Robert Reich, - robertreich.org
Stephan: I think this is a brilliant essay. It mirrors my own life experience and, if you are over 50, probably yours. I first became aware of that wonderful common agreement that infused society: America was a wonderful optimistic place, where even the bitter racism was beginning to ebb. Truman had integrated the military. There were Black vets going to college.
It happened when at 11, I became a Boy Scout. The boys in my troop came from several neighborhoods, one very modest, one in the middle, and one more affluent. Our scout master, Bill Buhmiller, was about 29, a WWII veteran and Marine sergeant. He and his wife Nancy cared nothing for the patriotic quasi-military aspect that is part of Scouting. They decided very early that since for some boy's families the paraphernalia of Scouting, would be an a meaningful expense, decided we as a troop would just wear the shirts. They were handed down, at some modest cost, from older to younger, and status was to get the shirt of some older boy you had looked up to, just as he had gotten it from someone he admired. Mothers patched them up. We made our own kerchiefs.
What the Buhmillers wanted to do was take boys into the woods, along the forest trails, and lakes, and teach them wood's craft. Backpacking, not a common interest, was their passion. As it became mine.
In the world of the forest your family's status made little difference, and so easy friendships developed that crossed boundaries. I spent a lot of time in the homes of boys from all three neighborhoods. One of my best friends at this time had a father who was a milkman. Like my father his dad was a vet. They lived in a small house, with a nice garden. His mother did not have to work but volunteered at the library. She made wonderful ice tea. Another boy's dad worked in a factory. They owned a house too. And while Smokey and I were friends his dad left his job to start his own machinist business, which prospered, and they moved to a bigger house. Over the five years I was involved with Scouting, I daily moved amongst these worlds and, in reading this essay I was reminded that this optimistic upwardly mobile world has vanished. Like a missing element in the air.
Do you recall a time in America when the income of a single school teacher or baker or salesman or mechanic was enough to buy a home, have two cars, and raise a family?
I remember. My father (who just celebrated his 100th birthday) earned enough for the rest of us to live comfortably. We weren’t rich but never felt poor, and our standard of living rose steadily through the 1950s and 1960s.
That used to be the norm. For three decades after World War II, America created the largest middle class the world had ever seen. During those years the earnings of the typical American worker doubled, just as the size of the American economy doubled. (Over the last thirty years, by contrast, the size of the economy doubled again but the earnings of the typical American went nowhere.)
In that earlier period, more than a third of all workers belonged to a trade union – giving average workers the bargaining power necessary to get a large and growing share of the large and growing economic pie. (Now, fewer than 7 percent of private-sector workers are unionized.)
Then, CEO pay then averaged about 20 times the pay of their typical worker (now […]
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NOAH SMITH, Assistant Professor of finance at Stony Brook University - The Week
Stephan: A number of writers, including myself, have made the comparison between the late Roman Empire and the U.S. Empire. But this paper I think accurately makes the point that a better correlation is the Ming Dynasty in China.
ing China was by far the greatest nation on the planet for most of the 15th and 16th centuries. It was certainly the biggest and the richest. Ming technology was in advance of anything in Europe or the Middle East, with movable type, compartmentalized ship hulls, steering rudders, advanced farming techniques, and the ability to solve systems of linear equations. Ming military power conquered Mongolia, subdued Korea and Vietnam, fended off a major invasion from Japan, and quickly disposed of meddlesome raiders from Portugal and the Netherlands. Taxes were low, industry was strong, and the society was peaceful and stable. For almost 300 years, Ming China could – and did – rightfully consider itself the center of the world.
But with the hindsight of history, the Ming doesn’t look so awesome. While China was basking in seemingly timeless stability, Europe was seething with new ideas and technological progress. Even as the Chinese government banned oceanic shipping and heavily restricted foreign trade, European countries were discovering the New World and building trading empires. By the time the Ming fell in the 17th century, Europe was well on the way to dominating the world.
The stagnation of the Ming may carry important lessons for […]
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MIKEY WEINSTEIN, - Truthout
Stephan: The media treats them like goons, but the Theocratic Right constitute a dangerous threat to American democracy. Think I am joking, or exaggerating. Read this.
Jerry Boykin has a grotesque conception of Jesus Christ. Most (non-fundamentalist) Christians practice their faith in a manner that holds aloft the treasured values of love, peace, and good will towards their fellow humans. Boykin, a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General and current Executive Vice President of the ultra-right wing, fundamentalist Family Research Council (FRC), will have none of that. Instead, Boykin’s avatar is a ravenously militant and militaristic one – a deity of universal destruction, bloodshed, rabid bigotry and unadulterated hatred.
Speaking to the WallBuilders’ Pro-Family Legislators Conference last fall, Boykin staked this claim:
‘The Lord is a warrior and in Revelation 19 it says when he comes back, he’s coming back as what? A warrior. A mighty warrior leading a mighty army, riding a white horse with a blood-stained white robe … I believe that blood on that robe is the blood of his enemies ’cause he’s coming back as a warrior carrying a sword. And I believe now – I’ve checked this out – I believe that sword he’ll be carrying when he comes back is an AR-15.
…And the sword today is an AR-15, so if you don’t have one, go get one. You’re supposed to have one. It’s […]
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SCOTT KAUFMAN, - The Raw Story
Stephan: Even a government agency like the United States Geological Survey (USGS) is now acknowledging that Fracking is the cause of earthquakes. But such is the stranglehold of carbon energy on the Congress and the White House that I don't expect anything will be done about it. If you happen to be in a Fracking zone... tough.
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) issued a press release yesterday indicating that the magnitude 5.7 earthquake that struck Prague, Oklahoma in 2011 was unintentionally human-induced.
The USGS claims that the magnitude 5.0 earthquake triggered by waste-water injection the previous day ‘trigger[ed] a cascade of earthquakes, including a larger one, [which] has important implications for reducing the seismic risk from waste-water injection.”
Injection wells are considered by some to be the most environmentally sound method of disposing of waste-water – which is a byproduct of both hydrofracking and conventional oil production – because they use the earth itself to both filter and contain the pollution.
The decade-long explosion of energy-producing facilities in the central United States has, according to a recent article in the journal Geology, led to an 11-fold increase in the number of earthquakes occurring in areas that are typically tectonically calm, including Arkansas, Texas, Ohio, and Colorado in the past four years alone.
The 5.7 magnitude quake in Prague followed an injection of waste-water approximately 650 feet away from the Wilzetta fault zone, a complex fault system about 124 miles in length. All three earthquakes exhibited a slip-strike motion, and did so at three different locations, indicating that three separate areas […]
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MARIETTE LE ROUX, - Agence France-Presse (France)
Stephan: Science only in the service of profit serves the non-compassionate, the non-life-affirming -- the dark side. This story is a case study. We take the air for granted at our peril. And we should have learned that lesson and figured out a way for people to both support the air and make a profit. It has been 30 years.
Paris – Worried scientists said Sunday they had found four new ozone-destroying gases in the atmosphere, most likely put there by humans in the last 50-odd years despite a ban on these dangerous compounds.
It is the first time since the 1990s that new substances damaging to Earth’s stratospheric shield have been found, and others may be out there, they said.
“Our research has shown four gases that were not around in the atmosphere at all until the 1960s, which suggests they are man-made,” the team from Europe and Australia wrote in the journal Nature Geoscience.
They analysed unpolluted air samples collected in Tasmania between 1978 and 2012, and from deep, compacted snow in Greenland.
“The identification of these four new gases is very worrying as they will contribute to the destruction of the ozone layer,” added a statement from the team.
“We don’t know where the new gases are being emitted from, and this should be investigated.”
Three of the gases are chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) — a group which includes chemicals traditionally found in air-conditioning, refrigerators and aerosol spray cans but banned under the Montreal Protocol.
The fourth is a hydrochlorofluorocarbon (HCFC), part of a closely-related group of compounds which replaced CFCs but are being phased out.
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