Thursday, November 29th, 2012
JULIANNE HING, - Colorlines
Stephan: The previous report was about Arizona. This one is about Mississippi, and I run them together to give a sense of the scale of the New American Slavery Trend.
Unless you read SR regularly you may know nothing about this. It is rarely touched upon in the corporate media. The truth is though there are now more Black prison slaves in America than there were plantation slaves at the beginning of the Civil War -- and that is just the African Americans. When you add in Hispanics, poor whites, and everyone else you understand why the American Gulag is the largest prison system in the world. We have five percent of the world's population and 25 per cent of the world's humans in prison. Does that make you proud?
Cedrico Green can’t exactly remember how many times he went back and forth to juvenile. When asked to venture a guess he says, ‘Maybe 30.
No Comments
Thursday, November 29th, 2012
STEPHEN C. WEBSTER, - The Raw Story
Stephan: This story I selected because it makes a very important point. When people talk about government benefits and the poor it is always couched in terms that the poor are lazy and become dependent, and ought not be given such things as medicare, medicaid, social security, or at least they should be restricted to lesser benefits. The current news is filled with conservatives talking about cutting entitlements, as if that is a kind of tough love that is needed to push the poor into trying harder. The fact that most of the poor are working anywhere from one to four jobs, and that many are single mothers just gets glossed over.
But that is not the worst of it. If there is anything more hypocritical than some corporate millionaire or billionaire whose individual benefits -- tax shelters, off-shore accounts, lower tax rates for invested income, etc. -- might support several thousand poor people blathering on about how entitlements must be cut I cannot imagine what it might be. Such people deserve a particularly loathsome pit in the depths of hell.
But even that is not the worst of it. That is reserved for this particularly egregious rigging of the system, as this report describes. Ronlyn and I do not shop at Walmart and I urge you to similarly drop them from your list of shopping venues.
Representative-elect Alan Grayson (D-FL) said Monday that he will put mega-retailer Walmart squarely in his sights during the next Congress for the company’s liberal use of public assistance programs to supplement their workers’ wages.
Speaking to Current TV host Cenk Uygur on Monday’s episode of ‘The Young Turks,
No Comments
Thursday, November 29th, 2012
SUZANNE GOLDENBERG, US Environment Correspondent - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: This is the latest on the Sea Level Rise Trend. I first wrote about the effects this trend was going to have on the U.S., and the migrations it will produce in 2009. (See: Migration. http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2808%2900398-4/fulltext). In looking back at that essay I am struck once again by what has turned out to be the iron rule of climate change: the only thing that has changed since science recognized something was happening has been the collapse of the timeline.
The stupidity and bone deep prejudice of the Theocratic Right and other climate deniers is a scandal whose consequences we are just now dimly beginning to appreciate. A century from now, I believe, such views will be perceived as a form of treason against humanity. Over a billion people will be affected around the world, including many millions in the U.S., just as this report spells out.
Sea-level rise is occurring much faster than scientists expected – exposing millions more Americans to the destructive floods produced by future Sandy-like storms, new research suggests.
Satellite measurements over the last two decades found global sea levels rising 60% faster than the computer projections issued only a few years ago by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The faster sea-level rise means the authorities will have to take even more ambitious measures to protect low-lying population centres – such as New York City, Los Angeles or Jacksonville, Florida – or risk exposing millions more people to a destructive combination of storm surges on top of sea-level rise, scientists said.
Scientists earlier this year found sea-level rise had already doubled the annual risk of historic flooding across a widespread area of the United States.
The latest research, published on Wednesday in Environmental Research Letters, found global sea-levels rising at a rate of 3.2mm a year, compared to the best estimates by the IPCC of 2mm a year, or 60% faster.
Researchers used satellite data to measure sea-level rise from 1993-2011. Satellites are much more accurate than tide gauges, the study said.
The scientists said they had ruled out other non-climatic causes for the rise in […]
No Comments
Thursday, November 29th, 2012
BEAU HODAI, - Truthout.org
Stephan: This report describes the latest in the New American Slavery trend. (See The New American Slavery http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2811%2900043-7/fulltext This trend is gathering speed in Red Value states, as prisons in those states are privatized, and prison lobbyists buy state legislators and bend them to their will. As you can see in this report, it is also degrading the school systems in those states. Essentially the poor increasingly become individual valves which tap public funds to the benefit of these private corporations.
In Arizona an unsettling trend appears to be underway: the use of private prison employees in law enforcement operations.
The state has graced national headlines in recent years as the result of its cozy relationship with the for-profit prison industry. Such controversies have included the role of private prison corporations in SB 1070 and similar anti-immigrant legislation disseminated in other states; a 2010 private prison escape that resulted in two murders and a nationwide manhunt; and a failed bid to privatize nearly the entire Arizona prison system.
And now, recent events in the central Arizona town of Casa Grande show the hand of private corrections corporations reaching into the classroom, assisting local law enforcement agencies in drug raids at public schools.
No Comments
Wednesday, November 28th, 2012
JONATHAN MARGOLIS, - The Guardian/Observer (U.K.)
Stephan: This story is very good news about a real breakthrough solution, to a real problem.
Many years ago one of my partners and I raised the money to start up Solar Aquafarms, a totally self-contained solar powered commercial project growing Talapia -- a farmed fish species grown since Pharaonic times -- in the desert near San Diego. It was the brainchild of a marine biologist and it worked. A dear friend was the business manager. Once up and operating it was bought by a large holding company which subsequently closed it. Long sad story. I have never forgotten this experience though, and this story picks up the thread in an extraordinary and very promising way.
The scrubby desert outside Port Augusta, three hours from Adelaide, is not the kind of countryside you see in Australian tourist brochures. The backdrop to an area of coal-fired power stations, lead smelting and mining, the coastal landscape is spiked with saltbush that can live on a trickle of brackish seawater seeping up through the arid soil. Poisonous king brown snakes, redback spiders, the odd kangaroo and emu are seen occasionally, flies constantly. When the local landowners who graze a few sheep here get a chance to sell some of this crummy real estate they jump at it, even for bottom dollar, because the only real natural resource in these parts is sunshine.
Which makes it all the more remarkable that a group of young brains from Europe, Asia and north America, led by a 33-year-old German former Goldman Sachs banker but inspired by a London theatre lighting engineer of 62, have bought a sizeable lump of this unpromising outback territory and built on it an experimental greenhouse which holds the seemingly realistic promise of solving the world’s food problems.
Indeed, the work that Sundrop Farms, as they call themselves, are doing in South Australia, and just starting up in Qatar, is […]
No Comments
