I’ve written a lot, no, seriously, I’ve written a shitload, about Myanmar. After Aung San Suu Kyi was finally relased and the National League for Democracy came to power, my writing tailed off. I still, however return to the odd story like Oliver Holmes piece for The Guardian: Myanmar commission proposes delaying election. He writes:

Myanmar’s election commission has asked the country’s top political parties to postpone next month’s election, citing concerns that flooding could prevent people from voting.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) said it opposed the delay. Local media said the ruling Union Solidarity and Development party and most of the other major parties supported the idea.

The commission said it would release a statement in about two days with a possible new election date.

Its intervention will raise concerns over interference by the country’s entrenched military rulers in what has being touted as Myanmar’s first free and fair general election.

In 1990, the army regime ignored a huge election victory by the NLD and put its leaders in prison. Aung San Suu Kyi, now 70, spent 15 years since then under house arrest.

The NLD is also expected to win this year’s election.

We think our Republicans are good at voter suppression? I don’t think the GOP has ever suggested using extreme weather events to rig a vote. Given what’s happened in South Carolina (and elsewhere in the United States) recently, I hope no one here gets any ideas.

Do what you can to make this a good morning, Myanmar.

We missed an opportunity in the ’60s when we failed to unite labor and the anti-war movement. That failure haunts us today when we look how the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street might have been a devastating force in American Politics.

So too, has this bad decision haunted, and continues to haunt, the environmental movement. Just as Big Green sold out labor with NAFTA, I expect the same play is being made with the horrible Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.

“One by one, former NAFTA opponents and skeptics became enthusiastic supporters, and said so publicly,” writes journalist Mark Dowie in his critical history of the U.S. environmental movement, Losing Ground. These Big Green groups even created their own pro-NAFTA organization, the Environmental Coalition for NAFTA—which included the National Wildlife Federation, The Environmental Defense Fund, Conservation International, the National Audubon Society, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Wildlife Fund—which, according to Dowie, provided its “unequivocal support to the agreement.” p. 84.

From This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

From This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

Found in my electronic chapbook.

A prosecutor and an FBI agent—two people obviously without bias in the matter of a shooting by Cleveland police officer Tim Loehmann—found that Loehmann acted reasonably in deciding last year to shoot when he confronted the 12-year-old boy carrying what turned out to be a replica gun.

No amount of sarcasm or snark can be sufficient here. This must not stand.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing in The Legal Murder Of Tamir Rice for The Atlantic, comments:

At some point the discussion of police violence will have to move beyond the individual actions of officers to the level of policy. Convicting an officer of murder effectively requires an act of telepathy. As long as this is the standard, then the expectation of justice for a boy like Tamir Rice is little more than a kind of magical thinking.

Perhaps it is necessary to ask why we even have this standard in the first place. This is where my own questions begin: Is our tolerance for the lethal violence of the police rooted in the fact that lethal violence in our society is relatively common? Put differently, murder in America is much more common than in other developed countries. Is this how we have made our peace with that fact? Our world is, in some real sense, more dangerous. In recognition of this, have we basically said to the police, “Do what you will?” And in the case of Stand Your Ground, has this “Do what you will” ethic even extended to the citizenry? And if that is the case, then is there a line that can be drawn from Tamir Rice to Walter Scott to Sandy Hook to Trayvon Martin?

The line is more like an eight-lane superhighway.

I think I was somewhere in my 40s when I realized that the world would not end and that I was not, in fact, letting fellow writers down, when I decided after 10, 50 or 100 pages that a book simply wasn’t working for me. I felt liberated. Oliver Burkeman writing in what’s so wrong about giving up on a book? for The Guardian clearly states his position.

Hence my official position: it’s fine to abandon books or other projects—but you’ve got to really abandon them, not let them fade amid vague intentions to finish them some day. “It cannot be said often enough that one should not postpone; one abandons,” said the management expert Peter Drucker. Give the unassembled bookshelf to someone who wants it; throw the beach-read into the sea. Make abandonment a positive choice. Otherwise you’ll be paralysed, unable to walk away entirely or to finish, stuck in a catch-22. Which is, by the way—according to the website Goodreads—the book that people are most likely to start but never complete.

There have been some books that I just didn’t get at a certain age—Robert Heinlein’s The Star Beast was like that in my early teens; Hermann Hesse’s Magister Ludi in my later teens—that I felt compelled to visit multiple times before I finished the books, and I’m glad, in those two cases, that I did.

It is not that companies moving their production to China wanted to drive up emissions: they were after the cheap labor, but exploited workers and an exploited planet are, it turns out, a package deal. A destabilized climate is the cost of deregulated, global capitalism, its unintended yet unavoidable consequence. p. 81-2

From This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Yes, we are tired of the news of yet another mass shooting by someone who ought to have never been allowed near a firearm, let alone own one. But are we so tired that the response is simply meh, or are we tired enough to get up off our asses and revolt?

Reporting on Bernie Sanders’ gathering with a 10,000-strong crowd in Tucson, Arizona, Tom Dart, in ‘Doing the hardest work in America’: Bernie Sanders woos Hispanic voters for The Guardian, writes:

With a Latino congressman’s endorsement, a boy’s heart-rending story and the mellifluous sounds of a mariachi band, Bernie Sanders began a push to woo Hispanic voters at a rally in Arizona on Friday night.

“We are tired of condolences and we are tired of just prayers. We are tired and we are embarrassed in picking up the paper or turning on the TV and seeing children in elementary schools slaughtered and young people on college campuses shot,” he said.

“I think the vast majority of the American people want us to move forward in sensible ways that keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have them and cut down on these senseless murders that we see every week.”

In a rare moment of common ground with Republicans, Sanders also linked the issue to the need for improved mental health services. “All over this country we have thousands of people who are suicidal, who are homicidal, but they cannot get the help they need when they need it. We need a revolution in mental health delivery in this country,” he said.

Continuing, Dart went to the heart of why Bernie was in Tucson: Hispanics, immigration and the endorsement of U.S. Congressional Representative Raul Grijalva.

Sanders said earlier in the week that he would be “moving very aggressively” to court Hispanic voters. They made up about 10% of the electorate in 2012 and skew heavily Democratic, the Pew Research Center found.

But they hardly know the US senator from Vermont. In July a Univision poll of Hispanic voters found Sanders was viewed as favourable by 16% of respondents and unfavourable by 16%, with 68% having no opinion. A Gallup poll the following month found Hillary Clinton was the only Democratic candidate widely known and popular among Hispanics. Clinton has a substantial lead over Sanders in the main national polls ahead of the first Democratic presidential debate on 13 October in Las Vegas.

Still, this event once again showcased Sanders’s knack for attracting large, energised crowds. And Raul Grijalva, a local Democratic US representative and member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, became the first sitting member of Congress to endorse Sanders this week. In front of a spirited—and, it seemed, mostly white—group, Grijalva explained why.

“Bernie’s my friend and beyond friendship I agree with his values, I agree with the solutions that he is bringing and his campaign is bringing to the American people; and finally it’s way past time that we had a national campaign and a voice that speaks truth to power. Not triangulated in any way: direct, honest, straight, truthful,” he said.

“The campaign’s mission is very simple. It’s about fairness and equality … Fixing an immigration system that is punitive at best and broken at worst.”

Grijalva invited a high school mariachi band to warm up the crowd before Sanders arrived on stage. “I hope this [rally] will excite the Latino population,” said Justin Enriquez, the band’s director. “I think he’s starting to gain a little bit more popularity. Hopefully Tucson will give him a good boost.”

To know Bernie is to venerate him.

To allow arcane trade law, which has been negotiated with scant public scrutiny, to have this kind of power over an issue so critical to humanity’s future is a special kind of madness. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz puts it, “Should you let a group of foolish lawyers, who put something together before they understood the issues, interfere with saving the planet?” p. 72

“If the trade rules don’t permit all kinds of important measures to deal with climate change—and they don’t—then the trade rules obviously have to be rewritten. Because there is no way in the world that we can have a sustainable economy and maintain international trade rules as they are. There’s no way at all.” [—Steven Shrybman] p. 72

Indeed the three policy pillars of the neoliberal age—privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending—are each incompatible with many of the actions we must take to bring our emissions to safe levels. p. 72

From This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Clearly, only one choice remains…

The Guardian emails:

Dear Jeff,

On Monday we launched the second phase of our climate change campaign. The new focus came directly from you: Keep it in the Ground supporters. You told us you wanted stories of hope about the transition to a world run on clean energy and the potential of solar power in particular.

You have taken action to support the campaign before, writing letters to the Wellcome Trust, filming videos appealing to Bill Gates and spreading the word on social media. So we’d like to understand better which stories you think we should be telling. What would like to understand about solar power and other renewables? What would you like to know about the UN climate conference in Paris, now less than eight weeks away? Do you have projects or ideas you think we should be telling readers about?

If you can spare a few minutes, let us know by answering a few questions.

We’ll then use your responses to plan the next stage of the campaign.

Thank you for your help, as ever.

Best,

James Randerson and the Keep it in the Ground team

Keep Carbon In The Ground…

Too big to fail is simply too big to exist. Failure is the vaccine of Capitalism. Bad ideas, whether economic, social or ethical, ought to fail, that’s crux of the invisible hand. When a society allows the invisible hand to be thwarted by an organization’s size, then society suffers.

Bernie Sanders understands that.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has a long history of standing up to Wall Street, on Thursday pressed for critical reforms that he said must include breaking up of too-big-to-fail banks and restoring the Glass-Steagall Act, the 1930s law which separated commercial and investment banking.

“Given the image of big banks today, it is easy now to take on Wall Street. I was there when it was not so popular,” Sanders said.

Sanders this year introduced legislation to break up too-big-to-fail financial institutions. He also is a co-sponsor of legislation by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to reinstate Glass-Steagall. As a member of the House Financial Services Committee, Sanders fought the push to deregulate Wall Street by then-Treasury Secretaries Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. In 1999, Sanders was one of only 57 Members of the House of Representatives who voted against the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that repealed Glass-Steagall.

“I was proud to lead the fight in the House against repealing the Glass-Steagall Act. I predicted then that such a massive deregulation of the financial services industry would seriously harm the economy. I would give anything to have been proven wrong about this, but unfortunately what happened to the economy during the financial collapse of 2008 was even worse than I predicted,” Sanders said.

During the House floor debate, Sanders warned that the measure “will lead to fewer banks and financial service providers; increased charges and fees for individual consumers and small businesses; diminished credit for rural America; and taxpayer exposure to potential losses should a financial conglomerate fail. It will lead to more mega-mergers; a small number of corporations dominating the financial service industry; and further concentration of economic power in our country.”

In the Senate, Sanders in 2009 voted against the bailout of the biggest Wall Street financial institutions whose greed, recklessness and illegal behavior had plunged the nation’s economy into a terrible recession. The nation’s largest financial institutions put taxpayers on the hook for a $700 billion bailout and more than $16 trillion in virtually zero interest loans from the Federal Reserve. Today, three of the four largest financial institutions are bigger today than before they were bailed out.

The six largest financial institutions in this country today (JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley) have assets of nearly $10 trillion, a figure equal to about 60 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. Those six financial institutions issue more than two-thirds of all credit cards, over 35 percent of all mortgages, control 95 percent of all derivatives and hold more than 40 percent of all bank deposits in the United States.

If that doesn’t signify what I mean as Too Big To Exist, I don’t know what does.

Regular readers know I’m an introvert, and Oliver Burkeman has written several times on the subject, but this morning I came across an aspect of introversion that I’ve not previously considered: cold.

Cold-lover Oliver Burkeman, writing in Loneliness and temperature for The Guardian asks:

People worry that social media are making us lonely and isolated, but what if that is exactly half-true? What if they are not making us isolated—online connections are real, after all—but are making us feel lonely, partly because those connections don’t involve heat? [snip] …I’m a cold-lover. Does that mean I hate people? I hope not. When I really think about it, the thing I love most about cold weather is coming back into the warmth.

My office at Harcourt-Brace was intentionally chilly. So much so that co-workers would drastically minimize their time there. If they needed to see me they would come in, take care of business and get out. I never thought that the cold, which, like Oliver, I love, was a defense mechanism, but perhaps that was the case.

The cold certainly allowed me to be more productive.

There is a particularly—for the present at least—American form of the if-then equation that goes something like this: if I just had [insert particular buyable object here] then I could live my fantasy. In a way this is a kind of fake-it-until-you-make-it psychology with a credit-card rider. In the end, the emperor has no new clothes and we’re left with closets and basements and attics and garages and storage facilities full of stuff that we thought would change our lives and didn’t.

Oliver Burkeman writing in Can you shop your way to happiness? for The Guardian, explores the nearly 250-year-old Diderot Effect.

“If there’s something you really want but don’t actually need,” writes the economist Juliet Schor, “there’s a good chance that a recurring symbolic fantasy is attached to it. A faster computer? The dream of getting more work done. A remodeled kitchen? The hope of eating proper family dinners… Laying bare the fantasy illuminates the often tenuous link between the product and the dream.” The Diderot effect hurts your bank balance, but even if it didn’t, it would still be futile, because the things we’re really looking for can’t be got that way. Diderot, in his dressing gown, was chasing a wild goose.

Reading this was particularly poignant because of a discussion yesterday with one of my students regarding the importance of owning the latest smart phone. I’m printing out Burkeman’s essay in a last ditch attempt to at least convince the student to think about what having that new smart phone represents. I’m not sure that the adolescent brain is capable of processing Burkeman’s argument, which is probably why marketers—forget the lawyers, hang the marketers first—so enthusiastically target this demographic.

You know what crocodile tears mean don’t you? They’re phony.

I guess we’re going to have those tears and plenty of hand-wringing from the arts community. Beggars.

They want your vote on November 3. It will retain a tax on cigarettes at 30 cents a pack for another 10 years.

They know that they are taking millions of dollars from the least of us economically but are claiming that it’s to HELP the least of us enjoy the Arts.

What BS.

They already have taken more than $150 million in Cuyahoga County with the cigarette tax. Even though they know that the tax weighs most heavily upon working people and low income users. They comprise the major smoking public.

Not a penny goes to reduce smoking, a killer and health burden. If there is a cigarette tax it should go to help smokers quit.

“In fact,” writes one apologist, “the levy allows even big arts institutions like the Cleveland Orchestra and the Cleveland Museum of Art to provide Continue Reading »

Something weird is going on with Comedy Central videos that is making them start to autoplay.

I’m researching this, but for now, I’m taking down this video.

Previously…

Via Mano Singham (who the Republicans don’t want to vote for a myriad of reasons).

I’m a coffee person (see blog-flag above) but I enjoy a good cuppa now and then whether the working-man’s mug preferred by Orwell and Hitchens or meditative green. This morning Mary Berry goes to the posh side in How to make the perfect cup of tea. She begins: My mother was fussy about making tea…

I’m certain that the comments will not be gentile and proper as evidenced by the response of the first of many: Bollocks.

Then there’s this hilarious bit…

The PEN Pinter Prize for 2015 has gone to Raif Badawi and James Fenton. The prize, named for 2005 Nobel laureate Harold Pinter,

is awarded annually to a British writer or a writer resident in Britain of outstanding literary merit who, in the words of Harold Pinter’s Nobel speech, casts an ‘unflinching, unswerving’ gaze upon the world, and shows a ‘fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies’.

The prize is shared with an international writer of courage selected by English PEN’s Writers at Risk Committee in association with the winner. This half of the prize is awarded to someone who has been persecuted for speaking out about their beliefs.

My copy of 1000 Lashes arrived last week. Here is how Laurence Krauss introduced the book in the forward:

Freethinking and Saudi Arabia are two descriptions that rarely appear in the same sentence, and for good reason. The former is officially outlawed by the government and religious leaders associated with the latter. For this reason, it is difficult to get a real sense of the difficulties experienced by those who live in Saudi Arabia and who do not want to be shackled by the chains of myth, hatred and ignorance that are the hallmark of religious fundamentalism. [Fundamentalism is unnecessary here, JH]

Most freethinking young people choose to leave the country and work in a more enlightened environment, or if they choose to stay, they keep their view to themselves. One such individual did not: Raif Badawi.

Clearly, Badawi deserves the prize, hell, I’m hoping that he becomes the first blogger to win a Nobel.

One of the reasons I voted for Barack Hussein Obama in 2008 was his support for the Employee Free Choice Act. That support, and my support for President Obama, quickly vaporized in the early months of 2009. I don’t think that will be the case for President Bernie Sanders.

Dan Roberts, writing in Bernie Sanders launches pro-union bill as battle for organized labor intensifies for The Guardian, ledes:

The battle for labor movement support among Democratic presidential candidates broke into the open on Tuesday with the launch of legislation by Senator Bernie Sanders protecting employees who seek to form unions.

Though the Workplace Democracy Act stands little chance of passing the current Republican-controlled Congress, it marks a new phase in the Sanders campaign’s effort to paint itself as the natural champion of organized labor.

The proposals to prevent workers from being victimized for attempting to form unions come amid growing union endorsements for Hillary Clinton and ahead of a White House “Worker Voice” summit on Wednesday which is expected to be attended by Vice-President Joe Biden.

Sanders rejected criticism that his support among unions was lower than he would have hoped, saying that members were backing him even if their leaders were influenced by personal ties to Clinton.

“We have a number of locals, we have the national nurses union and we are going to have a number of more unions on our side – no doubt about it,” the Vermont senator told reporters after a press conference on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.

“What sometimes happens is that Secretary Clinton has had a number of contacts with union leaders over the years, but I have zero doubt that we have massive rank-and-file support among trade unionists.”

But Sanders also insisted his support for the legislation, which would strengthen the role of the National Labor Relations Board in certifying unions, long predated his interest in running for president.

“This is legislation that I have supported since literally the first year that I was in the Congress,” he said. “It’s not a question of winning union support. What we are fighting for is the survival of the American middle class.”

Union leaders cast a handful of votes. Union members cast millions. Bernie is the candidate of the many, not the few as further evidenced by his agreement with former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke that that corporate executives should have gone to jail for the illegal behavior which caused the financial crisis in 2008.

There is a meme about the brazenness of a man convicted of murdering his parents begging for mercy from the court because he’s an orphan.

Wells Fargo has topped that bit of audaciousness. Matt Taibbi, writing in Wells Fargo’s Master Spin Job for Rolling Stone, ledes:

If you still don’t believe our brethren on Wall Street have planet-sized cojones, check out this story.

All over the country, Wells Fargo is making headlines for launching a multimillion-dollar homeowner assistance program called HomeLIFT, which among other things offers $15,000 down payment grants to prospective home-buyers.

Local mayors in big cities from one end of the country to the other are showing up at ribbon-cuttings and throwing rose petals at the bank for its generosity. Newspapers in turn are running breathless profiles of the low-income homeowners who will now get to buy dream homes thanks to the bank’s beneficence.

Some knew, some didn’t, but all are leaving out one key detail: Wells Fargo was forced to launch HomeLIFT.

Yes. Wells Fargo got nailed for robosigning and lost the court battle in City of Westland Police and Fire Retirement System v. Stumpf. The fallout from that loss mandated:

…that the bank spend $67 million on a series of measures to repair its reputation in communities hit the hardest by foreclosures and robosigning. Enter HomeLIFT.

Under the settlement, Wells had to dedicate $36 million in homeowner assistance to cities like Fresno, Bakersfield, Detroit, Albuquerque, Virginia Beach and New Haven. It also mandated $6 million in spending for credit counseling.

Wells Fargo had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the settlement and now the bank’s flacks have the balls to try and turn the court-mandated expenditure into a public-relations coup.

I checked the local news in Cleveland and there doesn’t appear to be any recent mention of HomeLIFT. As Taibbi notes, however, there was an earlier program, resulting from an earlier lawsuit: CityLIFT.

When I contacted Wells about this story, the bank initially seemed offended at the suggestion it had not been forthright about the impetus behind HomeLIFT. The new program, its spokesperson Tom Goyda explained, was “part of several Wells Fargo LIFT programs developed to create positive outcomes for people and communities recovering from the financial crisis.”

A similar program called NeighborhoodLIFT, which Goyda described as a philanthropic endeavor, had been created years before the Westland suit. HomeLIFT, he said, was just an extension of that program.

Goyda added that the fact that HomeLIFT and other programs were part of settlement agreements had “already been covered in the news media” and was “mentioned in press releases.”

That was a surprise to me, since I hadn’t seen anything like that in press releases. When I pressed Goyda for an example of a Wells Fargo press release admitting that HomeLIFT was part of a court settlement, he replied:

“Our CityLIFT program within the LIFT family was part of a 2012 settlement with the DOJ and that fact has been included in all CityLIFT releases and background is provided on the program Website and, as we discussed, HomeLIFT’s ties to the Westland settlement is discussed with city officials and has been covered by several media outlets previously.”

This is confusing, but funny. To deflect attention from one lawsuit, Wells directed me to a different and worse one.

While HomeLIFT doesn’t appear to be on Cleveland’s radar, CityLIFT is. Two years ago Olivera Perkins, writing in Homebuyers in Cleveland can get $15,000 toward down payment for the Plain Dealer told readers:

Homebuyers in the City of Cleveland may qualify for $15,000 in down payment assistance funding resulting from a federal mortgage settlement.

Wells Fargo is making $3.7 million available through its CityLIFT program.

Perkins gets points for putting the settlement in the lede and for additionally informing readers:

The money comes from a 2012 settlement between Wells Fargo and the U.S. Department of Justice regarding whether some Wells Fargo mortgages had adversely impacted African-American and Hispanic borrowers.

The same year, the lender was part of the $25 billion national mortgage settlement reached between the federal government and 49 state attorneys general and the nation’s five largest mortgage servicers: Ally/GMAC, Bank of America, Citi, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo.

The agreement settled state and federal investigations finding that these servicers routinely signed foreclosure-related documents without a notary public and without confirming if the information in such documents was correct. Both practices are against the law.

Matt Taibbi was away from us for too long working for First Look Media, the Glenn Greenwald/Pierre Omidyar startup. I had high hopes for that partnership since I greatly admire both Greenwald and Taibbi, but disagreements happened and Taibbi returned to Rolling Stone.

I’m very happy that he’s back.