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FOCUS: Mother Is Both a Noun and a Verb. |
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Sunday, 13 May 2018 12:37 |
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Solnit writes: "This is, once again, for all the misfits, the outcasts, the wanderers, the rejects, the people who had to make it for themselves and start from scratch and from scratches, the people who got up from beatings and out from houses of harm, the ones who took the hard road and the long way toward love."
Rebecca Solnit. (photo: David Levene)
Mother Is Both a Noun and a Verb.
By Rebecca Solnit, Rebecca Solnit's Facebook Page
13 May 18
 his is, once again, for all the misfits, the outcasts, the wanderers, the rejects, the people who had to make it for themselves and start from scratch and from scratches, the people who got up from beatings and out from houses of harm, the ones who took the hard road and the long way toward love. On this treacherous day approaching.
Mother is both a noun and a verb. Some people had great mothers but lost them, some had or have mothers who never mothered them or stopped mothering them for some reason, treated them as adversaries or as worthless, and Mother's Day can be a punitive day for all those for whom this is true.
The other half of the question of what there is to celebrate is what mothered and mothers you, how you mother yourself, how you celebrate and recognize what cares for you and takes care of you, and what you care for in return.
I remember once looking at the Pacific Ocean, to which I often reverted in trouble, and thinking "Everything was my mother but my mother." Books were my mother, coastlines, running water and landscapes, trees and the flight of birds, zazen and zendos, quiet and cellos, reading and writing, bookstores and familiar views and routines, the changing evening sky, cooking and baking, walking and discovering, rhythms and blues, friends and interior spaces and all forms of kindness, of which there has been more and more as time goes by.
And of my own mother I wrote, in The Faraway Nearby: Like lawyers, writers seek consistency; they make a case for their point of view; they do so by leaving out some evidence; but let me mention the hundreds of sandwiches my mother made during my elementary school years, the peanut butter sandwiches I ate alone on school benches in the open, throwing the crusts into the air where the seagulls would swoop to catch them before they hit the ground.
When my friends began to have babies and I came to comprehend the heroic labor it takes to keep one alive, the constant exhausting tending of a being who can do nothing and demands everything, I realized that my mother had done all these things for me before I remembered. I was fed; I was washed; I was clothed; I was taught to speak and given a thousand other things, over and over again, hourly, daily, for years. She gave me everything before she gave me nothing.
May you locate the ten thousand mothers that brought you into being and keep you going, no matter who and where you are. May you be the mother of uncounted possibilities and loves.
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RSN: Wizard of Id Finally Fractures Camel's Back |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=27921"><span class="small">Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Sunday, 13 May 2018 10:49 |
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Rosenblum writes: "I was just finishing an upbeat Trump-free report on a May Day drive through deepest France when an AP item from Washington stunned me to silence."
Sarah Huckabee Sanders. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Wizard of Id Finally Fractures Camel's Back
By Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News
13 May 18
 was just finishing an upbeat Trump-free report on a May Day drive through deepest France when an AP item from Washington stunned me to silence. The President of the United States, thinking with his thumbs, tweeted this:
“The Fake News is working overtime. Just reported that, despite the tremendous success we are having with the economy & all things else, 91% of the Network News about me is negative (Fake). Why do we work so hard in working with the media when it is corrupt? Take away credentials?”
And this at a time when trustworthy news organizations face mounting pressure from greedy management, political connivance, fragmentation, and background babble from every direction.
Nothing, I believe, is more dangerous than Donald Trump's insidious yet relentless campaign to strike America blind. His hardcore cheers him on, no matter what, and a broad sector of others, confused or indifferent, enable him by inaction.
Newspapers document lies and flip-flops. The New Yorker and others probe sordid dealings. Television, sometimes even Fox, shines light on loony behavior. Yet those rally T-shirts are still around: “Tree. Rope. Journalists. Some assembly required.”
Trump's tweet, far beyond politics, is a measure of the man, a despotic assault on America's bedrock belief in the people's right to know. The old saw about a last straw breaking the camel's back has never been so apt.
The issue is not credentials. The White House already plays favorites yet still leaks from top. At briefings, Sarah Sanders hints of occasional shame when the bullshit is too malodorous. What's at risk is democracy.
Trump, in that tweet, uses the royal “we.” He is a civil servant on a four-year contract living in public housing. He skirts sedition with legal fig leaves to evade scrutiny, exceed his mandate and endanger the nation by doing what is plainly wrong.
Congress, rather than checking presidential excess, has unbalanced the judiciary, the crucial third branch. That leaves only the Fourth Estate, a grand term rooted in English tradition that is essentially a permanent pack of watchdogs meant to bark and bite.
Much of America's news media does noble service despite it all. But the large part that does not provides “alternative facts.” Using textbook demagogy, Trump lies with the confidence of a man who grasps a basic human failing. People go to extremes not to admit being duped, even to themselves.
This is tough to explain to sane people in the real world who remember what the United States used to be. The French watched, sickened, as Trump told an NRA mob that one guy with a pistol would have stopped coordinated attacks that killed 130 people in Paris in 2015. He pointed a finger to demonstrate, like a demented kid with cap gun.
Abroad, neither friends nor foes trust America. We'll soon know the cost of spiking the Iran deal. Hard-liners in Tehran and Tel Aviv (or, rather, Jerusalem) are already splashing kerosene on smoldering embers. Bibi Netanyahu wants preventive war.
At home, Trump's authoritarian approach emboldens police to overreact. The other day, Ray McGovern, an ex-CIA analyst nearing 80, tried to tell congressmen what he knew firsthand about Gina Haspel and torture. Video shows officers throw him to the ground, his shoulder dislocated, and shout: “Stop resisting.” He wasn't.
That's in the capital, awash in journalists. We hear increasingly less from cities and towns where families shape world views and determine what their kids are taught in school. With slanted and censored reporting, what we don't know is killing us.
In Las Vegas, for instance, Sheldon Adelson bought the Las Vegas Independent-Journal to promote his casino interests and narrow views. Bent on tilting U.S. policy towards Israel, he offered to pay for a new embassy in Jerusalem.
Adelson is small-bore compared to Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which dictates scripted simultaneous propaganda to TV and radio stations in 40 percent of American markets. The once-admirable Chicago Tribune empire is now a bad joke known as Tronc.
Look at Colorado. During the 1980s, I co-published the Telluride Mountain Journal, a lively weekly with its own Paris bureau. Okay, me. Two Denver dailies thrived with 700 newsroom people between them, and there were others around the state.
The Rocky Mountain News won four Pulitzers in its last years until E. W. Scripps dumped it in 2009, just short of its 150th anniversary. Journalist and entrepreneur Dean Singleton tried to save the Denver Post and other newspapers elsewhere, but his group filed for bankruptcy in 2010. Alden Global Capital, hedge fund scavengers, took over. Alden controls 56 dailies, including some big ones, and a lot of weeklies.
Margaret Sullivan called the new owners in the Washington Post “one of the most ruthless of the corporate strip-miners seemingly intent on destroying local journalism.” News people ask questions, and they also ought to answer them. Not these guys.
“I tried to talk to someone in Alden's New York headquarters…to ask about the apparently counterproductive strategy of endless cuts but was told no one was there to speak to the news media,” Sullivan wrote. “When I asked to be connected to managing director Heath Freeman's office, the receptionist hung up on me.”
In April, after Alden slashed again and told survivors what not to write, the staff rebelled. Editorial page editor Kenneth Plunkett wrote, in a blast headlined, “As the Vultures Circle”: “We call for action…Denver deserves a newspaper owner who supports its newsroom. If Alden isn’t willing to do good journalism here, it should sell The Post to owners who will.”
Plunkett sketched the broader picture. Political interests buy up “echo-chamber outlets” to report from biased perspectives. That leaves “the hollowed-out shells of newsrooms loyal to traditional journalistic values to find their voice in the maelstrom.”
Soon after, he resigned. So did Dave Krieger, who wrote similarly in Boulder's Daily Camera, another Alden property. Other top editors also left. The company kept on cutting back.
Jason Blevins, who survived a dozen buyouts in 21 years at the Post, summed it up in the High County News. From a newsroom of more than 300 in 1997, the paper has shrunk to 35 reporters and photographers to be what it claims: “the Voice of the Rocky Mountain Empire.”
Here are some excerpts; a link is attached below:
“The lofty hope (the Post) espoused — that newspaper reporting can champion truth, meaning and a sense of community — has withered under the watch of Heath Freeman, who is murdering the paper…Freeman doesn't care about video. Or digital news. Or print news. Or news. He wants his newspapers to do one thing: kick out cash. He's cut more than 3,000 jobs from newsrooms across the U.S. It's a short-term play from a wannabe Gordon Gekko…And it's working...Last year Alden reaped $160 million from its newspapers, including $28 million from The Denver Post, according to an independent report.
“Even worse, Freeman is stifling coverage — even censoring his own editors — when we seek to expose how Alden Global is razing local journalism…And that's the real rub here. It's not just that journalists are out of jobs. It's that they are not telling the stories that we all need to hear…”
The best of U.S. newspapers, in contrast, are now better than ever, but they reach only a fringe of voters, few with any illusions about trumpery. Despite its strengths, TV depends on sideshows and sex scandals that drive up ratings. Nonstop ill-informed argument trivializes what matters and overdramatizes what doesn't.
This is fertile ground for manipulation. Trump's base spews venom at any news organization he targets, which includes “the failing New York Times” and The Washington Post to the full alphabet soup of TV news channels.
That trial balloon - “Take away credentials?” - merits a headline in big red letters. It is, again, the last straw on the camel. America needs a solid spine to thwart a creeping coup d'etat.
High Country News link
Mort Rosenblum has reported from seven continents as Associated Press special correspondent, edited the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and written 14 books on subjects ranging from global geopolitics to chocolate. He now runs MortReport.org.
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.
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Trump's Manufactured Crisis |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=48214"><span class="small">Derek Davidson, Jacobin</span></a>
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Sunday, 13 May 2018 08:36 |
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Davidson writes: "Donald Trump's decision this week to violate the United States' obligations under the 2015 Iran nuclear deal came as no surprise in Europe."
Emmanuel Macron. (photo: Frederick Floran)
Trump's Manufactured Crisis
By Derek Davidson, Jacobin
13 May 18
By pulling out of the Iran deal and reimposing sanctions, Trump has invented a crisis that could push the United States toward war.
 onald Trump’s decision this week to violate the United States’s obligations under the 2015 Iran nuclear deal came as no surprise in Europe. French president Emmanuel Macron spent three days in Washington in late April lobbying Trump to leave the accord alone and instead direct his energies toward negotiating a new “grand bargain,” one that would limit Iran’s missile program; penalize its support for Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthi rebels, and the Syrian government; and extend some of the deal’s time-limited provisions (its so-called “sunset clauses”). On his way out of Washington, Macron effectively declared that he’d failed to sway Trump. Additional cajoling from British prime minister Theresa May and German chancellor Angela Merkel had no effect either. In the end, all three European leaders reportedly agreed to meet Trump’s demands. It still wasn’t enough.
Yet the way Trump chose to pull out of the agreement — by immediately re-imposing all US sanctions that had been levied prior to the deal’s implementation and leaving the door open for additional sanctions beyond that — may have been a bit surprising. Trump had a range of options. He chose the most extreme. If the New York Times is accurate, when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo contacted his European counterparts late last week to inform them of Trump’s decision, he also told them he was working to convince Trump to delay an announcement for two weeks to give US and European diplomats a chance to keep negotiating on Macron’s grand bargain. They believed that Pompeo preferred a softer withdrawal from the agreement, whereby Trump would take some time before re-implementing sanctions. Whatever their impressions might have been, that’s not what came to pass.
Macron and company’s reaction to Trump’s move matters, because the survival of the nuclear accord now rests with Europe. Both Iranian president Hassan Rouhani and supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have suggested that Iran could choose to remain bound by the agreement — which, in return for sanctions relief, restricts the size and scope of Iran’s nuclear program and subjects it to thorough international inspections — despite US violations. Iran has fully complied with the deal to date, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. But both Rouhani and Khamenei say Iran will remain party to the accord only if it continues to see some benefit from doing so. Russia and, more importantly, China are likely to continue doing business with Iran whether or not the deal remains in place, though Saudi Arabia may be able to pry Beijing and Tehran apart to some degree. So that leaves Europe as the wild card.
As their last-minute attempts to sway Trump show, and their comments after his announcement reinforce, European leaders support the Iran deal both as a way to tamp down tensions over Iran’s nuclear program and because it opens up new business opportunities for European firms in Iran. European foreign ministers have arranged a “crisis meeting” with Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif for Monday to make their case for maintaining the accord. But realistically it will be difficult for Europe not to succumb to US sanctions pressure. Many of the reimposed penalties are “secondary sanctions,” wherein the United States assumes the right to punish foreign entities that attempt to do business with or in Iran. Firms that disregard these sanctions could be subject to harsh penalties that would lock them out of the US market or, worse, out of the US financial system.
While some European companies have made deals with Iran since the deal took effect and sanctions were lifted, access to the Iranian market, relatively small and bedeviled by challenging bureaucratic rules and high levels of corruption, simply isn’t worth the risk of running afoul of US sanctions. European governments could reinstate “blocking statutes” that actually prohibit their firms from abiding by US sanctions, or they could even threaten retaliatory sanctions against US firms. European leaders have begun talking about implementing such measures, but the reality is that they cannot completely insulate companies from US penalties. And the United States may respond forcefully to any European response — the conservative Weekly Standard reported on Thursday that congressional Republicans are already circulating an “external memo” outlining ways that the United States could retaliate against European efforts to undercut Iran sanctions.
The other major player in this new, US-manufactured crisis, Israel, appears to be doing what it can to support Trump’s decision. Shortly after Trump’s announcement, missiles suspected to be Israeli struck multiple targets in Syria related to Iran’s military presence in that country. The next day saw an exchange of artillery fire between the Israelis and someone inside Syria, possibly Iran’s Quds Force though Iranian media says it was the Syrian military. That exchange is now being treated in the West as an unprovoked Iranian attack against Israel (never mind that Israel has been striking Iranian targets in Syria for months).
These Israeli strikes are meant not to trigger a full-on war, which Israel doesn’t want, but to goad Iran into a response that turns Europe against it and helps ensure that the Europeans lose whatever appetite they might currently have to challenge Trump’s sanctions. The goal, for Netanyahu, is to stuff Iran back into the diplomatic box and, ultimately, to force regime change in Tehran by whatever means necessary. If that means war — so long as the war is between Iran and the United States and not Iran and Israel — then so be it. And if it gives Netanyahu’s polling numbers a boost in the process, even better.
If we assume the worst — that European promises to Iran will ultimately prove empty or at least insufficient to motivate Iran to continue abiding by the deal — then we can expect that at some point Tehran will exit the nuclear accord. Under the accord, Iran agreed to be subject to the “Additional Protocol” of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which grants the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) expanded rights to inspect Iranian facilities to ensure Tehran is not working on a nuclear weapon. These inspections are important not just for monitoring Iran’s activity, but for undercutting the ability of hawks in the US to concoct stories about Iran’s nuclear program in an effort to foment conflict.
If Iran were to now reject the expanded inspections along with the rest of the deal, if it were to take the next step and kick IAEA inspectors out of the country, it would undoubtedly be taken as proof that the Iranians are racing to build a bomb. We saw this scenario play out two decades ago in Iraq, so we should be pretty familiar with where it ends. The absence of proof that Iran is not building a bomb will be taken in Washington as proof that it must be building a bomb. In Riyadh, it will be taken as a green light to pursue their own nuclear arsenal, a scenario about which the Trump administration apparently has no particular thoughts.
The signs of escalation are already mounting. The day after announcing his plan to violate the deal, Trump told reporters that he “would advise Iran not to start their nuclear program.” Does he mean Iran’s civilian nuclear program, or the nuclear weapons program Trump assumes they have, absent any evidence and contrary to the conclusions of multiple Western intelligence agencies? Or is he deliberately conflating the two in order to confuse the issue and make it easier to justify taking harsher actions against Iran?
You can expect to see more ambiguous statements coming out of this White House, and probably more “errors” like the “typo” the White House press office made in a press release a couple of weeks ago that changed the sentence “Iran had a robust, clandestine nuclear weapons program” to “Iran has a robust, clandestine nuclear weapons program.” That’s a pretty big difference. Maybe the difference between war and peace.
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The GOP Farm Bill Actually Punishes Working Families Receiving SNAP |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=45531"><span class="small">Rebekah Entralgo, ThinkProgress</span></a>
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Sunday, 13 May 2018 08:33 |
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Entralgo writes: "Next week, the House will vote on a farm bill largely constructed by Republicans. The bill, which traditionally has been a bipartisan effort, will re-authorize a number of farm and nutrition assistance programs - this includes funds for food stamps, officially known as Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP)."
Shopping in Boston. (photo: ThinkProgress)
The GOP Farm Bill Actually Punishes Working Families Receiving SNAP
By Rebekah Entralgo, ThinkProgress
13 May 18
The devil is in the details.
 ext week, the House will vote on a farm bill largely constructed by Republicans. The bill, which traditionally has been a bipartisan effort, will re-authorize a number of farm and nutrition assistance programs — this includes funds for food stamps, officially known as Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP).
One of the most controversial parts of the farm bill are the tough work requirements for SNAP recipients. The work requirements are sure to please outgoing House Speaker Paul Ryan, who has tried to restrict access to government assistance programs ever since he was elected to Congress 20 years ago.
They are also sure to make President Donald Trump happy. Reportedly Trump will veto the bill unless even tougher work requirements are implemented. As ThinkProgress has previously reported, SNAP recipients are already subject to some work requirements.
Data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation show 58 percent of working-age, nondisabled SNAP households are employed while receiving benefits; that figure rises to 62 percent for households with children.
Hidden in the House farm bill draft, however, is a sinister measure that could harm families receiving SNAP who are already working, the very group the GOP claims to support. The move exposes the Republican party’s true end game: the goal has never been to lift low-income families out of poverty, but rather to punish them by creating more bureaucratic hoops for them to jump through.
The farm bill will strike a provision called “broad-based categorical eligibility,” which allows states to enroll their residents in SNAP if they can prove they qualify for other income-based public assistance programs. It provides a safety net for families and individuals working low-wage jobs that put them right above the income cutoff for SNAP.
The policy is extremely popular, with 42 states currently using broad-based categorical eligibility.
Those who benefit from the program are mainly low-income working families with an income close to SNAP’s cutoff of 130 percent of the federal poverty level, which amounts to roughly $1,702 a month for a family of three. These families are earning an income, yet still face significant costs like child care, transportation, or medical expenses, which make it difficult to afford food.
“A single mother with two children working full time at $12.50 an hour would have income at 129 percent of the poverty level and receive about $142 a month from SNAP, making up about 7 percent of her total monthly income,” the Center on Budget Budget and Policy Priorities estimates. “If her hourly wage increased by just 50 cents (or $87 a month), lifting her income just above 130 percent of the federal poverty limit, the family would become ineligible for SNAP under the federal income eligibility cut-off.”
This is where categorical eligibility comes in.
The 42 states that adopted the policy can create a SNAP cutoff level to reflect their own cost of living. In California, for example, the cutoff is 200 percent of the federal poverty level because rents and childcare costs are much higher.
“Categorical eligibility is critical for Californians because it allows for low-income families to get SNAP benefits even if their income doesn’t reflect the federal poverty level once you factor in cost of living,” Jared Call, managing policy advocate at California Food Policy Advocates told ThinkProgress.
The policy also helps promote work by slowly phasing out SNAP benefits as a household gains more earnings.
The CPBB, however, estimates that by striking categorical eligibility from the farm bill, households close to the income threshold that begin to make earnings slightly above the federal threshold would lose all of their SNAP benefits at once. That could leave the family worse off than before their wage increase.
“If you think about someone working a minimum wage job in the service industry, they don’t have control over their hours or schedule,” Call said. “Without categorical eligibility, they would have to report the extra earnings and be cut off from SNAP completely.”
In rural areas, categorical eligibility is essential for low-income families on SNAP that need multiple vehicles to travel long distances into town. Without it, families would have to claim a second car as an asset, and sell it off to meet SNAP’s federal requirements of one car per family.
Eliminating categorical eligibility would also jeopardize free school lunch for low-income children. The traditional way for a child to recieve free school lunch is through a paper application filled out by the child’s parent. In states that implemented categorical eligibility, however, a child whose family receives SNAP benefits is automatically enrolled by the district into the free school lunch program, ensuring that every child whose family is struggling to make ends meet is guaranteed one meal a day. Roughly 275,000 students would be in jeopardy of losing their free lunches if categorical eligibilty was eliminated.
Above all, curtailing categorical eligibility and imposing tougher work requirements just creates more red tape for low-income families. The policies proposed in the House version of the farm bill don’t encourge work, but rather punish families already working.
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very year, starting as early as April first, I am inundated with Mother’s Day commercials and advertisements employing myself and audiences alike to “show our mothers that we care.” These ads equate the level of our appreciation for mothers with the cost and size of our gift. And, we seem to be buying big: According to the 
