Tuesday, January 23rd, 2018
Alleen Brown, - The Intercept
Stephan: Yet another example of why, because it is not fact based nor interested in social wellbeing, Republican governance is almost always destructive of the quality of life for the many while enriching the few. It is not about politics in the usual conservative liberal clichés; it is about social outcome data.
Representatives from Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the controversial Dakota Access pipeline, traveled to Cambridge, Iowa, in October to present a series of $20,000 checks to emergency management departments in six counties. The money was, in part, an acknowledgement of the months of anti-pipeline protests that had taxed local agencies during construction, but it was also a nod to the possibility of environmental contamination. One of the counties had pledged to use its check to purchase “HazMat operations and decontamination training/supplies.” Less than a month later, in Cambridge, the Iowa section of the Dakota Access pipeline would experience its first spill.
According to the standards of most state environmental agencies, it was a small spill that wouldn’t require much attention from emergency managers. On November 14, “excessive vibration” caused 21 gallons of crude to leak out of a crack in a weld connection at one of the pump stations, which are situated along pipelines to keep the product moving and monitor its flow. Since the leak was contained at the site, it went unreported to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, although it did make it […]
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Tuesday, January 23rd, 2018
Jim Hightower, - Nation of Change
Stephan: Since most of the food you eat is harvested by migrant farm workers, and it is almost impossible to hire American citizens to do the work, you would think that in the interest of social wellbeing taking care of those farm workers would be in the national interest -- 56 per cent them work in crop agriculture, and the remaining 44 percent work in livestock. Your good health is dependent on their work.
But we are no longer a country that thinks about wellbeing, particularly the Republican Party. To enrich the few these workers are exploited, abused, and now subject to deportation. As a result there are fewer and fewer of them coming to the country to do the work.
That means your food costs are going to go up as crops rot in the ground, or don't get planted at all. Here's the story.
Immigrant farm workers
Credit: USDA/Bob Nichols
Every decade or so, America’s mass media are surprised to discover that migrant farmworkers are being miserably paid and despicably treated by the industry that profits from their labor.
Stories run, the public is outraged, assorted officials pledge action, then… nothing changes.
Several news reports recently have re-documented that the shameful abuse of these hard-working, hard-traveling families continues.
A Los Angeles Times report revealed that, even if they receive the legal minimum wage, many farm laborers earn less than $17,500 a year because of the low pay and the seasonal nature of their work. Moreover, they are often “housed” in shacks, old chicken coops, shipping containers, and squalid motels.
This year, though, multibillion-dollar agribusiness interests from Florida to California are uniting in a push for new assistance – not for workers, but themselves.
While they backed Trump for president, many are now expressing shock that he may actually try to fulfill his campaign promise to cut off the flow of undocumented immigrants to their fields.
They now admit that these immigrants […]
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Monday, January 22nd, 2018
Stephan A. Schwartz, Columnist - Explore - The Journal of Science and Healing
Stephan: I wrote this several months ago and what I saw then, I feel even more strongly about now. When I look at Puerto Rico, or the recent false alarm in Hawaii what I see is not isolated events but two warnings closely connected in a greater whole. The crumbling infrastructure of the United States has left the country ill-prepared to deal with climate change.
In the past year alone we have endured damages totaling $306 billion, and this is just the beginning. Because administrations both Republican and Democratic for over two generation have rested on the laurels of Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower and failed in their responsibilities, we are woefully unprepared for what is coming. And now we have an administration led by corrupt incompetents who don't even think climate change exists. I am afraid things are going to get very nasty.
According to the Pew Research Center nearly half of American adults say “climate change is due to human activity.” A similar percentage say Earth’s warming is entirely natural or that there is no evidence of warming.1 It is part of the Great Schism Trend, about which I have written in these pages many times.
Belief in climate change very strongly correlates with political beliefs. As Pew says, “On all of these matters there are wide differences along political lines with conservative Republicans much less inclined to anticipate negative effects from climate change or to judge proposed solutions as not likely to make much difference in mitigating any effects. Half or more liberal Democrats, by contrast, see negative effects from climate change as very likely and believe an array of policy solutions can make a big difference.”2 And that is the way the argument usually plays out.
Donald Trump on November 2, 2012 tweeted: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”
On October 19, […]
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Monday, January 22nd, 2018
Stephen Walsh, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Another city is beginning to realize what climate change means. This is such a tragedy but, I am afraid, we are going to see more and more of these stories. It is hard to understand why people can not seem to grasp what is in front of their eyes, but the data that they don't cannot be denied.
Hull, thankfully, has figured out they have to work with the earth's now disturbed meta-systems, not try to dominate them. It will be very interesting to watch how this story plays out.
City of Hull in the United Kingdom
Allan Fellowes had a rude awakening the day Hull flooded.
“It was raining very heavily,” he says of the previous night. “I woke up the next morning and I was looking at the ceiling and there were refraction marks on it. I noticed that the couch I’d fallen asleep on was moving a bit unusually. And I actually fell into [the water].
“I went out into the street and there were so many things happening. I was thinking: my God, what’s happened? Have I woken up yet? There were people going down the street in canoes.”
What had happened was the wettest day in one of the wettest months on record. On 25 June 2007, a depression moving slowly across the UK brought sustained heavy rain to Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and the Midlands. Around 100mm fell on Hull: a month’s worth in a day.
At Kingswood in the north of the city, the Yorkshire Water pumping station failed; […]
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Monday, January 22nd, 2018
JAMES POGUE, - Mother Jones
Stephan: Turning public schools into profit centers paid for by taxpayers in my view is simply an inherently bad idea. The social outcome data is proving that conclusion.
It is in the interest of a developed nation to have the best educated population they can achieve. That's why in Nordic countries there are programs fostering social wellbeing from childhood through college, almost all of it does not require individual payments. We are going in the opposite direction in the U.S., and this is the result.
Credit: Mother Jones
The west side of Columbus, Ohio, is a flat expanse of one-story houses, grimy convenience stores, and dark barrooms, and William Lager, in his business wear, cut an unusual figure at the Waffle House on Wilson Road. Every day, almost without fail, he took a seat in a booth, ordered his bottomless coffee, and set to work. Some days he sat for hours, so long that he’d outlast waitress Chandra Filichia’s seven-hour shift and stay on long into the night, making plans and scribbling them down on napkins.
The dreams on the napkins seemed impossibly grandiose: He wanted to create a school unlike anything that existed, a K-12 charter school where the learning and teaching would be done online, and which would give tens of thousands of students an alternative to traditional public schools across the state. It would offer them unheard of flexibility—a teen mom could stay with her child and study, while a kid worried about being bullied could complete lessons at home. And it would be […]
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