ALEC KARAKATSANIS, Civil rights Lawyer and the Founder of Civil Rights Corps - Jacobin / Economic Hardship Reporting Program
Stephan: We see the stories almost every day. How can be there any question that there is something profoundly wrong with the structure, training, racism,and performance of American law enforcement? And it would seem even worse were it not for the Copaganda, as this article styles it.
US police departments spend tens of millions of dollars every year to manipulate the news, flooding the discourse with “copaganda.” These aggressive tactics give the public a distorted view of what public safety means, what threatens it, and how to solve it.
In May of this year, I testified at a hearing in San Francisco where city leaders questioned the police department’s funding and use of public relations professionals. That funding was heavier than you might expect.
According to police department documents provided to the County Board of Supervisors, budget items included a nine-person full-time team managed by a director of strategic communications who alone costs the city $289,423; an undisclosed number of cops paid part-time to do PR work on social media; a Community Engagement Unit tracking public opinion; officers who intervene with the families of victims of police violence and who are dispatched to the scenes of police violence to control initial media reaction; and a full-time videographer making PR videos about cops.
Stephan: Here is what climate change is already doing to American cities. This is not something that is going to happen, it is happening.
Temperature hit 102F in San Antonio, Texas, on Monday, as more than 100 million people are currently under heat related warnings across the US. Credit: Xinhua / REX / Shutterstock
The ferocious heatwave that is gripping much of the US south and west has highlighted an uncomfortable, ominous trend – people are continuing to flock to the cities that risk becoming unlivable due to the climate crisis.
Some of the fastest-growing cities in the US are among those being roasted by record temperatures that are baking more than 100 million Americans under some sort of extreme heat warning. More than a dozen wildfires are engulfing areas from Texas to California and Alaska, with electricity blackouts feared for places where the grid is coming under severe strain.
San Antonio, Texas, which added more to its population than any other US city in the year to July 2021, has already had more than a dozen days over 100F this summer and hit 104F on Tuesday.
Stephan: A few days ago I ran a similar piece on this. I have been covering this trend since the Citizens United Supreme Court decision made it possible, and am increasingly concerned about its implications. Is Thom Hartmann exaggerating when he says 27 billionaires are the actual powers running the country? I don't think he is and there is no question that the United States is becoming, perhaps already is, an oligarchy with a handful of the uber-rich buying election outcomes, the Republican Party as well as a few Democrats, all notable mostly for their corruption. What is very clear to me is that unless something quite dramatic is done about the wealth inequality that plagues this country like cancer the America in which we grew up will cease to exist.
Now it’s official. Twenty-seven men run this country.
Pundits are fond of saying, “The President of the United States is the most powerful person in America.”
He’s not and hasn’t been for over a decade. Political power in this country, since five Republicans on the Supreme Court fully legalized both overt and secret political bribery in their 2010 Citizens United decision, is now centered in the money bins of the morbidly rich.
Political pundits also say that, for example, Val Demmings outraising Marco Rubio in the Florida Senate race bodes well for her and bad for Rubio in the upcoming election. In fact, it’s only marginally relevant because billionaire dark money doesn’t show up in official fundraising numbers. And Rubio has multiple billionaire backers.
A small number of rightwing billionaires today run the show, at least for the moment, and, according to a new study, 27 of them basically own the GOP and thus the ability to block most positive and forward action by the Biden administration.
In 1776 we declared independence from the world’s richest man and the planet’s largest […]
Damian Carrington, Environment Editor - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Several of the billionaires that have become so powerful in America derive their wealth from carbon energy. And the profit derived from what amounts to an addiction industry is so great that few people really comprehend how great it is, and what it can do in a comprised country like the United States. The sooner this industry can die, as it will, the better. It all hangs on ending the internal combustion engine.
The oil and gas industry has delivered $2.8bn (£2.3bn) a day in pure profit for the last 50 years, a new analysis has revealed.
The vast total captured by petrostates and fossil fuel companies since 1970 is $52tn, providing the power to “buy every politician, every system” and delay action on the climate crisis, says Prof Aviel Verbruggen, the author of the analysis. The huge profits were inflated by cartels of countries artificially restricting supply.
The analysis, based on World Bank data, assesses the “rent” secured by global oil and gas sales, which is the economic term for the unearned profit produced after the total cost of production has been deducted.
The study has yet to be published in an academic journal but three experts at University College London, the London School of Economics and the thinktank Carbon Tracker confirmed the analysis as accurate, with one calling the total a “staggering number”. It appears to be the first long-term assessment of the sector’s total profits, with oil rents providing 86% of the total.
Stephan: In 2022, the U.S. has 20.2 million millionaires. This is not a small group of people and their wealth is going to go down through generations. Then there are 750 billionaires. We have completely changed the economics of our society, and most do not recognize this has happened because their fears, racism, and resentments are being played like an instrument by this uber-wealthy sub-population, that comes complete with disinformation operations, like Fox, so that is all they hear.
The Hill Podcast
CEOs of the top 500 companies in the U.S. earned 324 times more money in 2021 than their employees, with executive compensation climbing $2.8 million dollars in the past year on average as worker wages declined, according to an AFL-CIO report.
While the report found that real worker wages fell 2.4 percent in 2021 after adjusting for inflation, the average compensation for the top CEOs in the nation last year was $18.3 million, a more than $5 million increase over the past decade.
CEOs of the top 500 companies in the U.S. earned 324 times more money in 2021 than their employees, with executive compensation climbing $2.8 million dollars in the past year on average as worker wages declined, according to an AFL-CIO report.
While the report found that real worker wages fell 2.4 percent in 2021 after adjusting for inflation, the average compensation for the top CEOs in the nation last year was $18.3 million, a more than $5 million increase over the past decade.
CEO pay, which includes salary, stocks, bonuses and nonequity incentives, rose […]
