Saturday, October 8th, 2016
Sarah K. Burris, - The Raw Story
Stephan: If you thought I was exaggerating in the previous post, when I said that there was a sizable component of the American population that was willfully ignorant, here is some data on why that is my assessment. I see this new dark age impulse as part of the Neo-feudalism Trend.
Three skulls showing human evolution
Credit: Shutterstock
Just last month, the Texas state Board of Education was exposed for approving racist textbooks that whitewash history while shaming Latinos as “lazy drunks.” Now some BOE members are kicking their right-wing policies up a notch by renewing efforts to undermine the teaching of evolution.
Last year, the BOE agreed that they would “streamline” the science standards and this July educators and scholars met to discuss their recommendations for what those standards should be, Kathy Miller of the Texas Freedom Network wrote in the El Paso Times. Anti-science creationists are already complaining about it, even though the panel hasn’t come to any final decisions.
The panel did decide, however, to cut any anti-evolution references that biologists and other scientists have called inaccurate and unscientific. That’s where the anti-science activists are launching their protests.
One such activist is Ray Bohlin, an associate of two national anti-evolution organizations Probe Ministries and the Discovery Institute. He takes issue with the “quick and concerted” effort […]
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Saturday, October 8th, 2016
David Runciman, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: This is an excellent extended exegetic essay on education and politics bringing together issues I highlighted in the earlier stories in today's edition, and describing the context.
However, in my view as good as it is, the essay in a sense doesn't reach a conclusion. What it misses is the third way: to make wellbeing from the individual, to the family, to the community, to the state, the nation and the planet itself the standard. The first question both individuals and governments should ask: Is this the option that will produce the greatest wellbeing?
Making that the priority is up to us. How we vote, not just in elections but with every purchase, every participation can make this happen. If we do not do this, I think we are going to tear the country apart. How it comes out is in our hands.
Princeton University
On 23 February, Donald Trump stood before a rally of cheering supporters to celebrate a thumping victory in the Nevada Republican caucus – his third consecutive win, in defiance of the naysayers who had predicted that his bubble was about to burst. “If you listen to the pundits, we weren’t expected to win too much – and now we’re winning, winning, winning the country,” he bragged. “We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”
That last line provoked immediate waves of mockery. It sounded at the time like another one of Trump’s many gaffes – he loves that people do not get a decent education? Yet behind the mockery was a real sense of disquiet, which has not gone away: Trump loves the less educated because they appear to love him back. As the Atlantic reported in March: “The best single predictor of Trump support in the Republican primary is the absence of […]
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Friday, October 7th, 2016
Avi Asher-Schapiro, - The International Business Times/The Raw Story
Stephan: The story that is right under corporate media's nose although for obvious reasons they won't cover it is that the American tax system is a prime manifestation of the vast government corruption that infects every aspect of our culture. It is a creature shaped to the service of rich special interests.
Donald Trump is a terrible businessman, although a brilliant marketer. But what he is really good at is gaming the tax system. And he is hardly alone.
This report presents one aspect of what I mean. It proves that when you have a corrupt government there is never a need to break the law because you can have the law written by your political vassals exactly as you want it.
Corporations are stashing more and more of their profits overseas, taking advantage of legal loopholes to avoid paying hundreds of billions in U.S. taxes, says a new report. The corporations involved include household names like Nike, Apple and Goldman Sachs.
The Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition (FACT Coalition) analyzed SEC filings from 367 Fortune 500 companies. In 2009, U.S.-based multinationals held less than $1.25 trillion in overseas tax havens — and by 2015, that number climbed to $2.5 trillion. “To put that in context, it is an amount larger than the GDP of France,” said Clark Gascoigne, the deputy director of FACT, a coalition that includes Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ), the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) Education Fund.
“Every year, corporations collectively report that they have tens of billion more in cash stashed offshore than they did the year before,” said Matthew Gardner of ITEP. “The hard fact is that the U.S. tax code incentivizes tax haven abuse.”
American tax laws allow corporations to stash profits overseas and indefinitely delay “repatriation.” While companies are technically required to disclose to the SEC how much they would […]
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Friday, October 7th, 2016
Alana Semuels, - The Atlantic
Stephan: Trickle down, supply side, Randian economics, the economics of Speaker Paul Ryan, the economics of the Republican Party, are an unmitigated social disaster -- unless you happen to be rich, in which case they are wonderful.
There are few places where this is more obviously illustrated than the county of Fairfield, Connecticut. Here's the story and the data. Note, in light of the previous story, how once again the tax code is used to protect the wealth of rich, at the cost of the middle class and poor.
An abandoned factory in Bridgeport, Connecticut
BRIDGEPORT, CONNECTICUT —Few places in the country illustrate the divide between the haves and the have-nots more than the county of Fairfield, Connecticut. Drive around the city of Bridgeport and, amid the tracts of middle-class homes, you’ll see burned-out houses, empty factories, and abandoned buildings that line the main street. Nearby, in the wealthier part of the county, there are towns of mansions with leafy grounds, swimming pools, and big iron gates.
Bridgeport, an old manufacturing town all but abandoned by industry, and Greenwich, a headquarters to hedge funds and billionaires, may be in the same county, and a few exits apart from each other on I-95, but their residents live in different worlds. The average income of the top 1 percent of people in the Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk metropolitan area, which consists of all of Fairfield County plus a few towns in neighboring New Haven County, is $6 million dollars—73 times the average of the bottom 99 percent—according to a report released […]
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Friday, October 7th, 2016
Thomas Fuller, - The New York Times
Stephan: Let me say it once again: water is destiny. The water trend, either too much or too little is going to bring the issue of water ownership to the fore. Although a human can only live about 3 days without water, water is not a birthright as people are beginning to discover. Nor is air a right by the way. And in a culture that only values profit the ownership of water and air are going to become issues, particularly water.
For small towns this is going to become a major challenge, and if you live in a small town I suggest you take the time to find out who owns your water. What is happening to the town of Weed in California is an example of what is coming.
The snow-capped dormant volcano Mount Shasta, as seen from Weed, in Northern California.
Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times
WEED, CALIFORNIA — The water that gurgles from a spring on the edge of this Northern California logging town is so pristine that for more than a century it has been piped directly to the wooden homes spread across hills and gullies.
To the residents of Weed, which sits in the foothills of Mount Shasta, a snow-capped dormant volcano, the spring water is a blessing during a time of severe and prolonged drought.
To the lumber company that owns the land where the spring is, the water is a business opportunity.
Roseburg Forest Products, an Oregon-based company that owns the pine forest where the spring surfaces, is demanding that the city of Weed get its water elsewhere.
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