Palestinian Christian: Western Christians Don't Understand Gaza/Israeli Conflict

"The Palestinian Christians, they don't live in an isolated area where oh, this is a Christian town. No, they live among the Muslims in Gaza and therefore as much as the Muslims are suffering, the Christians are suffering, not only in the Gaza strip but also in the West Bank."

"The Christians in the west, most of them, they don't know the realities here. They don't know who is occupying who, who is oppressing who, who is confiscating whose land, who is building walls to try and separate people from one another," said Alex Awad, who Pastors East Jerusalem Church.

"In the United States and much of Europe people — they just don't understand the realities on the ground," he added. "The news media doesn't tell [a] comprehensive story where the average person will understand the causes and effects," said Awad.

"The Palestinian Christians in Gaza today, they suffer as much as the Palestinian Muslims in Gaza. They are under bombardment. They have only eight hours of electricity of every 24 hours. They have a hard time getting fresh water," he said.

"The Palestinian Christians, they don't live in an isolated area where oh, this is a Christian town. No, they live among the Muslims in Gaza and therefore as much as the Muslims are suffering, the Christians are suffering, not only in the Gaza strip but also in the West Bank."

"We are part and parcel of the rest of the Palestinian people. We believe in Jesus Christ. We are still Palestinian Arabs. We speak the Arabic language. We consider ourselves Palestinian," he added.

Awad said that despite the shared sense of "being under the same yoke of oppression" that unites him with his fellow Palestinians, his "heart goes out to any Muslim, Christian, Jew, Israeli, whatever their title, who may be affected by this unnecessary war."

The full article is available here

Why Did Israel Provoke This War? - Henry Siegman in Tikkun

Why does Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’ continue to expand illegal settlements in the West Bank, and why did he use the tragic kidnapping and killing of three Israelis (which was not conducted by Hamas) as a pretext to bomb, then invade Gaza? 

The political and moral issues raised by these actions include Israel's violation of the cease-fire agreement that was in place since November 2012 and whether Israel’s civilian population could have been protected by nonviolent means that would not have placed Gaza’s civilian population at risk.  They also include Hamas' willingness to respond in kind - only perpetuating the cycle of violence - and their strategic placement of weapons in civilian areas.

Where, exactly, are Israel’s borders? It is precisely Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to identify those borders that places Israel’s population at risk. And the reason he has refused to do that is because he had not wanted the world to know that he had no intention of honoring the pledge he made in 2009 to reach a two-state agreement with the Palestinians.

But on July 12, as noted in The Times of Israel by its editor, David Horovitz, Netanyahu made clear that he has no interest in a genuine two-state solution. As Horovitz puts it, “the uncertainties were swept aside … And nobody will ever be able to claim in the future that [Netanyahu] didn’t tell us what he really thinks. He made it explicitly clear that he could never, ever, countenance a fully sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank.”

The Road Map for Middle East peace that was signed by Israel, the PLO and the United States explicitly ruled out any unilateral alterations in the pre-1967 armistice lines that served as a border between the parties. This provision was consistently and blatantly violated by successive Israeli governments with their illegal settlement project. And Netanyahu refused to recognize that border as the starting point for territorial negotiations in the terms of reference proposed by Secretary of State John Kerry.

The full article is available here

7 "Disposable" Items To Steer Clear Of - Kim Corkum at Postlandfill.org

Waste is not something we need to take for granted. It represents a fundamentally broken pattern of consumption.

The way we use and dispose of the Earth’s resources is fundamentally broken. We extract resources at ever-increasing rates to make consumer goods, which soon end up in landfills due to a lack of other solutions.

But our planet’s resources are not infinite, and our trash can be toxic.  If we don’t change course, we face resource depletion and growing toxicity in our air, soil, water, and bodies.

1. Plastic Water Bottles: 50 billion plastic water bottles are used each year. Although they are picked up by curbside recycling programs , only around 23 percent of these bottles are actually recycled. In addition plastic is not a sustainable material because it requires the extraction of more resources to make more water bottles.

2. Plastic Utensils: I know these seem like a quick and easy solution for having guests over or for your lunch at work. But in the long run these items end up in landfills and are detrimental to us. For each plastic fork, think about the petroleum oil that has to be extracted and the chemicals that will ooze out of it when it ends up in a landfill.

3. Ziploc Bags: stop wasting your money on these disposable plastic bags. They are hard to recycle and most curbside recycling programs do not accept them.

4. Batteries: disposable batteries are not only a waste of money but are very toxic when they enter landfills. They contain harmful metals like nickel,cadium, cobalt and they also contain mercury. If these chemicals leach into our environment, they are detrimental to our health and wildlife. Buy rechargeable batteries that can last up to 5,000 recharges.

5. Plastic Shopping Bags: Paper or plastic? How about neither! These bags are making their way into the ocean and are ending up in the bodies of our wildlife. Bring your own reusable bag when shopping at grocery stores, retail stores, etc. Find a smartphone app that will remind you to bring your reusable bags every time you are near a store here!

6. Pens and Ink Cartridges: Every school year we all buy new disposable pens and ink cartridges but where do the old ones go? Most likely they end up in landfills. To avoid this, buy refillable pens and ink cartridges.

7. Styrofoam: Resist accepting this packaging for left overs at a restaurant or for hot beverages at Dunkin Donuts. You cannot easily recycle this material and it breaks up into small toxic pieces in landfills. Bring your own containers to take extra food!

The full article is available here

House Votes to Push Millions Into Deeper Poverty - Bread For The World

Tax credits, like the child tax credit (CTC) and the earned income tax credit (EITC), keep more people – including children – out of poverty each year than any other federal anti-hunger program.

In a disturbing trend that prioritizes the wealthy over the most vulnerable Americans, the House today passed H.R. 4935 by a vote of 237 to 171.  Bread has dubbed it the “reverse Robin Hood” bill, which takes from the poor to give to the rich. The bill could push 12 million people—including 6 million kids--into poverty or deeper poverty while giving a tax break to households making $150,000 to $205,000.
 

In a media statement today, Bread for the World president, Rev. David Beckmann said,  “It is unacceptable that we are one of the wealthiest countries in the world and have one of the highest child poverty rates among developed countries. Our policies should help lower-income working families climb out of poverty - not push them deeper into it.”

We do not expect the Senate to take up the Child Tax Credit Improvement Act of 2014.  Instead, the bill, which does not extend critical improvements to the child tax credit for millions of low-income working families, could be considered as part of a tax extenders bill after the November mid-term elections.  Tax credits, like the child tax credit (CTC) and the earned income tax credit (EITC), keep more people – including children – out of poverty each year than any other federal anti-hunger program.

Bread is calling for any final bill on the child tax credit to include the 2009 improvements, which enable more low-income working families to receive a larger credit. Your advocacy helped build momentum and educate lawmakers that this is an issue the faith community cares about.

The full article is available here

Mr President, The Border Kids Are Refugees - Michelle Goldberg in The Nation

Many of the children — who largely hail from gang-ridden Honduras, the country with the world’s highest murder rate, and neighboring El Salvador and Guatemala — have valid claims to asylum.

The 52,000 unaccompanied children who have shown up at the border are fleeing gang violence and have valid claims to asylum.

The gratuitous cruelty of the U.S. right to these children isn’t much of a surprise.

More shocking is the response of the Obama administration, which is scarcely more hospitable. As the United Nations and others have said, the situation on the border, where 52,000 unaccompanied children have arrived from Mexico and Central America since October, is more a refugee crisis than an immigration one.

But rather than acknowledge this, the White House has suggested that it wants to strip some of these children of rights they have under the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, a 2008 law signed by George W. Bush. According to The New York Times, Obama is considering seeking “flexibility” in the law’s requirements, which gives lone child migrants from countries other than Mexico and Canada the right to an immigration hearing and, in the interim, release into the “least restrictive setting that is in the best interest of the child.”

The administration must acknowledge that many of the children—who largely hail from gang-ridden Honduras, the country with the world’s highest murder rate, and neighboring El Salvador and
Guatemala—have valid claims to asylum. “The UN said that in their judgment, we should call this a refugee matter, and I think they’re right,” Democratic Representative Zoe Lofgren of California. Indeed, she argues, calling the underlying problem gang warfare minimizes it: “These are armed warlords competing for governance of the countries.”

Treating this as a refugee crisis does not mean simply opening the borders, which could empower the smuggling rings that profit by bringing children to the United States. It means providing safety for the kids who are already here and working with the UN to create centers in their home countries where those whose lives are in danger can apply for asylum in the United States or other nations.

“To me, it’s recognizing reality,” Lofgren says. “You can say it’s not a refugee crisis, but it is, and we have tools in our toolbox, including UNHCR, to deal with a refugee crisis.”

The full article is available here

10 Supreme Court Rulings That Turned Corporations Into People - Alex Park in Mother Jones

Last week's decision is the latest in a 200-year-long line of rulings giving businesses the same rights as humans.

Last week's Hobby Lobby ruling charted new legal territory by granting corporations the same religious rights as real people. The rationale behind the decision—that expanding constitutional rights to businesses is necessary to "protect the rights of people associated with the corporation"—is far from novel.

A line of Supreme Court rulings stretching back 200 years has blurred the distinction between flesh-and-blood citizens and the businesses they own, laying the groundwork for Hobby Lobby and the equally contentious Citizens United ruling.

If a corporation has First Amendment rights, could it also claim Second Amendment protections? Amazingly, this is a question some scholars are seriously pondering.

As Darrell A.H. Miller wrote in his 2011 article "Guns, Inc." in the NYU Law Review, "If Citizens United is taken seriously, the Second Amendment, like the First Amendment and like many other provisions of the Bill of Rights, guarantees liberties to natural and corporate persons alike." Bang!

The full article is available here

To Understand Child Migration, Look Beyond the Border - Andrew Wainer

“Few people are elevating social and economic conditions that compel people to take such dangerous risks by crossing the U.S. border or sending their unaccompanied children in search of a better life, but they are conditions that must be addressed if we are serious about fixing this crisis.” - Rev. David Beckmann

The surge of unaccompanied children crossing the U.S. southern border is a humanitarian crisis. The solution to help these children lies in addressing the causes that are driving them to make the perilous journey alone. 

The causes of this surge are familiar. They appear to be an intensified version of the traditional drivers and dynamics of migration from Central America. 

Push factors. Poverty and violence are widespread in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. 

Pull factors. People are often driven by economic opportunity, safe haven, and the hope for potential legalization in the United States.

Transnational immigrant networks. The family, community, and economic links that connect Central Americans with the diaspora in the United States and other nations compel people to make the journey.

Stricter border enforcement and better care for recently arrived child migrants won't make the issue go away. It's not enough. It's a stopgap.

The full article is available here

Takeaways From the Hobby Lobby Case

Corporations can’t pray, but they do have religious rights.
Hobby Lobby isn’t a person. It’s a chain of crafts stores owned by a religious family. And though the evangelical Green family objects to parts of the Affordable Care Act’s emergency contraception mandate, it’s not the Greens but the company that writes the check for employees’ health insurance. The first question the justices had to answer was this: Does Hobby Lobby have religious rights? To many Americans, this sounds a little nutty. Does a craft store believe in God?

This court is rah-rah religious rights.
Chief Justice John Roberts’ court is shaping up to be pretty darn protective of that free exercise clause. Less than two months ago, the court ruled 5-4 that the town of Greece, N.Y., could regularly convene town meetings with sectarian Christian prayers. And in 2012, the court ruled 9-0 that a Lutheran school could fire a teacher who had some ministerial responsibilities, despite the government’s argument that her dismissal violated the Americans With Disabilities Act. In all these cases, the court sided with religious rights over other rights.

Hobby Lobby won, but the next company to cite religious objections might well lose.
The Hobby Lobby decision may certainly embolden religious employers to object to laws they consider burdensome. But that doesn’t mean they’re always going to win. The court made clear in this ruling that religion should not always trump the law, and said its decision applies to the contraception mandate, not other insurance mandates. The court also specified that an employer could not use religion to get an exemption from laws that prohibit discrimination — on the basis of race, for example.
The full article is available here

5 Torture Myths Debunked - Amnesty International

Torture is mostly practiced as a means of dehumanizing enemies.

Real life doesn't look like “24″ or “Zero Dark Thirty” – even in the U.S., torture is mostly practiced as a means of dehumanizing enemies. Amnesty International research shows that torture and other ill-treatment continue to be an issue in many countries. 

It also clearly shows that most victims of torture and other ill-treatment worldwide are not dangerous terrorists but rather poor, marginalized and disempowered criminal suspects who seldom draw the attention of the media and public opinion, either nationally or globally.

1. Torture is Mainly Used Against Terror Suspects and During War
The focus on torture and other ill-treatment in what the U.S. authorities then called the “war on terror” at the beginning of the century may have skewed the global picture.Torture continues in anti-terrorism contexts.

2. Torture is the Only Way to Get Information, FastTorture is a primitive and blunt instrument of obtaining information. Humane questioning techniques have proved to be efficient in obtaining information on crimes without the devastating personal, societal and legal consequences.

3. Some Forms of Torture Are Not That Bad
Torture doesn't come in levels. It is defined legally as an act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person to punish or obtain information. No torture is “lite.” All forms of torture are despicable and illegal

4. In Certain Circumstances, It Serves a Greater Good
Torture is never legal or acceptable. Countries that currently fail to punish it by law are violating internationally agreed standards. In legal terms, the absolute prohibition on torture and other ill-treatment is “non-derogable” – that is, it cannot be relaxed, even in times of emergency.

5. Only a Handful of the Worst Governments Use Torture
Over the past five years, Amnesty International has reported on torture or other ill-treatment in 141 countries and from every world region.  While in some of these countries, torture might be the exception, in others it is systemic, and even one case of torture or other ill-treatment is unacceptable.

The full article is available here

Why I'm A Pro-Life Leftist - Elizabeth Stoker

Human life is significant enough to allow wide latitude for. That is what necessitates the leftist part of my position.

Abortions are as much the result of a culture inhospitable to life as they are to the weak sources of support that arise out of that culture and the decisions of individual mothers.  It's useless and cruel to harass women seeking abortions at clinics. It does nothing to answer the echoing ethical question: What then should we do? It's not enough to say what we should not do.

The pro-life leftist position maintains that human life is so significant, so inherently valuable, so irreplaceable that it should be the central subject of political concern. To me, this requires a culture agreeing to put its money where its mouth is — that is, to provide robust support programs that render feasible the entire process of childbearing and childbirth, from pregnancy to child care to the total span of family life.

Programs that immediately come to mind include universal health care, which would obviate the incredible expenses of pregnancy, often costing in the thousands of dollars out of pocket; government-supported parental leave and policies protecting the employment of mothers; and a no-strings-attached child allowance.

A 2013 study featured in the journal BMC Women's Health found that financial reasons were the primary motive for 40 percent of women who sought abortions. In fact, financial concerns were the "most frequently mentioned theme" in women's explanations of why they needed an abortion. Other concerns included a lack of insurance, a lack of adequate housing, and a lack of stable living conditions. The study's authors note that for women seeking abortion, the decision is rarely simple; most women expressed multiple reasons that in culmination led them to believe they could not become mothers, and financial reasons were frequently at the core of those stacked concerns.

There is nothing especially mysterious about Finland, Sweden, or Norway that allows them to have such low child poverty rates — they merely choose, politically, to funnel public resources into preventing economic stress on parents and children. Accordingly, it's frequently the case that countries similar to the U.S. but with more robust social programs have lower rates of abortion: There are about 20 abortions per 1,000 women in the U.S., 7.8 per 1,000 in Germany, 14.3 in Denmark, and 11.1 in Finland.

Inequality and Polarization Rise In Tandem - Christopher Ingraham

Over the past 100 years or so, polarization and inequality have often moved in tandem.
Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century" has sparked a good deal of discussion on the rise of wealth and income inequality in the U.S. Separately, the mid-term election year has prompted the usual reckonings of growing political polarization and partisan gridlock.

What we often miss, however, is the historic links between the two: over the past 100 years or so, polarization and inequality have often moved in tandem.

We tend to think of our era as exceptional, both in terms of polarization and, to a lesser extent, inequality. But as the chart shows, the 2000s bear similarities to the early part of the 20th century on both measures, especially inequality.

We can further separate out the polarization figures by party. As Tom Mann noted in The Atlantic Monday, modern political polarization is largely a Republican phenomenon. The Republican party voters, he writes, "are more skewed to their ideological pole than Democratic Party voters are to theirs."

And indeed, as the charts below show, inequality is much more closely correlated with Republican partisanship than with Democratic partisanship. Those r-squared values noted on the charts are the key - higher numbers indicate a closer relationship between the variables plotted. And that value is much higher when you're looking at the relationship between inequality and Republican partisanship, versus Democratic partisanship.

The full article is available here

Color+City Matches Empty Walls With Street Artists - Holly Richmond in Grist

Walls separate. That’s their job. But unleash the PSHHH of an aerosol can of paint and maybe a wall can bring people together.

So thought Victor Garcia and Gabriel Pinheiro, two guys who founded Color+City with help from Google’s Cultural Institute. The website, which just won the Webby for City and Urban Innovation, connects graffiti artists with businesses and others who want their sad gray walls to get some color.

Wall- and façade-havers post photos of their space on the site, which artists peruse and then book for 15 days. (Street art doesn’t have a long shelf life.) The project was inspired by the way colorful murals have transformed São Paulo, Brazil. 

The full article is available here

The Answer To Injustice - Paul Robeson

Choosing To Have A Middle Class - Thom Hartmann

Having a middle class is a choice that a society has to make, and it's a choice we need to make again in this generation, if we want to stop the destruction of the remnants of the last generation's middle class. 

Despite what you might read in the Wall Street Journal or see on Fox News (both owned by Rupert Murdoch), capitalism is not an economic system that produces a middle class.

In fact, if left to its own devices, capitalism tends towards vast levels of inequality and monopoly. Wealth accumulates at the very top among the elites, not among everyday working people. Inequality is the default option.

By embracing Reaganomics and cutting taxes on the rich, we decided back in 1980 not to have a middle class within a generation or two. George H.W. Bush saw this, and correctly called it "Voodoo Economics."

When we had heavily regulated and taxed capitalism in the post-war era, the largest employer in America was General Motors, and they paid working people what would be, in today's dollars, about $50 an hour with benefits. Reagan began deregulating and cutting taxes on capitalism in 1981, and today, with more classical "raw capitalism," what we call "Reaganomics," or "supply side economics," our nation's largest employer is WalMart and they pay around $10 an hour.

This is how quickly capitalism reorients itself when the brakes of regulation and taxes are removed - this huge change was done in less than 35 years.

The full article is available here

Middle Class Broke Because Of Government Policy Dictated By Plutocracy - Egberto Willies

As productivity increased in this country, and employees provided more value, only those at the top that got the spoils.

If one watches corporate media, the impression is given that the free market as the best allocator of resources if left unfettered is the solution to all that ails the country’s economy. This god, the free market, will ensure that productivity and efficiency are rewarded.

Additionally one's wage is somehow proportional to their worth within the economy.

The wealth of most Americans has been in a state of stagnation since the institution of Ronald Reagan’s supply side economics (termed "voodoo economics" by George HW Bush) that America is still living under. Until this form of economics is disbanded and corrective action taken via the tax system, the middle class will continue to falter and the Plutocracy will continue its unfettered reign.

As productivity increased in this country, and employees provided more value, only those at the top that got the spoils. These are theories intent to keep a class system in which a very select few control most of the capital and the government.

Firstly, there is no free market. Corporations are grabbing patents or acquiring patents left and right however dubious the claims. Farmers are losing their ability to grow their crops free with their own seeds, because of cross pollination with genetically modified seeds of major corporations who own the patent on those seeds.

Secondly, while politicians are elected democratically, they are generally elected on false premises. The fact the mainstream news media is controlled by a few companies, means that the messaging heard by Americans are corporate-centric. As such, only politicians that toe the line tend to get the ability to get a message out that can get them elected.

Thirdly, the current tax structure mathematically ensures the demise of the middle class. This is a mathematical fact. The working person’s income comes mostly from wages. The wealthy person’s income comes mostly from municipal bonds and capital gains. Wages are taxed at up to 39% and municipal bonds interest is not taxed at all while capital gains are taxed at 15%. It is a mathematical impossibility that the wealthy will not continue to get a very disproportionate take of the pie.

The full article is available here

7 Facts About Our Broken Tax System - George Zornick in The Nation

Here are some actual facts about our tax system.

Conservative politicians and corporate lobbyists (coincidence, right?) have constructed a highly effective narrative about taxes.  It is a governmentaphobia that enlists the very people hurt by its advancement.  In many ways it has come to be taken for granted as common knowledge. 

However, this does not mean that it is any way accurate, factual or backed by data, events or statistics.  Here are some actual facts about our tax system to burst that fictitious balloon.

1. We don’t have a progressive tax system. A truly progressive tax system would ask those who are the most well-off in America to contribute the largest share of their income in taxes. Our federal taxes are progressive, but when you account for state, local and sales taxes, top-line taxation rate isn’t really progressive at all.

2. We’re one of the least-taxed countries in the world. Though the animating impulse of much of conservative politics is that we’re over-taxed, total government receipts are less in the United States than they are in any other member of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, as a percent of GDP.

3. Not many companies pay the corporate tax rate—and some don’t pay any corporate taxes at all. Politicians and corporate lobbyists are fond of saying the US corporate tax rate of 35 percent is the highest in the world, which is technically true—but thanks to expansive tax loopholes, many corporations don’t pay nearly that much.

4. Some of your tax dollars are given to hugely profitable companies. Many companies have a negative tax rate—meaning they actually get money from the government. This can come in the form of federal tax breaks and other preferential treatment of certain financial instruments. Then consider the subsidies given directly to industry, along with the safety net programs some of these companies force employees to rely on, and the number gets quite big.

5. Meanwhile, some people are actually taxed into poverty. Many high-profile conservatives like to complain about their supposedly oppressive tax rates. But there’s one group—low-wage childless adults—who can literally be taxed into poverty.

6. Washington doesn’t like to address the deficit by raising taxes. There has been quite a bit of deficit reduction talk—and action—since 2008. Despite the fact that, as noted, government receipts in the United States are extremely low, a vast majority of the savings that DC has found has come from cutting things, not raising more revenue.

7. Much More Revenue Is Out There. In order to raise more tax revenue, corporations paying negative tax rates are a logical place to start, as are the very wealthy. They are the only ones seeing their income increase, rather than decrease.

The full article is available here

The Supreme Court’s Ideology: More Money, Less Voting - Ari Bermanon

In the past four years, under the leadership of conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court has made it far easier to buy an election and far harder to vote in one.

The Court’s conservative majority believes that the First Amendment gives wealthy donors and powerful corporations the carte blanche right to buy an election but that the Fifteenth Amendment does not give Americans the right to vote free of racial discrimination.

These are not unrelated issues—the same people, like the Koch brothers, who favor unlimited secret money in US elections are the ones funding the effort to make it harder for people to vote. The net effect is an attempt to concentrate the power of the top 1 percent in the political process and to drown out the voices and votes of everyone else.

A country that expands the rights of the powerful to dominate the political process but does not protect fundamental rights for all citizens doesn’t sound much like a functioning democracy to me.

The full article is available here

US Drone Turns Yemeni Wedding Into Funeral - Juan Gonzalez

The strike not only may have violated international law, but also flies in the face of President Obama’s policies on targeted killings. 

A new report has revealed that a U.S. drone strike that killed at least a dozen people in Yemen in December failed to comply with rules imposed by President Obama last year to protect civilians.

The strike was carried out by the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command and targeted vehicles that were part of a wedding procession going towards the groom’s village outside the central Yemeni city of Rad’a. According to the Human Rights Watch investigation, quote, "some, if not all those killed and wounded were civilians" and not members of the armed group al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula as U.S. and Yemeni government officials initially claimed.

The report concluded that the attack killed 12 men between the ages of 20 and 65 and wounded 15 others. It cites accounts from survivors, relatives of the dead, local officials and news media reports.

There are serious concerns that the strike not only may have violated international law, but also flies in the face of President Obama’s policies on targeted killings. The president has said the U.S. does not strike unless it has near certainty that no civilians were killed, yet the evidence strongly suggests that at least some of those killed in this strike, and possibly all of them, were civilians.

The full article is available here

Flaws With the State Dept.’s Keystone Pipeline Study - Ben Adler

The State Department made several flawed assumptions and decisions.

When the State Department issued its environmental impact statement on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline two weeks ago, the media’s main takeaway was that State had found the project would not significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions.

But as environmental advocates have dug deeper into the report in the days since, they have concluded that State made several flawed assumptions and decisions. Moreover, even its own findings show potential contributions to global warming if the pipeline moves forward.

Here are environmentalists’ three major complaints:

1. The questionable assumption that tar-sands development is inevitable. Tar-sands oil is more expensive to extract than conventional oil. The State Department anticipates that high oil prices will make it economically viable to drill in the Canadian tar sands whether or not Keystone XL is built, and therefore concludes that the pipeline won’t lead to more tar-sands oil extraction or CO2 emissions.

2. Lack of context. State’s report did not consider Keystone in relation to other proposed pipeline projects — like an expansion of Enbridge’s Alberta Clipper Pipeline, which runs from the Alberta tar sands to Superior, Wis. Sixteen environmental organizations sent a letter to State saying it should have considered this larger context. The letter observed, “The Supreme Court has recognized that ‘when several proposals … that will have cumulative or synergistic environmental impact upon a region are pending concurrently before an agency, their environmental consequences must be considered together.’”

3. Conflict of interest. Environmental Resources Management (ERM), the consulting firm contracted to do the environmental impact study, was recommended to State by TransCanada, the company that wants to build the pipeline. In response to a query from State, ERM said it had not worked with TransCanada in the previous three years. But after it won the contract, ERM admitted that it had worked on a TransCanada project.

The full article is available here

Obama's Underwhelming Plan to Tackle Inequality - Lynn Stuart Paramore

If you were wanting something that takes on inequality in America the way Lyndon B. Johnson took on poverty in his 1964 State of the Union address, you did not find it tonight.

Obama's plans include include raising wages to $10.10 for people making a miserly $7.25, the current Dickensian minimum. Oh, wait, he's only talking about federal contract wages. OK, really only some of them. And only the new ones.

An income of $10.10 per hour falls short of a living wage. The plan does not even match the boldness of conservative California businessman Ron Unz, who wants to raise the minimum to $12 because he doesn’t like having to pay for all the social welfare programs people have to rely on when they get paid squat.

If you were wanting something bold and butt-kicking, something that takes on inequality in America the way Lyndon B. Johnson took on poverty in his 1964 State of the Union address, you did not find it tonight.

You didn't hear about expanding Social Security, a sensible plan supported by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others. You didn't hear about getting to full employment (but you did hear some conservative rhetoric about how unemployment is really about workers not having the right skills, which has been repeatedly debunked). 

You didn't hear about bringing justice to criminal bankers who prey on hard-working Americas. You didn't hear about asking the rich to pay their fair share in taxes, or putting a financial transaction tax on Wall Street, or backing off the grotesque Trans-Pacific Partnership, or ending too-big-to-fail, or taking real action to get the money out of politics.

The full article is available here

How To Talk To A Climate Change Skeptic - Coby Beck

“How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic” is a series from Grist Magazine written by Coby Beck.  It contains responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming. There are four separate taxonomies; arguments are divided by:

• Stages of Denial,
• Scientific Topics,
• Types of Argument, and
• Levels of Sophistication 

In the unpleasant event that you’re faced with someone who’s all “lol how can there be global warming it’s cold,” you could follow Grist's four-point plan for wasting your breath and not managing to change their minds. Or you could just send them this XKCD comic and let Randall Munroe do the work.

Pennsylvania Ruling Shows Problem With Voter ID Laws - Ari Berman

Pennsylvania became a case study for the problems with voter ID laws.
Judge Bernard McGinley found that the law violated the state constitution because hundreds of thousands of registered voters lacked the restrictive forms of ID required by the state, few had obtained the requisite ID since the law’s passage in March 2012, the state had not made it easy to get an ID and there was no evidence of in-person voter fraud to justify the burdens of the law.

Pennsylvania became a case study for the problems with voter ID laws. “The Voter ID Law as written suggests a legislative disconnect from reality,” McGinley wrote.

The lead plaintiff in the case, Viviette Applewhite, was a 93-year-old great-great grandmother who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and had voted in every election for the past fifty years but did not have a driver’s license and was at risk of being disenfranchised by the new law.

The state present failed evidence to justify the new voter ID law. The state “wholly failed to show any evidence of in-person voter fraud,” McGinley wrote. “Certainly a vague concern about voter fraud does not rise to a level that justifies the burdens construction here. Therefore, this Court does not find in-person voter fraud a compelling interest the Voter ID Law was designed to serve.”

The full article is available here

What Obama Didn’t Say NSA Spying Speech - Zoe Carpenter

The really significant parts of Obama’s speech were the things he did not mention. He did not call for a full stop to the bulk collection of communication records, only a transfer of ownership.

The president did not articulate a specific reason why this information needs to be collected and stored. His own intelligence review panel found that it serves no essential counter-terrorism purpose. On the other hand, the same panel (among others) emphasized the intrusiveness of bulk data collection.

Obama made a few important acknowledgements of the potential for abuse inherent in surveillance programs, but he painted a seriously misleading picture of the NSA’s recent history when he said that he’s learned nothing that “indicated that our intelligence community has sought to violate the law or is cavalier about the civil liberties of their fellow citizens.”

The full article is available here

Groups to Obama: Your Fossil Fuel-Driven Policies = Catastrophic Climate Future

18 environmental, environmental justice, and public health advocacy organizations have written a pointed letter to President Obama.

Citing the glaring gaps between his sometimes encouraging rhetoric and the realities of his fossil fuel-laden policies, eighteen environmental, environmental justice, and public health advocacy organizations have written a pointed letter to President Obama slamming his "all of the above" energy strategy as a "compromised" approach that "future generations can't afford."

“You can’t have it both ways,” said Sierra Club's executive director Michael Brune in an interview with the Washington Post, which received advanced notice of the letter that was sent to the White House on Thursday.

"In the coming months your administration will be making key decisions regarding fossil fuel development -- including the Keystone XL pipeline, fracking on public lands, and drilling in the Arctic ocean -- that will either set us on a path to achieve the clean energy future we all envision or will significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution."

The full article is available here

Advocacy For A Lifetime - Shirley Mullen

Sustained faithfulness in advocacy must be grounded in a larger life of discipline, humility, and hope if it is to endure for the long haul.

For some of us, advocacy is like a onetime cross-cultural experience. For some of us, advocacy is another way of "coming of age." It is a way of demarcating themselves from their own history.  For some of us, advocacy is a way of exerting their gifts of persuasion and organization to come out on top.

Describing these forms of advocacy in no way discounts their potential for good. We've probably all found ourselves in one or more of those forms at one time or another.  Sometimes things turn out much better than we planned for or expected. Imperfect people can be agents in accomplishing very good things in the world.

More often than not, however, our efforts do not yield what we had hoped, at least not in the short run. Far too often, well-intentioned and hardworking people do not see the results commensurate with their efforts.

The challenge for each of us is to allow advocacy to become a way of life and not a one-time experience that inoculates us against a lifetime of truly seeing the needs speaking faithfully for those who cannot speak for themselves.

Advocacy is tiring work. Results are not immediate. The work is never done. Even with occasional dramatic victories, changing the law is a long way from changing culture or changing hearts.

Sustained faithfulness in advocacy must be grounded in a larger life of discipline, humility, and hope if it is to endure for the long haul. We are sometimes called to invest our lives in causes that seem to go nowhere, because it is the right thing to do, because the tapestry of history is longer in the making than our lifetime.

The full article is available here

Everyday Life Has Been Financialized & It's Destructive - Costas Lapavitsas

Financialized capitalism is, thus, a deeply unequal system, prone to bubbles and crises — none greater than that of 2007-'09.

Evidence that financialization has come to dominate economies is offered by the global crisis of 2007-09. The crisis originated in the elephantine U.S. financial system, and was associated with speculation in housing.

For a brief period it led to serious questioning of mainstream economic theory and policy: how to confront the turmoil, and what to do about the diseased financial system; are new economic theories needed? However, after six years it is clear that very little has changed. Financialization is here to stay.

Consider, for instance, the policies to confront the crisis. First, public funds were injected into banks to boost capital. Second, public liquidity was made available to banks to sustain their operations. Third, public interest rates were driven to zero to enable banks to make secure profits by lending to their own customers at higher rates.

This extraordinary public largesse towards private banks was matched by austerity and wage reductions for workers and households. As for restructuring finance, nothing fundamental has taken place. The behemoths that continue to dominate the global financial system operate in the knowledge that they enjoy an unspoken public guarantee. The unpalatable reality is that financialization will persist, despite its costs for society.

The penetration of finance into the everyday life of households has not only created a range of dependencies on financial services, but also changed the outlook, mentality and even morality of daily life. Financial calculation evaluates everything in pennies and pounds, transforming the most basic goods — above all, housing — into "investments."

Financialized capitalism is, thus, a deeply unequal system, prone to bubbles and crises — none greater than that of 2007-'09. What can be done about it? The most important point in this respect is that financialization does not represent an advance for humanity, and very little of it ought to be preserved.

The full article is available here

P.U. litizer Prizes for 2013 - Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting

-The Sponsors Speak Award: PBS -- The January 23 episode of PBS series Nova was a mostly upbeat report on drones and surveillance. What viewers may not have known about "Rise of the Drones" was that it was funded in part by Lockheed Martin--the giant aerospace corporation that just happens to be a major drone manufacturer.

- Everyone (I Know) Is Rich: David Gregory -- During a discussion of the Affordable Care Act (aka "Obamacare"), NBC's Meet the Press host David Gregory (7/7/13) said that while he wasn't sure how the law would work out, he did know one thing: "Anybody who gets a paycheck in this country understands one thing, that there's a new line item. And it says Medicare surtax."

Actually, that additional Medicare tax doesn't apply to "anybody who gets a paycheck"—it applies to people making over $200,000, who are in the top 2 percent of household income.

- Deadly Website Award: Michael Shear -- The botched roll-out of the Healthcare.gov website was certainly widely covered, but it was New York Times reporter Michael Shear who thought it could be compared to a deadly hurricane that killed nearly 2,000 people (11/15/13).  Who exactly was raising this question? Shear attributes it to...a former adviser to George W. Bush. But the website = Katrina line was soon everywhere--which seemed absurd, until NBC's David Gregory explained that the more apt comparison would be the Iraq War

- Send a Union-Busting Message Award: Chris Matthews -- During a discussion about how the Obama administration should control the scandals swirling around the White House, MSNBC's Chris Matthews (Hardball, 5/14/13) brought up one president who did it right: Ronald Reagan, when he broke the PATCO air traffic controllers union in 1981.

The full article is available here

Thinking Like a Conservative: ‘Government Dependency’ - Rick Perlstein

Conservatives’ deepest convictions (however ill-founded and fundamentally flawed) determine their reaction in advance.

Never mind that the size of government is not “ever-increasing” (see here). Empirical debunking cannot reach the deepest fear of the reactionary mind, which is that the devouring leviathan, the state, will soon swallow up all traces of human volition and dignity. The conclusion is based on convictions that reason can’t shake.

"Relying on government is slavery ..."  This a consistent trope within modern conservatism.

Then there’s the old saw that the deal the Democrats supposedly offer African-Americans—you vote for us; we give you free stuff. 

And yet, despite rank anti-empirical irrationality that under-girds such convictions, conservatives believe they are immune to charges of “immorality” when it comes to denying citizens government services, because they believe “hooking” people on government services is profoundly immoral. 

Conservatives’ deepest convictions (however ill-founded and fundamentally flawed) determined their reaction in advance. Society using government to help people will be judged as an abomination.

But since genuine conservatives are in the American minority, as I wrote last month, isn’t it better to simply sin boldly, and let our conservatives devils have the hindmost? Use the state, use it well, to make people’s lives better. Do it without apology. That’s our moral imperative that should be beyond compromise.

The full article is available here

Elites Waging Brutal Class War in America - Noam Chomsky

The business classes are very class-conscious—they’re fighting a bitter class war to improve their power and diminish opposition.

The United States, to an unusual extent, is a business-run society, more so than others. The business classes are very class-conscious—they’re fighting a bitter class war to improve their power and diminish opposition.

That’s why we have a sequester over the deficit and not over jobs, which is what really matters to the population. But it doesn’t matter to the banks, so the heck with it. It also illustrates the consider- able shredding of the whole system of democracy.

If you care about other people, that’s now a very dangerous idea.  The mantra is that you should become rich, but you shouldn’t care whether other people’s kids can go to school, or can afford food to eat, or things like that. In the United States, that’s called “libertarian” for some wild reason. I mean, it’s actually highly authoritarian.

The bottom 70% or so are virtually disenfranchised; they have almost no influence on policy, and as you move up the scale you get more influence. At the very top, you basically run the show.  It’s not a big secret. Republicans try really hard to prevent people from voting, because the more people that vote, the more trouble they are in.

Private-sector unionization is very low, partly because, since Reagan, government has pretty much told employers, “You know you can violate the laws, and we’re not going to do anything about it.” Under Clinton, NAFTA offered a method for employers to illegally undermine labor organizing by threatening to move enterprises to Mexico.

When Obama declares a pay freeze for federal workers, that’s actually a tax on federal workers. It comes to the same thing, and, of course, this is right at the time we say that we can’t raise taxes on the very rich.

Take the last tax agreement where the Republicans claimed, “We already gave up tax increases.” Take a look at what happened. Raising the payroll tax, which is a tax on working people, is much more of a tax increase than raising taxes on the super-rich.

The full article is available here

Money, Needs and Resources - Miki Kashtan

Privilege works in part by masking the needs of others and habituating some segment of the population to having some of their needs met at the expense of others without even knowing this is so.

Every form of social organization includes in it implicit (or explicit) decisions about whose needs are prioritized, which needs are recognized and valued, and how resources are allocated towards meeting such needs.

Western economic theories resolve the question by not addressing it, or by assuming, implicitly, that the function of the system is to use the mechanisms of the market to meet pre-existing needs. We regularly reduce the question of whether or not human needs can be met to an empirical matter of market supply and demand.

Allocating resources on the basis of output equity is the method least tied to empathy. It’s a way of obscuring from view the fact that having fewer resources means we are less likely to be able to contribute, which means we receive less and continue to have our needs unmet. We have created a cycle which reinforces patterns of economic inequality while making them appear to be based on a just distribution. One result of such a system is insensitivity to others’ needs, and an overall decrease in empathy.

Privilege works in part by masking the needs of others and habituating some segment of the population to having some of their needs met at the expense of others without even knowing this is so. In particular, many people with privilege protect themselves from recognizing the effects of their privilege on others by attributing others’ suffering to their own actions. Thus the often-repeated talking point that people are poor because of not working hard enough.

Indeed, research indicates that people with lower income score better on measures of empathy than people of higher means. It is one thing to cultivate an abstract recognition that others have needs. It is a whole other matter for all of us who have access to privilege to give attention and consideration to how we might change our daily actions in order to be more responsive to others’ needs.

The full article is available here

ACA Hysteria: Don't Believe Canceled Insurance Hype - Michael Hiltzijk

It's time to tamp down the breathless indignation about these health plan cancellations.

Affordable Care Act critics (as well as governmentphobic corporate propagandists) are crying wolf, using the cancellation letters millions of Americans are receiving from their health insurers, informing them that their health plans won't conform to the new federal standards for health coverage as of Jan. 1.

Back in March, Consumer Reports published a study of many of these plans and placed them in a special category: "junk health insurance." Some plans, the magazine declared, may be worse than none at all.

It's time to tamp down the breathless indignation about these health plan cancellations. Many of the departing plans are being outlawed for good reason, and many of the customers losing them have no idea how much financial exposure they were saddled with in the old days. That's the real scandal in American health insurance, and the Affordable Care Act is designed, rightly, to fix it.

The full article is available here

Why Right Wing U.S. Evangelicals Salivate For "End Times" - Amanda Marcotte

While most of us would be alarmed if we thought we were facing down the apocalypse and a worldwide war that will kill millions, they can't wait.

There is a unique, strange tendency of American right wing, fundamentalist Christians to cast around looking for evidence that they will be witness to the apocalypse. The popular hymn may state that “they will know we are Christians by our love,” but when it comes to right-wing fundamentalists, a better bet to know them is by their apocalyptic revenge fantasies.

While most of us would be alarmed if we thought we were facing down the apocalypse and a worldwide war that will kill millions, people like Michelle Bachmann can't wait: “Rather than seeing this as a negative, we need to rejoice, Maranatha Come Lord Jesus, His day is at hand.”

3 out of 4 evangelicals believe Christ will return soon. This is, of course, mostly wishful thinking—they believe they’re seeing the end of the world because they want to see the end of the world. Why would anyone want that, when the Bible they believe in predicts it will be mass murder, hellfire, and every grotesque thing imaginable?

(The fact that none of these beliefs are based on an accurate interpretation of the Bible they so readily thump seems to escape them).

1.They don’t think they’ll be around for the worst of it. Modern American fundamentalist Christians believe in something that has never before been part of Christian tradition: the Rapture. The idea is that the true believers will be whisked away into heaven before the ugly parts of the end times begin.  The idea was invented in the 19th century but has caught like wildfire in 20th Century fundamentalism and amped up in the 21st Century through fantasy films like Left Behind.

2.The end of the world would mean they get to have the last word. History will tell us that end time predictions increase when people are being persecuted or feel persecuted. While conservative Christians are most definitely not being persecuted, watching their privileged position in society justifiably decline as the equality and liberty promised in the Constitution is more fully enfranchised often makes them feel persecuted (and they whine about it to no end).

3.It provides a distraction from and an excuse to avoid the real problems in the world. The appeal of apocalypse fantasies as a genre is mainly that they help believers avoid the fear of death.  However, belief that the end times are near is used by conservatives all the time to direct their followers politically.  The prediction that the apocalypse is near has been used to defend all manner of terrible policies; everything from indifference to environmental concerns to opposition to health insurance to preferred right-wing policies in the Middle East.

4.They want to see the non-believers punished and themselves instated as the rightful rulers of all mankind. The real message for those they regard as unsaved is to thumb their nose and do a little victory dance. That’s why, after any great tragedy, there is a rush of eager-beaver charlatans willing to say this is what people have coming for being sinners (as though we all aren't sinners?!?!?)

The full article is available here

The Psychodynamics of Tea Party Success - Rabbi Michael Lerner

Here’s what I learned about why right-wing extremists are on the ascendency.

After many years as a psychotherapist studying the psycho-dynamics leading Americans to move to the Right, (before I became a rabbi and editor of Tikkun), I began to understand why a fringe and extremist group could be so successful in gathering support that would eventually lead to its ability to shut down the functioning of the government.

Here’s what I learned about why right-wing extremists are on the ascendency:

1. The Right has a coherent worldview, deeply mistaken, but nevertheless held firmly and taught widely through the media it controls and the many institutions it funds. They know what they want—the elimination of government except for its policing, fire-fighting, immigrant fighting, and military services.

2. The Democrats are perceived as wimps, because they don’t fight for what they say they believe in.  So even though temporarily they are slightly winning the battle about who is to blame for the government shut down, they keep missing opportunities to challenge the Tea Party and their supporters.

3. With the decline of American political power and economic power globally, coupled with the intense assault by the 1% on the incomes and economic security of the rest of the population and growing awareness and despair about the way climate change might be real and might lead to environmental disaster, and you get a huge amount of insecurity about the future, and a willingness to grab on to a variety of pseudo-solutions.

4. The takeover of the culture by the ethos of materialism and selfishness (which go hand-in-hand with the Social Darwinism that is Libertarianism). Rarely in history have we seen such a huge buy-in to that ideology and to the common-sense notion that people are basically ego-driven and selfish and that “what they really want is more and more things,” as we see in the media-driven culture of the 21st century.

The full article is available here

Tea Party Created Existential Threat to US, Not Affordable Care Act - Republican Justin Holbrook

Common-sense Republicans like myself understand that the Affordable Care Act is not an existential threat and doesn't deserves an existential response.

By pretending that the Affordable Care Act poses such an existential risk to the republic that it merits dragging our national character through the mud of a government shutdown, tea party Republicans are belittling the very real crises America faces.

Common-sense Republicans like myself understand that it’s not an existential threat and doesn't deserves an existential response.  Freedom of religion, speech, the press; if these freedoms are taken away – not simply re-scoped or modified by representatives who, by the way, are popularly elected – we would have an existential crisis.

We live in a democratic republic. The people elect legislators who pass legislation and a president who signs it into law. By its very nature, there are winners and losers.

Sometimes one party wins and gets the legislation it wants. Sometimes not. But most of the time we compromise. We get a little here and give a little there. We work together.  Unfortunately, it’s a lesson that tea party Republicans – caught in the fog of war and self-appointed last stands – seem to have forgotten.

The existential crisis is the one that tea party Republicans are creating. This crisis is abusing the give-and-take of the political process to such a degree that both our national pride and credit are at risk in the world. It is creating a rift in the Republican Party.

If tea party Republicans want to avoid an existential threat to the republic, they should remember that their first loyalty is not to defeating the Affordable Care Act or winning the next election. Their first loyalty is to the republic.

The full article is available here