Robert Reich, Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Robert Reich, in my view, has it right when he says, "the three-decades-long shift in power to big corporations has transformed industrial policy into a system for bribing them to do the sorts of things government once demanded they do as the price for being part of the American system. This is the result of the Citizens United decision which legalized corporations buying politicians, particularly MAGAt politicians, as a man would rent the attention and submission of a whore.
President Joe Biden is applauded after signing into law the Chips and Science Act of 2022. Credit: Carolyn Kaster / AP
The Clean Air Act of 1970 authorized the government to regulate air pollution.
The Inflation Reduction Act, which Joe Biden signed into law this past week, allocates more than $300bn to energy and climate reform, including $30bn in subsidies for manufacturers of solar panels and wind turbines.
The Inflation Reduction Act is an important step toward slowing or reversing climate the crisis. It also illustrates the nation’s shift away from regulating businesses to subsidizing businesses.
From 1932 through the late 1970s, the government mainly regulated businesses. This was the era of the alphabet soup of regulatory agencies begun under Franklin D Roosevelt (the SEC, ICC, FCC, CAB, and so on) culminating in the EPA of 1970.
The government still regulates businesses, of course, but the biggest thing the federal government now does with businesses is subsidize them.
Consider Joe Biden’s biggest first-term accomplishments:
the Chips and Science Act (with $52bn of subsidies […]
Stephan: In this article, a Baptist pastor explains the deep religious conviction of Baptists, particularly evangelicals, that God intends women to be subordinate and submissive to men. This, I think, is why so many MAGAt women are anti-abortionists.
Cross at the Evangelical Church Credit: Getty
The Southern Baptist Conference is under investigation by the Department of Justice due to numerous claims of egregious sexual abuse and sexual harassment within the denomination. Perhaps people wonder why there is such an overabundance of sexual misconduct of various kinds within evangelical circles. The truth is that many believers in Christ have struggled with what was right and wrong in regards to their genitalia. Is the creator of the universe worried about our private areas? For most conservative evangelical Christians, it is apparently all God thinks about. As an ordained and evangelically trained minister, I tend to disagree.
Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. — Ephesians 5
I can barely get through one week of evangelical radio where this scripture […]
Stephan: The teacher shortage in the United States is, as this article describes, becoming a very serious crisis. And I thihk it has long term consequences. When you consider this trend, and you add the growing attempt by the MAGAts to pull books from school libraries, and censor what can be taught in history and civics classes, and you add in the systemic misinformation campaigns engineered by MAGAt world what you are seeing is a generation of children growing up poorly educated, and indoctrinated into all kinds of nonsense. The effect will be to further weaken our democracy if it even survives until these children grow up.
Veronica Roman, a long-term substitute teacher, works with fifth grade students on language arts at Hunt Elementary in San Bernardino, California on September 22, 2021. Credit: Watchara Phomicinda/MediaNews Group / The Press-Enterprise / Getty
National Education Association president Becky Pringle on Thursday warned that the U.S. teacher shortage has spiraled into a “five-alarm crisis,” with nearly 300,000 teaching and support positions left unfilled and policymakers taking desperate—and in some cases, questionable—measures to staff classrooms.
Pringle toldABC News that teachers unions have been warning for years that chronic disinvestment in schools has placed untenable pressure on educators as they face low pay and overcrowded classrooms.
“The political situation in the United States, combined with legitimate aftereffects of Covid, has created this shortage.”
“We have a crisis in the number of students who are going into the teaching profession and the number of teachers who are leaving it,” Pringle told the outlet. “But, of course, as with everything else, the pandemic just made it worse.”
As a survey taken by the NEA earlier this year showed, 91% of educators said pandemic-related stress and burnout […]
David Debolt, Senior Breaking News Reporter - The Oaklandside
Stephan: Here is the first example of what I hope is going to be a good news trend, the development of a system for providing first responder social support that does not involve the police. Oakland is a city with a serious homeless problem and other social issues in crisis. I intend to watch what happens, and congratulate Oakland for leading the way in this positive trend. I assume other cities are watching Oakland's MACRO program.
MACRO members Chiarra Duncan-Perry, left, and Rick Fitzsimmons, right, hand out water and snacks to an unsheltered woman in East Oakland on July 28, 2022. Credit: Amir Aziz
Early on a Thursday morning in late July, a Chrysler minivan loaded with Narcan, a medicine that reverses opioid overdoses, fentanyl test strips, COVID supplies, and stacks of water bottles and snacks rolls out of the Oakland Fire Department’s training grounds near Jack London Square.
Two radios are providing distinct soundtracks for the three-member crew. One is dialed to a FM hip hop and R&B station. The other, a hand-held radio, is connected to the Oakland Fire Department’s dispatch center, where emergency calls are routed to first responders.
“MACRO 4 is in service for the day,” community intervention specialist Rob Hanna says into the radio’s mic, as Tupac raps in the background. Hanna steers the van toward the Nimitz Freeway en route to East Oakland as his fellow crew members game plan what they’re about to do.
They’ll check on “sleepers”—unsheltered residents at their campsites who might be waking up—and offer them food, […]
Stephan: Everyone knows by now that there is not enough water in the Colorado River, or Lake Mead, or Lake Powell, nor is it likely there will be, for both the cities and the agriculture interests that are completely dependent on that water. And as this report spells out, the seven states that depend on the Colorado River are not yet ready or capable of facing that reality. Over the next few years, we are going to see massive changes in those seven states, and it will affect the entire country because there will not be the same abundance of food coming out of those regions.
From left; Satellite images of Boulder Harbor Launch Ramp at Lake Mead in Boulder City, Nevada, on May 18, 2020, and on July 17 this year. Credit: Satellite image / 2021 Maxar Technologies
States along the Colorado River have officially missed a federally imposed deadline to develop a new water-sharing agreement, and the federal government on Tuesday announced new water allocation reductions, including nearly 25 percent in cuts to Arizona.
The Colorado River basin serves seven states — an Upper Basin of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, and a lower one of Arizona, California and Nevada — and its waters are allocated based on the terms of a century-old agreement from when there was substantially more water in the river.
Meanwhile, the region is facing a 20-years-and-counting drought, the worst in centuries.
In June, the Interior Department gave the states 60 days to agree on a new allocation plan for an additional 15 percent reduction on top of expected federal reductions before the federal government stepped in. That period expired Tuesday.
In a news conference Tuesday, federal Bureau of Reclamation officials […]
