While other politicians attended Labor Day picnics Bernie Sanders chose to walk the line, the picket line. Jana Kasperkevic, writing in Bernie Sanders mans picket line as Democratic contenders woo unions for The Guardian reports:

Bernie Sanders kicked off Labor Day weekend in a true union style: by picking up a sign and joining a picket line outside Penford Products in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

“I want you to know being out on a picket line and standing with workers is something I have been doing for my entire life,” the senator from Vermont told the crowd.

The Penford Products workers in question are on strike over a new contract which they say would cut wages and holidays such as Veterans Day.

“I did when I was mayor of the city of Burlington,” Sanders added. “I did [it] in Congress, did it in the Senate.”

He was now doing it as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, with one poll would putting him nine points up on Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire.

“This is what I do,” he said. “This is what I believe in.”

This is why I’m backing Bernie Sanders with my time, my energy and my money.

Words are the raw material I sculpt with my life experiences to create fantasy castles and wisdom institutes. My vocabulary is better than some, but not a day passes that I don’t discover a word not in my brick yard. Here a few I’ve come across this past week.

Yahudihane: the Turkish word for tenement building housing multiple Jewish families. (The Star of Istanbul)

Summak Kawsay: “good living” in harmony with our communities, ourselves, and most importantly, our living, breathing environment. (This Changes Everything)

Fauboure: an ancient French term approximating suburb. (Les Miserables)

Congourde: an association of liberals at the time of the restoration of the Bourbons in France. The word literally means calabash gourd. (Les Miserables)

Schinderhannes: Johannes Bückler (c.1778—21 November 1803), nicknamed Schinderhannes, was a German outlaw who orchestrated one of the most famous crime sprees in German history. (Les Miserables)

Watteau Style: Jean-Antoine Watteau was the innovative artist who extended Rococo beyond architecture, interior design and sculpture to the canvas. (Les Miserables)

Asperity: harshness of behavior or speech that expresses bitterness or anger. (Les Miserables)

Bien-pensant: right-minded, one who holds orthodox views. (This Changes Everything)

African Sahel: the ecoclimatic and biogeographic zone of transition in Africa between the Sahara Desert to the north and the Sudanian Savanna to the south. (This Changes Everything)

What words have you learned lately?

Found in my email inbox this morning from Bernie Sanders.

Jeff,

The middle class is at a tipping point, and it won’t last another generation if we don’t boldly change course now.

The surest path to the middle class for American workers is with unions. The security and strength of a union job means that workers can have good pay, health care, and a voice at work.

Today our country celebrates Labor Day in honor of the working people who fought for our rights to regular hours, fair pay, and a decent living. For decades, the labor movement propped up the middle class in America by ensuring a level playing field for workers.

There are many reasons for the growing inequality in our economy, but perhaps the most significant reason for the disappearing middle class is that the rights of workers to join together and collectively bargain for better wages, benefits, and working conditions have been severely undermined.

That is why this fall I will introduce a bill in Congress whose sole purpose is to restore and encourage workers’ rights to bargain for better wages, benefits, and working conditions. It’s called the Workplace Democracy Act, and if it is made law, it will help rebuild the middle class.

Celebrate Labor Day by signing the petition to support the Workplace Democracy Act.

Workers need unions because there are people working for minimum wage, barely able to afford to put food on the table—if even that. There are people whose jobs are dangerous, or even life-threatening, who can’t speak up for workplace safety for fear of being fired. And there are countless people working without sick days or even health insurance.

Unions change that equation. When workers have unions, they are no longer afraid to speak up. They have a clear path to getting health care, sick days, basic safety precautions, and better pay. They don’t have to live in fear of their employers, and they can work to provide for their families.

That is unfortunately far from the reality that exists today. Under the current law, it is incredibly easy for corporations to prevent workers from joining unions. One in five workers who try to form a union today will be fired for doing so. And half of all employers threaten to close or relocate their businesses if workers elect to form a union.

But there’s effectively no deterrence for when companies do break the law. The penalties are far too weak, and there is no incentive to stop corporations from dragging their feet when workers want to negotiate contracts.

The Workplace Democracy Act changes that equation. Our bill would:

Ensure companies can’t prevent workers from getting a first contract.

Make it easier for workers to form unions through a majority sign up process.

Strengthen the enforcement when corporations break the law.

This is a commonsense idea that will help our economy and rebuild the middle class. Can you say you support it?

For Labor Day, join me in standing with working people.

Thank you for your support.
In solidarity,
Bernie Sanders

In July I took delight in sharing part of an essay written by Umberto Eco titled How To Justify A Private Library. Of Eco’s essay, Oliver Burkeman wrote:

His floor-to-ceiling bookshelves are… a research tool. Unread books are where the action is. The writer Nassim Taleb approvingly calls such a collection an “antilibrary”; one’s shelves, he argues, should contain “as much of what you do not know” as finances allow. And don’t expect the proportion of unread books to fall, either. The more you read, the more the perimeter of your knowledge increases, and the more you’ll realise you don’t know.

This morning I find Tom Peters echoing the same sentiments. Great minds don’t think alike, but they do, occasionally, briefly cross paths.

We mortals should take note of those intersections.

Previously…

In as clear and precise a way that no other politician is saying, Bernie Sanders lays out the stakes in the 2016 presidential election. Writing in Can Bernie Sanders really beat Hillary Clinton in Iowa? for The Guardian, Dan Roberts reports:

“Brothers and sisters, you are not living in a democracy; you are living in an oligarchy,” the leftwing Democratic presidential candidate tells an audience of Iowa supporters enthralled by his stinging attack on campaign finance and corporate lobbying. “People fought and died to defend American democracy and I will be damned if I am going to let them take that away from us.”

While every other candidate is running as hard as they can to please their billionaire masters, Bernie has other ideas.

Sanders revels in his self-confessed “grumpiness”.

With a thick Brooklyn accent so gravelly it sounds like he swallowed a bag of pebbles before coming on stage, he tells the crowd in Burlington later that night that he is less about change and more about revolution.

“The American people are sick and tired with establishment politics, sick and tired of establishment economics and sick and tired of establishment media,” he says as a freight train hoots hauntingly in the distance. “They want to see a government in which the American people and the middle class are represented rather than big money interests.”

Fuck yes we can: yes we do! How?

“When we stand together we win because there are a helluva lot more of us than there are of them,” concludes the Vermont insurgent. “We have a very simple message to the billionaire class: you cannot have it all.”

*Scott Adams has an unusual take on We The People…

Former Plain Dealer columnist James Neff has written a thriller-like book—Vendetta: Bobby Kennedy Versus Jimmy Hoffa—of the long smoldering battle between Bobby Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa, two giants on the national scene in the 1950s and 1960s.

The book is stacked with inside info about how Bob Kennedy, as a staffer of the 1950s Senate Rackets Committee and the 1960s U. S. Attorney General under his brother President Jack Kennedy relentlessly pursued the Teamster boss.

Sy Hersh, a Pulitzer winner, rightly appraises the book:

If you think you know it all you don’t. James Neff has turned Bobby Kennedy’s headline-making clash with Jimmy Hoffa into a psychological thriller about two tough, powerful, and vengeful men who fought with all they had, exhausting both. This is not a book about a good Bobby versus a bad Hoffa. It is a study of two men who always got what they wanted staging a shoot-out on the streets of Laredo. And, as Neff tells it, there were no winners.

Hoffa eluded Kennedy until 1964 when he was found guilty on two counts in a jury tampering case.

Neff reveals conclusively that Kennedy was out to get Hoffa almost by any means necessary.

As one U.S. official noted, “Kennedy and I were never on the same Continue Reading »

Jennifer Jacobs, writing in Iowa Poll: Clinton leads, but Sanders draws near for The Des Moines Resgister reports”:

Liberal revolutionary Bernie Sanders, riding an updraft of insurgent passion in Iowa, has closed to within 7 points of Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential race.

She’s the first choice of 37 percent of likely Democratic caucusgoers; he’s the pick for 30 percent, according to a new Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics Iowa Poll.

But Clinton has lost a third of her supporters since May, a trajectory that if sustained puts her at risk of losing again in Iowa, the initial crucible in the presidential nominating contest.

This is the first time Clinton, the former secretary of state and longtime presumptive front-runner, has dropped below the 50 percent mark in four polls conducted by the Register and Bloomberg Politics this year.

Joe Biden is a major factor here, polling at 14 percent, but Bernie’s message is resonating as reported by Martin Pengelly, writing for The Guardian in Sanders highlights differences with Clinton after Iowa poll shows tight race:

Asked on CNN how he would take on “the billionaire class”, a central target of his campaign stump speeches, in ways Clinton would not, Sanders said: “I believe that, when you have so few banks with so much power … you have got to break them up. That is not Hillary Clinton’s position.

“I believe that our trade policies—have been a disaster. I am helping to lead the effort against the Trans-Pacific Partnership. That is not Hillary Clinton’s position.”

Sanders also said that he would “defeat” the Keystone pipeline, expand social security and raise the minimum wage to $15, all things Clinton would not do.

Touching on foreign policy, which has not been a focus of his campaign, he said: “I voted against the war in Iraq. Hillary Clinton voted for it.”

In a subsequent appearance on ABC, Sanders was asked about his votes against military force in Iraq and in Syria, as well as the first Gulf War. In 2001, after 9/11, he voted in support of the invasion of Afghanistan.

“There are times when you have to use military force,” he said, “no question about it. I am prepared to do it, but that is the last resort, not the first.

“I think historically, in too many instances, the United States has gone to war often unilaterally when we should not have.”

Then there is the little Constitutional matter of Congress never having voted to go to war.

I keep listening and reading stories waiting to see if anyone will have the balls to pick up Scott Adams’ discussions of the rise of Donald Trump. So far, I’ve not heard a peep. I don’t know if Adams’ is right or not—although I suspect he is—but I do think that he is the only one choosing to look at Trump through the lens of business and not politics. That difference leads him to this:

My updated prediction is that Trump will win the general election by a large margin. (Prior prediction was a small margin.)

You should read the whole post, and those leading to Adams’ conclusion.

Trump is a black swan, and if we don’t figure that out, we’re in big trouble.

Why do we tell people to do what makes them happy? Is there a utility in happiness? How do we know that we are happy? How long must we exist in a state of happiness before we can consider ourselves happy?

One of the more important ideas I acquired in college came from a Political Science course in the early ’80s examining terrorists and terrorism. The easy take-away from the course was that one person’s terrorist was another’s freedom fighter, but that wasn’t the important bit. What stuck with me—I want to attribute this to Lenin but I’m uncertain as to the origin—was the greater idea that there can be just and unjust war. A just war is one in which the base of power is expanded by the war, i.e. more people share in the power of a community or nation, and a unjust war is one in which the power base is reduced.

As I learned this morning—in reading Oliver Burkeman, writing in Misery, failure, death and a slap in the face. Great advice for life from James Hollis for The Guardian—this dynamic can apply to the individual as well and that the better question to ask yourself is not will this choice make me happier? but rather, will this choice make me larger? Burkeman begins:

Frankly, I’m embarrassed to admit that one of the books that matters to me most is called What Matters Most. Sophisticated readers are supposed to be changed in subtler ways, by novels and poems that don’t crassly advertise their life-changing intent. But I don’t think the title of this wise book of advice should be interpreted as self-help cheesiness; really, it’s refreshing bluntness. Life is full of troubles, writes the psychoanalyst James Hollis, and every choice you make is in some sense a failure. Then you die.

That’s bleak.

The task, for each person, is to figure out what they are, and then heed that call instead of resisting it.

This is a radical and humbling way of thinking about psychology. It means that what you think you want from life probably isn’t what life wants from you. And it means that living meaningfully is almost certainly going to screw with your plans, forcing you out of comfort and certainty, and into suffering and the unknown

So, life sucks is a valid philosophy? Perhaps.

At any major juncture in life, Hollis argues, we should ask: “Does this path, this choice, make me larger or smaller?” There’s something uncanny about this question, which has seen me through several dilemmas since discovering his work. The usual question is “Will this make me happy?”—but few of us, if we’re honest, have much of a clue about what will make us, or our loved ones, happiest. Ask whether a choice will make you larger or diminish you, though, and surprisingly often the answer’s obvious.

I’ve never asked myself that question, but I will.

Living in North Royalton, Ohio, has many pluses. We have a Metro Park in my back yard. We have a mini-pack of dogs who romp and play in our insanely large front yard and who are always so happy to see me when I come home. We can sit on our back deck and watch our menagerie of wild turkeys, hawks, raccoons, owls, deer and snapping turtles, to name a few, that live and parade through our wee meadow.

What I miss is having a coffee shop. We had one, a really poor one, plain and sterile and about as inviting as McDonald’s (we do have one of those, along with a Burger King and an Arby’s and several Subway shops. The closest we come now is Becker’s Donuts, which does have a single table and acceptable coffee to go along with the great doughnuts.

Sitting here in my writing room, looking out at the meadow, is really great, but there are times when I miss the buzz (the real buzz, not the horrible soundtrack loop) of a busy coffee house like Phoenix in Cleveland Heights.

We can’t have everything.

Maybe the time has come to finally buy my own espresso machine.

Sigh

Hey, Jimmy Haslam, can we wipe your butt for you?

Do you need anything else we can give you?

That’s the attitude of Mayor Frank “Neighborhood” Jackson and Council President Kevin “Go Along” Kelley. And other city leaders for decades.

The pair has just given another gift to the Cleveland Browns owner.

Parking.

One of the most under-estimated downtown businesses is parking.

And now the Mayor and Council President sneakily have given Haslam almost exclusive use of the city’s Willard Park garage on game days. Willard attached to City Hall. Close to the stadium.

It follows the tradition of city government giving away assets to private interests.

Presently, the city rewards Haslam by allowing exclusive use of Willard garage, not far from the stadium the city gave Haslam.

And it’s for Browns loge and special seat fans. Screw the rest of you ordinary Browns fans. Find someplace else to park.

Further, it means those who ordinarily use Willard have to be out of the garage by 5 p.m. on game days. Private customers, screw you too.

“This legislation which came in by Department Request and was passed April 13, 2015 clearly ‘end runs’ the Council, to put it in football terms,” wrote Mike Polensek, dean of Council, to Kelley.

“I don’t believe for one moment that you, Councilman Ken Johnson or the Council as a whole, for that fact, envisioned the Administration leasing the Continue Reading »

At the first Bernie Sanders meeting I attended, the gathering was white and mostly 40-plus. There was a scattering of 20 somethings and I was encouraged by their attendance. The Guardian has a story this morning suggesting that Millennials, perhaps dissatisfied by the Occupy movement are turning out for Bernie.

Adam Gabbatt, writing in Millennials ‘heart’ Bernie Sanders: why the young and hip are #FeelingtheBern tells us that:

It’s 8pm on a Wednesday and in a Brooklyn loft, a Bernie Sanders screen-printing event is in full swing.

“It’s a four-year-old workout shirt,” says Nick Kowalczyk, holding up a once-white cotton T-shirt that now has a lot of yellowing under the arms.

Kowalcyzk, 29, is an actor originally from Atlanta. His friend asks if he plans to wear his cowboy hat with the freshly printed shirt, which now has a red heart with a cutout face in the middle which vaguely resembles an outline of the head of the Vermont senator and leftwing candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. Above the heart: “Bernie.” Below it: “For President.”

“Fuck yeah,” says Kowalczyk. “I’m gonna wear a lot of things with this.”

Dozens of people walk around the loft, an apartment with the high tin ceilings and single-pane windows of a converted factory. Most have brought T-shirts to be printed. Freshly inked shirts hang from clotheslines strung across the space, delicately balanced on window ledges and strewn across chairs.

This energy reminds me very much of the feelings around the campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern. They both lost, of course, but properly channeled and supported by more politically savvy organizations, they could have defeated Richard Nixon, just as the thousands turning out for Bernie can help him roll over the Republican drones.

The Guardian emails:

Dear Jeff,

What has the Wellcome Trust gained from its investments in coal, oil and gas?

The answer is that they have nose-dived in the past year due to falling share prices. By remaining wedded to the fossil fuel industry, the Wellcome Trust has lost £175m. BHP Billiton’s share price slid by 45%, Shell’s by 30%, Rio Tinto’s by 29% and BP by 21%.

The first-class research funded by the Wellcome Trust is vital for understanding and treating diseases such as cancer and malaria. But betting on the fossil fuel industry has been bad business for Wellcome over the last year.

The Keep it in the Ground campaign will keep pushing the Wellcome Trust (and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) to divest from fossil fuels. We worked with Medact, the global health NGO, to pool the voices of the medical profession against the Wellcome Trust’s stance on their investments. Just last week we published a letter signed by almost 1,000 health professionals.

Yours Sincerely,

James Randerson, Assistant National News Editor

Keep Carbon In The Ground…

Scott Adams make the case that Donald Trump is a scholarly descendant of Milton Hyland Erickson, a man that Scott calls the first American-born wizard. He also suggests that Hillary Rodham Clinton is also somewhere on the Erickson family tree.

Because the two presidential candidates are intellectual siblings, Adams sees the potential for the 2016 presidential race to become a wizard war.

What was Erickson’s wizardry power? Mind control.

In 1901 the first American-born wizard came into the world. His name was Milton Hyland Erickson. And to the wizards he later trained, he was their Merlin, or Dumbledore if you prefer. The main difference is that Erickson was real.

Erickson was an autodidact, and maybe more. He discovered that he could arrange words in a way that cast spells on people and took control of their minds. If you have seen the Star Wars movies, you know all about the Jedi Mind Trick. Erickson’s power was like that, but slower, and with more words.

In earlier times, such a person would be burned as a witch. But Erickson was born into an age of science, and in the new world, non-science claims such as his were swept to the side and assumed to be bunk.

Fortunately for us all, Erickson was a good wizard. And he made it his life’s work to train other wizards in his ways. As one might expect, the most talented of Erickson’s wizards went on to amass incredible wealth and breathtaking power. The new wizards were not saints, or even close, but they were generally a force for good. They built some of the biggest companies in the world. They led nations toward social justice. They ended wars triggered by evil wizards overseas. They stimulated economies.

These super-wizards live and work among us, but their powers are visible only to other trained wizards. The public believes these wizards achieved their success with luck, brains, hard work, and passion. Those things matter, but the wizards had more. They could shape reality by altering how people see the world.

What Scott calls wizardry, most people see as Psychology, but, as Adams reminds us, Arthur C. Clarke had a view on the difference: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Can Harry, Hermione and Ron save us?

Not a bad idea for your family, your community, your nation or the planet (well those too) but a bad idea for your investment portfolio. This email hit my desk this morning.

Dear Jeff,

What has the Wellcome Trust gained from its investments in coal, oil and gas?

The answer is that they have nose-dived in the past year due to falling share prices. By remaining wedded to the fossil fuel industry, the Wellcome Trust has lost £175m. BHP Billiton’s share price slid by 45%, Shell’s by 30%, Rio Tinto’s by 29% and BP by 21%.

The first-class research funded by the Wellcome Trust is vital for understanding and treating diseases such as cancer and malaria. But betting on the fossil fuel industry has been bad business for Wellcome over the last year.

The Keep it in the Ground campaign will keep pushing the Wellcome Trust (and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) to divest from fossil fuels. We worked with Medact, the global health NGO, to pool the voices of the medical profession against the Wellcome Trust’s stance on their investments. Just last week we published a letter signed by almost 1,000 health professionals – available here.

Yours Sincerely,

James Randerson, Assistant National News Editor

What Randerson is talking about is the story this morning from Damian Carrington who writes:

The Wellcome Trust’s investments in fossil fuel companies have lost an estimated £175m in the last year, due to sharp falls in share prices. Research by the Guardian shows the medical charity has sold off two-thirds of its holding in Shell but also increased its investment in the fastest falling of its stocks, mining giant BHP Billiton, by 8%.

The Wellcome Trust is the world’s second-biggest non-governmental funder of medical research but has been the focus of a Guardian campaign asking the Trust to sell its fossil fuel investments, which today stand at an estimated £370m.

Current fossil fuel reserves are already several times greater than could be burned while keeping below the internationally agreed target of 2C of global warming. But coal, oil and gas companies continue to explore for new reserves. The Keep it in the Ground campaign argues that financing such companies is inconsistent for an organisation dedicated to improving health, given that a recent landmark report concluded climate change threatens to undermine half a century of progress in global health.

The Wellcome Trust – which funds a range of research into diseases such as cancer, malaria and Ebola – invests in four major fossil fuel companies, all of which have seen large falls in their share prices in the last year. BHP Billiton’s share price slid by 45%, Shell’s by 30%, Rio Tinto’s by 29% and BP by 21%.

Bill McKibben, founder of the global fossil fuel divestment campaign which has seen companies, universities, churches, cities and philanthropic organisations around the world divest, said the Wellcome Trust’s failure to divest from fossil fuels meant it had lost money that could have funded its programmes.

I’m about half way through Namoi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate, the book that kicked off The Guardian’s campaign. You can read my notes on the introduction here. More are to follow.

Keep Carbon In The Ground…