Sunday, February 2nd, 2020
James Kilgore, - truthout
Stephan: Here is the latest on the American Gulag, where almost one percent of the population is incarcerated. Warehousing human beings is big business in the United States, lots and lots of profit to be made, from construction companies to prison guards, to social workers, to police, prosecutors and judges. Everyone has their beak in this honey pot.
This trend is so bad that there are many rural communities in the country whose entire economy is dependent on a prison as the largest area employer.
Few Americans seem to realize that it costs more per person to put a man or woman in prison than it does to send them to college. According to the Vera Institute which tracks this, "incarceration costs an average of more than $31,000 per inmate, per year, nationwide. In some states, it's as much as $60,000."
Ask yourself, what kind of country willingly spends more to uselessly warehouse a human than educate them?
A welder works on the construction of a state prison in Kenedy, Texas. Many rural areas are marketing their jails to immigration and drug enforcement agencies.
Credit: Greg Smith/Corbis/Getty
I live in Champaign County, the heart of the Illinois cornfields. Our somewhat liberal-minded county of 200,000 is home to the flagship campus of the University of Illinois, the “Fighting Illini.” But our county has another distinction: While Black people only comprise 13 percent of our population, they consistently make up 50-71 percent of those in the local jail, resulting in one of the highest racial discrepancies in the country.
For the past decade, rather than attempt to correct this gross inequity, local authorities have punted various plans to build a new jail. So far, the community, led by the grassroots organizing of Build Programs Not Jails, has blocked these efforts. However, the battle is not over. In September 2019, architects from Reifsteck Reid came to a county board meeting packing PowerPoint visuals of their grand plan for a $47 million revamp of our jail, likely […]
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Saturday, February 1st, 2020
The Editorial Board, - The New York Times
Stephan: Friday we saw 51 men and women consciously, knowingly, deliberately damage America's democracy. These are people who were elected by others in their states. If you believe in democracy your task is clear. In November these 51 people need to be voted out of office. There is only one way that can be done. Those of us who place country and democracy first must vote for someone else in those Senate races. We need to focus as much on the Senate as the Presidency. It is time to clean house. And clean house in a big way.
Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by Getty
Alas, no one ever lost money betting on the cynicism of today’s congressional Republicans. On Friday evening, Republican senators voted in near lock step to block testimony from any new witnesses or the production of any new documents, a vote that was tantamount to an acquittal of the impeachment charges against President Trump. The move can only embolden the president to cheat in the 2020 election.
The vote also brings the nation face to face with the reality that the Senate has become nothing more than an arena for the most base and brutal — and stupid — power politics. Faced with credible evidence that a president was abusing his powers, it would not muster the institutional self-respect to even investigate.
The week began with such promise, or at least with the possibility the Senate might not abdicate its constitutional duty. Leaks from John Bolton’s forthcoming book about his time in the White […]
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Saturday, February 1st, 2020
Mark Landler, Stephen Castle and Benjamin Mueller, - The New York Times
Stephan: The United States is not the only nation whose fundamental structure changed, and on the same day, and in a profoundly negative way. This was a day in which history changed.
Gathering in Parliament Square in London on Friday night.
Credit: Andrew Testa? The New York Times
LONDON — To the recorded peals of Big Ben and the gentle fluttering of Union Jacks, Britain bade farewell to the European Union at 11 p.m. on Friday, severing ties to the world’s largest trading bloc after nearly half a century and embarking on an uncertain future as a midsize economy off the coast of Europe.
For Britain, having transitioned in the postwar era from a globe-girdling empire to a reluctant member of the European project, it was yet another epoch-making departure.
It is a departure that will upend settled relations in virtually all areas of society, the economy and security matters, while confronting Britain with new questions of national identity. Three and a half years after the former prime minister, Theresa May, proclaimed that “Brexit means Brexit,” the British government will finally have to decide precisely what that means.
Britain must still […]
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Saturday, February 1st, 2020
JUSTIN NOBEL, - RollingStone
Stephan: Yet another reason to leave the carbon energy age. How many do you need?
Brine trucks at an Injection well in Cambridge, OH.
Credit: George Etheredge/Rolling Stone
In 2014, a muscular, middle-aged Ohio man named Peter took a job trucking waste for the oil-and-gas industry. The hours were long — he was out the door by 3 a.m. every morning and not home until well after dark — but the steady $16-an-hour pay was appealing, says Peter, who asked to use a pseudonym. “This is a poverty area,” he says of his home in the state’s rural southeast corner. “Throw a little money at us and by God we’ll jump and take it.”
In a squat rig fitted with a 5,000-gallon tank, Peter crisscrosses the expanse of farms and woods near the Ohio/West Virginia/Pennsylvania border, the heart of a region that produces close to one-third of America’s natural gas. He hauls a salty substance called “brine,” a naturally occurring waste product that gushes out of America’s oil-and-gas wells to the tune of nearly 1 trillion gallons a year, enough to flood Manhattan, almost shin-high, every single day. At most wells, […]
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Saturday, February 1st, 2020
Olivia Rosane, - EcoWatch
Stephan: In spite of all the obfuscation and denial about climate change at the federal level, coastal states are beginning to realize their survival depends on how they handle what is happening. Here is a data point on this trend, and some good news.
A roller coaster on the Jersey Shore flooded after Hurricane Sandy.
Credit: Master Sgt. Mark C. Olsen / U.S. Air Force / New Jersey National Guard
New Jersey will be the first state in the U.S. to require builders to take the climate crisis into consideration before seeking permission for a project.
Gov. Phil Murphy announced the new regulations Monday as part of the final version of the state’s master energy plan, which commits New Jersey to achieving 50 percent clean energy by 2030 and 100 percent by 2050, according to NJ Advance Media. But while The New York Times pointed out that other states have adopted a 2050 100 percent renewable energy goal, New Jersey will be the first to require that projects seeking Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) permits consider both how their projects’ emissions will contribute to global warming and how climate change will impact their building plans.
“This is a […]
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