Wednesday, August 9th, 2017
Steven Rosenfeld, National Political Reporter - Alternet
Stephan: One of the central tenants of White Identitarian politics is that White people are under threat, and steps must be taken to protect Whites and their dominant position in society. No one likes to talk about this. It's like saying your dinner hostess has crabs because she picks up strangers in bars. It may be true but it is very bad form to mention it. It makes everyone at the table very uncomfortable. That sort of thing. However, the truth that must be faced is that Donald Trump has a long history of Identitarianism going back to his days as a small apartment landlord; he got it from his father who was known for it.
Now, as president, he is appointing and supporting men and women who are strongly identified with White Identitarianism, indeed the Republican Party's gerrymandering and voter suppression programs are other facets of this same trend. Here's a report that lays it out.
Credit: Raw Story
Trump appointees with white power leanings are not just scaling back federal civil rights protections. They are elevating the defense of white Americans across the government as the nation’s demographics become increasingly diverse.
This startling shift can be seen across many departments, from justice to education to environmental protection to labor. It’s not just top appointees in policymaking posts who have long opposed affirmative action and worked to subvert equal rights for minorities; it’s also emerging civil rights enforcement directives, proposed budgets slashing civil rights lawyers and announcements for new anti-minority agendas.
“This White House initiative represents a dangerous departure from policies and practices that help heal our nation’s racial divisions; instead, it serves as a desperate appeal to the worst fears of those who consciously or subconsciously despise the increasing diversity and shifting power dynamic in America today,” said Edward A. Hailes Jr., managing director and general counsel at Advancement Project’s national office.
This pro-white cant was heard at the White House Wednesday, when Trump and two GOP senators, Arkansas’ Tom Cotton and Georgia’s David Perdue, […]
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Wednesday, August 9th, 2017
John Abraham, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: In talking with people when I tell them that through government corruption we are financing the pollution that is causing climate change, and mention that the carbon energy corporations worldwide receive trillions, yes, trillions, of dollars of subsidies the reaction I usually get is, "Stephan, are you sure? It would be a huge scandal. Why doesn't everyone know about it." Well it is true, here's some data.
In this photo taken on November 19, 2015, smoke belches from a coal-fired power station near Datong, in China’s northern Shanxi province.
Credit: Greg Baker/AFP
Fossil fuels have two major problems that paint a dim picture for their future energy dominance. These problems are inter-related but still should be discussed separately. First, they cause climate change. We know that, we’ve known it for decades, and we know that continued use of fossil fuels will cause enormous worldwide economic and social consequences.
Second, fossil fuels are expensive. Much of their costs are hidden, however, as subsidies. If people knew how large their subsidies were, there would be a backlash against them from so-called financial conservatives.
A study was just published in the journal World Development that quantifies the amount of subsidies directed toward fossil fuels globally, and the results are shocking. The authors work at the IMF and are well-skilled to quantify the subsidies discussed in the paper.
Let’s give the final numbers […]
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Wednesday, August 9th, 2017
Michael Lewis, - Vanity Fair
Stephan: The most notable thing about Trump's cabinet and agency appointments is how willfully ignorant, and generally incompetent they are, and that most of them have a prior career trying to dismantle or castrate the agency they now head. It is, of course, a measure of the corrupt and pusillanimous behavior of the Republican congress that these men and women were confirmed for the office they now hold.
Nowhere is this clearer than with the Department of Energy, the cabinet level department that according to the White House is charged with “advancing the national, economic, and energy security of the United States; promoting scientific and technological innovation in support of that mission; and ensuring the environmental cleanup of the national nuclear weapons complex.”
Trump replaced internationally respected physicist Ernest Moniz with former Texas governor Rick Perry, a man who at least in his public statements seems not only not very bright but completely ignorant of all the relevant science in which the DOE is involved. Mostly he just seems deeply confused.
Here is where the DOE stands under the "leadership" of Trump and Perry. It is not a pretty story.
On the morning after the election, November 9, 2016, the people who ran the U.S. Department of Energy turned up in their offices and waited. They had cleared 30 desks and freed up 30 parking spaces. They didn’t know exactly how many people they’d host that day, but whoever won the election would surely be sending a small army into the Department of Energy, and every other federal agency. The morning after he was elected president, eight years earlier, Obama had sent between 30 and 40 people into the Department of Energy. The Department of Energy staff planned to deliver the same talks from the same five-inch-thick three-ring binders, with the Department of Energy seal on them, to the Trump people as they would have given to the Clinton people. “Nothing had to be changed,” said one former Department of Energy staffer. “They’d be done always with the intention that, either party wins, nothing changes.”
By afternoon the silence was deafening. “Day 1, we’re ready to go,” says a former senior White House official. “Day 2 it was ‘Maybe they’ll call us?’
Teams were going around, ‘Have you heard from them?’ ” recalls another staffer who had prepared for the […]
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Tuesday, August 8th, 2017
Stephan A. Schwartz, Columnist - Explore
Stephan: This is my view of the opioid epidemic in the U.S.; a created entirely legal drug addiction crisis.
I will start where I started myself, eight years ago. On June 14, 2008, I read a research report and cited it that day in my daily web publication, Schwartzreport. The study was the work of the Florida Medical Examiners Commission.
They found that their:
… report’s findings track with similar studies by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, which has found that roughly seven million Americans are abusing prescription drugs. If accurate, that would be an increase of 80% in six years and more than the total abusing cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens, Ecstasy, and inhalants. The Florida report analyzed 168,900 deaths statewide. Cocaine, heroin, and all methamphetamines caused 989 deaths, it found, while legal opioids—strong painkillers in brand-name drugs like Vicodin and OxyContin—caused 2328. Drugs with benzodiazepine, mainly depressants like Valium and Xanax, led to 743 deaths. Alcohol was the most commonly occurring drug, appearing in the bodies of 4179 of the dead and judged the cause of death of 466—fewer than cocaine (843) but more than methamphetamine (25) and marijuana (0).1
Except for the antipode example of marijuana—a subject for another […]
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Tuesday, August 8th, 2017
Stephan: Day-by-day I am seeing more and more reports on the effects of climate change. Yet, in the U.S., particularly at the federal governmental level, it is as if nothing were happening, or was going to happen.
Map of Southeast Asia Credit: Phuket Art
Temperatures in heavily populated South Asia will exceed habitable levels by the end of this century without efforts to stem manmade climate change, according to new research.
Researchers behind the study, published in the journal Science Advances, found that 4% percent of the South Asian population is expected to experience temperature and humidity conditions in which humans cannot survive without air conditioning by 2100. Three quarters of the population will experience environmental conditions considered dangerous, even if not downright unlivable.
The effects of unchecked temperature rise would extend beyond the health concerns associated with being outside in high temperatures. With workers unable to stay outdoors for extended periods of time, the region’s economy and agricultural output would decline, experts say. “With the disruption to the agricultural production, it doesn’t need to be the heat wave itself that kills people,” […]
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