Monday, September 19th, 2016
Kurt Eichenwald , - Newsweek
Stephan: When I first read this story I thought, this is a game changer, and I expected it to dominate the news for several cycles. I held on to the story for several days expecting to see commentary which I could also use. The result: American corporate media -- except for Newsweek of course -- has completely ignored this story and, instead, we have spent the last several days lost in Birtherism, an utterly meaningless story. The hallmark of this campaign is that corporate media has become the collective Trump network focusing only on the most superficial issues. It has been an appalling performance.
Updated | If Donald Trump is elected president, will he and his family permanently sever all connections to the Trump Organization, a sprawling business empire that has spread a secretive financial web across the world? Or will Trump instead choose to be the most conflicted president in American history, one whose business interests will constantly jeopardize the security of the United States?
Throughout this campaign, the Trump Organization, which pumps potentially hundreds of millions of dollars into the Trump family’s bank accounts each year, has been largely ignored. As a private enterprise, its businesses, partners and investors are hidden from public view, even though they are the very people who could be enriched by—or will further enrich—Trump and his family if he wins the presidency.
A close examination by Newsweek of the Trump Organization, including confidential interviews with business executives and some of its international partners, reveals an enterprise with deep ties to global financiers, foreign politicians and even criminals, although there is no evidence the Trump Organization has engaged in any illegal activities. It also reveals a web of […]
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Monday, September 19th, 2016
Ben Norton, Political Writer - Salon
Stephan: In 1984 one of the most eminent historians of the 20th century, Barbara Tuchman, wrote a book entitled The March of Folly. In her elegant prose Tuchman laid out the stupidity, cupidity, hubris, and incompetence that led to the First World War, the death and maiming of millions, and the destruction of much of Europe.
As this report describes we are doing it again, this time in Middle East. Is it any wonder in this election cycle that so many are so cynical about government? The officials of government are poisoning our democracy in the service of the greed and profit of the few.
Libyan rebels on a tank outside the town of Ajdabiyah on March 26, 2011
Credit: Reuters/Andrew Winning)
A new report by the British Parliament shows that the 2011 NATO war in Libya was based on an array of lies. (emphasis added)
“Libya: Examination of intervention and collapse and the UK’s future policy options,” an
investigation by the House of Commons’ bipartisan Foreign Affairs Committee, strongly condemns the U.K.’s role in the war, which toppled the government of Libya’s leader Muammar Qaddafi and plunged the North African country into chaos.
“We have seen no evidence that the UK Government carried out a proper analysis of the nature of the rebellion in Libya,” the report states. “UK strategy was founded on erroneous assumptions and an incomplete understanding of the evidence.”
The Foreign Affairs Committee concludes that the British government “failed to identify that the threat to civilians was overstated and that the rebels included a significant Islamist element.”
The Libya […]
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Monday, September 19th, 2016
David Suzuki, Physicist and Co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. - Alternet
Stephan: Since 2005 I have been arguing that jet air travel is a major source of pollution, and that the trend was clear. There would soon come a time where either other propulsion systems were developed, or petroleum combustion propulsion had to be curtailed. David Suzuki very clearly lays out the case for why this is true.
Credit: Shutterstock
In July, Solar Impulse 2 became the first airplane to fly around the world without using fuel. At the same time, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration has been working on electric planes. These developments mean air travel and transport could become more environmentally friendly, with less pollution and fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and planes would be quieter.
As promising as solar and electric planes may be, these technologies still have a way to go and won’t likely usher in a new era of airline travel soon. That’s unfortunate, because aircraft are major sources of pollution and climate-altering greenhouse gases, contributing the same amount of emissions as Germany, about two percent of the global total. As air transport becomes increasingly popular, experts project aircraft emissions could triple by 2050. (emphasis added)
Analysis by U.K.-based Carbon Brief found that, under business as usual, a growing commercial aviation industry could contribute 27 per cent of allowable emissions between 2015 and 2050 if the world is to meet the 2015 Paris Agreement’s aspirational 1.5 C target for global average temperature […]
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Monday, September 19th, 2016
Sally Cabot Gunning, - The Daily Beast
Stephan: When I was a boy I knew an elderly woman who had owned a slave, a young woman who slept at the foot of her bed. And I knew an equally elderly man who had been born a slave. The stories of both left me with the realization of how close and intertwined between the races slavery in real day-to-day life had been. This article about Thomas Jefferson's daughters makes the point very well.
Martha Jefferson
Martha Jefferson was born in 1772, just as Monticello was rising above her, promising a life surrounded by beauty, luxury, and pampering. For the first ten years of her existence this promise held, but in 1782 Martha’s mother died, leaving a father incapacitated by grief, but still a father in pursuit of his daughter’s future happiness. He set out a stringent regimen of study which included reading, writing, literature, languages, music, art, and dance.
Two years later, Martha and her father traveled to France, joined later by Martha’s younger sister and her enslaved maid, Sally Hemings. In France Martha boarded at a convent school and received a formal education few other American women of the day would acquire in their lifetimes. At her father’s Paris residence, she received another kind of education, conversing with world leaders and learning, among other things, that there are countries where slavery was illegal. “I wish with all my soul that the poor Negroes were all freed,” she wrote her father from […]
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Sunday, September 18th, 2016
Michael Kane, - TomDispatch.com
Stephan: I have begun to think seriously about what the U.S. would be like if Donald Trump is elected President. I didn't think it was possible, but now realize that I seriously miscalculated the fear, anger, meanness, and racism of a large segment of my fellow Caucasians. Nate Silver of
fivethirtyeight led with this headline today:
Democrats Should Panic … If The Polls Still Look Like This In A Week.
Since along with many others, probably most of you, I consider climate change a civilization threatening trend I had begun to write an essay on the implications of such an election outcome, then I came across this essay.
If social progressives don't turn out in unusually large numbers we may need to learn to say President Trump without retching.
Donald Trump
Credit: Reuters/Jim Young
The man who might be president insists that climate change is an elaborate, “very expensive hoax,” even possibly a “Chinese” one meant to undermine the American economy. It’s “bullshit” and “pseudoscience” (on which, it seems, he’s an expert). He’s said this sort of thing numerous times, always mockingly, always dismissively. Only recently in his Phoenix speech on immigration, on his love of Mexicans, and on what suckers they’ll be when it comes to paying for his future wall, he put it this way: “Only the out-of-touch media elites think the biggest problems facing America… it’s not nuclear, and it’s not ISIS, it’s not Russia, it’s not China, it’s global warming.” Those fools! They know nothing. They don’t even know that there’s a crucial footnote, a lone exception, to The Donald’s climate change position: golf.
Though the heating of the planet via fossil fuels couldn’t be more of a fantasy, while
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