The Thom Hartmann Program - Aug 30th 2018
By louisehartmann
It seems it's all racism, all the time w/the GOP...Neo-Nazi robocall hits Iowa on Molly Tibbett’s murder: “KILL THEM ALL. ” Richard Wolff drops by about the National Debt. Is it a disaster or an OK thing? Also - Trump & The National Enquirer - Is the Economy Here To Serve Us Or Are We Here to Serve the economy? Has America Become a "Grifter" Country? Check out our short podcast today https://www.thomhartmann.com/hartmann-report-podcast
Thom
Comments
#2
"Trickle Down Racism: The Not So New Platform of The Republican Party"
-- by Thom Hartmann
#3
#4
Published on Monday, October 22, 2018 by Common Dreams.
Stop GOP Voter Suppression—Or Else!
Most American voters generally don’t like billionaires and corporations running politics, so the GOP is simply not letting them vote.
by Thom Hartmann:
The Republican Party is currently hoping to win nationwide using two simple elements: explicit and overt racism, and voter suppression.
No “ideas”; no pitch for tax cuts; no discussion of their “replacement” for the Affordable Care Act; no push for better schools, hospitals, airports, roads or bridges; no promise for more and better jobs—none of these staples of the 2016 presidential campaign can be found in pretty much any Republican advertising today.
Instead, the public Republican message is all about race or the subset of race, religion (“Muslim” stands in for “brown Arab” in GOP-speak) and “immigration” (aka brown people from south of our border). Republicans across the country are even recruiting white supremacist and neo-Nazi gangs to threaten or assault Democrats and their supporters, while Trump praises the criminal assault of reporters in the wake of Khashoggi’s murder.
Meanwhile, Republican secretaries of state across the nation are vigorously purging voters from the rolls (over 14 million, more than 10 percent of America’s active voters, in the past two years, according to investigative reporter Greg Palast).
Immediately after the five Republican appointees on the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, 14 GOP-controlled states moved, within a year (some within days), to restrict access to the vote, particularly for communities of color, students, and retired people.
In North Carolina, for example, 158 polling places were permanently closed in the 40 counties with the most African American voters just before the 2016 election, leading to a 16 percent decline in African American early voting in that state. An MIT study found that, nationwide, Hispanic voters wait 150 percent longer in line than white voters, and Black voters can expect to wait 200 percent longer in line to vote.
In Indiana, then-Governor Pence’s new rigorous voter ID law caused an 11.5 percent drop in African American voting. Students are suing for their right to vote, and retired people who no longer drive but care passionately about their Social Security and Medicare are being turned away at the polls by the tens of thousands.
How did it come to this?
The problem for the GOP has deep roots. In the 1870s, when the Party abandoned its Lincolnesque position in favor of granting full citizenship rights to freed slaves, it rapidly slid into the role of being the party of the barons of rail, oil, coal, steel, and construction.
The Democratic Party, meanwhile, largely threw its efforts—culminating in the New Deal in 1933 and the Great Society in 1967—in with working people, legislatively protecting unionization efforts, passing Social Security and Medicare, putting the minimum wage and unemployment insurance into law, and creating federal and state agencies to protect workers’ safety, children, and the environment.
This has led to a major problem for the GOP, since the very wealthy and CEOs only constitute a small part of the American voting public. In order to pass tax cuts and cut protective regulations for their rich owners, they needed political power, and—particularly since the disastrous “roaring 20s” leading straight to the Republican Great Depression (yes, they called it that until after WWII)—Republicans needed voters to put them into office.
And this was generally pretty tough for the GOP. In 1974, for example, the GOP only had outright control of seven states. The message of, “elect us and we’ll help the rich people out” just didn't generally resonate with American voters. It’s the reason why, outside of the fluke elections of 1946 and 1952, Democrats outright controlled the House of Representatives for three generations, from 1933 to 1996, and controlled the Senate for most of that time.
Desperate to win the presidency in 1968, Richard Nixon even went so far as to commit treason by torpedoing a peace deal that LBJ had worked out with the Vietnamese. According to the then-president of Iran, Reagan did the same thing by cutting a deal with Iran to hold the U.S. embassy hostages until after the election, destroying Jimmy Carter’s chances of re-election.
In 2000, though, the GOP changed tactics. After Reagan almost got busted for Iran/Contra (he testified that he “forgot” about details of the program over 80 times; he was saved by his growing Alzheimer’s from an indictment), they realized that getting busted for treason wasn't worth the risk. They needed a “Plan B.”
And it was deliciously simple. If the majority of voters don’t like what you’re selling, then just don’t let them vote.
Paul Weyrich had promoted this idea back in 1980 when he was campaigning for Reagan (after co-founding the Heritage Foundation), and, indeed, many Republican luminaries (like William Rehnquist, who went from poll-intimidator in the 1960s to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) rose up through the ranks by participating in Republican-run voter intimidation schemes.
But it became the foundational go-to tactic for the GOP in 2000.
While they used smear and innuendo to attack Al Gore (ridiculing him for helping write the legislation that created the modern internet, for example), the main thing that got George W. Bush into the White House was voter suppression crimes committed by his brother, then-Florida Governor Jeb Bush, and Bush’s Secretary of State, Katherine Harris. Throwing somewhere between 50,000 and 90,000 African American voters off the rolls, they were able to get the vote close enough that five Republican appointees to the Supreme Court functionally awarded Bush the presidency. (The BBC covered this in 2001 in two major investigative reports here and here that were literally seen all over the world except on any American media.)
By 2016, the Republican Party had fine-tuned their voter suppression and intimidation systems to the point that they ran in nearly 30 states like well-oiled machines. Between the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections, for example, Ohio had purged more than 2 million voters from its rolls, the vast majority (more than 2:1) in heavily African American and Hispanic counties. (And the Supreme Court ruled last year that they can keep it up; other states have since adopted their new tactic of caging voters.)
The New York Times noted that in Wisconsin, around 300,000 registered voters were turned away at the polls because they didn't have the particular types of ID necessitated by Scott Walker’s ALEC-recommended new voter ID law (in Texas, the Times reported, the number was 900,000).
It’s symbiotic: billionaires and corporations spend hundreds of millions to fund Republicans, who pass laws and tax breaks that give billions to the corporations and billionaires, who then recycle a fraction of that, mere millions, back to the legislators they own. To keep the cycle going, both must prevent people who object to this system from voting.
ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), funded by the Koch network and other billionaires and big corporations, has been at the forefront of these efforts, with the majority of voter suppressive state laws passed having been introduced by ALEC-affiliated Republican legislators. ALEC itself facilitated the production of voter suppressive “model legislation.”
Average American voters generally don’t like billionaires and corporations running politics, so the billionaires and their corporations have organized major efforts to keep those people from voting. Numbers are sketchy, because Republican Secretaries of State are unwilling to release purge numbers and details without being sued to do so.
Fortunately for America, investigative reporter Greg Palast is executing such lawsuits right now, and the purge lists he’s acquired in the past two weeks include over 90,000 people in largely Democratic parts of Nevada, 769,436 voters purged in Colorado, 340,134 in Georgia, 550,000 in Illinois, a large but as-yet-uncounted list from Nebraska, and 469,000 just purged in Indiana. More are coming in virtually daily, as Palast continues his lawsuits, along with the NAACP and Rainbow Push.
True the Vote, the latest Astroturf group pushing for voter purges, is partly fundedby the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), the group that spent millions to run nationwide TV ads for Judge Brett Kavanaugh disparaging Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony as a “sham.”
JCN, in turn, is funded by the Wellspring Committee that, according to investigative reporter Ken Vogel, was started by billionaires Charles and David Koch. (Their father, Fred Koch, was a founder and major funder of the John Birch Society, which ran “Impeach [Supreme Court Chief Justice] Earl Warren” billboards and ads across America in the 1950s and 1960s decrying the Supreme Court’s 1954 desegregation order in Brown v. Board, and funded publications and efforts characterizing the voter drives of Martin Luther King Jr. as a communist plot.)
Without these major voter purges, and without the disenfranchisement of young people, old people, and poor people by voter ID laws, it’s a virtual certainty that America would have had President Al Gore and President Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic Party would have a 7-3 or larger Democratic majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Republicans, instead of helping working people, love to lecture Americans that only their elected officials and Federal and Supreme Court justices are actually channeling the “original intent” of the founders and framers of the Constitution. (“Originalism” is a scam run uniquely by Republican justices, for example.)
Like their rigged elections and their ads saying that they want to defend Social Security and protect us against insurance companies viz preexisting conditions, it’s a lie.
Although about half of the founders were slaveholders, practicing their own form of voter suppression, they nonetheless held egalitarian values for the future of this country and worried obsessively about a takeover by the very rich. It’s hard to imagine that they’d ever sanction interpreting the First Amendment as a license for billionaires and corporations to buy our political system (as the Supreme Court first did in 1976 in the Buckley case, and then supercharged in 2010 with Citizens United).
In the summer of 1785, James Madison was essentially running the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and he gave a speech (you can read in his Notes on the Convention) about the importance of not allowing the new country they were forming to become an oligarchy, run of, by, and for the rich. He noted that there are “two cardinal objects of government, the rights of persons and the rights of property.”
He added that if only the rights of property were written into the Constitution, the rich would ravage the few assets of the poor. “Give all power to property,” he said, “and the indigent will be oppressed.”
In fact, Madison noted, all the former republics that they had studied in his five years of preparation for writing our Constitution had ended up corrupted by exactly that: the political power of concentrated money.
“In all the governments which were considered as beacons to republican patriots and lawgivers,” he said, “the rights of persons were subjected to those of property. The poor were sacrificed to the rich.”
Thus, wanting to establish a country where the rich didn't end up running it as their own private kingdom or oligarchy, he proposed that only the House of Representatives—the only branch elected directly by the people, and every two years at that—should have the power to raise taxes or spend federal funds.
“The time to guard against this danger is at the first forming of the Constitution,” he said in his speech. “Liberty, not less than justice, pleads for the policy here recommended.
“If all power be suffered to slide into hands [of the rich]” he warned, the American citizenry will “become the dupes and instruments of ambition, or their poverty and dependence will render them the mercenary instruments of wealth. In either case liberty will be subverted: in the first, by a despotism growing out of anarchy; in the second, by an oligarchy founded on corruption.”
And, indeed, the delegates assembled agreed. Only the House of Representatives, to this day, can raise taxes or spend money.
In a 1787 letter to Edward Carrington, Jefferson noted, “It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.”
Fighting those instincts of human nature, he argued, was at the core of the American experiment. (Like George Washington and many of his peers, Jefferson died broke. America’s first millionaire came along in 1791—a shipping magnate—and none of the founders or framers were wealthy enough to leave an estate that lasted even to a second generation.)
In an 1816 letter to Samuel Kercheval, Jefferson explained, “I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependance (sic) for continued freedom.”
He added that if we ended up with an oligarchic government that is run, directly or indirectly, by the rich, America’s working people “must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four;… and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they [poor Europeans] now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers.”
One wonders how the employees of the giant corporations that throw so much money at the Republican Party would compare that metaphor with their own current existence, since the GOP has successfully fought any meaningful reform of union rights, universal health care, or the minimum wage since Reagan.
And they’re using voting suppression to maintain a situation that’s so hostile to workers that wages have actually fallen for the bottom half of American workers in the 38 years since Reagan’s election in 1980.
Thomas Paine, in his 1795 Dissertation on First Principles of Government, noted that, “The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case.”
If we fail to do something large, substantial and dramatic about the scourge of voter suppression, we must all begin learning how to rivet chains.
Those are our options.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/10/22/stop-gop-voter-suppression-or-else
#5
HotCoffee,
Great morning. Fire resistant homes. Sounds like a great product. You should find an insurance company to invest with you. On a side note, my son and a group of his friends just heavily invested in a fire retardant company (which will remain nameless at this point) so I keep an eye on this market segment.
You were celebrating a big win last night and President Trump was being interviewed (soft ball questions) by Laura Ingraham on Thom's favorite news outlet, FOX News. Wait until they hear about his attempt to end the anchor baby tourism program. More exploding heads on the left. I am sure they will screech "future voter suppression".
See ya.
#6
G'morning DianeR,
I didn't watch Laura's program last night but I did tape it to watch today.
That 1 home left on mexico beach after the last hurricane is similar to what we are doing.
---------
The ghoul is still around!
https://www.libertynation.com/hillary-the-thing-that-wouldnt-leave/
more on immigration.... https://youtu.be/H0d21nQBY8o
Be back later.....enjoy!
PS
I just got Thom's special e mail about his new book cover...I wonder if he wants to take away his brothers gun?
And
Special Counsel and Former FBI Director Robert Mueller Accused of Rape By ‘Very Credible Witness ‘ https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/10/breaking-report-exclusive-documents-special-counsel-and-former-fbi-director-robert-mueller-accused-of-rape-by-very-credible-witness/
She MUST be believed!
#7
So Soon They Forget.....On The Illegals...A Terse Collection Of Dem Quotes
Fox News - President Trump used his predecessor's own words against him when he quoted President Obama's forceful 2005 opposition to illegal immigration, but he could have cherry-picked an old quote from any number of top Democrats on the controversial subject. Excerpts:
Barack Obama, 2005
“We are a generous and welcoming people here in the United States. But those who enter the country illegally and those who employ them disrespect the rule of law and they are showing disregard for those who are following the law.”
“We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently and lawfully to become immigrants into this country.”
Charles Schumer, 2009
“The American people are fundamentally pro-legal immigration and anti-illegal immigration. We will only pass comprehensive reform when we recognize this fundamental concept.”
“First, illegal immigration is wrong, and a primary goal of comprehensive immigration reform must be to dramatically curtail future illegal immigration.”
Nancy Pelosi, 2008
“Do we have a commitment to secure the border? Yes. What are the options that we have available to us, let's make sure they work. Because we do need to address the issue of immigration and the challenge we have of undocumented people in our country. We certainly do not want any more coming in.”
Dianne Feinstein, 1993
“It's a competition for space. Whether the space is a job, the space is a home, a place in a classroom, it becomes a competition for space. This is a country that's based on immigration. And we all know that.”
“And yet, at times you become so overtaxed you have to concentrate on saying, 'The people who should be here are those who come legally at this time.’ And we've got to, for the time being, enforce our borders.”
Bill Clinton, 1995
“All Americans, not only in the States most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country.”
“The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers.”
#9
...and hotter.
#10
Opening Statement by Hoesung Lee, Chair of the IPCC
48th Session of the IPCC, Incheon, Korea, 1 October 2018
"It’s a great honour to welcome you to my home country, Korea, and I am very grateful to the government of the Republic of Korea and the authorities of the City of Incheon for hosting us here in this beautiful conference centre.
I am particularly honoured, because this will be one of the most important meetings in the IPCC’s history. We will consider the Summary for Policymakers of the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 ºC. That is our main business here this week and I will concentrate on the 1.5 ºC report in these remarks.
Why is this report so keenly awaited?
Scientists have been warning us for years that we can expect to see more extreme weather with climate change. The heat waves, wildfires, and heavy rainfall events of recent months all over the world underscore these warnings.
Three weeks ago in New York, the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres described climate change as the great challenge of our time. But, he also noted that, thanks to science, we know its size and nature. Science alerts us to the gravity of the situation, but science also, and this special report in particular, helps us understand the solutions available to us.
Distinguished delegates, nearly three years ago your governments adopted the Paris Agreement. It sets a target of holding the rise in global mean temperatures to well below 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, while pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5 ºC.
At that time, relatively little was known about the risks avoided in a 1.5 ºC world compared with a 2 ºC warmer world, or about the pathway of greenhouse gas emissions compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5 ºC. So, as part of the decision adopting the Paris Agreement, governments invited the IPCC to prepare a report assessing the impacts of warming of 1.5 ºC and related emissions pathways.
Governments asked the IPCC to deliver this report in 2018, in time for what has become the Talanoa Dialogue at this year’s Climate Conference, COP24.
To prepare a report on 1.5 ºC to this timeline was extremely ambitious. The IPCC, and through it the scientific community, responded positively and with sincere enthusiasm.
In April 2016, at our 43rd Session, the IPCC decided to prepare the report as part of the work programme for the Sixth Assessment Cycle. The Panel decided to prepare this report in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty, thus placing the report firmly among the tools to be used to achieve the sustainable development goals.
We held the scoping meeting in August of that year, and the Panel approved the outline at the 44th Session in October.
In February 2017 the Panel was able to announce the author team of the report – 91 authors and review editors were selected from 40 countries. And less than 20 months later, you have the report for your consideration.
Let me give you some statistics to illustrate the scale of work that has been achieved in this time. The final draft of the report contains over 6,000 cited references. The expert review of the First Order Draft, from July to September 2017, attracted almost 13,000 comments from some 500 experts in 61 countries. The government and expert review of the Second Order Draft, from January to February this year, attracted over 25,000 comments from 570 experts and officials in 71 countries.
Governments provided close to 4,000 comments on the Final Government Draft. So in all we have received 42,000 comments on the drafts of this report. Allow me to remind you that under the IPCC procedures, the authors must address each comment received in the review process.
Review is an essential part of the IPCC process, and we are grateful to the hundreds of experts who have contributed to our work in this way. We thank the 133 Contributing Authors who have added their expertise.
And special thanks to our National Focal Points who played a key role in the nomination of authors and the review process. I would also like to express my profound respect and gratitude to the co-chairs, authors and review editors, and the technical support units, for accomplishing this Herculean task.
This achievement goes beyond numbers.
This Special Report is unique in IPCC history as it has been prepared under the joint scientific leadership of all three IPCC Working Groups. Each chapter is a genuine piece of cross-disciplinary work, bringing together all the scientific expertise of the IPCC. That is why the line-by-line consideration of the Summary for Policymakers will be conducted by the First Joint Session of Working Groups I, II and III. In the same way, the Summary for Policymakers that will be considered in detail this week integrates the most important findings of the chapters in each section.
Distinguished delegates, the scientific community has responded to the invitation of policymakers and presented you with a robust and timely report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 ºC and related greenhouse gas emission pathways.
The task is now yours.
You will consider the draft Summary for Policymakers line by line to ensure that it is consistent with the detailed assessment of scientific, technical and socio-economic information provided by the underlying detailed chapters.
Governments have asked the IPCC for an assessment of warming of 1.5 degrees, its impacts and related emissions pathways, to help them address climate change. We will work together in a constructive and collaborative spirit to produce a strong, robust and clear Summary for Policymakers that responds to the invitation of governments three years ago while upholding the scientific integrity of the IPCC.
Lastly I would like to share the important news with you that these sessions will be climate-neutral. We have taken measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions where possible and we will be estimating and compensating the remaining ones.
I am also pleased to inform you that the financial position of the IPCC continues to improve. I would like to thank the many governments who have contributed in recent months for their generous and continuing support, and urge all of you to provide us with the means to carry out the tasks you have given us. In this regard I would like to thank the Panel for your financial support for this report – 1.2 million Swiss francs for the various meetings required to prepare and approve it – and for endorsing the outline of the report and the author team.
I would also like to express my gratitude for the in-kind contributions of the countries that hosted the scoping meetings for this report and the four lead author meetings – Switzerland, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Sweden and Botswana.
Thank you for your trust in the IPCC.
I am pleased to note that we have posted on the PaperSmart system the Code of Conduct for IPCC meetings that was introduced at the first Lead Author Meeting of Working Group I a couple of months ago. I hope we will have an opportunity to discuss this in the Panel soon; it provides a valuable framework to ensure that all of us here have a respectful working environment.
Let me finish by thanking the Government of Korea for its generous support for this meeting. I would also like to take the opportunity to thank our partners for their continued unwavering support – our parent organizations WMO and UN Environment, and the UNFCCC.
With these words I would like to wish you a successful and collegial meeting. Thank you for your attention."
#11
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/
IPCC PRESS RELEASE
8 October 2018
Summary for Policymakers of IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of .5ºC approved by governments
INCHEON, Republic of Korea, 8 Oct - Limiting global warming to 1.5ºC would require rapid, farreaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society, the IPCC said in a new assessment. With clear benefits to people and natural ecosystems, limiting global warming to 1.5ºC compared to 2ºC could go hand in hand with ensuring a more sustainable and equitable society, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said on Monday.
The Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC was approved by the IPCC on Saturday in Incheon, Republic of Korea. It will be a key scientific input into the Katowice Climate Change Conference in Poland in December, when governments review the Paris Agreement to tackle climate change.
“With more than 6,000 scientific references cited and the dedicated contribution of thousands of expert and government reviewers worldwide, this important report testifies to the breadth and policy relevance of the IPCC,” said Hoesung Lee, Chair of the IPCC.
Ninety-one authors and review editors from 40 countries prepared the IPCC report in response to an invitation from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) when it adopted the Paris Agreement in 2015.
The report’s full name is Global Warming of 1.5°C, an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty.
“One of the key messages that comes out very strongly from this report is that we are already seeing the consequences of 1°C of global warming through more extreme weather, rising sea levels and diminishing Arctic sea ice, among other changes,” said Panmao Zhai, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group I.
The report highlights a number of climate change impacts that could be avoided by limiting global warming to 1.5ºC compared to 2ºC, or more. For instance, by 2100, global sea level rise would be 10 cm lower with global warming of 1.5°C compared with 2°C. The likelihood of an Arctic Ocean free of sea ice in summer would be once per century with global warming of 1.5°C, compared with at least once per decade with 2°C. Coral reefs would decline by 70-90 percent with global warming of 1.5°C, whereas virtually all (> 99 percent) would be lost with 2ºC.
“Every extra bit of warming matters, especially since warming of 1.5ºC or higher increases the risk associated with long-lasting or irreversible changes, such as the loss of some ecosystems,” saidHans-Otto Pörtner, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group II.
Limiting global warming would also give people and ecosystems more room to adapt and remain below relevant risk thresholds, added Pörtner. The report also examines pathways available to limit warming to 1.5ºC, what it would take to achieve them and what the consequences could be.
“The good news is that some of the kinds of actions that would be needed to limit global warming to 1.5ºC are already underway around the world, but they would need to accelerate,” said Valerie Masson-Delmotte, Co-Chair of Working Group I.
The report finds that limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require “rapid and far-reaching” transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport, and cities. Global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching ‘net zero’ around 2050. This means that any remaining emissions would need to be balanced by removing CO2 from the air.
“Limiting warming to 1.5ºC is possible within the laws of chemistry and physics but doing so would require unprecedented changes,” said Jim Skea, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group III.
Allowing the global temperature to temporarily exceed or ‘overshoot’ 1.5ºC would mean a greater reliance on techniques that remove CO2 from the air to return global temperature to below 1.5ºC by 2100. The effectiveness of such techniques are unproven at large scale and some may carry significant risks for sustainable development, the report notes.
“Limiting global warming to 1.5°C compared with 2°C would reduce challenging impacts on ecosystems, human health and well-being, making it easier to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals,” said Priyardarshi Shukla, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group III.
The decisions we make today are critical in ensuring a safe and sustainable world for everyone, both now and in the future, said Debra Roberts, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group II.
“This report gives policymakers and practitioners the information they need to make decisions that tackle climate change while considering local context and people’s needs. The next few years are probably the most important in our history,” she said.
The IPCC is the leading world body for assessing the science related to climate change, its impacts and potential future risks, and possible response options.
The report was prepared under the scientific leadership of all three IPCC working groups. Working Group I assesses the physical science basis of climate change; Working Group II addresses impacts, adaptation and vulnerability; and Working Group III deals with the mitigation of climate change.
The Paris Agreement adopted by 195 nations at the 21st Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC in December 2015 included the aim of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change by “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above preindustrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”
As part of the decision to adopt the Paris Agreement, the IPCC was invited to produce, in 2018, a Special Report on global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways. The IPCC accepted the invitation, adding that the Special Report would look at these issues in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty.
Global Warming of 1.5ºC is the first in a series of Special Reports to be produced in the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Cycle. Next year the IPCC will release the Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, and Climate Change and Land, which looks at how climate change affects land use.
The Summary for Policymakers (SPM) presents the key findings of the Special Report, based on the assessment of the available scientific, technical and socio-economic literature relevant to global warming of 1.5°C.
The Summary for Policymakers of the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC (SR15) is available at http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/ or www.ipcc.ch.
Key statistics of the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC
91 authors from 44 citizenships and 40 countries of residence
- 14 Coordinating Lead Authors (CLAs)
- 60 Lead authors (LAs)
- 17 Review Editors (REs)
133 Contributing authors (CAs)
Over 6,000 cited references
A total of 42,001 expert and government review comments
(First Order Draft 12,895; Second Order Draft 25,476; Final Government Draft: 3,630)
For more information, contact:
IPCC Press Office, Email: ipcc-media@wmo.int
Werani Zabula +41 79 108 3157 or Nina Peeva +41 79 516 7068
(Follow IPCC on Facebook, Twitter , LinkedIn and Instagram)
Notes for editors
The Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 ºC , known as SR15, is being prepared in response to an invitation from the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in December 2015, when they reached the Paris Agreement, and will inform the Talanoa Dialogue at the 24th Conference of the Parties (COP24). The Talanoa Dialogue will take stock of the collective efforts of Parties in relation to progress towards the longterm goal of the Paris Agreement, and to inform the preparation of nationally determined contributions. Details of the report, including the approved outline, can be found on the report page. The report was prepared under the joint scientific leadership of all three IPCC Working Groups, with support from the Working Group I Technical Support Unit.
What is the IPCC?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the UN body for assessing the science related to climate change. It was established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UN Environment) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988 to provide policymakers with regular scientific assessments concerning climate change, its implications and potential future risks, as well as to put forward adaptation and mitigation strategies. It has 195 member states.
IPCC assessments provide governments, at all levels, with scientific information that they can use to develop climate policies. IPCC assessments are a key input into the international negotiations to tackle climate change. IPCC reports are drafted and reviewed in several stages, thus guaranteeing objectivity and transparency.
The IPCC assesses the thousands of scientific papers published each year to tell policymakers what we know and don't know about the risks related to climate change. The IPCC identifies where there is agreement in the scientific community, where there are differences of opinion, and where further research is needed. It does not conduct its own research.
To produce its reports, the IPCC mobilizes hundreds of scientists. These scientists and officials are drawn from diverse backgrounds. Only a dozen permanent staff work in the IPCC's Secretariat.
The IPCC has three working groups: Working Group I, dealing with the physical science basis of climate change; Working Group II, dealing with impacts, adaptation and vulnerability; and Working Group III, dealing with the mitigation of climate change. It also has a Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories that develops methodologies for measuring emissions and removals.
IPCC Assessment Reports consist of contributions from each of the three working groups and a Synthesis Report. Special Reports undertake an assessment of cross-disciplinary issues that span more than one working group and are shorter and more focused than the main assessments.
Sixth Assessment Cycle
At its 41st Session in February 2015, the IPCC decided to produce a Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). At its 42nd Session in October 2015, it elected a new Bureau that would oversee the work on this report and Special Reports to be produced in the assessment cycle. At its 43rd Session in April 2016, it decided to produce three Special Reports, a Methodology Report and AR6.
The Methodology Report to refine the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories will be delivered in 2019. Besides Global Warming of 1.5ºC, the IPCC will finalize two further special reports in 2019: the Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate and Climate Change and Land: an IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems. The AR6 Synthesis Report will be finalized in the first half of 2022, following the three working group contributions to AR6 in 2021.
For more information, including links to the IPCC reports, go to: www.ipcc.ch
#12
HotCoffee, I saw the picture of the house. on Mexico Beach. How cool are you doing something like that? I still say you should explore mortgage and insurance companies just in case they will offer discounts to buyers of your products and somehow you can use that in your marketing. Capitalism at its finest. It could be worse. Bernie "freeshit" Sanders could have been president and you would have to turn your ideas over to big brother so people in black pajamas could go marching off to the factory every day and you get nothing.
Hillary Clinton is the gift that keeps on giving. I call her the bunion, always there, can be very painful, and the surgery may be worse than just learning to live with it.
Other than Thom's book the crash of 2016 which he started hyping in late 2014 and early 2015, made me a lot of money as I did the exact opposite of his advice.
Thom is a smart guy but there are at least two topics that he knows absolutely nothing about, Finance and Firearms. He will do mountains of research, twist it the way he sees fit, repeat it for months or years, and pump it out as fact. I have been involved in the firearms industry for years from the competitive, retail, and political side. Regardless of Thoms "research" I could refute literally 90% of his views with facts published by the FBI, ATF, and CDC. Nothing fancy, just real hard data. Back in the day, on multiple occasions I offered to get in touch with, and bring in to the studio (which was televised on RT at the time) and have real firearm knowledgeable people come on his show with the caveat he discuss, not talk over, the guest. He ran from that idea as fast as he could. Thom does not like to lose what he calls debates, I call one sided lectures thanks to his ability to pot down the guest..
On the founding fathers second amendment side, there are pages of quotes from the major patriots of the day supporting every citizens right to own arms. I have them but to avoid duplicating another groupie here with loooong posts, I will hold off until needed.
Perhaps, if Thoms new book is gun oriented, it will be fun to poke holes in it on a daily basis with one quote per day. I can easily go a couple of months before we get into actual real facts and numbers, then it gets heavy.
You may like this. This past summer I made it a point to get both local senators out to the gun range and taught them to shoot for their very first time. The best was a democrat who would not leave the range until I had taken multiple pictures of her holding my handgun and her excellent target. I do not know if I changed her, but she darn near fell over when I gave her a $100 check for her upcoming election telling her I respected her for her commitment to show up and shoot before she voted on the topic. Had the check been for less I think she would have framed it and hung it on her office wall. Gun people are not supposed to like democrat anti-gunners.
Sorry for the long post.
Good day to you.
#13
DianeR,
We are considering the insurance & mortgage companies, but we want to go public with stock first....still a few months down the road. I would share our web site with you if I could without prying eyes! At this point it looks like we have a very strong investor and a couple of RE Agents that want in. Also have a couple of patents pending to improve existing ideas. Plus we have strong relationships in alt energy developments.
I worked on a catering truck at a rifle range for a neighbor when I was 12, that was the first time I shot a rifle. That was a great Idea you had.
For your amusment.......
http://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2018/10/when-you-know-you-knocked-on-wrong-door.html
#14
HotCoffee, My son has taken three companies public. Timing is everything. Walk slowly down that path knowing if you have a really great product or service, someone will want to buy you out which takes away a lot of risk on your part.
I will look for you on Shark Tank.
#15
Thats been true in energy also...remember who killed the electric car....
above is Thoms special e mail.
#16
Subject: Special Tuesday Edition: The Hidden History of Guns & Second Amendment Help Pick The Cover Design for Thom Hartmann's Next Book You have to experience the X Chair! The Second Amendment Was Ratified to Preserve Slavery
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#17
Tried to dump the junk in the email but too much of a pain in the butt to clean it up.
#18
aka Chelsea, another closet racist bangs out another worthless opinion.
#19
DianeR,
More fun
https://aim4truth.org/2018/10/30/boom-citizen-patriots-launch-an-october-surprise-into-the-swamp/
#20
Of course, Trump Is Willing to Destroy the Constitution to Win an Election; of course, he won't succeed.
#21
#22
Thanks HotCoffee. There is really a lot of crap that comes in that weekly e-mail.
I think I will wait until thom's re-write of history is in publication then just dribble out refuting quotes and facts on a daily basis. I have some friends that will help fill in the blanks if needed.
Off to the archery range,
Till tomorrow.
#23
Been thinking of setting up a target and getting into archery.....hmmm
Just have horse shoes now.
Tomorow it is.
#24
OpEdNews - 10/17/2017 - from Alternet
"The America I Knew Has Almost Disappeared"
By Thom Hartmann:
Like an alcoholic family that won't discuss alcoholism (proving Don Quixote's warning never to mention rope in the home of a man who's been hanged), far too many Americans are unwilling to acknowledge or even discuss the ongoing collapse of democracy in the United States.
President Jimmy Carter took it head on when he told me on my radio program that the Citizen's United decision:
"[V]iolates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it's just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members. So now we've just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election's over."
This "complete subversion of our political system" grew, in large part, out of Richard Nixon's 1972 appointment of Lewis Powell to the Supreme Court. Powell, in 1971, had authored the infamous Powell Memo to the US Chamber of Commerce, strongly suggesting that corporate leaders needed to get politically involved and, essentially, take over everything from academia to our court system to our political system.
In 1976, in the Buckley case, Powell began the final destruction of American democracy by declaring that when rich people or corporations own politicians, all that money that got transferred to the politicians wasn't bribery but, instead, was Constitutionally-protected First Amendment-defined "Free Speech." The Court radically expanded that in 2010 with Citizens United.
As a result, there's really very little democracy left in our democracy. Our votes are handled in secret by private, unaccountable for-profit corporations. Our laws are written, more often than not, by corporate lawyers/lobbyists or representatives of billionaire-level wealth. And our media is owned by the same class of investors/stockholders, so it's a stretch to expect them to do much critical reporting on the situation.
In his book The Decline of the West, first published in German in 1918 and then in English in 1926, Oswald Spengler suggested that what we call Western civilization was then beginning to enter a "hardening" or "classical" phase in which all the nurturing and supportive structures of culture would become, instead, instruments of the exploitation of a growing peasant class to feed the wealth of a new and strengthening aristocracy.
Culture would become a parody of itself, average people's expectations would decline while their wants would grow, and a new peasantry would emerge, which would cause the culture to stabilize in a "classic form" that, while Spengler doesn't use the term, seems very much like feudalism -- the medieval system in which the lord owned the land and everyone else was a vassal (a tenant who owed loyalty to the landlord).
Or its more modern incarnation: fascism.
Spengler, considering himself an aristocrat, didn't see this as a bad thing. In 1926 he prophesied that once the boom of the Roaring Twenties was over, a great bust would wash over the Western world. While this bust had the potential to create chaos, its most likely outcome would be a return to the classic, stable form of social organization, what Spengler calls "high culture" and I call neofeudalism and/or fascism.
He wrote:
"In all high Cultures, therefore, there is a peasantry, which is breed stock, in the broad sense (and thus to a certain extent nature herself), and a society which is assertively and emphatically 'in form.' It is a set of classes or Estates, and no doubt artificial and transitory. But the history of these classes and estates is world history at highest potential.
Twentieth and 21st century cultural observers, ranging from billionaire George Soros in his book The Crisis of Global Capitalism, to professor Noreena Hertz in The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy, have pointed to deep cracks in the foundational structure of Western civilization, traceable in part to the current legal status of corporations versus humans.
Most recently, Jane Mayer has laid out in painful detail how the Koch Network and a few other political-minded billionaires have essentially taken over the entire Republican Party in her book Dark Money, as has Nancy MacLean with her new book Democracy in Chains. The extent of the problems within our political and economic structures are laid bare with startling and sometimes frightening clarity.
As a result, Princeton scholars Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page famously found that the odds of average Americans' political desires being translated into policy are about the same as random noise, whereas what they referred to as "economic elites" frequently get everything they want from the political class.
They wrote that we still have the "features" of democracy like elections, but ended their paper with this cautionary note: "[W]e believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America's claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened."
It seems that America has arrived at the point Spengler saw in early 20th century Europe, and, indeed, there are some concerning parallels, particularly with the late 1920s and early 1930s. Italy, Germany, and Spain all lost their democracies and moved to fascism, while many of Spengler's acolytes cheered.
And, indeed, it was one of FDR's biggest challenges in the early 1930s -- steering America through a "middle course" between communism (which was then growingly popular) and fascism (also growingly popular). He pulled it off with small (compared to Europe) nods to democratic socialism, instituting programs like Social Security, the minimum wage, and establishing the right to unionize (among other things).
Mark Twain is often quoted as saying that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. Many look at the all-out war being waged against American government right now by the hard right, from Trump and his cronies to the billionaire networks funding right-wing propaganda and lobbying outlets, and think "it can't happen here."
They're wrong. It can happen here.
We now have police intervening in elections, privatized corporate votingsystems, and a massive voter suppression campaign to prevent elderly, young, and non-white Americans from being able to vote.
Meanwhile, as Lee Fang reported, Republican politicians and the billionaires who own them are now dropping any pretense at all to caring about the fate and future of our country's fiscal health, so long as they get their tax cuts NOW.
In summary, what's left of our democratic institutions are under siege.
Add to that a largely billionaire-funded/owned right-wing media machine that's willing to regularly and openly deceive American voters (documented daily by Media Matters and Newshounds), and you have the perfect setup for a neofeudalist/fascist takeover of our government.
Or, as President Carter so correctly called it, oligarchy.
#25
One more thing DianeR,
Just a reminder.
James Comey, Director – FIRED
Andrew McCabe, Deputy Director - FIRED
Jim Rybicki, Chief of Staff and Senior Counselor – FIRED
James Baker, General Counsel – FIRED
Bill Priestap, Director of Counterintelligence (Strzok’s boss) – Cooperating witness [power removed]
Peter Strzok, Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence – FIRED
Lisa Page, Office of General Counsel – FIRED/FORCED
Mike Kortan, Assistant Director for Public Affairs – FIRED
Josh Campbell, Special Assistant to Comey – FIRED
David Laufman, Chief of the Justice Department’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section [NAT SEC - HRC email invest] - FIRED/FORCE
John Carlin, Assistant Attorney General – Head of DOJ’s National Security Division - FIRED/FORCED
Sally Yates, Deputy Attorney General & Acting Attorney General - FIRED
Mary McCord, Acting Assistant Attorney General – Acting Head of DOJ’s National Security Division - FIRED/FORCED
Bruce Ohr, Associate Deputy Attorney General – Demoted 2x - cooperating witness [power removed] - TERMINATION IMMINENT
Rachel Brand, Associate Attorney General – No. 3 official behind Deputy AG Rosenstein - FIRED/FORCED
#26
#27
Most normal Americans would rather have good and decent people as neighbors rather than hysterical wild-eyed bigots.
#28
OpEdNews - 9/30/2017 - From Alternet
"How the Republican Party Has Conned America for Over 30 Years"
By Thom Hartmann:
The Republican Party has been running a long con on the American people, and Trump's new tax cut proposals are just the latest iteration on it. This con involves getting Democrats to shoot Santa Claus (Clinton cutting welfare/Obama proposing the chained CPI cut to Social Security) and using tax policy to put a jolly old Saint Nick outfit on the Republicans.
As Bruce Bartlett -- one of the architects and major salespeople for Reagan's tax cuts in the '80s -- wrote in USA Today this week: "Virtually everything Republicans say about taxes today is a lie. Tax cuts and tax rate reductions will not pay for themselves; they never have. Republicans don't even believe they will, they are just excuses to slash spending for the poor when revenues collapse and deficits rise. There is no evidence that tax reform raises growth, although it may improve fairness and tax administration."
So how do Republicans get away with this lie, and why does the press let them get away with it? It's a fascinating story.
Odds are you've never heard of Jude Wanniski, but without him Reagan never would have become a "successful" president, Republicans never would have taken control of the House or Senate, Bill Clinton never would have been impeached, and George Bush never would have become president. Ditto for Trump.
When Barry Goldwater went down to ignominious defeat in 1964, most Republicans felt doomed (among them the 28-year-old Wanniski). Goldwater himself, although uncomfortable with the rising religious right within his own party and the calls for more intrusion in people's bedrooms, was a diehard fan of Herbert Hoover's economic worldview.
In Hoover's world (and virtually all the Republicans since reconstruction with the exception of Teddy Roosevelt), market fundamentalism was a virtual religion. Economists from Ludwig von Mises to Friedrich Hayek to Milton Friedman had preached that government could only make a mess of things economic, and the world of finance should be left to the Big Boys -- the Masters of the Universe, as they sometimes called themselves -- who ruled Wall Street and international finance.
Hoover enthusiastically followed the advice of his Treasury Secretary, multimillionaire Andrew Mellon, who said in 1931: "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. Purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down... enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people."
Thus, the Republican mantra was: "Lower taxes, reduce the size of government, and balance the budget."
The only problem with this ideology from the Hooverite perspective was that the Democrats always seemed like the bestowers of gifts, while the Republicans were seen by the American people as the stingy Scrooges, bent on making the lives of working people harder all the while making the very richest even richer. This, Republican strategists since 1930 knew, was no way to win elections.
Which was why the most successful Republican of the 20th century up to that time, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had been quite happy with a top income tax rate on multimillionaires of 91 percent. As he explained to his right-wing brother Edgar Eisenhower in a personal letter on November 8, 1954:
"[T]o attain any success it is quite clear that the Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. The political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort, we will lose everything -- even to a possible and drastic change in the Constitution. This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon 'moderation' in government.
"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
Goldwater, however, rejected the "liberalism" of Eisenhower, Rockefeller, and other "moderates" within his own party. Extremism in defense of liberty was no vice, he famously told the 1964 nominating convention, and moderation was no virtue. And it doomed him and his party.
And so after Goldwater's defeat, the Republicans were again lost in the wilderness just as after Hoover's disastrous presidency. Even four years later when Richard Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Nixon wasn't willing to embrace the economic conservatism of Goldwater and the economic true believers in the Republican Party. And Jerry Ford wasn't, in their opinions, much better. If Nixon and Ford believed in economic conservatism, they were afraid to practice it for fear of dooming their party to another 40 years in the electoral wilderness.
By 1974, Jude Wanniski had had enough. The Democrats got to play Santa Claus when they passed out Social Security and Unemployment checks -- both programs of the New Deal -- as well as when their "big government" projects like schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, and highways were built giving a healthy union paycheck to construction workers and driving economic growth. Democrats kept high taxes on businesses and rich people to pay for things, which worked out just fine for working people (wages were steadily going up, in fact), and made the Democrats seem like a party of Robin Hoods, taking from the rich to fund programs for the poor and the working class.
Americans loved it. And every time Republicans railed against these programs, they lost elections.
Everybody understood at the time that economies are driven by demand. People with good jobs have money in their pockets, and want to use it to buy things. The job of the business community is to either determine or drive that demand to their particular goods, and when they're successful at meeting the demand then factories get built, more people become employed to make more products, and those newly-employed people have a paycheck that further increases demand.
Wanniski decided to turn the classical world of economics -- which had operated on this simple demand-driven equation for 7,000 years -- on its head. In 1974 he invented a new phrase, "supply-side economics," and suggested that the reason economies grew wasn't because people had money and wanted to buy things with it, but instead, because things were available for sale, thus tantalizing people to part with their money. The more things there were, the faster the economy would grow.
At the same time, Arthur Laffer was taking that equation a step further. Not only was supply-side a rational concept, Laffer suggested, but as taxes went down, revenue to the government would go up!
Neither concept made any sense -- and time has proven both to be colossal idiocies -- but together they offered the Republican Party a way out of the wilderness.
Ronald Reagan was the first national Republican politician to suggest that he could cut taxes on rich people and businesses, that those tax cuts would cause them to take their surplus money and build factories to make more stuff, and that the more stuff there was supplying the economy the faster it would grow.
In the 1980 GOP primary, George Herbert Walker Bush -- like most Republicans of the time -- was horrified. Ronald Reagan was suggesting "Voodoo Economics," said Bush in the primary campaign, and Wanniski's supply-side and Laffer's tax-cut theories would throw the nation into such deep debt that we'd ultimately crash into another Republican Great Depression.
But Wanniski had been doing his homework on how to sell supply-side economics. In 1976, he rolled out to the hard-right insiders in the Republican Party his "Two Santa Clauses" theory, which would enable the Republicans to take power in America for the next generation.
Democrats, he said, had been able to be "Santa Clauses" by giving people things from the largesse of the federal government. Republicans could do that, too -- spending could actually increase.
Plus, Republicans could be double Santa Clauses by cutting people's taxes! For working people it would only be a small token -- a few hundred dollars a year on average -- but would be heavily marketed. And for the rich it would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts. The rich, he said, would use that money to import or build more stuff to market, thus increasing supply and stimulating the economy. And that growth in the economy would mean that the people still paying taxes would pay more because they were earning more.
There was no way, Wanniski said, that the Democrats could ever win again. They'd have to be anti-Santas by raising taxes, or anti-Santas by cutting spending. Either one would lose them elections.
When Reagan rolled out supply-side economics in the early '80s, dramatically cutting taxes while exploding (mostly military) spending, there was a moment when it seemed to Wanniski and Laffer that all was lost. The budget deficit exploded and the country fell into a deep recession -- the worst since the Great Depression -- and Republicans nationwide held their collective breath.
But David Stockman came up with a great new theory about what was going on -- they were "starving the beast" of government by running up such huge deficits that Democrats would never, ever in the future be able to talk again about national health care or improving Social Security -- and this so pleased Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman, that he opened the spigots of the Fed, dropping interest rates from 19 to 9 percent (between 1981 and 1982) and buying government bonds, producing a nice, healthy goose to the economy. Greenspan further counseled Reagan to dramatically increase taxes on people earning under $37,800 a year by doubling the Social Security (FICA/payroll) tax, and then let the government borrow those newfound hundreds of billions of dollars off-the-books to make the deficit look better than it was.
Reagan, Greenspan, Winniski, and Laffer took the federal budget deficit from under a trillion dollars in 1980 to almost $3 trillion by 1988, and back then a dollar could buy far more than it buys today. They and George HW Bush ran up more debt in eight years than every president in history, from George Washington to Jimmy Carter, combined. Surely this would both starve the beast and force the Democrats to make the politically suicidal move of becoming deficit hawks and shoot Santa Claus.
And that's just how it turned out. Bill Clinton, who had run on an FDR-like platform of a "new covenant" with the American people that would strengthen the institutions of the New Deal, strengthen labor, and institute a national health care system, found himself in a box. A few weeks before his inauguration, Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin sat him down and told him the facts of life: he was going to have to raise taxes and cut the size of government.
Clinton took their advice to heart, raised taxes, balanced the budget, and cut numerous programs, declaring an "end to welfare as we know it" and, in his second inaugural address, an "end to the era of big government." He was the anti-Santa Claus, and the result was an explosion of Republican wins across the country as Republican politicians campaigned on a platform of supply-side tax cuts and pork-rich spending increases.
Looking at the wreckage of the Democratic Party all around Clinton by 1999, Winniski wrote a gloating memo that said, in part: "We of course should be indebted to Art Laffer for all time for his Curve... But as the primary political theoretician of the supply-side camp, I began arguing for the 'Two Santa Claus Theory' in 1974. If the Democrats are going to play Santa Claus by promoting more spending, the Republicans can never beat them by promoting less spending. They have to promise tax cuts..."
Ed Crane, then president of the Libertarian CATO Institute, noted in a memothat year: "When Jack Kemp, Newt Gingrich, Vin Weber, Connie Mack and the rest discovered Jude Wanniski and Art Laffer, they thought they'd died and gone to heaven. In supply-side economics they found a philosophy that gave them a free pass out of the debate over the proper role of government. Just cut taxes and grow the economy: government will shrink as a percentage of GDP, even if you don't cut spending. That's why you rarely, if ever, heard Kemp or Gingrich call for spending cuts, much less the elimination of programs and departments."
George W. Bush embraced the Two Santa Claus Theory with gusto, ramming through huge tax cuts -- particularly a cut to a maximum 15 percent income tax rate on people like himself who made their principle income from sitting around the pool waiting for their dividend or capital gains checks to arrive in the mail -- and blowing out federal spending. Bush even out-spent Reagan, which nobody had ever thought would again be possible.
And it all seemed to be going so well, just as it did in the early 1920s when three consecutive Republican presidents cut income taxes on the uber-rich from over 70 percent to under 30 percent. In 1929, pretty much everybody realized that instead of building factories with all that extra money, the rich had been pouring it into the stock market, inflating a bubble that -- like an inexorable law of nature -- would have to burst. But the people who remembered that lesson were mostly all dead by 2005, when Jude Wanniski died and George Gilder celebrated the Reagan/Bush supply-side-created bubble economies in a Wall Street Journal eulogy:
"...Jude's charismatic focus on the tax on capital gains redeemed the fiscal policies of four administrations. ... Unbound by zero-sum economics, Jude forged the golden gift of a profound and passionate argument that the establishments of the mold must finally give way to the powers of the mind. He audaciously defied all the Buffetteers of the trade gap, the moldy figs of the Phillips Curve, the chic traders in money and principle, even the stultifying pillows of the Nobel Prize."
In reality, his tax cuts did what they have always done over the past 100 years -- they initiated a bubble economy that would let the very rich skim the cream off the top just before the ceiling crashed in on working people.
The Republicans got what they wanted from Wanniski's work. They held power for over 30 years, made themselves trillions of dollars, cut organized labor's representation in the workplace from around 25 percent when Reagan came into office to around 6 percent of the non-governmental workforce today, and left such a massive deficit that some misguided "centrist" Democrats are again clamoring to shoot Santa with working-class tax hikes and entitlement program cuts.
And now Trump and the whole crowd are again clamoring to be recognized as the ones who will out-Santa Claus the Democrats. You'd think after all the damage they've done that the infotainment stars on TV would at least acknowledge this history. But that's not convenient when you need GOP "stars" to come on your show or you lose your million-dollar job.
Wanniski is gone, but his memo still lives on, particularly where he admonished Ed Crane at CATO to stop talking about cutting the federal deficit and instead promise people the Santa Claus of economic growth. He ended his infamous memo with:
"If the Democrats are going to play Santa Claus by promoting more spending, the Republicans can never beat them by promoting less spending. They have to promise tax cuts in order to grow the economy -- not to 'starve the government of revenue,' which is Milton Friedman's rationale. Let's shoot Santa Claus? Let's not. Instead, let's force the Democrats to shoot Santa!"
The Two Santa Claus theory isn't dead, as we can see from today's Republican rhetoric. Hopefully, though, reality will continue to sink in with the American people and the massive fraud perpetrated by Wanniski, Reagan, Graham, Bush(s), and all their "conservative" enablers will be seen for what it was and is.
And the rest of us can get about the business of repairing the damage and recovering the stolen assets of our nation from these cheap hustlers who dare call themselves politicians.
#29
#30
#33
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The Thom Hartmann Program - 1st hour - 10/30/18
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#34
There was a local event in the little town where I live that brought together several candidates for local and state offices from both parties. There was a local radio/TV host who was trying to ask relevant questions to the candidates.
He first addressed the repubs and was asking them their views on the economy, health care, immigration, etc. As expected by me, most gave the usual party line responses. He then turned his attention to the democrats and basically asked the same questions about the same topics.
"What would you do about the immigrant caravan heading to the US, and what kind of immigration policy would you support?" Response...we hate Trump. "Well okay, but what would you do about immigration in this country?" Response...we hate Trump.
"Okay then...our state still has areas of high unemployment despite the sucess of the national economy. What would you do to spur economic growth in these areas?" Response...we hate Trump.
Now, to be fair, it wasn't quite that simple, but it was pretty close. The democratic slate basically had no specifics to offer about any of the topics/questions asked of them other than to say we hate Trump. Maybe that works for some people in some places in this big country, but it did not play well with most of the folks in attendance at this event. The moderator was clearly exasperated that he wasn't really getting any answers on topic.
Now, I do not know what the outcome of the mid-terms will be come Tuesday night. I imagine there will be a few surprises that even the pundits have not predicted. But the demise of the democratic party is just sad to watch. I saw a few clips of the democratic candidate for senate in Arizona. You have got to be kidding me? Is that the best that they could come up with? The dems have now clearly become the party of hate and division. It is pathetic to watch. If you don't like Trump, come up with some better ideas. If you want open borders, then make the case why anyone and everyone should just be able to walk into this country anytime, anywhere. If you want medicare for all, make the case how it will be better for every citizen and how you will pay for it. Don't like the president's economic policiies? Then propose something better, if you can. So far, the only thing I hear from democrats is we hate Trump. I think we already knew that, but that is not nearly good enough for me.
#35
Coalage3, We all have heard the same since Nov, 2016. What is most interesting is the fact the leftie/socialists are totally blind to the fact they have lost all control and it is they themselves that do nothing but push out hate and negativity 24/7.
What do they expect from Trump, sit back and take their scree? That ain't going to happen when you have a guy thin skinned guy with a spine in office.
With total democrat party disaster that went on full display during the Kavanaugh hearings really hurt their cause. They twist and manipulate polls to satisfy their minds but they are only fooling themselves. Notice they now are switching the conversation and going into full "excuse mode" by claiming voter fraud. Maybe their internal polling is more realistic.
Their engineered drama goes on but I really wonder what will happen if they do not have successful midterm results.
Maybe Mexico will be on the receiving end of a marching mob of angry democrats. One could only hope.
#36
Morning HotCoffee, the laugh of the day.
Trump Lawyers Send Stormy Daniels a Bill for $341,559.50
Ms. Gifford raised more than $580k from left-wing political supporters via her “Crowd Justice.” Trump's lawyers want to thank all lefite/socialists for helping Stormy raise that money that now belongs to Trump's lawyers.
#37
(1 of 2)
OpEdNews - 7/30/2017 - From Alternet
"The Past 5 GOP Presidents Have Used Fraud and Treason to Steer Themselves to Electoral Victory.
The deception started long before Donald Trump."
By Thom Hartmann:
People are wondering out loud about the parallels between today's Republican Party and organized crime, and whether "Teflon Don" Trump will remain unscathed through his many scandals, ranging from interactions with foreign oligarchs to killing tens of thousands of Americans by denying them healthcare to stepping up the destruction of our environment and public lands.
History suggests -- even if treason can be demonstrated -- that, as long as he holds onto the Republican Party (and Fox News), he'll survive it intact. And he won't be the first Republican president to commit high crimes to get and stay in office.
In fact, Eisenhower was the last legitimately elected Republican president we've had in this country.
Since Dwight Eisenhower left the presidency in 1961, six different Republicans have occupied the Oval Office.
And every single one of them -- from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump -- have been illegitimate -- ascending to the highest office in the land not through small-D democratic elections -- but instead through fraud and treason.
(And today's GOP-controlled Congress is arguably just as corrupt and illegitimate, acting almost entirely within the boundaries set by an organized group of billionaires.)
Let's start at the beginning with Richard Nixon.
In 1968 -- President Lyndon Johnson was desperately trying to end the Vietnam war.
But Richard Nixon knew that if the war continued -- it would tarnish Democrat (and Vice President) Hubert Humphrey's chances of winning the 1968 election.
So Nixon sent envoys from his campaign to talk to South Vietnamese leaders to encourage them not to attend an upcoming peace talk in Paris.
Nixon promised South Vietnam's corrupt politicians that he would give them a richer deal when he was President than LBJ could give them then.
LBJ found out about this political maneuver to prolong the Vietnam war just 3 days before the 1968 election. He phoned the Republican Senate leader Everett Dirksen -- here's an excerpt (you can listen to the entire conversation here):
President Johnson:
"Some of our folks, including some of the old China lobby, are going to the Vietnamese embassy and saying please notify the [South Vietnamese] president that if he'll hold out 'til November the second they could get a better deal. Now, I'm reading their hand, Everett. I don't want to get this in the campaign.
"And they oughtn't to be doin' this. This is treason."
Sen. Dirksen: "I know."
Those tapes were only released by the LBJ library in the past decade, and that's Richard Nixon that Lyndon Johnson was accusing of treason.
But by then -- Nixon's plan had worked.
South Vietnam boycotted the peace talks -- the war continued -- and Nixon won the White House thanks to it. As a result, additional tens of thousands of American soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians, died as a result of Nixon's treason.
And Nixon was never held to account for it.
Gerald Ford was the next Republican.
After Nixon left office the same way he entered it -- by virtue of breaking the law -- Gerald Ford took over.
Ford was never elected to the White House (he was appointed to replace VP Spiro Agnew, after Agnew was indicted for decades of taking bribes), and thus would never have been President had it not been for Richard Nixon's treason.
The third was Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980.
He won thanks to a little something called the October Surprise -- when his people sabotaged then-President Jimmy Carter's negotiations to release American hostages in Iran.
According to Iran's then-president, Reagan's people promised the Iranians that if they held off on releasing the American hostages until just after the election -- then Reagan would give them a sweet weapons deal.
In 1980 Carter thought he had reached a deal with newly-elected Iranian President Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr over the release of the 52 hostages held by radical students at the American Embassy in Tehran.
Bani-Sadr was a moderate and, as he explained in an editorial for The Christian Science Monitor earlier this year, had successfully run for President on the popular position of releasing the hostages:
"I openly opposed the hostage-taking throughout the election campaign.... I won the election with over 76 percent of the vote.... Other candidates also were openly against hostage-taking, and overall, 96 percent of votes in that election were given to candidates who were against it [hostage-taking]."
Carter was confident that with Bani-Sadr's help, he could end the embarrassing hostage crisis that had been a thorn in his political side ever since it began in November of 1979. But Carter underestimated the lengths his opponent in the 1980 Presidential election, California Governor Ronald Reagan, would go to win an election.
Behind Carter's back, the Reagan campaign worked out a deal with the leader of Iran's radical faction -- Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini -- to keep the hostages in captivity until after the 1980 Presidential election.
This was nothing short of treason. The Reagan campaign's secret negotiations with Khomeini -- the so-called "October Surprise" -- sabotaged Carter and Bani-Sadr's attempts to free the hostages. And as Bani-Sadr told The Christian Science Monitor in March of 2013:
"After arriving in France [in 1981], I told a BBC reporter that I had left Iran to expose the symbiotic relationship between Khomeinism and Reaganism.
"Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the 'October Surprise,' which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan."
And Reagan's treason -- just like Nixon's treason -- worked perfectly.
The Iran hostage crisis continued and torpedoed Jimmy Carter's re-election hopes.
And the same day Reagan took the oath of office -- almost to the minute, by way of Iran's acknowledging the deal -- the American hostages in Iran were released.
And for that, Reagan began selling the Iranians weapons and spare parts in 1981, and continued until he was busted for it in 1986, producing the so-called "Iran Contra" scandal.
But, like Nixon, Reagan was never held to account for the criminal and treasonous actions that brought him to office.
cont'd...
#38
I strongly urge all democratic candidates to make climate change their number one campaign issue. Please do it now so that the republicans who end getting elected can get on with the business of running the country.
The only segment of the population who are really concerned about climate change are rich, mostly white, college educated progressives. In other words, they are elitists who don't have to worry about where their next paycheck comes from.
#39
cont'd (2 of 2)...
OpEdNews - 7/30/2017 - From Alternet
"The Past 5 GOP Presidents Have Used Fraud and Treason to Steer Themselves to Electoral Victory.
The deception started long before Donald Trump."
By Thom Hartmann:
After Reagan -- Bush senior was elected -- but like Gerry Ford -- Bush was really only President because he served as Vice President under Reagan.
If the October Surprise hadn't hoodwinked voters in 1980 -- you can bet Bush senior would never have been elected in 1988. That's four illegitimate Republican presidents.
And that brings us to George W. Bush, the man who was given the White House by five right-wing justices on the Supreme Court.
In the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision in 2000 that stopped the Florida recount and thus handed George W. Bush the presidency -- Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his opinion:
"The counting of votes ... does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he [Bush] claims to be the legitimacy of his election."
Apparently, denying the presidency to Al Gore, the guy who actually won the most votes in Florida, did not constitute "irreparable harm" to Scalia or the media.
And apparently it wasn't important that Scalia's son worked for the law firm that was defending George W. Bush before the high court (thus no Scalia recusal).
Just like it wasn't important to mention that Justice Clarence Thomas's wife worked on the Bush transition team and was busy accepting resumes from people who would serve in the Bush White House if her husband stopped the recount in Florida...which he did. (No Thomas recusal, either.)
And more than a year after the election -- a consortium of newspapers including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today did their own recount in Florida -- manually counting every vote in a process that took almost a year -- and concluded that Al Gore did indeed win the presidency in 2000.
As the November 12th, 2001 article in The New York Times read:
"If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won."
That little bit of info was slipped into the seventeenth paragraph of the Times story on purpose so that it would attract as little attention as possible around the nation.
Why? because the 9/11 attacks had just happened -- and journalists feared that burdening Americans with the plain truth that George W. Bush actually lost the election would further hurt a nation that was already in crisis.
And none of that even considered that Bush could only have gotten as close to Gore as he did because his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, had ordered his Secretary of State, Kathrine Harris, to purge at least 57,000 mostly-Black voters from the state's rolls just before the election.
So for the third time in four decades -- Republicans took the White House under illegitimate electoral circumstances. Even President Carter was shocked by the brazenness of that one.
And Jeb Bush and the GOP were never held to account for that crime against democracy.
Most recently, in 2016, Kris Kobach and Republican Secretaries of State across the nation used Interstate Crosscheck to purge millions of legitimate voters -- most people of color -- from the voting rolls just in time for the Clinton/Trump election.
Millions of otherwise valid American voters were denied their right to vote because they didn't own the requisite ID -- a modern-day poll-tax that's spread across every Republican state with any consequential black, elderly, urban, or college-student population (all groups less likely to have a passport or drivers' license).
Donald Trump still lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, but came to power through an electoral college designed to keep slavery safe in colonial America.
You can only wonder how much better off America would be if six Republican Presidents hadn't stolen or inherited a stolen White House.
In fact -- the last legitimate Republican President -- Dwight Eisenhower -- was unlike any other Republican president since.
He ran for the White House on a platform of peace -- that he would end the Korean War.
This from one of his TV campaign ads:
"The nation, haunted by the stalemate in Korea, looks to Eisenhower. Eisenhower knows how to deal with the Russians. He has met Europe leaders, has got them working with us. Elect the number one man for the number one job of our time. November 4th vote for peace. Vote for Eisenhower."
Two of his campaign slogans were "I like Ike" and "Vote For Peace, Vote For Eisenhower."
Ike was a moderate Republican who stood up for working people -- who kept tax rates on the rich at 91 percent -- and made sure that the middle class in America was protected by FDR's New Deal policies.
As he told his brother Edgar in 1954 in a letter:
"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history."
And Eisenhower was right -- the only way Republicans have been able to win the presidency since he left office in 1961 has been by outright treason, a criminal fraud involving conflicted members of the Supreme Court, or by being vice-president under an already-illegitimate president.
And that's where we are today, dealing with the aftermath of all these Republican crimes and six illegitimate Republican presidents stacking the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary.
And this doesn't even begin to tell the story of how the Republican majority in the senate represents 36 million fewer Americans than do the Democrats. Or how in most elections in past decades, Democrats have gotten more votes for the House of Representatives, but Republicans have controlled it because of gerrymandering.
This raises serious questions about the legitimacy of the modern Republican Party itself.
They work hand-in-glove with a group of right-wing billionaires and billionaire-owned or dominated media outlets like Fox and "conservative" TV and radio outlets across the nation, along with a very well-funded network of rightwing websites.
The Koch Network's various groups, for example, have more money, more offices, and more staff than the Republican Party itself. Three times more employees and twice the budget, in fact. Which raises the question: which is the dog, and which is the tail?
And, as we've seen so vividly in the "debate" about healthcare this year, the Republicans, like Richard Nixon, are not encumbered by the need to tell the truth.
Whether it's ending trade deals, bringing home jobs, protecting Social Security and Medicaid, or saving our public lands and environment -- virtually every promise that Trump ran and won on is being broken. Meanwhile, the oligarchs continue to pressure Republican senators to vote their way.
Meanwhile, a public trust that has taken 240 years to build is being destroyed, as public lands, regulatory agencies, and our courts are handed off to oligarchs and transnational corporations to exploit or destroy.
The Trump and Republican campaign of 2016, Americans are now discovering, was nearly all lies, well-supported by a vast right-wing media machine and a timid, profit-obsessed "mainstream" corporate media. Meanwhile, it seemed that all the Democrats could say was, "The children are watching!"
Fraud, treason, and lies have worked well for the GOP for half a century.
Thus, the Democrats are right to now fine-tune their message to the people. But in addition to "A Better Deal," they may want to consider adding to their agenda a solid RICO investigation into the GOP and the oligarchs who fund it.
It's way past time to stop the now-routine Republican practice of using treason, lies, and crime to gain and hold political power.
#40
Again...
48th Session of the IPCC, Incheon, Korea, 1 October 2018
Opening Statement
By Hoesung Lee:
"It’s a great honour to welcome you to my home country, Korea, and I am very grateful to the government of the Republic of Korea and the authorities of the City of Incheon for hosting us here in this beautiful conference centre.
I am particularly honoured, because this will be one of the most important meetings in the IPCC’s history. We will consider the Summary for Policymakers of the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 ºC. That is our main business here this week and I will concentrate on the 1.5 ºC report in these remarks.
Why is this report so keenly awaited?
Scientists have been warning us for years that we can expect to see more extreme weather with climate change. The heat waves, wildfires, and heavy rainfall events of recent months all over the world underscore these warnings.
Three weeks ago in New York, the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres described climate change as the great challenge of our time. But, he also noted that, thanks to science, we know its size and nature. Science alerts us to the gravity of the situation, but science also, and this special report in particular, helps us understand the solutions available to us.
Distinguished delegates, nearly three years ago your governments adopted the Paris Agreement. It sets a target of holding the rise in global mean temperatures to well below 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, while pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5 ºC.
At that time, relatively little was known about the risks avoided in a 1.5 ºC world compared with a 2 ºC warmer world, or about the pathway of greenhouse gas emissions compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5 ºC. So, as part of the decision adopting the Paris Agreement, governments invited the IPCC to prepare a report assessing the impacts of warming of 1.5 ºC and related emissions pathways.
Governments asked the IPCC to deliver this report in 2018, in time for what has become the Talanoa Dialogue at this year’s Climate Conference, COP24.
To prepare a report on 1.5 ºC to this timeline was extremely ambitious. The IPCC, and through it the scientific community, responded positively and with sincere enthusiasm.
In April 2016, at our 43rd Session, the IPCC decided to prepare the report as part of the work programme for the Sixth Assessment Cycle. The Panel decided to prepare this report in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty, thus placing the report firmly among the tools to be used to achieve the sustainable development goals.
We held the scoping meeting in August of that year, and the Panel approved the outline at the 44th Session in October.
In February 2017 the Panel was able to announce the author team of the report – 91 authors and review editors were selected from 40 countries. And less than 20 months later, you have the report for your consideration.
Let me give you some statistics to illustrate the scale of work that has been achieved in this time. The final draft of the report contains over 6,000 cited references. The expert review of the First Order Draft, from July to September 2017, attracted almost 13,000 comments from some 500 experts in 61 countries. The government and expert review of the Second Order Draft, from January to February this year, attracted over 25,000 comments from 570 experts and officials in 71 countries.
Governments provided close to 4,000 comments on the Final Government Draft. So in all we have received 42,000 comments on the drafts of this report. Allow me to remind you that under the IPCC procedures, the authors must address each comment received in the review process.
Review is an essential part of the IPCC process, and we are grateful to the hundreds of experts who have contributed to our work in this way. We thank the 133 Contributing Authors who have added their expertise.
And special thanks to our National Focal Points who played a key role in the nomination of authors and the review process. I would also like to express my profound respect and gratitude to the co-chairs, authors and review editors, and the technical support units, for accomplishing this Herculean task.
This achievement goes beyond numbers.
This Special Report is unique in IPCC history as it has been prepared under the joint scientific leadership of all three IPCC Working Groups. Each chapter is a genuine piece of cross-disciplinary work, bringing together all the scientific expertise of the IPCC. That is why the line-by-line consideration of the Summary for Policymakers will be conducted by the First Joint Session of Working Groups I, II and III. In the same way, the Summary for Policymakers that will be considered in detail this week integrates the most important findings of the chapters in each section.
Distinguished delegates, the scientific community has responded to the invitation of policymakers and presented you with a robust and timely report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 ºC and related greenhouse gas emission pathways.
The task is now yours.
You will consider the draft Summary for Policymakers line by line to ensure that it is consistent with the detailed assessment of scientific, technical and socio-economic information provided by the underlying detailed chapters.
Governments have asked the IPCC for an assessment of warming of 1.5 degrees, its impacts and related emissions pathways, to help them address climate change. We will work together in a constructive and collaborative spirit to produce a strong, robust and clear Summary for Policymakers that responds to the invitation of governments three years ago while upholding the scientific integrity of the IPCC.
Lastly I would like to share the important news with you that these sessions will be climate-neutral. We have taken measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions where possible and we will be estimating and compensating the remaining ones.
I am also pleased to inform you that the financial position of the IPCC continues to improve. I would like to thank the many governments who have contributed in recent months for their generous and continuing support, and urge all of you to provide us with the means to carry out the tasks you have given us. In this regard I would like to thank the Panel for your financial support for this report – 1.2 million Swiss francs for the various meetings required to prepare and approve it – and for endorsing the outline of the report and the author team.
I would also like to express my gratitude for the in-kind contributions of the countries that hosted the scoping meetings for this report and the four lead author meetings – Switzerland, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Sweden and Botswana.
Thank you for your trust in the IPCC.
I am pleased to note that we have posted on the PaperSmart system the Code of Conduct for IPCC meetings that was introduced at the first Lead Author Meeting of Working Group I a couple of months ago. I hope we will have an opportunity to discuss this in the Panel soon; it provides a valuable framework to ensure that all of us here have a respectful working environment.
Let me finish by thanking the Government of Korea for its generous support for this meeting. I would also like to take the opportunity to thank our partners for their continued unwavering support – our parent organizations WMO and UN Environment, and the UNFCCC.
With these words I would like to wish you a successful and collegial meeting. Thank you for your attention."
#41
and...
PCC PRESS RELEASE
8 October 2018
Summary for Policymakers of IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of .5ºC approved by governments
INCHEON, Republic of Korea, 8 Oct - Limiting global warming to 1.5ºC would require rapid, farreaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society, the IPCC said in a new assessment. With clear benefits to people and natural ecosystems, limiting global warming to 1.5ºC compared to 2ºC could go hand in hand with ensuring a more sustainable and equitable society, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said on Monday.
The Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC was approved by the IPCC on Saturday in Incheon, Republic of Korea. It will be a key scientific input into the Katowice Climate Change Conference in Poland in December, when governments review the Paris Agreement to tackle climate change.
“With more than 6,000 scientific references cited and the dedicated contribution of thousands of expert and government reviewers worldwide, this important report testifies to the breadth and policy relevance of the IPCC,” said Hoesung Lee, Chair of the IPCC.
Ninety-one authors and review editors from 40 countries prepared the IPCC report in response to an invitation from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) when it adopted the Paris Agreement in 2015.
The report’s full name is Global Warming of 1.5°C, an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty.
“One of the key messages that comes out very strongly from this report is that we are already seeing the consequences of 1°C of global warming through more extreme weather, rising sea levels and diminishing Arctic sea ice, among other changes,” said Panmao Zhai, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group I.
The report highlights a number of climate change impacts that could be avoided by limiting global warming to 1.5ºC compared to 2ºC, or more. For instance, by 2100, global sea level rise would be 10 cm lower with global warming of 1.5°C compared with 2°C. The likelihood of an Arctic Ocean free of sea ice in summer would be once per century with global warming of 1.5°C, compared with at least once per decade with 2°C. Coral reefs would decline by 70-90 percent with global warming of 1.5°C, whereas virtually all (> 99 percent) would be lost with 2ºC.
“Every extra bit of warming matters, especially since warming of 1.5ºC or higher increases the risk associated with long-lasting or irreversible changes, such as the loss of some ecosystems,” saidHans-Otto Pörtner, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group II.
Limiting global warming would also give people and ecosystems more room to adapt and remain below relevant risk thresholds, added Pörtner. The report also examines pathways available to limit warming to 1.5ºC, what it would take to achieve them and what the consequences could be.
“The good news is that some of the kinds of actions that would be needed to limit global warming to 1.5ºC are already underway around the world, but they would need to accelerate,” said Valerie Masson-Delmotte, Co-Chair of Working Group I.
The report finds that limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require “rapid and far-reaching” transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport, and cities. Global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching ‘net zero’ around 2050. This means that any remaining emissions would need to be balanced by removing CO2 from the air.
“Limiting warming to 1.5ºC is possible within the laws of chemistry and physics but doing so would require unprecedented changes,” said Jim Skea, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group III.
Allowing the global temperature to temporarily exceed or ‘overshoot’ 1.5ºC would mean a greater reliance on techniques that remove CO2 from the air to return global temperature to below 1.5ºC by 2100. The effectiveness of such techniques are unproven at large scale and some may carry significant risks for sustainable development, the report notes.
“Limiting global warming to 1.5°C compared with 2°C would reduce challenging impacts on ecosystems, human health and well-being, making it easier to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals,” said Priyardarshi Shukla, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group III.
The decisions we make today are critical in ensuring a safe and sustainable world for everyone, both now and in the future, said Debra Roberts, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group II.
“This report gives policymakers and practitioners the information they need to make decisions that tackle climate change while considering local context and people’s needs. The next few years are probably the most important in our history,” she said.
The IPCC is the leading world body for assessing the science related to climate change, its impacts and potential future risks, and possible response options.
The report was prepared under the scientific leadership of all three IPCC working groups. Working Group I assesses the physical science basis of climate change; Working Group II addresses impacts, adaptation and vulnerability; and Working Group III deals with the mitigation of climate change.
The Paris Agreement adopted by 195 nations at the 21st Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC in December 2015 included the aim of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change by “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above preindustrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”
As part of the decision to adopt the Paris Agreement, the IPCC was invited to produce, in 2018, a Special Report on global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways. The IPCC accepted the invitation, adding that the Special Report would look at these issues in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty.
Global Warming of 1.5ºC is the first in a series of Special Reports to be produced in the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Cycle. Next year the IPCC will release the Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, and Climate Change and Land, which looks at how climate change affects land use.
The Summary for Policymakers (SPM) presents the key findings of the Special Report, based on the assessment of the available scientific, technical and socio-economic literature relevant to global warming of 1.5°C.
The Summary for Policymakers of the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC (SR15) is available at http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/ or www.ipcc.ch.
Key statistics of the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC
91 authors from 44 citizenships and 40 countries of residence
- 14 Coordinating Lead Authors (CLAs)
- 60 Lead authors (LAs)
- 17 Review Editors (REs)
133 Contributing authors (CAs)
Over 6,000 cited references
A total of 42,001 expert and government review comments
(First Order Draft 12,895; Second Order Draft 25,476; Final Government Draft: 3,630)
For more information, contact:
IPCC Press Office, Email: ipcc-media@wmo.int
Werani Zabula +41 79 108 3157 or Nina Peeva +41 79 516 7068
(Follow IPCC on Facebook, Twitter , LinkedIn and Instagram)
Notes for editors
The Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 ºC , known as SR15, is being prepared in response to an invitation from the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in December 2015, when they reached the Paris Agreement, and will inform the Talanoa Dialogue at the 24th Conference of the Parties (COP24). The Talanoa Dialogue will take stock of the collective efforts of Parties in relation to progress towards the longterm goal of the Paris Agreement, and to inform the preparation of nationally determined contributions. Details of the report, including the approved outline, can be found on the report page. The report was prepared under the joint scientific leadership of all three IPCC Working Groups, with support from the Working Group I Technical Support Unit.
What is the IPCC?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the UN body for assessing the science related to climate change. It was established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UN Environment) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988 to provide policymakers with regular scientific assessments concerning climate change, its implications and potential future risks, as well as to put forward adaptation and mitigation strategies. It has 195 member states.
IPCC assessments provide governments, at all levels, with scientific information that they can use to develop climate policies. IPCC assessments are a key input into the international negotiations to tackle climate change. IPCC reports are drafted and reviewed in several stages, thus guaranteeing objectivity and transparency.
The IPCC assesses the thousands of scientific papers published each year to tell policymakers what we know and don't know about the risks related to climate change. The IPCC identifies where there is agreement in the scientific community, where there are differences of opinion, and where further research is needed. It does not conduct its own research.
To produce its reports, the IPCC mobilizes hundreds of scientists. These scientists and officials are drawn from diverse backgrounds. Only a dozen permanent staff work in the IPCC's Secretariat.
The IPCC has three working groups: Working Group I, dealing with the physical science basis of climate change; Working Group II, dealing with impacts, adaptation and vulnerability; and Working Group III, dealing with the mitigation of climate change. It also has a Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories that develops methodologies for measuring emissions and removals.
IPCC Assessment Reports consist of contributions from each of the three working groups and a Synthesis Report. Special Reports undertake an assessment of cross-disciplinary issues that span more than one working group and are shorter and more focused than the main assessments.
Sixth Assessment Cycle
At its 41st Session in February 2015, the IPCC decided to produce a Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). At its 42nd Session in October 2015, it elected a new Bureau that would oversee the work on this report and Special Reports to be produced in the assessment cycle. At its 43rd Session in April 2016, it decided to produce three Special Reports, a Methodology Report and AR6.
The Methodology Report to refine the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories will be delivered in 2019. Besides Global Warming of 1.5ºC, the IPCC will finalize two further special reports in 2019: the Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate and Climate Change and Land: an IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems. The AR6 Synthesis Report will be finalized in the first half of 2022, following the three working group contributions to AR6 in 2021.
For more information, including links to the IPCC reports, go to: www.ipcc.ch
#42
#43
OpEdNews - 10/10/2017 - From Alternet
"What the Corporate News Industry Won't Ever Tell Its Audience.
Only people power can defeat the oligarchy that's seized our nation."
By Thom Hartmann:
We were watching the TV at the airline departure area.
"Is it a terrorist incident?" Wolf Blitzer asked. Nobody knows, was the apparent answer.
"Something's happened to the news," a woman around my age at the DC airport, said to Louise and me. "I don't know what it is, but we used to actually know a lot of detail about a lot of things going on, 30 years ago, and now it seems like all the media does is focus on one or two stories all day long and I feel like I'm uninformed."
"Like eating junk food?" I said.
"Yeah, exactly. Empty calories. Why doesn't the news give me the news?"
Louise and I were sitting in front of a TV watching CNN, which was doing hour-long (perhaps day-long?) coverage of a possible terrorist incident in London (turned out it was a traffic accident). Louise shook her head. "Now you've got him started," she said.
The woman, an employee of the airline, looked interested.
"Used to be," I said, "that radio and TV stations had to deliver actual news in order to retain their over-the-air broadcast license. It was called 'the fairness doctrine,' and Reagan stopped enforcing it in '87 and the Obama administration's FCC removed it altogether. Then the media consolidated like crazy, in part because Reagan had stopped enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and no president since Jimmy Carter broke up AT&T has been willing to put it back into effect, and in part because of the media deregulation that Clinton signed in 1996."
"So?" she asked. "Why does that mean that all we get now is nonstop hype and opinion-drivel?"
"It used to be that the metric news organizations used to determine if they were 'doing their job' was how well the American public was informed. That was actually a serious metric, pre-1987, because your station's license depended on it. The public could -- and did -- complain that they weren't being well-informed, and stations jumped when those FCC complaints came in. But now, the only metric the 'news' business uses is how many viewers they have and, thus, how profitable they are for advertisers."
"But why does that mean all we get are the disasters and the dramas of Donald Trump and other crap like that?" She'd expanded her universe of media complaints.
I remembered a lesson that Bob Brakeman, the news director at WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, Michigan, where I used to work in the 1970s as a beat reporter and studio news presenter, taught me.
"When you're choosing what goes into your newscast, remember that there are three buckets of news," Bob, one of the best news guys I ever worked for, said (as best I can remember). "First, there are the facts: who, what, where, when, why, and how. Second is drama: who is hurt or hurting, who is angry, who is happy, who is trying to do what to whom. And the third is sports: who is winning and who is losing."
"Got that," I said. "So how do I determine what goes into a story?"
"The facts are the most important," Bob said. "The drama and sports, unless they're at the core of the story itself, just add to the interest appeal of the story. The drama could be interviewing a family who just lost their home to a tornado, or the sports could be who's expected to win or lose an election. But both should always be subordinate to the facts."
I explained this to our new friend in her airline uniform. "Okay," she said. "What happened to the facts?"
"Advertising," I said. "I remember driving down the autobahn in Germany in 1987 listening to American Forces Radio when the reporter announced that, because of Reagan's change in the Fairness Doctrine, CBS had moved their news division under the supervision of their entertainment division, and the other networks were expected to soon follow. So, now, networks don't give a damn at all about 'the facts' or 'what Americans need to know' to be informed and active citizens. They only care about what's going to get the most eyeballs. And that will always first be drama and sports."
"This is why we have Trump," Louise added. "As a reality TV-show star, he's an expert at delivering what Bob called 'drama' and 'sports' to the TV news networks. Who's in, who's out; who's ahead, who's behind. The media loved it, and gave him $2 billion in free TV time, while making billions themselves in advertising because he increased their ratings. Les Moonves, the head of CBS, actually bragged about how much money they were making by hyper-covering Trump in a stockholder phone call."
"The average American has no meaningful understanding of what's happening anywhere else in the world," I said, "nor do they realize what's being done right now in front of us by the EPA, Interior, and other government agencies that are taking apart over 70 years of work to clean up our world and build a middle class."
"I've noticed this on NPR," the airline woman said. "I used to love listening to their in-depth reporting, and particularly their investigative reporting. But now I'm hearing more and more spin from think-tanks, and less and less about the details of legislation and news."
"In 1996, NPR busted Archer Daniels Midland for a huge fraud," I said. "But the Republicans have now cut their funding so badly that today, with only 7 percent of their budget coming from the government, that they no longer take on corporate malfeasance, but instead beg for corporate money with great enthusiasm. They even publish lists of who's paying, some would say, to influence their broadcasting."
"Same as corporate news?"
"Pretty much. Seen or heard ads for oil and natural gas companies? Defense contractors? You want to buy an oil well or a F-35? Unlikely. But they want that money delivered to the networks, so they won't do any sort of investigative reporting on the fossil fuel or defense industries. Or pharma. Everybody's metric nowadays is clicks or viewers that can be delivered to advertisers for money. Nobody much cares about whether the American people are informed enough to make an intelligent vote."
"So, where do we get real news?" our new friend asked.
"My answer a few weeks ago would have been to look on the internet, but Google and Facebook have so locked down what news sources are allowed to get through their search/sort algorithms that it's hard to get anything that's not 'corporate-friendly news.'"
"I thought the internet was neutral," she said.
"In 1996, NPR busted Archer Daniels Midland for a huge fraud," I said. "But the Republicans have now cut their funding so badly that today, with only 7 percent of their budget coming from the government, that they no longer take on corporate malfeasance, but instead beg for corporate money with great enthusiasm. They even publish lists of who's paying, some would say, to influence their broadcasting."
"Same as corporate news?"
"Pretty much. Seen or heard ads for oil and natural gas companies? Defense contractors? You want to buy an oil well or a F-35? Unlikely. But they want that money delivered to the networks, so they won't do any sort of investigative reporting on the fossil fuel or defense industries. Or pharma. Everybody's metric nowadays is clicks or viewers that can be delivered to advertisers for money. Nobody much cares about whether the American people are informed enough to make an intelligent vote."
"So, where do we get real news?" our new friend asked.
"My answer a few weeks ago would have been to look on the internet, but Google and Facebook have so locked down what news sources are allowed to get through their search/sort algorithms that it's hard to get anything that's not 'corporate-friendly news.'"
"I thought the internet was neutral," she said.
"The internet isn't neutral any more," I said, "because of these corporate behemoths. And it's going to get a lot worse when Ajit Pai and his FCC decide that your internet service provider -- the company that brings internet into your home -- can decide to block or slow down sites they don't agree with...and all of today's successful ISPs are large, politically active, 'conservative' corporations."
I added: "When the only metric is profit, everything can be explained by profit. And profit doesn't give a damn about morality or democracy or you or me or even the future of our nation or world. It's essentially a sociopathic business model, which works out really well for sociopathic politicians and the sociopathic polluters who own them -- and the media they lavish billions onto."
"What do we do?" she said.
"End Reaganism," I said. "Start enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, break up the big media, put back into place local media ownership rules, and have Congress say explicitly that the Net Neutrality that's the law in every other civilized country on earth should also be the law here."
"And how do we do that?" she aske.
"Get politically active. Only people power can defeat the oligarchy that's seized our nation."
She shook her head skeptically. "I've gotta get back to work."
We left to board our flight.
#44
Coalage3, Not to mention the fact, if you are given grants to show an effect the provider wants to see, why would you kill the goose that laid the golden egg?
#45
Good morning DianeR,
My laugh of the day is watching all the clips of Harry Reid, The Clintons, Obama all talking about why we need to stop the flow of immigration. Were they lying then or are they lying now?
The bummer in Ca. is we don't even have a Republican to vote for in the Senate.... 2 Democrats running. Thats how Di Fi has stayed in office for so long.
Hope your day is full of treats...no tricks. enjoy and watch out for the ghouls!
#46
HotCoffee, Your timing is perfect.
This year I am going as a democrat.
https://www.someecards.com/usercards/viewcard/MjAxMi1mZjNmY2ZkMTkxZTUwYWM4/
#47
LOL ....not me I was one in real life....silly me!
I think I'll go as a cat.
http://stateofthenation2012.com/?p=107089
#48
#49
OpEdNews - 10/3/2017 - From Alternet
"So Few Americans Understand What the Second Amendment Is Really About -- or Its Dark History.
The Second Amendment is an anachronism that's no longer relevant today."
By Thom hartmann:
With the crazed assault in Las Vegas that killed over 50 and wounded hundreds as only the most recent example, America's gun violence problem has reached a breaking point. While we can talk all we want about assault weapons bans, universal background checks and terror watch lists, there's only one real solution to this problem: We need to repeal the Second Amendment.
This, of course, is completely unacceptable to Republicans, but that's because they don't know the real history of the Second Amendment, and the real history of the Second Amendment is as ugly as it gets.
Thanks to corporate media's unquestioning regurgitation of right-wing talking points, most Americans think that Second Amendment is in the Constitution to protect the rights of individual gun owners from the government.
But that's not even remotely true.
The "Second Amendment" as we know it today is a legal fiction invented by the gun industry and their buddies on the Supreme Court and sold to Americans by an expensive multi-decade-long PR campaign.
Despite what you might hear on Fox So-Called news, there actually was no "individual right to own a gun" until 2008, when the Supreme Court said there was in its decision in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller.
That decision, which struck down Washington, D.C.'s handgun ban, was the culmination of a decades-long push by the gun industry to twist the Second Amendment into something that would help it sell more weapons, and it had zero basis in real Constitutional history.
It's what former Chief Justice Warren Burger called a "fraud on the American public," and it's a fraud that now makes it very, very hard to put in place sensible gun control laws.
So, if the Second Amendment wasn't originally about protecting gun rights, why is it in the U.S. Constitution? What were the Founders thinking?
Well, the first and most obvious answer, and the one accepted by most historians, is that they were trying to prevent the existence of a standing army during times of peace.
were scholars of classical history, and they knew that history teaches that when given too much power, armies, repeatedly and throughout history, would overthrow democracy and put in place a military dictatorship. There's even a phrase to describe it: a military coup.
As James Madison told the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention in 1787,
"'A standing military force' will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.
"With this situation in mind, the Founders wrote the Second Amendment, which says that, 'A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.'"
The key word here is "Militia."
At the time the Bill of Rights was written, America had no real professional army, and what military it did have was in the form of 13 separate state militias.
The Founders saw these militias as the best check against the rise of the standing army, and so they wrote the Second Amendment to make sure that they were always protected. But that's only part of the story.
By protecting the militias, the Founders weren't just preventing or trying to prevent the rise of mischief by a standing army; they were also protecting the institution of slavery that was the key to the southern economy. In states like Georgia, Virginia and the Carolinas, militias were also known as slave patrols.
And after the Constitution was written, southern slave-owners, led by Patrick Henry (Virginia's biggest slave owner) started freaking out that their slaves could be constitutionally freed and then drafted by the federal government, which was given the power under Article 1, Section 8 to raise a national militia.
The slave-owners worried that this national militia would eventually be used by Northern anti-slavery types to destroy the slave patrols and maybe even the institution of slavery itself. So what did those slave-owners do?
They had the Founders write into the Second Amendment specific protections for slave patrols.
These protections aren't obvious, but they're there, and we know this because of the difference between James Madison's original draft of the Second Amendment and the final version included in the Bill of Rights. Madison's original version of the Second Amendment reads as follows:
"The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person."
This version of the Second Amendment didn't fit well with slave-owners because it included words like "country," words they felt could be used to justify the creation of a national militia that would include freed slaves -- a backdoor way for a Northern president to free Southern slaves. And so Patrick Henry lobbied James Madison to rewrite the Second Amendment into the version we know today.
He spoke passionately at the Virginia Ratifying Convention:
"If the country be invaded, a state may go to war," Henry said, "but cannot suppress [slave] insurrections [under this new Constitution]. If there should happen an insurrection of slaves, the country cannot be said to be invaded. They cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition of Congress ... Congress, and Congress only [under this new Constitution], can call forth the militia."
He added:
"In this state [of Virginia], there are two hundred and thirty-six thousand blacks, and there are many in several other states. But there are few or none in the Northern States ... May Congress not say, that every black man must fight? Did we not see a little of this last war? We were not so hard pushed as to make emancipation general; but acts of Assembly passed that every slave who would go to the army should be free."
As Michael R. Burch wrote, "Henry was obviously convinced that the power granted the federal government in the new Constitution could be used to strip the slave states of their slave control militias. He anticipated exactly what Abraham Lincoln would end up doing:
"'They will search that paper [the Constitution],' Henry said, 'and see if they have power of manumission. And have they not, sir? Have they not power to provide for the general defence and welfare? May they not think that these call for the abolition of slavery?
"'May they not pronounce all slaves free, and will they not be warranted by that power? This is no ambiguous implication or logical deduction. The paper speaks to the point: they have the power in clear, unequivocal terms, and will clearly and certainly exercise it. This [slavery] is a local matter, and I can see no propriety in subjecting it to Congress.'"
To satisfy Henry, James Madison changed the word "country" to the word "state," a change Patrick Henry demanded to make it explicitly clear that the Constitution protected the state militia (aka slave patrol) in Virginia.
The big picture here isn't a pretty one: The Second Amendment, which is now used by the weapons industry to justify selling weapons of war to civilians, was originally created, at least in part, to help preserve slavery in the South. You really couldn't ask for a better metaphor for everything that's challenging about America and its history.
But here's the thing: we don't need to be trapped by that history.
Ever since it was ratified, Americans have repeatedly changed parts of the Constitution that don't match up with the times. We've changed electoral rules so that the person who comes in second place in a presidential race no longer becomes vice president, we've given women the right to vote; we've given black people full citizenship; we made alcohol illegal, and then re-amended the Constitution to make it legal. These are just a few examples of ways in which we've broken with our past and moved toward a better future.
It's time we did the same with the Second Amendment.
At its best, the Second Amendment is an anachronism that's no longer relevant in an era in which the United States has a standing army but remains a democracy. At its worst, it's a tool for slave-owners that's now being used by the weapons industry to prevent any and all sensible gun laws.
There's only one way out of this mess: it's time to repeal the Second Amendment.
#50
DianeR,
http://bitsofwisdom.org/2018/10/31/advice-from-a-pumpkin/
Thom's Blog Is On the Move
By webmaster
Hello All
Thom's blog in this space and moving to a new home.
Please follow us across to hartmannreport.com - this will be the only place going forward to read Thom's blog posts and articles.
Images of Thom
Mueller's favorite place to pray (written about in "Prophet's Way"), and the roof of the room where the Last Supper is reputed to have happened.
At Mondragon - both the mountain and the cooperative city - in Spain (written about in "Threshold" book)
From The Thom Hartmann Reader:
"In an age rife with media-inspired confusion and political cowardice, we yearn for a decent, caring, deeply human soul whose grasp of the problems confronting us provides a light by which we can make our way through the quagmire of lies, distortions, pandering, and hollow self-puffery that strips the American Dream of its promise. How lucky we are, then, to have access to the wit, wisdom, and willingness of Thom Hartmann, who shares with us here that very light, grown out of his own life experience."
From Cracking the Code:
"Thom Hartmann ought to be bronzed. His new book sets off from the same high plane as the last and offers explicit tools and how-to advice that will allow you to see, hear, and feel propaganda when it's directed at you and use the same techniques to refute it. His book would make a deaf-mute a better communicator. I want him on my reading table every day, and if you try one of his books, so will you."
From Screwed:
"Thom Hartmann’s book explains in simple language and with concrete research the details of the Neo-con’s war against the American middle class. It proves what many have intuited and serves to remind us that without a healthy, employed, and vital middle class, America is no more than the richest Third World country on the planet."
October 29, 2018
"It’s a Right-Wing Cover-Up: Trump Was a Big Inspiration for the Synagogue Slaughter in Pittsburgh.
We can’t let them conceal the motive for the killings, which lead back to Trump."
By Thom Hartmann / Independent Media Institute:
It’s already started. They’re messaging, texting, tweeting, and even calling into my radio/TV show. Breitbart is even bragging that they got it on CNN.
“This killing in Pittsburgh has nothing to do with Donald Trump. He’s not an anti-Semite; his daughter converted to Judaism and his grandkids are Jews! How can you blame him for the ‘mentally ill’ guy [a phrase used to describe terrorists only when they’re white]?”
But the shooter, by his own words—words that are almost entirely missing from most TV coverage—acted because of what both Trump and Newt Gingrich have said was the main election-year message of Trump and the entire Republican Party: Immigration by people of color.
As the terrorist himself posted on social media just a few hours before he walked into the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh with an AR-15, he was going to kill members of a congregation that supported the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS).
HIAS (whose slogan is “Welcome the stranger; Protect the refugee”) had designated October 19 and 20 of this year as the “National Refugee Shabbat”—and when they did so, the terrorist posted on a right-wing social media site, “Why hello there HIAS! You like to bring in hostile invaders to dwell among us? We appreciate the list of friends you have provided.”
HIAS was founded in New York in 1881 to help resettle Jewish refugees, but in recent years has moved many of its efforts toward other refugees, including people from Africa, the Americas, and people who practice Islam. As HIAS’s president, Mark Hetfield, told the New York Times, “We used to welcome refugees because they were Jewish. Today HIAS welcomes refugees because we are Jewish.”
Dark skin and “Muslim” are triggers for bigots like the cowardly terrorist and his buddies on social media. In another post, presumably referencing HIAS, he wrote, “Open you [sic] Eyes! It’s the filthy evil jews [sic] Bringing the Filthy evil Muslims into the Country!!”
HIAS used to have a link on its website to the 270 congregations in 32 states that were participating in the work to bring refugees into the United States (and elsewhere), although that link now just points back to their homepage (perhaps because the event is over, or maybe because of the terrorist’s threat).
Noting the terrorist’s pointing out that link to the congregations, which included Tree of Life in Pittsburgh, the Times of Israel reported, “To mark the organization’s personal involvement, at the back of the hall, information on volunteer opportunities in the refugee and immigration committees of participating synagogues and HIAS materials were available for attendees to take home, including a bookmark with the words ‘My People Were Refugees Too.’”
Apparently this festered with the terrorist, because just a few hours before he walked past those brochures and started murdering people at Tree of Life, he posted to a right-wing social media site, “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
And in he went, guns blazing.
So, Trump and Gingrich and Fox are giving all-day, all-the-time coverage to a ragtag band of Central American refugees, mostly women and children, who are traveling together on foot for their own mutual safety, lying that there are Arab terrorists and evil gang members among them. This white American terrorist gets increasingly agitated by it all, freaked out that more people of color (or even Muslims!) might be coming to our border to legally apply to asylum, and decides it’s time to take out one of the groups associated with HIAS, who is helping refugees.
It’s a straight line—through Fox and right-wing hate radio—from Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants to the terrorist himself.
Certainly this terrorist had a history of hating Jews; he had repeatedly posted on one of his snowflake “safe places” for haters, “Kill all the Jews!” and “There is no MAGA as long as there is a kike infestation.”
But this wasn't entirely an anti-Semitic attack, by the attacker’s own words.
A few days after another white terrorist (“history of mental illness,” said the media) with Trump and Fox graphics and slogans all over his van attempted the largest political assassination in U.S. history, we now have the single most lethal attack on Jews in this country’s history—in part because their synagogue supported helping immigrants coming into America.
And all of it being amped up, day after day, over and over again, by Trump.
This aspect of xenophobic immigrant-hating, along with the insanity of the U.S. allowing AR-15s and other weapons of war on our streets, must be discussed along with the horrors of anti-Semitism.
This is all one package brought to us by Trump, and it’s beginning to eerily resemble a previous insecure man with little hands, a single testicle, and a big mouth in the 1930s who warned his people about both immigrants and Jews.
We all know how well that turned out for Germany and the world.
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/its-right-wing-cover-trump-was-big-inspiration-synagogue-slaughter-pittsburgh