Sam Fleming and Shawn Donnan, - Financial Times (U.K.)
Stephan: If Hillary Clinton is the Democratic Party nominee, at this point in the process, at this juncture, my prediction is Donald Trump will be elected President, precisely because of the social dynamics described in this report in the respected British Financial Times.
In my view the Democratic Party has grossly misunderstood Democratic and Independent voters -- probably because the Democratic leadership is almost as much in the bag to the oligarchy as the Republicans. It's pretty hard not to be when you have to raise on average $14,351 a day to stay in office. Debbie Wasserman Schultz is an iconic example.
That Sanders has not been co-opted is one of the things that makes him so unusual. Another reason is, I think, his programs are the future of the Democratic Party. Sanders understands the deep anger and resentment that has built up over last 30 years of governance by both Republicans and Democrats. The American oligarchy has gutted the middle class like a field-dressed shot deer. Sanders' programs are the only ones that will take a different path. He has made wellness the first priority.
I can see Hillary voters moving to Sanders, but I think the shift would be much smaller the other way -- Sanders to Hillary.
Sanders has the added benefit of being completely consistent in his positions across decades, and free of scandals, while Hillary Clinton is the opposite. I think this matters because just listening to the news today it is obvious that if it is a Trump Clinton match-off the entire election cycle will be fought in the sewers with one outcome: The Great Schism Trend will reach a crisis point, and social instability will increase.
The United States will not survive as we have known it, if the devastation of the middle class is not just stopped but pro-actively reversed. The 2016 election is going to decide which path we take. High voter turn-out in favor of the compassionate and life-affirming outcome is essential.
More than four-fifths of America’s metropolitan areas have seen household incomes decline this century, according to new research that exposes the politically charged reality of middle-class decline at the heart of this year’s presidential election. (emphasis added)
The research on urban centres that are home to three-quarters of the US population shows that median household incomes, adjusted for the cost of living in the area, grew in just 39 out of 229 metro areas between 1999 and 2014.
The figures, prepared by the non-partisan Pew Research Center and shared with the Financial Times, cast light on the drivers of the economic discontent that have fuelled the rise of Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee, and Bernie Sanders, the challenger to Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton.
Both men’s campaigns have tapped into deep-seated concerns among middle class voters on the right and the left. Pew’s research illuminates one source of that anxiety and raises questions about even […]
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David Sparkes, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Here is some good news about the transition out of the carbon age. There are so many developments in so many areas of alternative energy production that one can only wonder: if we had made the commitment to exit the carbon era in 1973 when we had the first oil crisis, what would we look like today, and what impact would that have had on climate change.
Solar Reserve’s 110MW Crescent Dune plant in Nevada, US, will be a blueprint for its planned solar thermal plant in Port Augusta, South Australia.
Credit: SolarReserve
Companies working on large-scale solar thermal projects in Australia say they are tantalisingly close to achieving the dream of building plants big enough to replace coal-fired energy in Australia.
Experts speaking at the Australian Solar Energy Exhibition and Conference in Melbourne last week said the technology had been proven in other countries, and projects in Australia were viable, but the challenge was getting major investors to gamble on something new.
James Fisher, the chief technology officer of Australian solar energy company Vast Solar, said solar thermal energy had been the “poor cousin” to photovoltaic solar panels for some years, but that may finally be changing.
“We’ve got a whole lot of coal-fired power stations that largely are 30-plus years old and many of […]
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The Thom Hartmann Program Team, - truthout
Stephan: The stories of the corruption of American regulatory agencies by the industries they are supposed to regulate just never stop coming. It is one of the most active trends in our political life.
Conservative politicians love to talk about how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) only issues “job-killing regulations,” especially if they’re taking campaign contributions from fossil fuel billionaires like the Koch brothers or from agrochemical giants like Monsanto.
Republican Chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee Lamar Smith, for example, has spent years trying to stop the EPA from conducting any real research about climate change or passing any real regulations in general. But apparently it’s true that every once in a while, even a blind mouse finds cheese; it seems like Lamar Smith might actually have a legitimate complaint about an EPA report.
Last week, Smith wrote a letter to the EPA, demanding to know why a risk report marked “Final Report” about glyphosate was retracted just three days after it was published.
The EPA’s Cancer Assessment Review Committee issued the “Final Report” on glyphosate on April 29, 2016, and 13 members of the review committee had signed their name to the report’s findings that glyphosate is “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.”
The findings should raise eyebrows to begin […]
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Philip Shenon, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: I think there are several ticking political bombs that could go off between now and the election. The first is the FBI report on Hillary Clinton and her email server. I know most people think this is old news by now, but I am not one of them, and I think the Trump campaign operation feel the same. If she is the nominee expect to hear a lot about this.
The other ticking conteniousness is the cover-up begun by the Bush Administration and continued by the Obama administration to protect the Saudis from accountability for their role in 9/11.
Conspiracy seems to unusually cloud 9/11; most of it is nonsense, but the Saudi connection I think is very real. And this bomb is ticking pretty loudly at the moment. Here a good account of the latest.
A former Republican member of the 9/11 commission, breaking dramatically with the commission’s leaders, said Wednesday he believes there was clear evidence that Saudi government employees were part of a support network for the 9/11 hijackers and that the Obama administration should move quickly to declassify a long-secret congressional report on Saudi ties to the 2001 terrorist attack.
The comments by John F Lehman, an investment banker in New York who was Navy secretary in the Reagan administration, signal the first serious public split among the 10 commissioners since they issued a 2004 final report that was largely read as an exoneration of Saudi Arabia, which was home to 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11.
“There was an awful lot of participation by Saudi individuals in supporting the hijackers, and some of those people worked in the Saudi government,” Lehman said in an interview, suggesting that the commission may have made a mistake by not stating that explicitly in its final […]
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Ted Zukoski, Pro Bono Staff Attorney in the Denver Office of Earthjustice - The Agenda
Stephan: Even though I have been doing SR for decades I continue to be surprised by the grotesque level of corruption in the American government, and more or less complete ownership of the U.S. regulatory agencies by the industries they are supposed to regulate.
It's not so much shopping bags of cash, alá Vice President Spiro Agnew (for those old enough to remember him), so much as it is the revolving door in which compliant government regulators move with ExLax smoothness from their public responsibilities to much higher paying jobs in the companies they used to "regulate."
Here is a very clear example of what this produces.
From the Paris climate agreement to recent proposals to limit pollution from oil and gas wells, President Barack Obama has made combating climate change a focal point of his final year in office. But at least one agency within his administration is actively pushing policies that undercut these efforts.
The U.S. Forest Service is tasked with protecting 190 million acres of land throughout the country, including high alpine meadows, towering spruce and stately ponderosa pines. It has a clear legal mandate to protect forest resources, as well as to “protect and, where appropriate, improve the quality of soil, water, and air resources.” So it might come as surprise to learn that instead of working to limit greenhouse gas pollution, it’s pursuing policies that actually exacerbate climate change — notably the impending approval of a huge coal mining expansion in remote Colorado wildlands.
There’s no question climate change threatens forests, watersheds and wildlife: It dries woodlands, weakens trees so they are more susceptible to insects and disease, and lengthens the fire season. The fire season in the United States and elsewhere is starting earlier and lasting longer, and fires are burning with more intensity. Those fires can damage ecosystems and drain agency budgets; […]
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