Stephan: Here is the latest on Monsanto, one of the truly evil corporate entities plaguing the world.
To the horror of farmers across
America’s farm belt, hundreds of thousands of crop acres have been adversely impacted by the apparent misuse of the drift-prone herbicide dicamba on Monsanto’s Roundup Ready Xtend soybean and cotton plants.
According to a recent U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) compliance advisory, the EPA and state agencies have received an “unusually high” number of reports of crop damage that appear related to the illegal spraying of dicamba.
A soybean plant affected by dicamba drift from a nearby field, roadside or other area where the herbicide was applied. Purdue
The EPA has collected similar reports of crop damage from 10 states: Missouri, Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.
Missouri appears to have suffered the most. According to the Southeast Missourian, the state’s department of agriculture has received 125 complaints of dicamba damage on more than 40,000 crop acres.
Missouri farmers have reported damage on a number of crops including peaches, tomatoes, cantaloupes, watermelons, rice, cotton, peas, peanuts, alfalfa and soybeans, the EPA said.
The reason behind this widespread crop damage is that while Monsanto’s genetically modified (GMO) crops can withstand sprays of dicamba, other crops cannot. The seed […]
Stephan: American is a nation of laws and justice, right? One hears it said over and over again. Unfortunately it's a lie we tell ourselves. In fact the subject of justice and fairness seems to be of no interest to either media or politicians, and that is reflected in the fact that the United States ranks 19th in the world for justice.
Here is a report about one aspect of the truth we dare not speak -- the public defender aspect of the legal system. It is beyond dreadful, as this piece describes. And I think it is important to note that this article was published not in an American but a British publication. This is what we look like to the rest of the world.
“What if I’d had more time?” Across the US, it is the question public defenders often find themselves asking the most. Would a young, pregnant African American woman in Lexington, Kentucky, who faces minor fraud charges laid down in April still be in jail if her lawyer had the time to appeal against an impossible $40,000 bail bond?
Could the 50-year-old illiterate white man in Cole County, Missouri, charged in August with vehicular assault and facing over a decade in prison, ever be assigned an attorney with the resources to defend him?
How many of the 30 defendants present for a single “mass plea” hearing in Louisiana’s 16th judicial district in June would have pleaded not guilty if they’d had more than 20 seconds of legal counsel?
In 1963, the landmark Gideon v Wainwright supreme court ruling enshrined the constitutional right for indigent criminal defendants – those who cannot afford to pay for a lawyer – to access legal counsel. But 53 years on, as the rate of incarceration across the country has […]
Stephan: The Republican Party does not like public university education for the masses. Why? Because the more educated people are the more likely they are to be wellness oriented social progressives. The party has become dominantly a White nativist authoritarian cohort -- Donald Trump is the leader. It is in this group's interest to degrade and limit education, just as it is in their interest to gerrymander, and attempt voter suppression. They cannot compete on a level playing field.
This story presents the education aspect. The only solution to this is more voting by the Wellbeing Cohort. And with thanks to Bernie Sanders for bringing college education into the public conversation.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker AP /Jacquelyn Martin and former Texas Governor Rick Perry.
Anyone who attended one of Bernie Sanders’ rallies during the Democratic primary campaign knows what the central issue was behind his call for “political revolution.” There was one unifying factor that drove Sanders’ unexpected groundswell of support, and that crystallized all the themes of economic inequality and social injustice he repeated in stump speech after stump speech. Not by coincidence, it was also the most prominent issue on which Hillary Clinton ultimately felt compelled to move almost all the way to Sanders’ position, after repeatedly insisting that she disagreed with him. That issue was the cost of a college degree, perhaps the most visible symptom of a far-reaching attempt by the super-rich and their ideological allies to reshape public education to serve their interests.
At a certain point in every rally, the Vermont senator would ask young people in the crowd to call out how much they […]
Stephan: Since 2006 the percentage of Americans who have confidence in voting accuracy has dropped 10%. The percentage of people who have no confidence has doubled to 16%. This is very dangerous to the foundations of democracy. Assuring the integrity of the polling booth ought to be a matter of the highest priority because the corruption of the vote is much more dangerous to our wellbeing than terrorism.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — About six in 10 Americans are confident that votes will be accurately cast and counted in the coming election. This is similar to their confidence level in 2008, but down from levels from 2004 to 2007 when confidence ranged between 71% and 75%.
Despite the controversy over ballot accuracy in the 2000 election, Gallup’s trend shows that the highest level of voting confidence was in 2004 — the first time Gallup polled on this question — four months before that year’s presidential election. Confidence remained similarly high in the 2006 midterm and in December 2007, shortly before the 2008 presidential primaries and caucuses started. Before the 2008 election, confidence in the accuracy of vote counting had dropped sharply, perhaps as an indirectly related response to the global financial crisis that sent Americans’ satisfaction with the way things were going in the U.S. into the single digits. Eight years later, the confidence level in voting accuracy is not much higher.
Prominent political figures and former federal security officials raised concerns about a compromised vote count leading up to Gallup’s latest measurement, taken in an Aug. 15-16 poll.
In April, supporters of Democratic primary candidate Bernie […]
Stephan: This is one of the best essays I have read on the Great Schism Trend. We are retribalizing.
The following is an excerpt from the new bookStrangers in Their Own Landby Arlie Hochschild (The New Press, 2016).
Along the clay road, Mike’s red truck cuts slowly between tall rows of sugarcane, sassy, silvery tassels waving in the October sun, extending across an alluvial plain as far as the eye can see. We are on the grounds of the Armelise Plantation, as it was once called. A few miles west lies the mighty Mississippi River, pressing the soils and waste of the Midwest southward, past New Orleans, into the Gulf of Mexico. “We used to walk barefoot between the rows,” Mike says. A tall, kindly white man of sixty-four, Mike removes his sunglasses to study an area of the sugarcane, and comes to a near stop. He points his arm out the truck window to the far left, “My grandma would have lived over . . . there.” Moving his arm rightward, he adds, “My great uncle Tain’s carpentry shop was about . . . there.” Nearby was the home of another great uncle Henry, a mechanic nicknamed “Pook.” A […]
“What if I’d had more time?” Across the US, it is the question public defenders often find themselves asking the most. Would a young, pregnant African American woman in Lexington, Kentucky, who faces minor fraud charges laid down in April still be in jail if her lawyer had the time to appeal against an impossible $40,000 bail bond?
Along the clay road, Mike’s red truck cuts slowly between tall rows of sugarcane, sassy, silvery tassels waving in the October sun, extending across an alluvial plain as far as the eye can see. We are on the grounds of the Armelise Plantation, as it was once called. A few miles west lies the mighty Mississippi River, pressing the soils and waste of the Midwest southward, past New Orleans, into the Gulf of Mexico. “We used to walk barefoot between the rows,” Mike says. A tall, kindly white man of sixty-four, Mike removes his sunglasses to study an area of the sugarcane, and comes to a near stop. He points his arm out the truck window to the far left, “My grandma would have lived over . . . there.” Moving his arm rightward, he adds, “My great uncle Tain’s carpentry shop was about . . . there.” Nearby was the home of another great uncle Henry, a mechanic nicknamed “Pook.” A […]
