Kali Holloway, - The Raw Story/Alternet
Stephan: Colleges that rely on foreign students to pay full freight now find fewer enrolling. That means fewer technical startups, and fewer patents. Hospitals that depend on immigrant nurses and physicians now find no one accepting their offers. Canadian Girl Guides and students are no longer coming to the U.S.. And now, as this story illustrates, we are getting reports from the tourist industry that there has been a significant drop in tourists generally. All of this is costing the U.S. economy billions of dollars, degrading the country's already marginal healthcare system.
Why is all this happening? Because Americans voted Donald Trump president and he is translating White racism into public policy, which will have the effect of harming the daily lives of the people who voted for him. What goes around comes around. Enjoy.
Japanese tourists
Credit: Reuters
Well, that didn’t take long. People around the world have taken a look at Donald Trump and decided his America is not a place they want to visit. The result has been labeled the “Trump Slump,” a drop in international tourism that’s predicted to cost the United States more than $7 billion. Experts across the travel industry have sounded the alarm that the Trump presidency, already destructive on so many fronts, may also do serious financial damage to the country’s $250 billion tourism sector.
Frommer’s, a prominent travel guide, notes that “the prestigious Travel Weekly magazine (as close to an ‘official’ travel publication as they come) has set the decline in foreign tourism at 6.8 percent” for this year. ForwardKeys, which crunches travel numbers, points to a 6.5 percent downturn in international travel to the U.S. in the week after Trump attempted to issue the Muslim travel ban in January. During the same period, the company found reservations for U.S.-bound flights from Western Europe fell 14 percent […]
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Jeffrey M. Jones, - The Gallup Organization
Stephan: This Gallup survey tells us, "67% of lower-income adults worry 'a great deal' about hunger, homelessness." Welcome to American, land of opportunity.
Story Highlights
- 67% of lower-income adults worry “a great deal” about hunger, homelessness
- Up from 51% in 2010-2011
- Middle-income (47%), upper-income (37%) much less worried
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Over the past two years, an average of 67% of lower-income U.S. adults, up from 51% from 2010-2011, have worried “a great deal” about the problem of hunger and homelessness in the country. Concern has also increased among middle- and upper-income Americans, but they still worry far less than do lower-income Americans.
Since 2001, worry has been highest among those residing in lower-income households, likely because those with limited financial resources are more at risk of going hungry or becoming homeless. A consistent majority of lower-income adults worried about the problem before 2012, but that has only increased in the past five years. Concern among middle-income Americans in 2016-2017 falls just short of the majority level at 47%, while 37% of upper-income Americans are worried.
Rising concern among all income groups could be a result of the political and media attention devoted to U.S. income inequality in recent years. Americans may also worry more about hunger and […]
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Saturday, April 1st, 2017
Charlie Wood, - The Christian Science Monitor
Stephan: One of the strongest negative trends in American society today is that we have become a post-fact world that has lost its moral bearings. It is an enormous problem particularly in any area where the profits of the corporate rich are in jeopardy, and no where are they more in jeopardy than climate change. As a result people who care nothing for the long term well being of American society or the biosphere itself are pouring millions of dollars into creating "alternative facts" and spreading them, particularly in the education system. Here is one example of the process.
Scientists in Boston demonstrate on behalf of the science of climate change and the need for remediation.
Credit: Steven Senne/AP
If you’re a public school science teacher, you’ve got mail. Or if it hasn’t arrived yet, it’s on the way.
The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank promoting public policy based on individual liberty, limited government, and free markets, has mailed 25,000 copies of its book “Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming” and an accompanying explanatory DVD to science teachers across the United States. It plans to continue the campaign until all 200,000 K-12 science teachers in the country have a copy.
As the title hints, the organization hopes to convince science teachers that the science of global warming has yet to be settled. Katie Worth described the package in a Frontline story published Tuesday.
Accompanying the materials is a cover letter from Lennie Jarratt, project manager of Heartland’s Center for Transforming Education. He asks teachers to “consider the possibility” that the science is not settled. “If that’s the case, […]
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Saturday, April 1st, 2017
Ryan Grenoble, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: A few days ago I did a story on one of the gut jobs Republicans are doing on ordinary Americans: selling their personal browsing history. It's an idea completely owned by the Republicans in Congress, and I have to be honest, I'm not sure it is possible to be an ethical person and propose something like this.
So what can an ordinary person do at this point? Here's one answer.
Republican Representative Marsha Blackburn, one of the main proponents of selling your privacy and personal browsing history. Also one of the main recipients of money from ISP corporations. Is there a connection? You decide.
Comcast has done the impossible. Somehow, Americans are about to hate it (and just about every other large internet service provider in the country) more than they already do.
Thanks in no small part to the efforts of those ISPs, the House of Representatives passed a bill Tuesday that would allow internet and telecom companies to share customers’ personal information, including web browsing history, without their consent.
Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who introduced the legislation in the House, has Read the Full Article
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Saturday, April 1st, 2017
Damian Carrington, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: The unrealized consequences of climate change continue to set off alarms. But the Trump administration is deaf to the sound, so this is what your grandchildren will be living with. Do you think they'll thank you?
Global warming is reshuffling the ranges of animals and plants around the world with profound consequences for humanity, according to a major new analysis.
Rising temperatures on land and sea are increasingly forcing species to migrate to cooler climes, pushing disease-carrying insects into new areas, moving the pests that attack crops and shifting the pollinators that fertilise many of them, an international team of scientists has said.
They warn that some movements will damage important industries, such as forestry and tourism, and that tensions are emerging between nations over shifting natural resources, such as fish stocks. The mass migration of species now underway around the planet can also amplify climate change as, for example, darker vegetation grows to replace sun-reflecting snow fields in the Arctic.
“Human survival, for urban and rural communities, depends on other life on Earth,” the experts write in their analysis published in the journal Science. “Climate change is impelling a universal redistribution of life on Earth.”
This mass movement of species is the biggest for […]
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