The Crisis Lurking in Californians’ Taps: How 1,000 Water Systems May Be at Risk

Stephan:  Stories like this are going to become more and more prevalent, and we are doing far too little to prepare for what is coming. If you know someone in your local government talk to them. Find out what is going on where you live.  Time is running short.

Rosalba Moralez estimated that her family spent about $150 a month on bottled water in addition to the family’s $67 monthly payment to the water district in Willowbrook, Calif.
Credit: Rozette Rago/ The New York Times

COMPTON, Calif. — It was bath time and Rosalba Moralez heard a cry. She rushed to the bathroom and found her 7-year-old daughter, Alexxa, being doused with brown, putrid water.

“We kept running the tub, we turned on the sink, we flushed the toilet. All the water was coming out dirty,” Ms. Moralez said.

For more than a year, discolored water has regularly gushed from faucets in the family’s bathroom and kitchen, as in hundreds of other households here in Willowbrook, Calif., an unincorporated community near Compton in South Los Angeles.

The brown water, provided by the Sativa Los Angeles County Water District, first drew public outrage and local news media attention last year when customers began protesting over unexplained stomach pains and skin so itchy it had scarred […]

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The Numbers Are In, and Trump’s Tax Cuts Are a Bust

Stephan:  Republicans cannot govern if the function of government is to foster wellbeing, and nowhere is this clearer than in the tax cuts.

Credit: Gage Skidmore / Flick

The most commonly heard refrain when Donald Trump and the GOP were seeking to pass some version of corporate tax reform went something like this: There are literally trillions of dollars trapped in offshore dollar deposits which, because of America’s uncompetitive tax rates, cannot be brought back home. Cut the corporate tax rate and get those dollars repatriated, thereby unleashing a flood of new job-creating investment in the process. Or so the pitch went.

It’s not new and has never really stood up to scrutiny. Yet virtually every single figure who lobbied for corporate tax reform has made a version of this argument. In the past, Congress couldn’t or wouldn’t take up the cause, but, desperate for a political win after the loss on health care, Trump and the GOP leadership ran with a recycled version of this argument, and Congress finally passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on December 22, 2017. The headline feature was a cut in the official corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent.

So […]

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More White Extremist Propaganda Appearing at US Colleges

Stephan:  When I tell you the Christofascist White Supremacists are making a concerted effort to take over the country, as the National Socialists took over Germany, I'm not kidding.

Signs, fliers and other notices with racist language are increasingly being found at colleges and universities in the United States, a new report finds.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported recently that examples of white supremacist propaganda on U.S. college campuses rose during the most recent school year.

The ADL watches hate groups, including those who believe that white people are better than members of other races. The group says its aim is to secure justice and fair treatment for all people. It adds that white supremacist propaganda on campuses has increased in each of the past two years.

The report noted a sharp increase in documented cases in the 2017-2018 school year. Examples included white supremacist fliers, stickers and other material.

​More extremist propaganda was found during the spring term of 2019 than any term in the past, the ADL said. There were 161 incidents on 122 different college and university campuses across 33 states, and in Washington, D.C. The report documented 313 cases of white supremacist propaganda on U.S. campuses between September 2018 and the end of May 2019.

The cases were tied to organizations linked […]

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FBI director says white supremacy is a ‘persistent, pervasive threat’ to the US

Stephan:  Here is confirmation from the head of the FBI concerning what I have been saying for several years. We definitely have a terrorist problem in the U.S. but it has nothing to do with Muslims. As philosopher Eric Hoffer said back in 1951, "Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both."

Eric Hoffer  The True Believer

WASHINGTON — FBI Director Christopher Wray said Thursday that white supremacy presents a “persistent” and “pervasive” threat to the United States,(emphasis added)  breaking from President Donald Trump, who has sidestepped questions of whether white nationalists present a growing problem.

“The danger. I think, of white supremacists, violent extremism or another kind of extremism is of course significant,” Wray said at a House hearing. “We assess that it is a persistent, pervasive threat. We tackle it both through our joint terrorism task forces on the domestic terrorism side as well as through our civil rights program on the civil side through hate crime enforcement.”
Wray also spoke out against hate crimes and was asked by Democrats what the FBI was doing to crack down on hate crimes, which they say have ticked up during Trump’s presidency.
“We are determined not to tolerate hate-filled violence in our communities, so we’re going to aggressively investigate those cases,” Wray said, adding that there has been an increase in “the reporting of hate crimes,” but that this doesn’t automatically mean more hate crimes were happening. FBI efforts to encourage the public to report hate crimes could be yielding benefits, […]

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Chinese Money in the U.S. Dries Up as Trade War Drags On

Stephan:  The trade war that Trump initiated with China is having all manner of unintended consequences, none of them good. Consider this report as an example of what I mean.

A Chinese trade delegation visiting a soybean farm near Norborne, Mo. Chinese foreign direct investment in the United States fell to $5.4 billion in 2018 from a peak of $46.5 billion in 2016.
Credit: Dave Kaup/Reuters

WASHINGTON — Growing distrust between the United States and China has slowed the once steady flow of Chinese cash into America, with Chinese investment plummeting by nearly 90 percent since President Trump took office.

The falloff, which is being felt broadly across the economy, stems from tougher regulatory scrutiny in the United States and a less hospitable climate toward Chinese investment, as well as Beijing’s tightened limits on foreign spending. It is affecting a range of industries including Silicon Valley start-ups, the Manhattan real estate market and state governments that spent years wooing Chinese investment, underscoring how the world’s two largest economies are beginning to decouple after years of increasing integration.

“The fact that the foreign direct investment has fallen so sharply is symbolic of how badly the economic […]

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