Joni Ernst's measles solution: yep, it's bread bags

February 3, 2015

Dingbat Iowa senator's letter eschews vaccinations

By Andy Borowitz

Credit Photograph by Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via Getty

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) — On Tuesday, Senator Joni Ernst (R.-Iowa) responded to the recent measles outbreak with the following letter to the American people:

Hi, it’s Joni!

In recent days, you’ve heard about a measles outbreak among children who have not been vaccinated. Like many Americans, you have probably been asking, “How would Joni solve this problem?”

Some in the media have suggested that politicians should not have opinions about vaccinations because we’re not scientists. Excuse me, but that’s like saying people shouldn’t have opinions about flowers because they’re not bees.

The fact is, many parents are concerned about vaccinations, and for a valid reason: they’ve read something bad about them on the Internet. But the good news is that there’s an alternative to vaccinations that’s cheap, readily available, and totally safe: bread bags.

Take a look at a bread bag. It’s made out of plastic, which means that no microscopic virus can get through it, unless there’s a hole in the bag. That’s why, every morning, my parents sent me to school with bread bags on my hands.

You see, measles are a hand-borne virus. You can only catch them through contact with someone’s measles-infected hand. If every child in America would go to school with bread bags on their hands, why, before you know it, measles would go the way of the Macarena (a dance that used to be very popular but has pretty much disappeared).

Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? Maybe because there’s big money behind vaccinations but not behind bread bags. No one makes money on bread bags. They just come with the bread.

So do Joni a favor. Tomorrow, send your kids to school with bread bags on their hands. As my mom used to say, “Joni, if there’s a problem bread bags can’t solve, it’s probably not a problem.”

To your health,

Joni

P.S. Important! This will only work if there are no holes in the bags.

Super-Rich Can’t Hide from the Rest of Us

The world's rich and influential people are running scared to idyllic places trying to fend off human wrongdoing. With growing inequality and the civil unrest, are the rich "preparing for the consequences?”

Madness propelled by an orgy of greed and brutality

Published: February 3, 2015 | Authors: Michael Winship | BillMoyers.com | Op-Ed

My friend Craig Zobel just premiered his new movie at the Sundance Film Festival.Z for Zachariah is based on a young adult novel from the seventies about a post-apocalyptic world and a woman who lives on a farm in a remote valley. A geographic anomaly, the valley has been isolated and protected from the nuclear radiation that devastated the rest of humanity. But then a man arrives and, a while later, another. You’ll have to see it.

Craig’s movie is the latest in a long line of such stories about faraway, idyllic places trying to fend off human wrongdoing – from Aristophanes’ Cloud Cuckoo Land and the pre-serpent-and-apple Garden of Eden to the Shangri-La of James Hilton’s novel, Lost Horizon. In the classic, 1937 movie version, Shangri-La’s High Lama says to the hero, a British diplomat, “Look at the world today. Is there anything more pitiful? What madness there is! What blindness! What unintelligent leadership! A scurrying mass of bewildered humanity, crashing headlong into each other, propelled by an orgy of greed and brutality.” Sounds like a typical night at Fox News. 

Z for Zachariah was filmed on New Zealand’s South Island, about as close to a distant Paradise on Earth as I’ve ever been. Which apparently is part of the reason why, according to former hedge fund director Robert Johnson, “I know hedge fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway.”

And not just a getaway for a couple of weeks of vacation fun. No, the British newspaper The Guardian reports, “With growing inequality and the civil unrest from Ferguson and the Occupy protests fresh in people’s mind, the world’s super rich are already preparing for the consequences.”

In other words, they’re getting ready to run away from the mess they’ve helped create. But instead of holding off the barbarians at the gates, they are the barbarians. Take your ill-gotten gains behind the walls of your Fortress of Solitude, you ubermensches, and pull up the drawbridge behind you.

Johnson’s remarks about hedge fund managers seeking refuge were made at another greed fest, the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, high in the Alps, the perfect combination of attitude and altitude. He’s head of the Institute of New Economic Thinking, a board member of both the Economic Policy Institute and the Campaign for America’s Future, and a former managing director at Soros Fund Management.

Jim Wallis, founder and president of the Christian social justice organization Sojourners, was at Davos, too, and has a more benign view of the proceedings. He’s on the conference’s Global Action Values Council, which holds daily sessions on ethics. But writing in The Huffington Post, he, too, saw evidence that the rich and influential are running scared:

“Those who control the world seemed to feel, and be, out of control and unsure how to deal with growing and frightening global instabilities and the violence that keeps emerging. Terrorism and blatant inexcusable barbarism arise out of grievances and injustices that nobody wants to confront or seem to know how to address. In theological language, sin begets sin, and we don’t seem to know how to deal with that.”

Robert Johnson recognizes that rampant inequality could be the death of us all. “People need to know there are possibilities for their children, that they will have the same opportunity as anyone else,” he said at Davos. Johnson continued, “There is a wicked feedback loop. Politicians who get more money tend to use it to get even more money.”

That’s the money they get from the plutocrats who pull their strings; in the past three elections alone, the financial sector has given $256 million to Republicans and $153 million to Democrats. USA Today recently editorialized, “Wall Street got its swagger back not long after the bailout, which is no surprise. Its culture is built on greed and ego. What is more surprising is how quickly Congress again became Wall Street’s errand boy.”

That’s not really surprising either. Dangle enough cash before their hungry eyes and most elected officials turn into Labradoodles begging for stray bits of bacon. In exchange for treats, in just the last few weeks, the wealthy have been granted a ten-fold increase in campaign contribution limits, a weakening of the Dodd-Frank bank reform law, proposed legislation to hinder environmental and other safety regulations by weighing them down with burdensome cost-benefit analyses, and the move to fast-track trade treaties that will make the rich richer while sucking more jobs from America. And that’s on top of the tax breaks and loopholes that have allowed the one percent to horde excess billions, rather than paying their fair share of taxes or investing those dollars in jobs and better wages, education, infrastructure, rebuilding the middle class and helping the poor.

Instead of spending their mega-fortunes on luxury hiding places to escape the mob, better to use that money to improve the conditions that have the populace thinking about tar and feathers or worse. But no, as DePaul University’s Paul Buchheit writes, “Even though corporate profits are at their highest level in 85 years, corporations aren’t pumping it back into the economy. Instead, they’re holding it. S&P companies last year spent an incredible 95% of their profits on stock buybacks to enrich executives and shareholders.” Wages grew just 1.7 percent last year, “the slowest rate since at least the 1960s,” Bryce Covert at ThinkProgress reports. “That’s not because American workers are slacking off, though. While they have seen an entire decade of stagnant or falling wages, they’ve increased their productivity by nearly 25 percent.”

We’ve learned this past week that 16 million kids in this country relied on food stamps last year — that’s one in five, a rate higher than before the financial meltdown. We’ve learned that, as Buchheit notes, “almost two-thirds of polled Americans said they didn’t have enough money to cover a $500 repair bill or a $1,000 emergency room visit.” And that, as economist Justin Wolfers writes atThe New York Times, “The concentration of income among the richest Americans remains at levels last seen nearly a century ago… so far all of the gains of the recovery have gone to the top 1 percent.”

Meanwhile, Michael Fletcher at The Washington Post observes, “… black families who worked painstakingly to climb into the middle class are seeing their financial foundation for future generations collapse.” And across the country, a Los Angeles Times headline reads, “More homeless camps are appearing beyond L.A.’s skid row.” The paper’s Gale Holland reports:

“Over the last two years, street encampments have jumped their historic boundaries in downtown Los Angeles, lining freeways and filling underpasses from Echo Park to South Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, a city-county agency, received 767 calls about street encampments in 2014, up 60% from the 479 in 2013.”

Unlike the rich – especially the ones who, according to a Pew Research Center poll, think the “poor have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return” – these impoverished, desperate people have no place safe to hide.

And as for those hedge managers Johnson was describing at Davos, the wealthy ones buying up those remote retreats far from the madding crowd, they shouldn’t be hiding out of fear. They should be hiding out of shame.

Jazz doubleheader this weekend

Friday February 6th, 5 - 7 pm, trumpeter "Dr Jass" Claudio Zamorano joins the Fossil Creek Gang for a "First Friday" affair. 

A $5 donation gets you a stuffed potato dinner plate and refreshments, but the performance is free. The Fossil Creek Gang is composed of Dale and Suzanne Knighton on guitar, bass, banjo and vocals, and Gerry Reynolds on drums. They will be performing popular early-era Dixieland and blues tunes. Many will remember Dale & Suzanne as they were quite popular in their own group, "Whitewater."

Sunday February 8th, 3 pm, guitarist Ted Goddard joins the Frank Smith Quartet to perform "mainstream" jazz from the mid to late 20th century -- tunes you know, that swing and you will recall hearing from the greatest jazz period in this country. 
 
Ted Goddard's professional experience includes working with dozens of major artists, (Rita Moreno, Charlie Pride, Dinah Shore, Glen Campbell are just a few) and he is considered a major artist himself. Frank Smith is a sensational musician on piano, sax and flute, and he supported by the supreme bassist, Steve Douglas, and drummer Gerry Reynolds.  A $5 donation at the door includes refreshments. The CPC is the best entertainment value in town!
 
BOTH EVENTS AT COMMUNITY PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, 800 W. MAIN STREET, PAYSON, AZ

Alcatraz: A prison as Disneyland

Prisons expose the dark heart of America. Alcatraz is about state-sanctioned sadism and dehumanization, but it's the story the state does not want you to hear.

Published: December 2, 2014 | Authors: Chris Hedges | Truthdig | Op-Ed

nationofchange.org 

SAN FRANCISCO—I took the ferry from Pier 33 on San Francisco’s Embarcadero toAlcatraz. I stepped onto the island from the gangway, walked up the hill to the old prison entrance and was given a portable audio guide. I spent two hours going through the corridors and cells where horrific suffering and trauma crushed human beings. Alcatraz purportedly had the highest insanity rate of any federal penitentiary of its era.

I was regaled through the headset with stories about famous Alcatraz inmates includingAl Capone, Robert “Birdman” Stroud and George “Machine Gun” Kelly, escape attempts, the 1946 armed uprising that was ruthlessly put down by the Marine Corps, and intrepid FBI agents who hunted down the nation’s most notorious criminals and brought them to justice. In this binary, cartoon narrative of good guys and bad guys, of cops and gangsters, even the repugnant J. Edgar Hoover was resurrected as a virtuous symbol of law and order.

At the end of the tour—5,000 people a day, some 1.4 million a year, visit the prison—we were funneled into the gift shop. It was possible to buy T-shirts, replica blue prisoner shirts, replica tin prison cups and other Alcatraz souvenirs. We were encouraged to take cards from a wooden rack and mail them to foreign governments on behalf of selected prisoners of conscience. The message was clear: In the United States those in prison deserve it; in foreign lands they are imprisoned unjustly. The Disneyfication of Alcatraz is the equivalent of turning one of Stalin’s gulags into a prison-themed amusement park. Prisons are institutionalized evil. And whitewashing evil is a moral monstrosity.

The Alcatraz narrative as presented by the National Park Service ignores the savagery and injustice of America’s system of mass incarceration, in which we today imprison 25 percent of all the world’s prisoners although Americans are only 5 percent of the global population. It ignores our decades-long use of torture, isolation and trauma to turn prisoners into psychological cripples. It ignores that most prisoners are poor and never had adequate legal defense. It ignores how people of color in our urban “internal colonies” are worth nothing on the streets but, in cages, each generates $40,000 to $50,000 a year for corporations. It ignores that prisoners are repeatedly punished and given longer sentences not for crimes they committed while free but for amorphous infractions such as “disrespect” and “agitation” done in prison. It ignores the prison system’s one-sided “justice” that denies prisoners a fair hearing. It ignores that a guard is God, that he or she can verbally and physically abuse a prisoner without repercussions. It ignores that prisons are despotic fiefdoms. It ignores the daily humiliation, despair and pain of those trapped inside. It ignores that prisoners who initially believe in the system, who think justice is possible, are usually the first to have psychological breakdowns or commit suicide. It ignores—and here is the greatest crime—the deep and profound humanity of many of the prisoners themselves, who are as caring, intelligent and loving as those outside the walls. It ignores, finally, who we are as a nation, how callous and brutal we are to the dispossessed and how we revel in stories of violence and human degradation.

This excitement, and this fictitious narrative of good and evil, is possible only if we see prisoners as less than human. And this is a task perfected to an art at Alcatraz by the National Park Service, and by popular culture. Anyone who truly grasped what took place at Alcatraz, and what is taking place in prisons across the country, would weep.

I thought, as I stepped away from the gaggles of tourists and stood alone in an open cell, of the students I teach in prison. How would they have reacted? What would they have felt about the tourists who lapped up the stories of crime and retribution? What trauma and pain would they have experienced upon stepping once again into an isolation cell? My students think of themselves as slaves—under the 13th Amendment prisoners are forced to work for no pay or perhaps for as little as a dollar a day. They see prisons as replicating the power structure of plantations. And listening to the audio-guide stories would, for them, be like a former slave taking a tour of his or her old plantation while being fed tales of shiftless and lazy “Negroes” in the cotton fields and the gallantry of Southern whites.

To anyone who has worked or been in a prison, the physical and psychological structure of Alcatraz—where there was no attempt at rehabilitation and usually a fifth of the population of about 250 was rotated in and out of isolation cells—is chillingly familiar. Prisoners as soon as they arrived at Alcatraz were forced to strip and stand naked before the guards. This ritual, repeated daily in prisons across the country, is primarily a rite of humiliation, a way to deny prisoners their dignity. Prisoners must be broken. Forcing prisoners to stand naked before the guards begins the process. Those who resisted authority in Alcatraz—and resisting authority often meant merely talking back to a guard—were thrown into isolation cells known as “the Hole.” This too is a contemporary experience.

In Alcatraz on the bottom tier of the three-tier D Block were four isolation cells. I walked into one. This is where men were locked for up to 19 days in total darkness, denied a bath and had no change of clothes. The toilet was, for a long time, an eight-inch hole in the floor. The prison often reverberated with the screams of inmates being beaten by guards in darkened isolation cells in D Block. And when those in isolation were released they were often disoriented and psychologically impaired. Many, weak and barely able to walk, were taken directly to the prison infirmary, suffering at times from pneumonia after sleeping for over two weeks on wet concrete. There were some who never left the Hole alive.

At Alcatraz there was one place worse than the Hole—the dungeon. It was not on the tour. Prisoners, if they were not broken in isolation, were hauled to a staircase in front of A Block that led downward to a heavy steel door. Behind the door were the old gun ports from the prison’s days as a fortress and later an Army prison that held Native Americans who had resisted being herded, and, during World War I, conscientious objectors. Prisoners were stripped and chained to the wall in one of two rooms near the old gun ports. They were given a bucket for a toilet that was emptied once a week. They were fed primarily bread.

The psychological destruction of prisoners was common, as it is in today’s prisons. Capone, who suffered from dementia caused by syphilis and compounded by abusive treatment, was reduced to idiocy. Guards reported finding him crouched in fear in the corner of his cell or lying on his cot weeping. At the end of his time in prison he sometimes babbled in unintelligible sounds and was incontinent. He would sit on his cot for hours in a near-catatonic state or get up at night and manically arrange and rearrange his magazines, repeatedly dress and undress or make his bed over and over.

Another prisoner, Rufe Persful, suffered from frequent delusions—he claimed there was an alligator in his cell. He attempted on several occasions to make a noose out of his sheet. He eventually took a hatchet off the side of a prison fire truck and nonchalantly hacked four fingers from one of his hands in the view of the guards. He also had intended to hack off his feet and his other hand, he told the deputy warden later in the infirmary. He was not declared insane by the prison authorities.

Joe Bowers, who robbed a post office of $16.63 and was sentenced to 25 years, cut his throat with a piece of glass from his eyeglasses but survived. He repeatedly butted his head against his cell door. He was shot to death when he partly scaled a fence in front of guards and ignored warnings to climb down.

Ed Wutke committed suicide by using the blade of a pencil sharper to cut his jugular vein.

The park service omits these stories, and many more like them, from the tour.

If an inmate did not have a prison job at Alcatraz he spent 23 or 24 hours a day in a cell, a practice that remains common throughout the U.S. prison system.

Even guards knew of prisoners who should never have been imprisoned. George H. Gregory, in his book “Alcatraz Screw: My Years as a Guard in America’s Most Notorious Prison,” tells of a prisoner he calls Kevin.

Kevin, a young black kid, was involved in some clothing-room fights. He was in prison because he did a favor for a person he didn’t know. Kevin had worked in a theater in a southern state. A man came in, handed him a small package, and told him to give it to a person who would come in and ask for it. Kevin didn’t know what was in the package. He was arrested and convicted of handling dope.

Kevin told me the story of his arrest and the thirty days he spent in quarantine. The kid was put in a dormitory with a group of aggressive studs. Unable to defend himself, he was raped five times the first night.

Relatives who visited prisoners endured a gantlet of body searches and verbal abuse from the guards. This ritual too is familiar to those who visit today’s prison population. Being with prisoners was made so unpleasant that many family members never went back, and the situation is unchanged.

I stood in the visitation room at Alcatraz and looked at a circle on the wall. It was three inches in diameter and perforated with tiny holes. The only way to be heard through the holes was to shout, meaning everyone around you, including the guards, could hear the conversation. If the prisoner and the visitor wanted to see each other they had to stand up and look through a thick,  narrow strip of glass, but when in that position they could no longer talk to each other. The system was intentionally designed for maximum frustration and embarrassment.

“Actually, there were very few visits during all the years I was on Alcatraz,” Ernie Lopez remembered in his memoir, “To Alcatraz, Death Row, and Back.” “I didn’t receive one until I had been there nine years. This was not uncommon.”

Letters from outside were reduced to three or four cryptic lines by the guards, who handed the brief note to the prisoner and destroyed the letter itself. Some prisoners never received letters that were mailed to them. The infirmary was primitive and poorly equipped. Seriously ill prisoners who were deemed escape risks were sent there to die rather than be transferred to a federal prison hospital. A dentist came only once every three months. The food, former prisoners say, was rancid, although the audio tour assured listeners it was plentiful and of high quality.

Decades in prison reduce prisoners to glassy-eyed wrecks who hold conversations with themselves and shuffle in a daze down prison corridors. Younger prisoners see these specters wandering the prison and tremble. They wonder if that is their fate. Robert Stroud, known as the “Birdman” after he adopted, cared for and published books about birds while he was a prisoner at Leavenworth, ended up at Alcatraz. Stroud, who had become nationally known for his studies of sick birds, was prohibited from rebuilding his bird sanctuary at the California institution. He was serving a life sentence for stabbing a guard to death in 1916 after the guard taunted him and stripped of his visitation privilege, meaning he could no longer see his younger brother. He was sent to Alcatraz in 1942. Of the 54 years he spent in prison, 42 were in solitary confinement.

“I remember watching him through the window when he was taken to the yard, all by himself, every week, for the one hour he was allowed outside,” Lopez wrote. “I would see him walking by himself, an old man pacing back and forth across the tiny yard. He was hunchbacked by then, and he would wear a green visor that gamblers often wear. He was a very intelligent man who knew five or six languages well, and he got As on all the courses that he took by mail from Stanford University.”

Prisons expose the dark heart of America. They expose the lie of impartial justice. They expose the raw forms of coercion, the physical and psychological torture we have institutionalized and directed mostly against our poor. Prisons are about state-sanctioned sadism and dehumanization. That is the story of Alcatraz. It is the story of all prisons in America. But it is a story the state does not want you to hear. These institutions were and are consciously designed to deform and destroy souls. And for “whoever destroys a soul,” the Talmud reminds us, “it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world.”

Time for John McCain to take a hike

Open Letter to John McCain: Get Out of Washington, You Low-Life Scum

By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News

30 January 15
readersupportednews.org

 
Dear Senator McCain,

What would you call a war veteran who answers a veteran’s question about providing more jobs to veterans by saying it’s his “highest priority,” only to vote against more jobs for veterans when he’s back in Washington? What would you call a veteran who was tortured, survived miraculously, got elected to the U.S. Senate, sent more young men to die in a foreign war, voted to deny them jobs and benefits, and yet demands the arrest and full prosecution of those who exercise the constitutional rights he supposedly fought for? To borrow phrasing from you, Senator, I would call you low-life scum.

The Code PINK protesters you called “low-life scum” during a Senate hearing this week are Americans exercising their constitutional rights to freedom of speech, which you swore an oath to defend both as a naval officer and as a member of Congress. These protesters were also within their right to make a citizens’ arrest against someone who has committed a felony – in this case, war crimes. It’s critical for you to understand why these protesters are patriotic Americans and not “low-life scum,” as you called them.

When Henry Kissinger, whom you just vociferously defended from the dais, authorized the secret bombing of Laos and Cambodia in 1969 and 1970, his actions killed over 40,000 people, including civilians who had nothing to do with the Vietnam War. Kissinger has said he did so to stop North Vietnamese troops from using Cambodia as a staging ground. However, research has shown that all Kissinger’s bombing campaign did was pave the way for the brutal Khmer Rouge to take over Cambodia, then use the B-52 bombings as propaganda to justify their cause, leading to more death and destruction. Kissinger illegally bombed a sovereign nation that we never officially declared war on, destabilized its government, and allowed a violent, autocratic regime to seize power. If that isn't a felony, I don't know what is. 

Washington D.C. statute allows for citizens’ arrests in the case of a felony. And in Code PINK’s case, war crimes are certainly a felony offense. When you called on the capitol police, it should’ve been to arrest Kissinger, not Code PINK activists. But your classless outburst during that hearing is indicative of the allegiances you hold, and the longstanding hypocrisy of your entire Congressional career.

Despite going through a war firsthand, and going on record saying “war is wretched beyond description,” you are one of the loudest voices consistently in favor of going to war with anyone at the drop of a hat. You bragged to a conservative radio host that nobody supported President Bush's war in Iraq more than you. You were the first member of the Senate to call for airstrikes on Syria. You’ve openly said you’d like to keep troops in Iraq for 100 years. You even made a joke about bombing Iran at a campaign rally. As a Vietnam veteran, haven't you had enough war for one lifetime?

Speaking of veterans, I would think that someone who has personally experienced the worst imaginable hell of war would be the first one to stand up for veterans when given the chance. But you, Senator McCain, have turned your back repeatedly on America’s veterans when they asked for even the most concrete necessities.

When the Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA) urged you to pass the Comprehensive Veterans Health and Benefits & Military Retirement Pay Restoration Act of 2014, you voted against even bringing it to the floor for debate, despite the fact that several of your Republican colleagues supported it. You claim to support better healthcare for veterans, and that bill would’ve provided that care by, among other things, expanding the Comprehensive Caregiver Assistance Program, and advanced veterans’ retirement payments even in the event of a government shutdown. As a fellow veteran who bears permanent scars of war, how could you deny your brothers and sisters at the PVA this vote?

After you came home from Vietnam, where you endured years of cruel imprisonment, solitary confinement, and torture, where would you be if you didn’t have for a father a four-star admiral who commanded all U.S. forces in Vietnam? Unlike you, many of the veterans who are lucky enough to come back from the wars you eagerly sent them off to don’t have wealthy, highly-connected families to support them when they return stateside. Almost 50,000 veterans today are struggling to survive on the streets despite serving their country. Yet when you were given multiple opportunities to show your commitment to homeless veterans, you did nothing.

When the House of Representatives passed the Homeless Veterans Reintegration Program Reauthorization Act of 2009, which would have funded the transition for veterans to go from wandering the streets to having a roof over their head, you allowed the bill to die, and said nothing. You even allowed your party to kill the Homeless Women Veterans and Homeless Veterans with Children Act of 2009, which would have provided homes for single mothers who served their countries with distinction in the military. But as bad as your inaction was on those bills, it still wasn’t your biggest slight to America’s veterans.

At the 2012 Republican National Convention, Meg Lanker-Simons, a veteran and journalist, asked you about providing more jobs to veterans, 14 percent of whom are unemployed. You responded, to her face, that you were going to “try to find more and better ways to hire veterans,” that chronic unemployment of veterans was a “national disgrace,” and that making more jobs available to veterans was your “highest priority.” But just a month later, when the Senate was voting on the Veterans Job Corps Bill, which would’ve paired veterans up with job opportunities based on their skill sets, you mocked the idea before voting it down. While your reason was that the $1 billion cost was too high, the bill would have paid for itself by $1 billion of new revenue for the office of Veterans’ Affairs. So, Mr. McCain, not only are you a hypocrite, but a liar as well. If you didn’t run for elected office to serve your fellow veterans, why did you run in the first place?

With a net worth of over $10 million, you are one of the richest members of Congress. And as everyone learned in 2008, you own 8 properties, making you one of the wealthiest 0.01 percent of Americans. During your Congressional career, you voted 19 times against increasing the minimum wage, yet in 2010, you voted to extend George W. Bush’s tax cut package. That was a complete 180 from your earlier position against it, in which you rightly called it “generous tax relief to the wealthiest individuals of our country at the expense of lower and middle-income taxpayers.” You also voted for a $700 billion bailout of the big banks that crashed our economy in 2008. Those same banks gave you almost $2 million in campaign and leadership PAC donations between 2005 and 2010, including over $50,000 from bailout king Goldman Sachs. If someone who didn’t know any better took a look at that data, they would think you’re only in office to serve yourself.

You’ve been in Washington long enough, Senator McCain, and you’ve done enough damage to veterans and working people. Either resign now with some semblance of dignity, or prepare to be thrown out of office in 2016.

Carl Gibson, 25, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin. You can contact him at carl@rsnorg.org carl@rsnorg.org, and follow him on twitter at @uncutCG.

The fight to save your Social Security

Obama's Pledge To Defend Social Security

February 2, 2015

Isaiah J. Poole

Campaign for America's Future

ourfuture.org

President Obama’s 2016 budget proposal includes language that directly confronts a Republican House maneuver to force a debate on potential Social Security benefit cuts.

It also includes a promise that the administration will “oppose any measures that privatize or weaken the Social Security system and will not accept an approach that slashes benefits for future generations or reduces basic benefits for current beneficiaries.”

That language certainly makes it sound as if the Obama administration is closer in its sympathies to people like Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) who want to strengthen Social Security than he is to the austerity lobby that insists that the only way to save Social Security is to either adopt schemes that will reduce benefits or turn it into some sort of private stock brokerage account.

There is a caveat. But before that, let’s give the administration praise where it is due.

The disability portion of the Social Security trust fund is expected to run out of money to pay full benefits late next year unless it gets an infusion of cash from the old age and survivors’ portion of the program. Such transfers have been authorized with little fuss from Congress periodically over the years. But this year, House Republicans chose to forbid such a transfer from taking place unless there was a larger deal to address the long-term solvency of the entire Social Security system.

What Republicans mean when they say that is that they want the Obama administration to sign on to a deal that would cut benefits for future Social Security recipients through a combination of raising the retirement age and reducing the inflation adjustment for benefits by using a technique called the “chained CPI,” which would make benefit checks worth less over time.

The administration in its budget today announced that it is not going to stand for holding disability benefits hostage to that debate. The 2016 budget proposes to “reallocate existing payroll tax collections between the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) and DI [disability insurance] trust funds while a longer term solution to overall Social Security solvency is developed with the Congress.”

The administration says that such a transfer would “have no effect on the … trust funds on a combined basis.”

This is a fight with the Republican Congress that is worth picking, both to protect the benefits of people with disabilities and to ensure that the debate over the future of Social Security is done with all of the options on the table – including such progressive reforms as ensuring that wealthy wage-earners pay the same percentage of their income in payroll taxes as working-class people.

The caveat is that we’ve seen that “will not accept an approach that slashes benefits” language before from the White House – at the same time the administration was offering the “chained CPI” and an increased retirement age as olive branches in fiscal negotiations with congressional conservatives.

It took loud and persistent protest from progressives to block momentum toward that approach – and that has given space for progressive lawmakers to argue that we need to be expanding Social Security, not cutting it. Those allies need more political wind in their backs in 2015. Perhaps we can use the administration’s language, in the context of its willingness to confront the House Republicans over disability benefits, to keep them on the right side of this issue.

Coral Reefs About to Crash in a Big Way

A diver documents bleached coral at the Great Barrier Reef. (photo: OceanWideImages.com)

By Tom Philpott, Grist

31 January 15

readersupportednews.org

 

oral reefs cover just 0.1 percent of the ocean floor, but provide habitat to 25 percent of sea-dwelling fish species. That’s why coral scientist C. Mark Eakin, who coordinates the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch program, is surprised that the warning he has been sounding since last year — that the globe’s corals appear to be on the verge of a mass-scale bleaching event — hasn’t drawn more media attention.

Bleaching happens when corals lose contact with zooxanthellae, an algae that essentially feeds them nutrients in symbiotic exchange for a stable habitat. The coral/zooxanthellae relationship thrives within a pretty tight range of ocean temperatures, and when water warms above normal levels, corals tend to expel their algal lifeline. In doing so, corals not only lose the brilliant colors zooxanthellae deliver — hence, “bleaching” — but also their main source of food. A bleached coral reef rapidly begins to decline. Coral can reunite with healthy zooxanthellae and recover, Eakin says, but even then they often become diseased and may die. That’s rotten news, because bleaching outbreaks are increasingly common.

Before the 1980s, large-scale coral bleaching had never been observed before, Eakin says. After that, regionally isolated bleaching began to crop up, drawing the attention of marine scientists. Then, in 1998, an unusually strong El Niño warming phase caused ocean temperatures to rise, triggering the first known global bleaching event in the Earth’s history. It whitened corals off the coasts of 60 countries and island nations, spanning the Pacific Ocean, Indian Ocean, Red Sea, Persian Gulf, Mediterranean, and the Caribbean. We functionally “lost between 15 percent and 20 percent of the world’s coral reefs” in ’98, Eakin said. Only some have recovered.

Eakin is concerned about a relapse, because the oceans are relentlessly warming, driven by climate change from ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions. As heat builds in the ocean, he says, corals become more vulnerable to bleaching.

Global Ocean Heat (photo: NOAA)

As a result, it no longer takes a classic strong El Niño to cause warming and trigger mass bleaching. This current El Niño, after starting strong last year, has essentially collapsed, in what Eakin calls a “highly unusual” pattern. Even so, the northeast Pacific is experiencing “very warm” water, he said. Overall, the oceans’ waters have warmed so much in recent years that most coral areas are “right on the verge of having enough heat stress to cause bleaching and it doesn’t take nearly as much to start one of these global-scale events,” he said. Since 1998, there have been two major beaching events, neither driven by a strong El Niño. In 2005, the Caribbean ocean experienced its worst-ever bleaching event despite a relatively tame El Niño year, and in 2010, the second-ever globe-spanning bleaching event occurred, again during a mild El Niño. It wasn’t as severe as the 1998 disaster, but unlike the earlier one, it “didn’t have a strong El Niño driving it,” Eakin says.

Which brings us to 2015. During our phone conversation, Eakin directed me to this page on NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch site. He asked me to consider the below chart, which shows the water-temperature patterns that prevailed in spring ’98 — bleaching was most severe where the color is darkest red, signifying the most severe warming.

Global Ocean Heat (photo: NOAA)

Then he directed me to the latest NOAA analysis, taken this month, that forecasts warming patterns four months into the future.

Global Ocean Heat (photo: NOAA)

He called the warning currently happening in the Indian Ocean (the one on the left in the above charts) “amazingly similar” to the situation in ’98, which foretells a warming pattern that could subject corals to a ’98-scale bleaching crisis. “If you look at where we were in 1998 and look at where we are now, you see that the ocean is primed to respond with a sustained high temperature during the warm season in a way that previously took a big El Niño, and now doesn’t,” he said.

Again, a mass bleaching doesn’t translate directly to mass coral die-off, because corals can recover. But the recovery takes decades — large corals grow about 1 centimeter per year, Eakin says — and the bleaching events are coming faster and faster, each one stalling recovery and causing new damage. The emerging pattern for large-scale events looks like this: 1998, 2005 (confined mainly to the Caribbean), 2010, and now, quite possibly, 2015.

And another facet of climate change makes recovery even more difficult, Eakins added: acidification, which comes about as the oceans sponge up more and more carbon from the atmosphere. Heightened acidity makes it harder for corals to absorb the calcium carbonate they need to build and maintain their skeletal structure.

Eakin says it will take major action to reverse climate change to save the globe’s coral reefs. Currently, carbon dioxide makes up nearly 400 parts per million of the atmosphere, and for corals to thrive, we’ll need to throttle that back to 350 ppm or possibly even 320 ppm, he said. Those are ambitious goals. Making corals resilient enough to survive until we can manage to do that, he added, will require taking action against “local stressors” that also harm them, like overfishing and pollution.

“People say corals are the rainforests of the sea. But coral reefs are more biodiverse than rainforests,” he said. “It ought to be the other way around: Rainforests are the coral reefs of the land.” And these glorious cradles of oceanic life aren’t getting any stronger. “The punch that knocks a boxer out in the ninth round doesn’t have to be as hard as the punch that would knock him out in round one,” Eakin said.