Kai Huschke, Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). - truthout
Stephan:
Yesterday I watched the non-stop commentary on the indictment of convicted rapist, con man, and abuser of women Donald Trump. If my count is right Trump will soon be indicted for 78 felonies. He is like an evil cartoon villain, and in spite of all that he is running again, and even with Joe Biden in the polls. My takeaway from all this, and what is coming, is that this is what our democracy has come to. This is what the American culture has evolved into. Kai Huschke describes good examples of how the 8 Laws of Change operate, and how this supports democracy. I am hoping many of you will volunteer to serve on election staff in your area. We really are at a crossroads as a country, and it is going to take all of us to save democracy. We must start separating corporations from control of the state by reversing Citizens United.
Voters wait in line to cast their ballot for early voting at the Franklin County Board of Elections, on the eve of the U.S. midterm elections, in Columbus, Ohio, on November 7, 2022. Credit: Paul Vernon / AFP/ Getty
In 1979, the children’s educational television series Schoolhouse Rock! broadcast a now-classic episode titled “Three Ring Government” about the three branches of the U.S. government — executive, legislative and judicial.
“No one part can be more powerful than the other,” proclaimed the narrator, who explains that our system of government comes with “checks and balances” — each branch watches the other so no one becomes tyrannical.
The episode is quite entertaining, but facile. In truth our government is more like a three-ring circus — one that makes a mockery of democracy.
In reality the system of “checks and balances” guards against the power of the people.
Local Officials Block Direct Democracy
Community Rights Lane County, an all-volunteer community rights group in Oregon, has been attempting to challenge decades-long spraying of toxic herbicides on forest ecosystems by helicopter, a practice that spreads poison indiscriminately […]
David Badash, Staff Writer - Alter Net / The New Civil Rights Movement
Stephan:
This is what is going on in Republican controlled Red states. The Republican Party wants peasants. People easily manipulated through misinformation that speaks to their fears, resentments, and hate. They don’t want children to be educated, they want them to be indoctrinated. The only thing that is going to stop this, is you.
Credit: Svet foto / Shutterstock
The Houston Independent School District, the largest in Texas and the eighth-largest in the United States, will eliminate librarian positions in 28 schools and turn libraries into what are being called “discipline centers,” according to Click2Houston.
Texas has a $32 billion state surplus but rather than allocate needed funds to public schools, lawmakers in the majority-Republican state legislature, at the behest of Governor Greg Abbott, just delivered a massive property tax cut.
The move to gut librarians and massively reduce access to books and other material does not appear to be budget related, as librarians will be allowed to apply for other positions.
KHOU reports libraries at those 28 schools “will be repurposed into ‘team centers’ where students who had to be removed from class due to behavioral issues will be placed to watch their class virtually.”
In my opinion one of the central cultural trends in the United States is that beginning with the Reagan administration we have transformed from the country that emerged from WWII, recognizing that the fostering wellbeing was the path for the country to take into something very different. From the 1940s to the 1970s we created America’s great middle class and that led us to be the most admired nation in the world. Here for instance is the Republican party platform Dwight Eisenhower ran on:
❋ Assistance to low income communities
❋ Protect social security
❋ Extend minimum wage
❋ Improve unemployment benefits to cover more people
❋ Strengthen labor laws so workers can join unions
❋ Equal pay regardless of sex
Today, we are country in which virtually every major social activity is set up with profit as its first priority, and the MAGAt Republican Party has rigged healthcare, rigged the pharmaceutical industry, rigged the tax structure, and now, as this article lays out, rigged the education of our children with profit as the main consideration. The Republican created culture war has destroyed the cultural commitment to foster wellbeing.
Credit: Alex Bandoni / ProPublica. Source images: monkeybusinessimages and Viorel Kurnosov / Getty
Test scores are plummeting while tens of billions in federal aid flows to schools. A visit to a recent education technology convention provides a glimpse of the frenzy to profit from the recovery efforts.
For the burgeoning education technology sector, however, the crisis has proven a glimmering business opportunity, as a visit to the industry’s annual convention revealed. The federal government has committed $190 billion in pandemic recovery funds to school districts since 2020, and education technology sales people have been eagerly making the case that their products are just what students and teachers need to make up lost ground.
“We’re huge in learning loss,” said Dan DiDesiderio, a Pittsburgh-area account manager for Renaissance Learning, a top seller of educational software and assessments. He was talking up his company’s offerings in the giant exposition hall of the Philadelphia Convention Center, where dozens of other vendors and thousands of educators gathered for three days late last month at the confab of the International Society for […]
The Republicans at the state level are diligently trying to get control of the election process in their states. This is deep in the grass of our democracy, and from what I am reading I don’t think many Americans understand what the Republican Party is trying to do to control voting. As a result, as this report describes, experienced election workers are leaving in droves to be replaced by who, will to do what?
Absentee ballot election workers fill ballot applications in Charlotte, North Carolina. Credit: Logan Cyrus / AFP / Getty
North Carolina, a critical swing state, is seeing rapid changes in election law, placing extra stress on new officials trying to grasp how the system works
The first job many people take out of college usually doesn’t come with a lot of responsibility. Adam Byrnes’s first job is to make sure democracy works in a critical US swing state.
Before graduating with a political science degree from Emory University, Byrnes, 21, applied to be the director of elections for Swain county, a mountainous region of about 14,000 people in western North Carolina. He was offered the job before he had a diploma in hand and started at the end of May. He’s currently preparing for municipal elections in the county seat of Bryson City, which take place in November, while also laying the foundations for the 2024 presidential contest.
Although he’d worked with an on-campus civic engagement organization and an outside group that researched voter access in Georgia, Byrnes quickly […]
Here is a first report about a new electric technology that has the potential to change the culture of America and the world at the scale of the advent of the internet.
Electrified cement (artist’s conception) could store enough energy in a home’s foundation to power household appliances for a full day. Credit: N. Chanut et al. Credit: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Tesla’s Powerwall, a boxy, wall-mounted, lithium-ion battery, can power your home for half a day or so. But what if your home was the battery?
Researchers have come up with a new way to store electricity in cement, using cheap and abundant materials. If scaled up, the cement could hold enough energy in a home’s concrete foundation to fulfill its daily power needs. Scaled up further, electrified roadways could power electric cars as they drive. And if scientists can find a way to do this all cheaply the advance might offer a nearly limitless capacity for storing energy from intermittent renewable sources, such as solar and wind.
So far, the cement devices are small, only big enough to power a few LED lightbulbs. But efforts are already underway to scale them up. “It would be a very attractive technology if they can achieve that at a larger […]
