What Explains Moral Leaders' Silence On Climate Change? - Bill McKibben

Climate change—the biggest thing ever to happen on our planet—strikes me as a test not just of whether the big brain was a good adaptation, but also whether it’s attached to a big enough heart to matter.

In June, a team of prominent scientists published a long article in Nature.  It concluded that people have so disturbed the operations of the planet that it's nearing—perhaps within decades—a “state shift” to a new biological paradigm unlike any human civilization has ever encountered.

The data suggests that there will be a reduction in biodiversity and severe impacts on much of what we depend on to sustain our quality of life, including, for example, fisheries, agriculture, forest products, and clean water. This could happen within just a few generations.

What’s surprising is not the science. It’s the endless lack of reaction to it. I didn’t hear any reaction at all from the nation’s clerics.  The whole first page of their sacred text is about nothing but creation, the fact that God made everything around us, pronounced it good, and told us to take care of it.

Which we manifestly haven’t done. We haven’t exercised careful dominion, we’ve just trashed the place. All those creeping beasts and birds of the air? We’re wiping them out at a rate accomplished in the past only by asteroids. And in the process we’re doing more damage to the least among us than any other people who’ve come before.

What explains the mealy-mouthed silence of our moral leaders? I have no idea.

Climate change—the biggest thing ever to happen on our planet—strikes me as a test not just of whether the big brain was a good adaptation, but also whether it’s attached to a big enough heart to matter. At this point the scientists have done all they can to speak for the brain; our religious leaders have done precious little to make the case for the heart.

The full article is available here

Old Man Gloom: NO - Craig Hayes

Old Man Gloom was on hiatus for eight years, but, earlier in 2012, the band emerged to play a series of shows, where its previously hinted-at new album was put on sale for fans in advance of its full release. Eight years is an excruciatingly long time without a release from Old Man Gloom, and the band has rewarded fans with its most compositionally adventurous album yet. Its distinctive slough was produced by the consistently laudable Kurt Ballou, whose work raises Old Man Gloom’s noisome vapors to choking levels.

Old Man Gloom has always intertwined bludgeoning weight with the prospect of emotional disintegration. NO takes that familiar sense of imminent crisis, and marries it to an even greater sense of dread. While the desire to instill trepidation is often defeated in metal by clumsy cliché, Old Man Gloom is far too astute to use tired old routines. It comes as no surprise to find that NO worms its way into your brain easily, picking at uncomfortable fears along the way.

The full article is available here

"The Government Can't Do Anything Right" - from the blog New Appeal To Reason

This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the U.S. Department of Energy.

I then took a shower in the clean water provided by a municipal water utility.

After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC-regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like, using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

I watched this while eating my breakfast of U.S. Department of Agriculture-inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

At the appropriate time, as regulated by the U.S. Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank.

On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the U.S. Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school.

After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and Fire Marshal's inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.

And then I log on to the internet -- which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration -- and post on Freerepublic.com and Fox News forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can't do anything right.

You can read more here

Climate Reality Bites: Gen-Xers Don’t Care Much About Global Warming - John Upton

Members of Generation X are responding in a disturbing way to climate change — with a big, collective shrug of indifference.  Only 22 percent expressed “high concern” about climate change in a 2011 survey [PDF] of about 3,000 Gen-Xers in their late 30s. This despite the fact that “Generation X is the most scientifically literate and best educated generation in American history,” according to lead researcher Jon D. Miller.

Ooh, more disappointing news for you: The latest survey results indicate that Generation Xers with children actually pay less attention to climate change news than other members of their generation.  Miller attributed that surprising finding to the heavy demands of parenting in modern America.

David Herring, a science communicator in NOAA’s climate office, said mainstream media’s coverage of climate change confuses many people and causes them to tune the topic out of their minds.

The full article is available here

The Magna Carta And The Shredding Of The Common Good - Noam Chomsky

Recent events trace a threatening trajectory, sufficiently so that it may be worthwhile to look ahead a few generations to the millennium anniversary of one of the great events in the establishment of civil and human rights: the issuance of Magna Carta, the charter of English liberties imposed on King John in 1215.

A lesser known portion of the document is the Charter of the Forest.  It demanded protection of the commons from external power. The commons were the source of sustenance for the general population – their fuel, their food, their construction materials. The Forest was no wilderness. It was carefully nurtured, maintained in common, its riches available to all, and preserved for future generations.

The Charter of the Forest imposed limits to privatization. By the 17th century however, it had fallen victim to the commodity economy and capitalist practice and morality. No longer protected for cooperative care and use, the commons were restricted to what could not be privatized – a category that continues to shrink before our eyes.

The rise of capitalist practice and morality brought with it a radical revision of how the commons are treated, and also of how they are conceived.  Its goal was to protect the source of sustenance for the population, the commons, from external power -- in the early days, royalty; over the years, enclosures and other forms of privatization by predatory corporations and the state authorities who cooperate with them, have only accelerated and are properly rewarded.

Politics today has been reduced to a lucrative venture where one looks out mainly for returns on investment rather than on what one can contribute to rebuild highly degraded environments, communities, and a nation.  Congressional Republicans are dismantling the limited environmental protections initiated by Richard Nixon, who would be something of a dangerous radical in today’s political scene.

The full article is available here

Fox And Romney Tag-Team False Small-Business Attack On Obama - Simon Maloy

Last week in Virginia, President Obama made a fairly basic point about succeeding in business: you benefit not just from your own initiative, but also from the successes and contributions of others, including government.

Since then, Fox News has led the way in tearing two sentences of Obama's argument out of context and distorting them to claim that the president said small business owners deserve no credit for their own success.  Now the Romney campaign has picked up Fox News' distortion of Obama's comments, and Fox News is reporting on Romney's use of the false attack they helped create.

Yesterday morning's Fox & Friends aired a deceptively edited clip of Obama's remarks, which host Gretchen Carlson called "startling."

Campaigning in Pennsylvania this afternoon, Romney himself repeated the distortion of Obama's remarks, and characterized it as "insulting to every entrepreneur, every innovator in America and it's wrong."And shortly afterward, on Studio B, Fox News chief political correspondent Carl Cameron reported on how Romney attacked the president using the same quote his colleagues enthusiastically distorted.

The full article is available here

Obama Taken Wildly Out Of Context On "Building Business" By Cooperation-phobes - Benjy Sarlin

Mitt Romney and an array of surrogates are mocking President Obama for remarks he made defending public investments in infrastructure, accusing him of arrogantly claiming credit for small businesses’ hard work and risk-taking. But it takes an Olympic-level gymnastic leap to make the attack work as advertised.  

The Romney campaign is seizing on an out-of-context line the president said at a campaign event in Virginia on Friday: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Or, as a Romney press release blared: “OBAMA, TO BUSINESS OWNERS: ‘YOU DIDN’T BUILD THAT.’”

Sounds pretty bad — and it is, if you leave out the sentences directly before and after, which make it crystal clear Obama wasn’t talking about building businesses at all. The “that” in “you didn’t build that” referred to roads, bridges, infrastructure, education, emergency services and law and order — all services that protect and enable business owners along the way toward creating a successful operation.

The full article is available here

Obama = Smallest Government Spender Since Eisenhower -- Rick Ungar, Forbes

Amidst all the cries of Barack Obama being the most prolific big government spender the nation has ever suffered, Marketwatch is reporting that our president has actually been tighter with a buck than any United States president since Dwight D. Eisenhower.

So, how have the Republicans managed to persuade Americans to buy into the whole “Obama as big spender” narrative?

In the first year of the Obama presidency, the federal budget increased a whopping 17.9% —going from $2.98 trillion to $3.52 trillion. I’ll bet you think that this is the result of the Obama sponsored stimulus plan that is so frequently vilified by the conservatives ... but you would be wrong.

The first year of any incoming president term is saddled—for better or for worse—with the budget set by the president whom immediately precedes the new occupant of the White House. Indeed, not only was the 2009 budget the property of George W. Bush—and passed by the 2008 Congress—it was in effect four months before Obama took the oath of office.

If you are truly interested in a fair analysis of the Obama years to date—at least when it comes to spending—you’re going to have to acknowledge that under the Obama watch, even President Reagan would have to give our current president a thumbs up when it comes to his record for stretching a dollar.

The full article is available here

Rotten To The Core - Nick Penniman

Late last year, President Obama made a pilgrimage of sorts to the sleepy town of Osawatomie, Kansas, to talk about the economy. He went there because it’s where, in 1910, Teddy Roosevelt gave one of his most famous speeches, called “The New Nationalism,” which was, in part, an attempt to unite his party around a common vision of a well-managed economy.

A few minutes in, he quoted from Roosevelt’s speech: “‘Our country,’” Obama said, “‘means nothing unless it means the triumph of a real democracy ... of an economic system under which each [person] shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him [or her].’”

But, notice those ellipses. What he omitted was an important phrase from the original quote: “the triumph of popular government.” Five words may not seem like much. Perhaps the president felt as if “real democracy” said enough, or perhaps his speechwriters felt as if it wouldn’t be politically prudent for him to speak so highly of government. But the omission also points to a larger exclusion, not just in Obama’s speech, but in his presidency and, most significantly, in our country’s priorities.

Here’s how Roosevelt defined such priorities in his Osawatomie speech:

 “At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the [people] who possess more than they have earned and the [people] who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen [and women] to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will.”

Roosevelt knew that what stood in the way of his goals—his vision of America—was the control of Washington by the lobbyists and the economic elite, and that to “advance humanity” we first had to regain “the right of self-government.” As all history students know, he sure did fight to regain that right. In fact, by 1910 Roosevelt could have been resting on his reform laurels—three years earlier, he had forced the passage of the Tillman Act, which, as the first major piece of campaign finance reform legislation in history, banned corporate contributions to campaigns.

While the problem of money in politics was bad in Roosevelt’s day, it’s much worse today. Two years ago the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision empowered corporations’ involvement in politics in unprecedented ways. But it’s unclear if President Obama understands as clearly as Roosevelt did that the fight for a better America begins with the fight to “gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests.”

The full article is available here

People Like Affordable Care Act Once They Know What's In It - Joshua Holland

There are two Affordable Care Acts. There's the legislation passed by Congress in 2009, and then there's the mythical Obamacare – the perfidious “government takeover” decried and demagogued by so many conservatives.

A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation asked about 12 specific provisions in the legislation, and found that, on average, 63 percent of respondents approved of the nuts and bolts of the Affordable Care Acts.  The poll found that the most popular parts of the law were also the ones most Americans weren't aware of, and vice-versa.  Fewer than half of those polled knew about the law's tax credits for small businesses that offer their employees coverage, a provision that eight out of 10 people liked when they heard about it.

None of this should come as a surprise, given the level of mendacity of the law's opponents. If the Affordable Care Act did in fact feature “death panels,” resulted in deep cuts to Medicare, represented a "massive” tax increase and “Sovietized” our healthcare system, nobody would support it. Fortunately, none of that bears any resemblance to reality.

Like the idea of government itself, people are suspicious of the Affordable Care Act as an abstraction, but when it gets to the specifics they tend to like it a lot better.

The full article is available here