened the hand of unions, essential parts of every welfare-capitalist order in the twentieth century, from Scandinavia to Canada. Sanders, astonishingly, didn’t once mention unions in his Georgetown speech. Roosevelt proposed a maximum income of twenty-five thousand dollars (the equivalent of about four hundred thousand dollars today), which we won’t be hearing from Sanders. Sanders’s socialism is a national living wage, free higher education, increased taxes on the wealthy, campaign-finance reform, and strong environmental and racial-justice policies.

This is not a program for a different kind of economy, based on coöperation and deepened democracy— what socialism used to stand for, which powered it as both a threat and a hope. The heart of Sanders’s program, like F.D.R.’s, is economic security: like F.D.R., he argues that “true freedom does not occur” without it. In the same way, he sees a strong government as protecting individualism from an economy that bats people around like the gods in Greek dramas. Calling this once mainstream idea socialism is a way of saying how far it feels from where we find ourselves now, how radical a step it would be to get back to it.


MORE AT LINK, BUT I GOT THE GOOD STUFF.

November 21, 2015

The REALLY ANNOYING Don’t-Wanna-Subsidize-Wealthy-Kids’-College-Tuition Canard

http://angrybearblog.com/2015/11/the-really-annoying-dont-wanna-subsidize-wealthy-kids-college-tuition-canard.html



Stromberg, a Washington Post editorial writer who also blogs there, is an all-but-official Clinton campaign mouthpiece who last month, in a blog post and (unforgivably) a Post editorial (i.e., commentary with no byline, published on behalf of the Post’s editorial board) baldly misrepresented what Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon on Tuesday misrepresented about Sanders’ single-payer healthcare insurance plan, but from a different angle: Stromberg said that the cost of the single-payer plan would be in addition to the cost of healthcare now. Actual healthcare, not just insurance premiums...According to Stomberg and the Post’s editorial board then, hospitals, physicians and other healthcare provides would receive full payment from private insurers and also full payment from the government. And employers, employees and individual-market policyholders would continue to pay premiums to private insurers while they also paid taxes to the federal government for single-payer—double-payer?—insurance. A nice deal for some but not, let’s say, for others. Also, a preposterous misrepresentation of Sanders’ plan.

Fast-forward a month and Stromberg, this time speaking only for himself (as far as I know; I don’t read all the Post’s editorials) and for the Clinton campaign, picks up on Clinton’s invocation of the horror of the public paying college tuition for Donald Trump’s kids. But since he probably knows that Trump’s kids no more went to public colleges than did Clinton’s kid, he broadens it. Instead of making college free for everyone, increase access to those who need it and decline to subsidize wealthy kids’ tuition. Good line! At least for the ears of voters who are unaware that public universities, like private ones, quietly skew their admissions processes to favor the kids of parents who likely can pay full tuition simply by switching the funds from a CD or other savings account into a checking account at the beginning of each semester, thus removing the need for the school to dig into its endowment fund to provide financial assistance. Or to worry about whether the student will have that loan money ready at the beginning of each semester. Which is why Jennifer Gratz, salutatorian at her working class Detroit suburb’s high school, whose extracurriculars included cheerleading but probably not a summer in Honduras assisting the poor, was denied admission to the University of Michigan back in 1995. And why she sued the University in what eventually became a landmark Supreme Court case challenging the constitutionality under the equal protection clause of UM’s affirmative action program. She did not challenge the constitutionality of the U’s almost-certain, but unstated, admissions policy that would ensure that the freshman class had a substantial percentage of students from families wealthy enough to pay the full tuition. Y’know, the ones wealthy enough to pay for SAT tutoring, SAT practice courts, and if necessary more than one SAT exam.

What especially angers me about this let’s-not-subsidize-wealthy-kids’-college-tuition canard is that it uses disparities in ability to pay the tuition as a clever way to ensure the admissions status quo. Or something close to the status quo. In her and her campaign spokesman’s statements in the last several days—most notably her “Read My Lips; No New Taxes on the Middle Class, Even $1.35/wk to Pay for Family and Medical Leave” declaration, but other statements too—she’s overtly declaring herself a triangulator. And some progressive political pundits are noticing it. Yes!* They!** Are!*** And Sanders needs to start quoting these articles, in speaking and in web and television ads...

——

*Hillary Clinton Attacks Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Agenda: Why is she talking like a Republican?, Jonathan Cohn, Senior National Correspondent, Huffington Post, Nov. 17

**Hillary Clinton Hits Bernie Sanders on Taxes, Paul Waldman, Washington Post, Nov. 17

***Under attack at the Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton plays EVERY POSSIBLE CARD, Alexandra Petri, The Washington Post, Nov. 14

November 21, 2015

Gaius Publius: Is Clinton Still a Carbon Candidate? The Data to Date

http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2015/11/is-clinton-still-carbon-candidate-data.html



Hillary Clinton’s carbon-connected bundler network http://littlesis.org/maps/814-oil-gas-lobbyists-bundle-for-clinton

I’ve been trying to get a handle on Hillary Clinton’s climate and carbon policies. I know, for example, that in 2013 she looked for all the world like a “carbon candidate” based on these remarks in upstate New York:



So it’s fair enough to say she is, or was, pro-fracking and pro-natural gas (methane, a greenhouse gas, that when burned, becomes CO2, another greenhouse gas). Is she still pro-fracking and pro-methane?

In an attempt to determine Hillary Clinton’s climate policy to date, I looked at four sources — her bundler network (see the graphic above), her statements from the first two Democratic debate, and the proposals on her web page. The close of this piece contains a comment on Clinton and the disastrous 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, which Clinton is now painting as a victory for herself and Obama.

Oil & Gas Lobbyists Bundle for Clinton

First, there are plenty of connections to the oil and gas industry (the carbon extraction industry) in the Clinton bundler network. From a piece at LittleSis published in July 2015:



Keep in mind, this was July, so the numbers have likely grown larger. Also, since bundler information is much less public than announced positions, it’s easier to hide support here than in campaign declarations. If I had to guess her level of support for emissions based on just these two data points, I’d say, “Yes, she’s still a pro-carbon candidate,” since frankly, it matters where she (or any candidate) gets her money. But let’s look at announced positions as well. Perhaps we’ll be happily surprised.

Debate Statements on Climate Change

In the two Democratic debates, climate change was discussed, much more so in the first than the second. From the first debate:



Nothing about bringing emissions to zero on any time frame; some mention of her “clean energy plan” (which echoes, deliberately or not, Obama’s pro-methane “Clean Power Plan”); a reference to her laudable rejection of the Keystone pipeline; and many references to her attempts to engage the Chinese and Indians at the (horribly failed) Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 (more on that below).

Now from the second debate, this lone statement (as near as I can find):


Believing “climate change is real” is laudable, but tells us nothing about what she’d actually do to put an end to it. So let’s turn to her campaign Issue web page on climate change. From the introduction, this hints at, yes, more drilling:



The page lists two goals, which have been announced for a while:



About these she says:



The close includes this:



The response from climate scientists and activist has not been favorable. This is James Hansen’s reaction:

“It’s just plain silly,” said James Hansen, a climate change researcher who headed Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies for over 30 years. “No, you cannot solve the problem without a fundamental change, and that means you have to make the price of fossil fuels honest. Subsidizing solar panels is not going to solve the problem.”

MORE AT LINK