RSN | 4 Gorillas to End Climate Chaos: Election Protection, No Nukes, Defund the Military, Kill King CONG
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6004"><span class="small">Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
Wednesday, 02 October 2019 12:10
Wasserman writes: "Four gorillas block our way to survival. They demand a next step of mass action far beyond anything we can do as individuals."
Students hold signs demonstrating their support for a Green New Deal. (photo: Getty)
4 Gorillas to End Climate Chaos: Election Protection, No Nukes, Defund the Military, Kill King CONG
By Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
02 October 19
he Greta/AOC generation is marching for our place on this planet.
We can all turn off lights, get off plastic, go vegan, ride bikes, sail the Atlantic, demand eco-straws, solarize our homes.
But four gorillas block our way to survival. They demand a next step of mass action far beyond anything we can do as individuals:
1) ELECTION PROTECTION: Big corporations have stolen our democracy. When Jeb Bush ripped Florida 2000 for brother W, the corporate Democrats did nothing but rant at Ralph Nader. But Jeb was ALWAYS going to get George exactly the votes he needed. Trumputin did it in 2016. In 2020, stripped voter rolls and flipped vote counts could again steal the Electoral College. Our Mother Earth DEMANDS universal hand-counted paper ballots, easy and open registration, fair access to the polls, and much more. This year Al Gore should shift his climate organizing to election protection – and do it with Ralph.
2) NO NUKES: Reactors are killing us all. They (430 worldwide, 96 in the US) spew heat, radiation and carbon. Chernobyl killed more than a million people and cost more than a trillion dollars. Fukushima is poisoning the Pacific. More will explode. Radwaste is out of control. Fantasy designs (thorium, fusion, etc.) are absurd. All existing reactors can be replaced with cheaper, cleaner, safer, more reliable, and more job-producing solar, wind, batteries and LED/efficiency. DO IT NOW!! Before the next one blows!
3) MILITARY MADNESS: America’s imperial military (Earth’s worst polluter) wastes trillions. We need our soldiers here installing wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, efficiency/LED lighting, planting trees and hemp. The trillions wasted on worthless weapons (War is a racket!) must instead ride us to Solartopia.
4) KILL KING CONG (Coal, Oil, Nukes & Gas): WE need to own and run the fossil-nuke corporations. The “free market” is a myth. A handful of billionaires suck up our cash. Why do we bail them out while they kill us and our planet?
Corporations are not human. They care about nothing except money. We need to control, own and reshape these industrial death machines.
We need to tax heat, carbon and radiation. Plant a trillion trees and an ocean of hemp. Fund Solartopia with the military budget. Own/control these “too-big-to-fail/kill-us-all ” corporations.
NOW!
Harvey Wasserman's The People's Spiral of US History: From Deganawidah to Solartopia will be out October 1 at http://www.solartopia.org/. Harvey hosts California Solartopia at KPFK/Pacifica 90.7 fm, Los Angeles, and Green Power & Wellness at prn.fm.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
FOCUS: There's Another Whistleblower Complaint. It's About Trump's Tax Returns.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=31562"><span class="small">Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post</span></a>
Wednesday, 02 October 2019 10:45
Rampell writes: "This whistleblower alleges a whole different category of impropriety: that someone has been secretly meddling with the Internal Revenue Service's audit of the president."
The Internal Revenue Service building in Washington, D.C. (photo: Bloomberg/Getty Images)
There's Another Whistleblower Complaint. It's About Trump's Tax Returns.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
02 October 19
ey, have you heard about this whistleblower complaint?
An unnamed civil servant is alleging serious interference in government business. If the allegations are true, they could be a game-changer. They might set in motion the release of lots of other secret documents showing that President Trump has abused his authority for his personal benefit.
Wait, you thought I meant the whistleblower from the intelligence community?
Nope. I’m talking about a completely different whistleblower, whose claims have gotten significantly less attention but could prove no less consequential. This whistleblower alleges a whole different category of impropriety: that someone has been secretly meddling with the Internal Revenue Service’s audit of the president.
We don’t know exactly what he might be hiding. His bizarre behavior, though, suggests it’s really bad.
Maybe these documents would reveal something embarrassing but not criminal (e.g., the relatively puny size of his fortune). Maybe they’d reveal that some of his financial dealings are legally dubious or even fraudulent, which would be consistent with past Trump-family tax behavior.
Most significantly, they might reveal that Trump has been profiting off the presidency. Among the relevant conflict-of-interest questions that Trump’s taxes could answer: whom he gets money from, whom he owes money to (and on what terms) or how his 2017 tax overhaul enriched him personally.
Not that you’d know it from the administration’s stonewalling, but Congress actually has unambiguous authority to get Trump’s returns. In fact, it has had the authority to get any federal tax return, no questions asked, for nearly a century. Under a 1924 law, Treasury “shall furnish” any tax document requested by the House Ways and Means or Senate Finance Committee chairs.
That’s exactly what the House Ways and Means chairman, Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.), did in the spring. The statute doesn’t require him to state any legislative purpose for his request, but he provided one anyway: He said that committee needed to make sure the IRS, which it oversees, is properly conducting its annual audit of the president and vice president, as the IRS manual has required post-Watergate.
There is historical precedent for worrying about how rigorously the IRS might be auditing its own boss. In the early 1970s, the agency commended then- President Richard M. Nixon on his supposedly pristine tax filings, even though he owed about a half-million dollars in unpaid taxes and interest.
Since then, presidents have voluntarily released their tax returns. So Congress didn’t really need to worry much about whether the IRS was going easy on the president.
“The concern about the IRS’s audit is almost minimal or nonexistent if tax returns are public, because there are effectively a million auditors,” says George K. Yin, University of Virginia School of Law professor emeritus and former chief of staff of Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation. “The public can see if there’s any funny business going on.”
Current circumstances are different, of course.
Still, from an optics standpoint, this IRS-audit-oversight rationale seemed a strange one for Neal to cite. Especially because it was the primary rationale offered, and there was no reason at the time to believe the IRS was actually being bullied. So, for the first time in history, the administration refused a Ways and Means tax request, on the grounds that Neal’s stated legislative purpose was “pretextual.”
But now, in retrospect, Neal’s stated purpose looks either extremely ingenious — or extremely lucky.
That’s because this summer an anonymous whistleblower approached the House committee to say its concerns had been justified. The whistleblower offered credible allegations of “evidence of possible misconduct,” specifically “inappropriate efforts to influence” the audit of the president, according to a letter Neal sent to the treasury secretary.
We don’t know the complaint details, including who allegedly meddled with the audit or how, and whether the IRS complied. The complaint hasn’t been released, and Neal said last week that he’s still consulting with congressional lawyers about whether to make it public.
But the exact details of the allegations matter less than the fact that they corroborate Democratic lawmakers’ argument that oversight of the IRS’s annual presidential audit is indeed a legitimate reason they — and hopefully, eventually, the public — should see Trump’s taxes. It’s hard to imagine how the federal judge in this case could now rule against the committee.
As is so often true with allegations of Trumpian wrongdoing, we’ve learned once again that there’s a there there — and there, and there, and all sorts of other places you mightn’t have thought to look.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=47782"><span class="small">Paul Blest, Splinter</span></a>
Wednesday, 02 October 2019 08:29
Blest writes: "Trump cannot be blamed for the history of white supremacy in America. But his administration has so far been a close friend to the furthest fringes of the far-right-those who believe that the Second American Civil War is here, now, and that they're the only ones who both acknowledge it and are willing to die for the cause."
A member of a white supremacists militia stands near a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017. (photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
Trump's Civil War Is Already Starting
By Paul Blest, Splinter
02 October 19
ince the very beginning of the 2016 campaign, it’s been exceedingly difficult to describe anything Donald Trump has done or said as a “new low.” On Sunday, he came pretty damn close by extensively quoting Dallas pastor and Trump sycophant Robert Jeffress’ declaration on Fox News that impeachment could lead to a “civil war like fracture.”
....If the Democrats are successful in removing the President from office (which they will never be), it will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal.” Pastor Robert Jeffress, @FoxNews
Trump is in the middle of quite possibly his longest uninterrupted meltdown yet. During this meltdown, he has also threatened to have the Ukraine whistleblower whacked. So it’s safe to say that Trump has no real grasp of what’s happening around him, let alone the gravity of an American president implying that we should have Round 2 of the bloodiest conflict in American history if he’s removed from power. This is a man who’s most at home when he’s honking the horn of a big truck or complaining about how Graydon Carter was very unfair to him in the 1980s. On this one, he’s out of his league.
The much bigger problem is that the “civil war like fracture” is already here. It goes back at least to the election of Barack Obama (and its lineage back even further, to Reconstruction, the civil rights movement, and everything in between) and the right-wing reaction to the first black president. White supremacist violence has never really left us, but it’s reached new heights in the Trump era, from James Fields to Robert Bowers to Patrick Crusius and manyotherswhosenames will thankfully die in obscurity.
At best, Trump has ignored the rise of white supremacy or purposefully tried to obscure it, by comparing it to, well, those who oppose white supremacy. At worst, he’s aided and abetted it: Not even two weeks after he took office, Reuters reported that administration wanted to rename the Countering Violent Extremism program to the “Countering Radical Islamic Extremism” program and focus its efforts on groups like ISIS and lone wolves inspired by their rhetoric. (It appears that change was never actually made, but as the Brennan Center said in a report last year, CVE has targeted Muslim populations even more under Trump.) It took until September 20—yes, 10 days ago—for the Department of Homeland Security to add white supremacist terrorism to its “list of priority threats.” (DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan, in an interview with The Atlantic, said the El Paso massacre was “an attack on all of us.”)
Trump cannot be blamed for the history of white supremacy in America. But his administration has so far been a close friend to the furthest fringes of the far-right—those who believe that the Second American Civil War is here, now, and that they’re the only ones who both acknowledge it and are willing to die for the cause. And as viscerally stupid and senile as Trump is, periodically blasting out encouragement to his 65 million followers to prepare for violent conflict in the event of his removal from power just adds fuel to the fire.
At this point, it’s unclear whether Trump will leave office peacefully (either via the unlikely event of full impeachment by Congress, losing the 2020 election, or at the end of his two terms in office), let alone where the white supremacist movement goes in a post-Trump world with a rapidly deteriorating climate. The only thing that seems certain at the moment is that all of this is going to get worse before it gets better.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51741"><span class="small">Azadeh N. Shahshahani and Rev. Sadie Stone, Jacobin</span></a>
Wednesday, 02 October 2019 08:29
Excerpt: "Rodrigo Duterte's drug war has killed thousands of Filipinos. It is time for the United States to stop enabling human rights violations by ending military aid to the Philippines."
Protesters draw chalk outlines mimicking the thousands of killings happening under the Duterte presidency on November 14, 2017 in Manila, Philippines. (photo: Jes Aznar/Getty Images)
Stop US Military Aid to the Philippines
By Azadeh N. Shahshahani and Rev. Sadie Stone, Jacobin
02 October 19
Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war has killed thousands of Filipinos. It is time for the United States to stop enabling human rights violations by ending military aid to the Philippines.
his summer, The United Nations Human Rights Council approved a resolution to compile a comprehensive report on President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war, during which at least 6,700 people have been killed per official figures; human rights experts say that it is likely that more than 30,000 have been killed.
When asked whether UN investigators will be allowed entry in the Philippines, the Foreign Secretary of the Philippines, Teodoro Locsin, called the UN experts “bastards” and announced that they will not be let in to conduct the investigation.
The UN resolution is part of a pattern of international scrutiny against Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte in light of that government’s systematic human rights violations. In response to the assassination of labor leaders, a high-level mission from the International Labor Organization (ILO) is reportedly going to the Philippines next month to conduct investigations on labor-related killings. The Philippines government is not surprisingly also opposed to the investigation by the ILO.
The US government on the other hand is continuing its massive support for the Duterte regime. It is time for the United States to stop enabling human rights violations against the people of Philippines.
Recently human rights organizations in the Philippines such as Karapatan, the Rural Missionaries of the Philippines (RMP), and Gabriela have been forced to seek legal remedies after a series of red-tagging, illegal arrests, and targeted extrajudicial killings of their members and advocates. In response, the Philippines National Security Advisor, retired Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) general Hermogenes Esperon Jr, filed a lawsuit accusing these human rights organizations of perjury. This is in line with a disturbing trend of Philippines government officials using the legal system to repress, harass, and retaliate against anyone who dares defend human rights.
Additionally, the Philippines was named the second most dangerous country in the world for environmentalists. In a country that is rich in natural resources; there is a long line of exploitative, nature-ravaging multinational corporations which aim to profit from its natural wealth. The Philippines government has long acted as a facilitator for these corporations by utilizing the AFP and Philippine National Police (PNP) to stifle the struggle of environmentalists, indigenous peoples, and farmers’ rights defenders. In 2017, the year following Duterte’s election, there was a 71 percent rise in the killings of activists and advocates.
Last year, an International Peoples Tribunal was held in Brussels, Belgium to delve into the human rights violations and US government support. Based on numerous testimonies, the tribunal declared that Duterte’s forces have summarily killed human rights defenders and those in the Philippines civil society who have criticized the government. The tribunal found the defendants Duterte and Trump, among others, guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, criminalization of human rights defenders, and other human rights violations, and called for accountability and reparations for the population whose rights have been violated.
The US government is indeed complicit in the human rights abuses by Duterte as it is providing hundreds of millions of dollars in police and military aid to the Philippines government. In 2018, US military aid to the Philippines increased to a total of $193.5 million dollars — this figure does not include arms sales or donated equipment. This is in clear violation of the Leahy law which “prohibit(s) the U.S. Government from using funds for assistance to units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights.”
Recently, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a resolution condemning the shooting and urging repatriation for Brandon Lee, a Chinese-American, San Francisco native who was shot by elements of the Philippines military last month. The resolution also urged a Congressional hearing and suspension of US aid to the Philippines’ military and police. This resolution was the second of its kind from the San Francisco City Council this year. The first upheld the demand to end US military aid to the Philippines.
Within a week of Brandon Lee’s shooting, the US Embassy agreed to build a $10 million counter-terror training center in Cavite, Philippines.
Until the Philippines government can at least uphold the basic human rights of its people, not one more dime of US taxpayer money should be spent funding a regime mired in the blood of thousands of poor people, farmers, and human rights defenders.
Laughing Instead of Crying: Climate Humor Can Break Down Barriers and Find Common Ground
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51740"><span class="small">Maxwell Boykoff, The Conversation</span></a>
Wednesday, 02 October 2019 08:29
Boykoff writes: "Climate change is not inherently funny. Typically, the messengers are serious scientists describing how rising greenhouse gas emissions are harming the planet on land and at sea, or assessing what role it played in the latest wildfire or hurricane."
A satirical picture about climate change from the bunkaryudo.com blog. (photo: Bun Karyudo)
Laughing Instead of Crying: Climate Humor Can Break Down Barriers and Find Common Ground
By Maxwell Boykoff, The Conversation
02 October 19
limate change is not inherently funny. Typically, the messengers are serious scientists describing how rising greenhouse gas emissions are harming the planet on land and at sea, or assessing what role it played in the latest wildfire or hurricane.
Society may have reached a saturation point for such somber, gloomy and threatening science-centered discussions. This possibility is what inspires my recent work with colleague Beth Osnes to get messages out about climate change through comedy and humor.
I have studied and practiced climate communication for about 20 years. My new book, "Creative (Climate) Communications," integrates social science and humanities research and practices to connect people more effectively through issues they care about. Rather than "dumbing down" science for the public, this is a "smartening up" approach that has been shown to bring people together around a highly divisive topic.
Why Laugh About Climate Change?
Science is critically important to understanding the enormity of the climate challenge and how it connects with other problems like disasters, food security, local air quality and migration. But stories that emanate from scientific ways of knowing have failed to significantly engage and activate large audiences.
Largely gloomy approaches and interpretations typically stifle audiences rather than inspiring them to take action. For example, novelist Jonathan Franzen recently published an essay in The New Yorker titled "What If We Stop Pretending?" in which he asserted:
"The goal (of halting climate change) has been clear for thirty years, and despite earnest efforts we've made essentially no progress toward reaching it."
Social science and humanities research have shown that this kind of framing effectively disempowers readers who could be activated and moved by a smarter approach.
Comics took a different path when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report in 2018 warning that the world only had until about 2030 to take steps that could limit warming to manageable levels. Trevor Noah, host of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," observed:
"You know the crazy people you see in the streets shouting that the world is ending? Turns out, they're all actually climate scientists."
On ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live," Kimmel commented:
"There's always a silver lining. One planet's calamity is another planet's shop-portunity."
He then cut to a going-out-of-business advertisement for Planet Earth that read:
"Everything must go! 50% of all nocturnal animals, insects, reptiles and amphibians … priced to sell before we live in hell. But you must act fast because planet Earth is over soon. And when it's gone, it's gone."
Social science and humanities scholars have been examining new, potentially more effective ways to communicate about climate change. Consistently, as I describe in my book, research shows that emotional, tactile, visceral and experiential communication meets people where they are. These methods arouse action and engagement.
Scholars have examined how shows like "Saturday Night Live," "Last Week Tonight," "Jimmy Kimmel Live," "Full Frontal" and "The Daily Show" use jokes to increase understanding and engagement. In one example, former Vice President Al Gore appeared on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" in 2017 and took turns with Colbert serving up climate change pickup lines over saucy slow-jam background music:
Gore: "Are you climate change? Because when I look at you, the world disappears."
Colbert: "I'm like 97% of scientists, and I can't deny … it's getting hot in here."
Colbert: "Is that an iceberg the size of Delaware breaking off the Antarctic ice shelf, or are you just happy to see me?"
Gore: "I hope you're not powered by fossil fuels, because you've been running through my mind all day."
Comedian Sarah Silverman took time during her 2018 Hulu show "I Love You America" to address the need for climate action. In her monologue, she focused on how climate change is driven "by the interests of a very small group and absurdly rich and powerful people." She added:
"The disgusting irony of all of it is that the billionaires who have created this global atrocity are going to be the ones to survive it. They are going to be fine while we all cook to death in a planet-sized hot car."
Breaching Barriers and Finding Common Ground
Research shows that in a time of deep polarization, comedy can lower defenses. It temporarily suspends social rules and connects people with ideas and new ways of thinking or acting.
Comedy exploits cracks in arguments. It wiggles in, pokes, prods and draws attention to the incongruous, hypocritical, false and pretentious. It can make the complex dimensions of climate change seem more accessible and its challenges seem more manageable.
Many disciplines can inform comedy, including theater, performance and media studies. With my colleagues Beth Osnes, Rebecca Safran and Phaedra Pezzullo at the University of Colorado, I co-direct the Inside the Greenhouse initiative, which uses insights from creative fields to develop effective climate communication strategies.
For four years we have directed "Stand Up for Climate Change," a comedy project. We and our students write sketch comedy routines and perform them in front of live audiences on the Boulder campus. From those experiences, we have studied the content of the performances and how the performers and audience respond. Our work has found that humor provides effective pathways to greater awareness, learning, sharing of feelings, conversations and inspiration for performers and audiences alike.
A comic approach might seem to trivialize climate change, which has life-and-death implications for millions of people, especially the world's poorest and most vulnerable residents. But a greater risk would be for people to stop talking about the problem entirely, and miss the chance to reimagine and actively engage in their collective futures.
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he Greta/AOC generation is marching for our place on this planet.
ey, have you heard about this whistleblower complaint?
ince the very beginning of the 2016 campaign, it’s been exceedingly difficult to describe anything Donald Trump has done or said as a “new low.” On Sunday, he came pretty damn close by extensively quoting 
limate change is not inherently funny. Typically, the messengers are serious scientists describing how rising greenhouse gas emissions are harming the planet 
