Tuesday, September 12th, 2017
Ryan Grenoble, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: The climate related devastation is far greater than you would guess from the media coverage, which is now entirely focused on Irma. What's going on in Houston is hardly discussed now, and the wild fires that are sweeping across the central and western United States have hardly been mentioned. Here's something on the fires.
The main point that I have not heard anyone on television mention, nor any print reporter write about is that this is the beginning. All of these disasters are related to climate change. This is what we are going to be seeing more and more of. We are not prepared for what is coming, and we are not doing the things we should be doing to prepare or even better to remediate what is going to happen. Why? Because Republicans at the federal and state level don't even believe climate change is real. But Mother earth couldn't care less about what politicians believe; the earth's great meta-systems will not be denied.
Wildland Firefighters battle the Bridge Coulee Fire, part of the Lodgepole Complex, east of the Musselshell River, north of Mosby, Montana, U.S. July 21, 2017. Bureau of Land Management/Jonathan Moor/Reuters
While the South drowns amid a succession of unprecedented and record-shattering hurricanes, the West is burning.
Some 172 fires are burning across the region, 78 of which the National Interagency Fire Center considers “large” incidents of greater than 100 forested acres or 300 grassland acres.
So far this year, more than 8 million acres have burned, scarring and scorching western Montana and the Pacific Northwest, and smothering cities as far away as Denver in thick smoke.
That’s nearly twice the 10-year average of 5.5 million acres, and it’s taking its toll everywhere, including on state budgets.
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Tuesday, September 12th, 2017
Stephan: The Fox Channel, in my view, is a long term carefully executed multi-year well-funded strategy to turn America into a Christofascist identitarian nation. And the truth is, as of today, it is succeeding, as this report describes. The American population, like the Germans before them, driven to irrationality by fear of change are being manipulated to acquiesce in the creation of an ideological kleptocracy.
There is only one thing that is going to stop this, and that is the actions and choices of American citizens. You're either part of the solution or part of the problem. And it's time to choose.
Fox News is, by far, America’s dominant TV news channel; in the second quarter of 2017, Fox posted 2.35 million total viewers in primetime versus 1.64 million for MSNBC and 1.06 million for CNN. Given that Fox was founded by a longtime Republican Party operative and has almost exclusively hired conservative commentators, talk radio hosts, and the like to host its shows, it would stand to reason that its dominance on basic cable could influence how Americans vote, perhaps even tipping elections.
A new study in the American Economic Review (the discipline’s flagship journal), with an intriguing and persuasive methodology, finds exactly that. Emory University political scientist Gregory Martin and Stanford economist Ali Yurukoglu estimate that watching Fox News directly causes a substantial rightward shift in viewers’ attitudes, which translates into a significantly greater willingness to vote for Republican candidates.
They estimate that if Fox News hadn’t existed, the Republican presidential candidate’s share of the two-party vote would have been 3.59 points lower in 2004 and 6.34 points lower in 2008.
For context, that would’ve made John Kerry the 2004 popular vote winner, and turned […]
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Tuesday, September 12th, 2017
Stephan: With the storms the Equifax story has passed off stage. The media can only do two stories in a cycle. This didn't make the cut. But that doesn't mean it is any less important, although less visual. The consequences of this breach could get very up close and personal. Here's what to do.
Equifax Building
Credit: Quartz
Yesterday (Sept. 7) Equifax, one of the three major US credit bureaus, reported a security breach that may have compromised 143 million customers‘ personal data, including Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and driver’s license numbers. Equifax found out about the hack on July 29, according to the company, despite only announcing it yesterday. The incident is one of the largest and most threatening cyberattacks that has occurred in recent years and is the third major attack on the company since 2015.
If you have a credit report, there’s a higher-than-50% chance that your data has been affected, Pamela Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, a nonprofit research group, told the New York Times.
Here are some steps you can take to protect your credit score.
To check whether you’ve been affected:
1. Check your credit report
Check your credit report with Equifax, as well as Experian and TransUnion, for unauthorized activity. Go to creditreport.com for a free annual report. You may not see suspicious activity yet, given that it’s still in the […]
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Monday, September 11th, 2017
Stephan: You just can't make this stuff up.
The head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, insisted that talking about climate change as Texas continues to recover from the devastating Harvey storm, and Florida currently braces for the impact of Hurricane Irma, would be “very, very insensitive.”
‘To have any kind of focus on the cause and effect of the storm; versus helping people, or actually facing the effect of the storm, is misplaced,” said Pruitt, a well-known climate skeptic, according to CNN.
“What we need to focus on is access to clean water, addressing these areas of superfund activities that may cause an attack on water, these issues of access to fuel,” he continued. “Those are things so important to citizens of Florida right now, and to discuss the cause and effect of these storms, there’s the… place (and time) to do that, it’s not now.”
President Donald Trump has also failed to acknowledge the consequences, or even the dangers of, climate change as well. The president’s administration has instead attempted to roll back Obama-era pollution regulations in the name of job creation.
Houstonians saw record-setting amounts of water pouring into their […]
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Monday, September 11th, 2017
Lynn Parramore, Senior Analyst - Institute for New Economic Thinking
Stephan: Because it is a system based on greed, selfishness, and exploitation, with only one social priority, profit, fascism produces sharply delineated class differences. That's why it also is always associated with militarized law enforcement -- you have to control the peasants, and keep them in their place, and make sure they don't discommode the elite.
Quite predictably as the U.S. has become more and more fascist, we have seen exactly that kind of militarization of police departments all over the country, but particularly in Red value states, which are much more fascist as societies than occurs in Blue value states.
In my view we are building a dynamic that must inevitably result in social unrest and violence. It has already produced the upsurge of White Supremacy.
Credit: Daily Mail
A new book by economist Professor Peter Temin finds that the U.S. is no longer one country, but dividing into two separate economic and political worlds. Temin is Elisha Gray II Professor Emeritus of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
You’ve probably heard the news that the celebrated post-WW II beating heart of America known as the middle class has gone from “burdened,” to “squeezed” to “dying.” But you might have heard less about what exactly is emerging in its place.
In a new book, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy, Peter Temin, Professor Emeritus of Economics at MIT, draws a portrait of the new reality in a way that is frighteningly, indelibly clear: America is not one country anymore. It is becoming two, each with vastly different resources, expectations, and fates.
Two roads diverged
In one of these countries live members of what Temin calls the “FTE sector” (named for finance, technology, and electronics, the industries which largely support its growth). These are the 20 percent of Americans who […]
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