Saturday, March 31st, 2018
Luke Barnes, - Think Progress
Stephan: Here is some important news about the future of the internet. Read this, advocate in your own community, and write your state and federal representatives and tell them how strongly you feel about this. Under the corruption of Trump and the Republican congress no one is going to assure net neutrality but we ourselves, and that only if we have the energy, grit, and interest to make our views known.
A new ACLU report proves community broadband networks can challenge the Telecom monopoly and beat net neutrality’s repeal.
Credit: Chip Somodevilla
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has seen serious pushback since it voted to repeal net neutrality last December.
At least 27 U.S. states are now considering their own replacement net neutrality legislation, and 21 attorneys general have filed suit against the FCC for repealing the Obama-era regulations, which prohibited Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from slowing down or blocking certain websites they don’t like.
Now, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is releasing new guidelines highlighting an additional step activists can take to prevent corporations like Comcast, Verizon and AT&T from monopolizing the internet: building their own broadband networks.
“Nothing the FCC has done prevents a city, county, or town from directing its own, municipally run service to honor strong network neutrality,” the report, released Thursday, read. “If commercial providers are determined to make money by violating the privacy and speech rights of their users…then states, cities, towns and counties should […]
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Saturday, March 31st, 2018
Stephan: Here is some exciting good news about citizens and climate change, and the courts. It's not definitive, but it can become so if Americans rise up and demand it.
The defendants standing in front of a courthouse in West Roxbury
Credit: Peter Bowden.
When politics damage climate, civil disobedience should be allowed to save the day, Massachusetts court rules.
For almost a year now, hundreds of Massachusetts locals have fought to thwart the construction of a high-pressure fracked gas pipeline, set to run through five miles of West Roxbury, a Boston neighborhood. The protests got increasingly heated, with people sitting in and refusing to vacate holes that were dug for the pipeline, eventually culminating in some 200 arrests. Many of them faced criminal charges for trespassing and disturbing the peace.
This Tuesday, however, the final 13 protesters facing charges were found not responsible by a Massachusetts judge; the potential environmental and public health impacts of the pipeline – including its potential role in deepening climate change – made the public’s disobedience legally necessary, he ruled.
Legally illegal
Although environment and climate activists have been using the necessity defense more and more in recent years to tackle fossil fuel infrastructure development, this is the first case […]
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Saturday, March 31st, 2018
Megan Brenan and Lydia Saad, - The Gallup Organization
Stephan: Because Republicans don't live in a fact based world, and get their information principally from Trump state television and rest of the propaganda organizations of the right, they suffer from severe willful ignorance. This has profound implications for the future of America, and it is not a happy story. Here are the facts.
Partisan gaps across global-warming measures slightly wider than in 2017- Democrats view global warming seriously; Republicans view it skeptically
- 69% of Republicans, 4% Democrats say global warming is exaggerated
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans’ concerns about global warming are not much different from the record-high levels they were at a year ago. However, the views of some partisans have shifted, creating larger gaps than what Gallup saw last year across all questions about global warming.
Gallup’s annual survey about the environment, conducted March 1-8, found that Americans’ opinions about global warming, like many other issues, have increasingly become politically polarized.
President Donald Trump, who has called global warming a “hoax,” may have contributed to this widening divide by reversing a number of government actions to address the issue. These included the announcement that the U.S. will withdraw from the 2015 Paris climate accord, the removal of climate change from the list of top U.S. national security threats and the elimination of the terms “global warming” and “climate change” from U.S. government websites and lexicons.
In general, Democrats view global warming seriously, while Republicans […]
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Saturday, March 31st, 2018
Stephan: Three readers sent me this article over the last week, and I find that almost as appalling as the essay itself. I am seeing an increasing number of essays like this about the state of American society. I see them the same way I would see my daughter with a temperature of 104°F. Most of mainstream media talks about the stock market doing great, and unemployment being down, but it does not follow that the daily lives of millions of Americans are anything but impoverished and stressed. We are seriously off the rails as a culture, and we are not acknowledging this truth.
In this essay, I want to share with you a tiny theory of what it means to be American. It is up to you to judge, as ever, whether it carries any weight. All that I will say is that when I look around, it explains, a little, what I see.
Any theory of being American must explain one salient and striking fact: cruelty. America is the most cruel nation among its peers — even among most poor countries today. It is something like a new Rome. It has little, if any, functioning healthcare, education, transport, media, no safety nets, no stability, security. The middle class is collapsing, and life expectancy is falling. Young people die for a lack of insulin they cannot crowdfund. Elderly middle-class people live and die in their cars. Kids massacre each other in schools — when they’re not self-medicating the pain of it all away. The combination of these pathologies happens nowhere else — not a single place — in the world. Not even Pakistan, Costa Rica, or Rwanda. Hence, the world […]
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Eric Levitz, - New York Magazine
Stephan: As predictable as the swallows returning to Capistrano the Republicans, after significantly cutting taxes for the rich, thus creating a $1.5 trillion increase in the deficit, are now planning to reduce that deficit by cutting the already shockingly shabby social safety net programs of the United States to pay for that transfer of wealth to the rich. It is as blatant a smash and grab as we have ever seen in American history.
The Republicanism of Eisenhower, Dirksen, and Baker that your father and mother may have voted for is long gone, replaced by christofascism. Today the Republican party espouses every man for himself, White men first, women submissive to their men and the state, democracy in form perhaps, but not in substance. Because this is factually so, you cannot be an ethical person and vote Republican in my opinion. But people do, and that is what is wrong with America.
Senate Majority Leader Republican Senator Mitch McConnell
A wise, out-of-touch coastal elite once wrote that American conservatism was less a political philosophy than a set of “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” This was never a fair summary of our nation’s rich tradition of reactionary thought — but it is a serviceable definition of the Republican agenda, circa 2018.
Today’s Grand Old Party is officially committed to ever-lower taxes on the rich, ever-higher spending on the military, and a balanced budget within ten years. It would be virtually impossible to square these three priorities, even if Republicans had the courage of Charles Koch’s convictions on entitlement spending. But they don’t. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan campaigned against Barack Obama’s “Medicare cuts” in 2012; Donald Trump ran on a promise not to cut one penny from Social Security or Medicare in 2016; and last year, the Republican leadership proved unwilling to fully abolish Barack Obama’s main addition to the welfare state — and unable to get 50 GOP senators […]
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