---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Thompson <dmt031073@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2016 08:17:43 -0500
Subject: National Coffee Day and coffee/tea facts, Dan's tip for
Thursday September 29 2016
To: Dan Thompson <dmt031073@gmail.com>
National Coffee Day, September 29 2016
Belowis lots of information about National Coffee day, facts about tea
and a place to get free coffee only today if you call or order via
email.
What's the one thing you always do right after you get up in the morning?
If you're anything like me, probably one of two things:
1. Drink coffee.
2. Drink tea.
And you and I are not alone. More than half of Americans drink tea,
and more than
three quarters drink coffee.
Don't worry. I'm not going to tell you to stop drinking coffee or tea.
I believe both can be
quite healthy, in fact...
Coffee has been shown time and again to boost metabolism.
Many teas are rich in antioxidants, among other things.
Plus, both drinks just taste so good...
What I am going to tell you is how to make your coffee or tea better.
Much better.
You see, thanks to some unfortunate industry practices, there are
currently some
serious pitfalls to both of these beverages...
And you're about to find out how to get around these pitfalls… in the
most delicious way
possible.
Let's start with coffee.
(NOTE: If you only drink tea, you can scroll straight down to the tea
section below.)
With coffee being one of the most widely consumed beverages in the world, one
question has come up time and again:
Is it healthy?
And a sky-high pile of research answers this question with a resounding "YES."
Studies published in medical journals like Neuropsychobiology and
Psychopharmacology have shown coffee to increase energy and improve cognitive
function.
Studies such as one published in the American Journal of Clinical
Nutrition in January of
2004 have shown coffee to increase fat metabolism.
So, the consensus is in: if you love coffee...keep enjoying it!
But there is one big danger with mass-produced coffee: what you put IN it.
For example, just 3 spoonfuls of Coffee Mate French Vanilla liquid
creamer — one of
the most popular on the market — adds over 100 calories to your mug of
coffee in the
morning...
And ALL of those calories come from refined sugar and trans fat — generally
considered the most unhealthy fat in existence.
So, if you're going to cream your coffee, real cream is a better
option — organic if
possible. And if you must sweeten it, try real maple syrup or raw sugar.
But the better option is just to drink better coffee and skip the
fattening additions… or at
least make it so you don't have to add as much of them!
Did you know the coffee you get in stores has often been sitting in
bags for weeks or
sometimes months? Not only that… It's often poorly roasted (read:
burnt to a crisp).
And the resulting brew is a bitter, harsh beverage that needs
additions like sugar and
cream to be drinkable… and like I said before, THAT'S where you run
into serious
trouble.
Coffee is supposed to taste sweet on its own, and it does... if you
get truly fresh, high-
quality coffee.
And it's actually pretty easy (and inexpensive) to get it. You have a
couple of options:
1. Get your coffee from a local coffee shop run by people that
get their beans in
fresh and roast them in-house… and know what they're doing.
2. Order your coffee online from a company of passionate
coffee experts that
specialize in fresh, precisely roasted coffee.
The first option can be fun adventure. Get some friends together, and
go explore the
coffee shops in the area!
As for the second option, I can certainly help you there...
In my quest for the perfect cup of coffee, these are some of the best
online companies
I've found:
Coffee Fool is my personal favorite. Reasonably priced, super-skilled
roasters... Plus,
every Friday, they do storewide sales!
Blue Bottle, one of the fastest-rising coffee companies in the
country. Found in many
gourmet restaurants, they're a bit pricier than Coffee Fool, but
absolutely outstanding.
Olympia Coffee. Meticulous about every aspect of coffee-making, pretty
much anything
Olympia rolls out is delicious. That's why it's the priciest of the bunch.
There are plenty more, such as Stumptown, Intelligentsia, and PT's
Coffee… so if you
want to taste the good stuff, it's definitely available to you.
And no… I'm not affiliated with any of these coffee companies. They
don't even know
who I am!
I just enjoy their coffee, and I wanted to show you some of the
options out there that
blow store-bought coffee out of the water!
Now let's talk about tea for a minute…
Some of the problems with tea, unfortunately, are more dangerous than
with coffee.
Two main factors can make certain teas a minefield for your health:
1. Tea is often heavily sprayed with pesticides.
2. Most of the time, tea leaves aren't washed before they're
put in tea bags.
The resulting pesticide residue leaches straight out into your hot
water when you brew
these teas and drink them.
And we're not just talking about trace amounts here…
Several independent studies have found pesticide levels in
mass-produced teas to be in
excess of both U.S. and European Union safety limits.
Two such tea studies were recently done by Greenpeace in cooperation with an
international DAkks-certified testing laboratory. One of the studies
was in India, and the
other in China.
The India Study found pesticides on 94% of the teas tested… 60% of them having
levels OVER the European Union safety limit.
The China study, meanwhile, not only found pesticides on ALL the teas tested…
66% percent of the teas contained at least one of three globally
banned pesticides:
methomyl, fenvalerate, and endosulfan... all considered unfit for
human consumption.
India and China are the two biggest producers of tea on Earth, folks.
They're where we
get most of our tea!
And yes, much of that heavily sprayed tea makes it over here.
Celestial Seasonings, one of the biggest tea brands in the U.S., was recently
independently tested by consumer watchdog groups.
When the results came back, 91% of their teas were found to have
pesticide levels over
the U.S. limits!
In fact, Celestial Seasonings has reportedly already received two
warning letters from
the FDA about quality control.
And what about higher-end teas?
Well, Teavana teas were also tested by the same groups, and 100% of their teas
contained pesticides.
Not only that… 77% of their teas had pesticide levels in excess of
European Union
safety limits... and 62% contained endosulfate — one of those 3 globally banned
pesticides I mentioned earlier.
The sad fact is… many of the popular brands of tea you see at the
store have been
similarly called out for pesticide content.
That's why most of them are also loaded with added flavoring to cover
up the inferior
quality of the tea.
So, given the shocking state of the tea industry, if there were ever
something I'd advise
you to go organic on, tea is it.
After all, organic standards take the guesswork out by prohibiting the
use of pesticides
altogether.
Personally, when I found out the startling truth about tea, I scoured
the market for
organic brands I could trust.
Here are the three I've found that I trust the most:
Numi Tea, my personal favorite. CEO Ahmed Rahim is very outspokenly
critical of the
state of the tea industry. Numi is all-organic, with strict quality
standards across the
board. Plus, their Aged Earl Grey is the best I've ever tasted, hands
down. I could drink
it all day!
Rishi Tea, another outstanding, all-organic company. They're very open
about where
they source each tea from. Plus, their traditional Masala Chai Tea
Blend probably my
favorite chai. And I've tried a lot of them.
Traditional Medicinals. Focused in green and herbal teas, this
all-organic brand is
zeroed in on medicinal qualities of tea, such as clearing sinuses,
aiding digestion, and
just plain relaxation. On that note, their chamomile lavender tea is
outstanding.
Same as with the coffees, I am NOT even remotely affiliated with any
of these tea
companies.
I just happen to like them… and I wanted to share with you a few
brands I personally
trust after doing quite a bit of research.
All these teas, by the way, are readily available for order on their
company websites and
on Amazon if you don't see them at your local store.
Not to mention, if you order them online, they're generally not much
more expensive
than regular teas are at the store!
And as to taste…
These organic teas are nuanced, beautiful, and delicious.
So…whether you're drinking fresh, perfectly roasted coffee or
beautifully aromatic
organic tea… your mornings hopefully just got a whole lot better!
Source: Food Truth Letters series,
http://nucific.com/blog/category/food-truth-letters/
National Coffee Day:
WASHINGTON - Java lovers, rejoice! September 29 is National Coffee
Day-- though some of you might be surprised to learn that not EVERY
DAY is National Coffee Day. Local coffee shops and chains around the
DC area are offering FREEBIES or coffee deals to celebrate the roasted
bean, and as you might imagine, we've got a list of where to find it.
Here are a few places offering free coffee for on Thursday, September 28:
Peet's Coffee & Tea
The return of the deal! Score a free medium cup of drip coffee with
any fresh food purchase.
Click here to find a location
http://www.peets.com/
Celebrate National Coffee Day. Free Ship Sitewide*. Thurs. 9/29 ONLY!
(800) 999-2132
Email Us 24/7
.
promo image
Peet's Coffee & Tea
Email us 24/7 by visiting the link below.
https://www.peets.com/customer-service/contact-us/
Common and perhaps little-known facts on two of our most treasured
beverages: Coffee and Tea.
Coffee and Tea Facts from Belly Bytes
Intro to Tantalizing Tea
A beverage prepared by infusion of the young leaves, leaf buds and
internodes of varieties of Camellia sinensis and C. assamica,
originating from China. Green tea is dried without further treatment.
Black tea is fermented (actually an oxidation) before drying; Oolong
tea is lightly fermented.
Among the black teas, flowering Pekoe is made from the top leaf buds,
orange Pekoe from first opened leaf, Pekoe from third leaves, and
Souchong from next leaves. Earl Grey is flavored with bergamot;
lapsang souchong was originally produced by burning tarry ropes near
the tea during processing. Up to 30 percent of the dry weight may be
various polyphenols that have been associated with protection against
cardiovascular disease.
*Tea Facts
Cup of Tea with Lemon
◦Tea was originated in China and then was introduced to Japan.
◦Mexican tea is called Epazote.
◦Teaseed oil is oil from the seed of Thea sasangua, cultivated in
China; used as salad oil and for frying.
◦Iced tea and coffee can be greatly improved if the ice cubes are made
of coffee or tea instead of water.
◦You can avoid cloudiness in iced tea by letting freshly brewed tea
cool to room temperature before refrigerating it. If the tea does
become cloudy, pour a little boiling water into it until it becomes
clear.
◦For a new taste in tea, add a small bit of dried orange peel to the teapot.
◦The Island of Celon is the world's leading producer of tea.
◦An experienced picker can pluck about 40 pounds of tea leaves a day.
◦Salada Tea and Bigelow English Tea time are two of the highest
caffeine content teas. They average about 60 mg. of caffeine per 8
ounce cup.
When drinking tea, never use polystyrene cups with lemon.
◦When drinking tea, never use polystyrene cups with lemon. The
combination of the hot tea and the lemon will corrode the cup away
releasing carcinogens into your drink. It will actually eat right
through the cup.
◦Tannin, found in tea and red wine may interfere with the body's use
of iron, thiamin, and vitamin B12.
◦At present there is no risk factor related to drinking tea and heart disease.
◦Black teas are the most popular in the U.S., importing 130 million
pounds per year. The yearly consumption is 35 billion servings.
◦Iced tea was first created at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition
in St. Louis.
◦One pound of tea will brew approximately 200 cups (200 teabags).
◦The U.S. imports approximately 72 percent of its tea from India.
*Classifications of Tea
Black Tea: Turns black due to oxidation. This is the best quality
tea. Includes Organic Assam Tea, Ceylon, Darjeeling, English
Breakfast, Keemun, Lapsang and Lapsang Souchong Tea.
Green Tea: Oxidation is omitted. The natural color is green. Two main
types: Basket Fired and Gunpowder Tea.
Oolong Tea: Semi-processed, makes the leaves partly green and brown.
Two types: Formosa Style Oolong Tea and Organic Tea Jasmine.
*Outdoor Tea Facts and Tips
1.Tea bags, new or used, can be placed on the soil around plants in
garden beds and planters to fertilize. Cover the tea bags with mulch.
Every time you water the plants, the nutrients from the decomposing
tea leaves work their way into the soil. You could also use instant
iced tea. Mix up a quart according to directions. Don't add sugar or
ice. Use the solution to fertilize your plants. Or, sprinkle the
powdered mix directly on the soil. As the tea decomposes, the
nutrients work their way into the soil.
2.Water azaleas with cold, strongly brewed tea to increase nitrogen
content in the soil for healthy leaf growth. You can also split open
tea bags and sprinkle the leaves on the soil. If preferred, you could
use instant iced tea mix in place of the brewed tea.
Coffee
Cups of coffee
◦Coffee manufacturers do not have to disclose their method of decaffeination.
◦Brazil has experienced two major frosts in 1994 that destroyed over 1
billion pounds of coffee, approximately 10 percent of supply in the
entire world. The result was an increase in the price of coffee
worldwide.
◦The United States consumes about one-third of all coffee worldwide,
approximately 400 million cups per day.
◦The only coffee grown in the United States is Kona coffee, which is
grown on the island of Hawaii. The coffee is grown in volcanic soil
and has the richest coffee flavor in the world.
◦Black salsify is a hardy perennial sometimes used roasted as coffee substitute.
◦ If you give up coffee and are drinking two cups a day or more, you
will probably have withdrawal symptoms, such as headaches, nausea and
possibly depression.
◦The safest way to prepare coffee is to boil it in water instead of
filtering it. This is the way it is prepared in the Scandinavian
countries.
◦Mocca is a mixture of coffee and cocoa used in bakery and
confectionery products.
◦Mocha means a few things: 1.A variety of arabica coffee
2.Flavored with coffee
3.In the USA, a combination of coffee and chocolate flavorings.
◦Fresh roasted coffee beans are usually packed in non-airtight bags to
allow the carbon monoxide formed during the roasting process to
escape. If the carbon monoxide does not escape, the coffee may have a
poor taste.
◦The Swiss Water decaffeinated process is the safest. Check decaf
labels. Other water processed methods are not as good.
◦The freshness of a cup of coffee only survives 10 to 30 minutes in a
coffee warmer.
◦Coffee will taste better if you start with quality cold water, not
hot tap water.
◦Purchase only unbleached brown coffee filters. The chemical digoxin
is used to bleach filters white and may leave a residue.
◦Dripped coffee has almost twice the caffeine as instants.
◦Beverages that contain caffeine may cause your skin to become
dehydrated and promotes premature aging.
◦The polyphenols in coffee and the tannins in tea may reduce the
amount of iron available for the body to use. One cup of coffee
consumed with a hamburger reduces the amount of iron
◦The polyphenols in coffee and the tannins in tea may reduce the
amount of iron available for the body to use. One cup of coffee
consumed with a hamburger reduces the amount of iron absorbed by
approximately 40 percent tea by 90 percent.
◦Caffeine takes approximately 30 minutes to affect your brain and
lasts for two to six hours.
◦Two cups of coffee will cause an increase in hydrochloric acid in the
stomach for at least an hour.
◦Coffee reduces the healing time of ulcers.
◦One cup of coffee or one cigarette will cause a rise pressure in blood.
◦Caffeine may affect zinc ◦Caffeine may affect zinc absorption which
may adversely affect the prostate gland and possibly reduce sexual
urges in some people.
◦Withdrawal symptoms will appear if caffeine is discontinued. These
usually start with headaches but only last for three to five days. The
cells become dependent on the caffeine.
◦If you consume more than 300mg of caffeine a day, it can over
stimulate the central nervous system and may cause insomnia,
nervousness, diarrhea and increase your heart rate.
◦Coffee drinkers have a higher incidence of heart disease; however,
there is no positive proof of a connection. It could just be that the
percentage of coffee drinkers is so much higher than non-coffee
drinkers, this is the way the statistics play out.
◦Caffeine causes chemical changes in cells that cause excess
triglycerides to be released into the blood stream.
◦Caffeine reduces the ability of the body to handle stress.
◦A dash of salt added to coffee that has been over cooked or re-heated
will freshen the taste.
◦Coffee trees originally came from Africa.
◦The first people known to actually drink the beverage known today as
coffee were the Arabs who would not allow the beans to be exported.
They were finally smuggled to Holland in 1660 and then to Brazil in
1727.
◦Opened coffee cans should be stored in the refrigerator upside down.
The coffee will retain its freshness and flavor longer.
◦Leftover coffee and tea can be frozen in ice cube trays then used to
cool hot coffee or in tea or other beverages.
◦Tiramisu is an Italian dessert made from coffee flavored sponge or
biscuit filled with sweetened cream cheese (mascarpone) and cream,
doused with syrup.
◦For a fast cup of coffee, have a cup of fresh coffee in a sealed
container in the refrigerator. Coffee will warm up and have an
excellent taste.
◦Hills Brothers Coffee was the first commercial company to sell vacuum
packed coffee in 1900.
◦Coffee trees require 70 inches of rainfall per year.
◦Ground coffee oxidizes very fast and coffee is best purchased in vacuum cans.
◦Americans consume 4,848 cups of coffee per second, 24 hours a day.
◦A coffee tree produces approximately one to twelve pounds of coffee
cherries from a six year old tree.
◦Approximately 2000 coffee cherries are required to produce one pound
of coffee, the crop of one tree.
◦The U.S. is the largest consumer of coffee. About three billion
pounds are used annually.
◦When reheating coffee, never boil, as this will cause an undesirable flavor.
◦Coffee is a significant source of niacin.
◦Viennese coffee: Ground coffee containing dried figs.
Source for Common Coffee and tea Tea Facts
Coffee and Tea Facts from Belly Bytes
http://www.bellybytes.com/foodfacts/coffee_tea_facts.html#.V-0PwMtTFkc
Pondering Question
If a mayfly was born in June would it become a junebug?
Fact of today:
To cook an egg, a sidewalk needs to be 158°F.
"Love all God's creations, both the whole and every grain of sand.
Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the
plants, love each separate thing. If you love each thing, you will
perceive the mystery of God in All." —Fyodor Dostoevsky
You can subscribe to Dan's Tips by sending a blank email with
"subscribe dan's tips" in the subject line.
You can subscribe to "Hotspot With God" daily devotion by sending a
blank message with "subscribe devotion" in the subject line.
My email is <mailto:dmt031073@gmail.com> dmt031073@gmail.com
"Let} love {be} without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil; cling to what is good./"
Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.
Each day has enough trouble of it's own."
Matthew 6:34(NIV)
Friends are angels who lift us to our feet when our wings have
forgotten how to fly
you can subscribe to Dan's Tips by sending an email to
<mailto:dthompson5@mchsi.com> dthompson5@mchsi.com with
Subscribe Friday finds in the subject line or subscribe to Hotspot
with God by entering Devotion in the subject line.
Thursday, September 29, 2016
Re: [acb-l] My Retina Tracker Crowdsources People with Visual Impairments
You would think that greater numbers would make a difference. But
take a look at our political landscape. We, the working class
Americans far outnumber the 1% who comprise the Ruling Class. And
yet, we do not live in a democracy. We live in an Oligarchy. And
that government of the small minority has created an Empire, the likes
of which we've never seen on this tired old planet. So numbers do not
equate to control. I would suggest two basic ingredients in our
struggle toward full membership in our world. Commitment and money.
In order to be committed, we need a vision...a plan. And to
underwrite the Plan, we need financial support. In fact, we can
broaden out how we look at money. We can see that it is not the
actual gold, itself, but the power it brings. Take a look at our
current Run for the Roses, the presidential race. Donald Trump has
positioned himself so that he is receiving millions of dollars of free
advertising, without spending a dime of his own money. What Trump is
doing is to piggy back on the great wealth of the Mass Media. It is
the Media's money that is providing Trump with a broader platform than
he could ever buy with his own money. Despite his popularity, Bernie
Sanders never found a way to link with the Mass Media, and despite
raising amazing amounts of cash, he could not begin to buy enough
space to compete with Hillary Clinton. It did not matter whether
Sanders had a broader base of followers than did Clinton. She had the
power of dollars behind her. She had the Democratic Central
Committee, along with large corporate dollars. Simply put, Sanders
was outmaneuvered.
The question for us is, how do we either build such a power base, or
connect with one that already exists? To do that, we don't need more
blind bodies, we need thoughtful planning. We need to step outside
our little blind box and see what other winners are doing to gain
positive results.
Just one personal word of caution. If our ultimate goal is to gain a
toehold and share in the power of this current American Corporate
Empire, then I am not interested. The capitalist system is not
serving the needs of blind men and women, nor the needs of the
majority of working class Americans, able bodied or disabled, young or
old, White or Colored. My vision is for a broad based government, a
true democracy, not an Oligarchy or a military dictatorship, but a
People's government where each of us is able to participate to the
limit of our ability.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/28/16, Karen Rose <rosekm@earthlink.net> wrote:
> As for an organization fighting blindness that I have always thought that we
> need more not few were blind people so that we can have more political
> effect.
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
>> On Sep 28, 2016, at 12:12 PM, Chris Coulter via acb-l <acb-l@acblists.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>> You're right, Carl. I suffer from shortness myself and there is less belly
>> fat for me to suffer from now, but I remember what that felt like. I guess
>> some blind people suffer from or with glaucoma, but my blindness is just
>> eyes that can't see and they only hurt if I get something in them or I get
>> too tired.
>>
>> Chris
>>> On Sep 28, 2016, at 11:03 AM, Carl Jarvis via acb-l <acb-l@acblists.org>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> "Suffering from Blindness..." Well, are we also suffering from Life?
>>> Having been a blind man for 51 of my 81 years, I neither embrace, nor
>>> suffer blindness. I'm simply blind. Suffers. What a word. I have a
>>> friend who suffers from shortness. Another who, at 7 feet 3 inches,
>>> suffers from tallness. In my older years I do believe that I'm
>>> suffering from Belly Fat.
>>>
>>> Carl Jarvis
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> On 9/28/16, Carly Mihalakis via acb-l <acb-l@acblists.org> wrote:
>>>> Good morning, my Lisa,
>>>>
>>>> You might not need to be so sensitive. While so-called blind
>>>> organizations, in their work, address these types of ebbing and
>>>> flowing of our blind identity, the FFB, I gather, is into medical
>>>> research, looking for a means of fighting blindness, no, not
>>>> necessarily for us but lately, I have really begun to embrace ocular
>>>> darkness, but that's just me.
>>>> Car I wonder if they are aware of just how insensitive their words
>>>> can feel to those of us who are blind, and will always be blind.
>>>>
>>>>> Thanks
>>>>> Lisa
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>> On Jul 14, 2015, at 8:38 PM, Karen Rose via acb-l
>>>>>> <acb-l@acblists.org> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Defective genes? Suffering from blindness? Whose ideas are these?
>>>>> This sounds like very biased research. Karen
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Sent from my iPhone
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On Jul 14, 2015, at 2:34 PM, peter altschul via acb-l
>>>>> <acb-l@acblists.org> wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> My Retina Tracker Crowdsources Blind Research Participants
>>>>>>> Vision researchers are collecting data with the help of the
>>>>> people who know the most about blindness-patients.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Sean Captain
>>>>>>> Curing blindness is, in part, a data-crunching
>>>>> problem. Hundreds of genetic mutations, and ensembles of
>>>>> mutations, can cause vision loss. Sorting out cause and effect
>>>>> requires digging through patient data to find patterns and finding
>>>>> the right people for potential treatments, such as replacing
>>>>> defective genes or regrowing lost tissue with stem cells. An
>>>>> online patient registry, MyRetinaTracker.org, crowdsources this
>>>>> data collection by recruiting the people who know the most about
>>>>> blindness-the people who suffer from it.
>>>>>>> So far, only a few ailments that affect vision can be
>>>>> fixed. Doctors can transplant corneas (the outer lens of the eye),
>>>>> and even replace the lens inside the eye with a synthetic
>>>>> version. What they can't yet fix is the retina-a layer of cells
>>>>> less than half a millimeter thick in the back of the eye that turns
>>>>> light into signals in the brain that become images.
>>>>>>> Most challenging are about 20 rare inherited genetic diseases
>>>>> such as retinitis pigmentosa (RP), which starts by killing cells at
>>>>> the periphery of the retina and works its way inward. Any of at
>>>>> least 84 genes can cause RP (more keep being discovered). Just one
>>>>> gene seems to cause most cases of Stargardt's disease, which
>>>>> usually starts attacking the center of the retina and works its way
>>>>> outward. But it's a monster gene, containing 6,819 base pairs that
>>>>> code for proteins. Mutations on different parts of that gene
>>>>> affect the severity of Stargardt's and can even cause other
>>>>> diseases, including RP.
>>>>>>> "It comes down to which particular gene you have and which
>>>>> particular mutation on which gene you have," said Brian Mansfield,
>>>>> deputy chief research officer at the Foundation Fighting Blindness
>>>>> (FFB) in Baltimore.
>>>>>>> Mansfield is taking on the challenge of finding them with My
>>>>> Retina Tracker, an online registry for patients with retina
>>>>> diseases to store their medial records and provide anonymous data
>>>>> to researchers. FFB soft-launched My Retina Tracker in June 2014,
>>>>> with no press coverage beyond a few niche websites. Yet it
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> acb-l mailing list
>>>>>> acb-l@acblists.org
>>>>>> http://www.acblists.org/mailman/listinfo/acb-l
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> acb-l mailing list
>>>>> acb-l@acblists.org
>>>>> http://www.acblists.org/mailman/listinfo/acb-l
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> acb-l mailing list
>>>> acb-l@acblists.org
>>>> http://www.acblists.org/mailman/listinfo/acb-l
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> acb-l mailing list
>>> acb-l@acblists.org
>>> http://www.acblists.org/mailman/listinfo/acb-l
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> acb-l mailing list
>> acb-l@acblists.org
>> http://www.acblists.org/mailman/listinfo/acb-l
>>
>>
>
>
take a look at our political landscape. We, the working class
Americans far outnumber the 1% who comprise the Ruling Class. And
yet, we do not live in a democracy. We live in an Oligarchy. And
that government of the small minority has created an Empire, the likes
of which we've never seen on this tired old planet. So numbers do not
equate to control. I would suggest two basic ingredients in our
struggle toward full membership in our world. Commitment and money.
In order to be committed, we need a vision...a plan. And to
underwrite the Plan, we need financial support. In fact, we can
broaden out how we look at money. We can see that it is not the
actual gold, itself, but the power it brings. Take a look at our
current Run for the Roses, the presidential race. Donald Trump has
positioned himself so that he is receiving millions of dollars of free
advertising, without spending a dime of his own money. What Trump is
doing is to piggy back on the great wealth of the Mass Media. It is
the Media's money that is providing Trump with a broader platform than
he could ever buy with his own money. Despite his popularity, Bernie
Sanders never found a way to link with the Mass Media, and despite
raising amazing amounts of cash, he could not begin to buy enough
space to compete with Hillary Clinton. It did not matter whether
Sanders had a broader base of followers than did Clinton. She had the
power of dollars behind her. She had the Democratic Central
Committee, along with large corporate dollars. Simply put, Sanders
was outmaneuvered.
The question for us is, how do we either build such a power base, or
connect with one that already exists? To do that, we don't need more
blind bodies, we need thoughtful planning. We need to step outside
our little blind box and see what other winners are doing to gain
positive results.
Just one personal word of caution. If our ultimate goal is to gain a
toehold and share in the power of this current American Corporate
Empire, then I am not interested. The capitalist system is not
serving the needs of blind men and women, nor the needs of the
majority of working class Americans, able bodied or disabled, young or
old, White or Colored. My vision is for a broad based government, a
true democracy, not an Oligarchy or a military dictatorship, but a
People's government where each of us is able to participate to the
limit of our ability.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/28/16, Karen Rose <rosekm@earthlink.net> wrote:
> As for an organization fighting blindness that I have always thought that we
> need more not few were blind people so that we can have more political
> effect.
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
>> On Sep 28, 2016, at 12:12 PM, Chris Coulter via acb-l <acb-l@acblists.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>> You're right, Carl. I suffer from shortness myself and there is less belly
>> fat for me to suffer from now, but I remember what that felt like. I guess
>> some blind people suffer from or with glaucoma, but my blindness is just
>> eyes that can't see and they only hurt if I get something in them or I get
>> too tired.
>>
>> Chris
>>> On Sep 28, 2016, at 11:03 AM, Carl Jarvis via acb-l <acb-l@acblists.org>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> "Suffering from Blindness..." Well, are we also suffering from Life?
>>> Having been a blind man for 51 of my 81 years, I neither embrace, nor
>>> suffer blindness. I'm simply blind. Suffers. What a word. I have a
>>> friend who suffers from shortness. Another who, at 7 feet 3 inches,
>>> suffers from tallness. In my older years I do believe that I'm
>>> suffering from Belly Fat.
>>>
>>> Carl Jarvis
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> On 9/28/16, Carly Mihalakis via acb-l <acb-l@acblists.org> wrote:
>>>> Good morning, my Lisa,
>>>>
>>>> You might not need to be so sensitive. While so-called blind
>>>> organizations, in their work, address these types of ebbing and
>>>> flowing of our blind identity, the FFB, I gather, is into medical
>>>> research, looking for a means of fighting blindness, no, not
>>>> necessarily for us but lately, I have really begun to embrace ocular
>>>> darkness, but that's just me.
>>>> Car I wonder if they are aware of just how insensitive their words
>>>> can feel to those of us who are blind, and will always be blind.
>>>>
>>>>> Thanks
>>>>> Lisa
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>> On Jul 14, 2015, at 8:38 PM, Karen Rose via acb-l
>>>>>> <acb-l@acblists.org> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Defective genes? Suffering from blindness? Whose ideas are these?
>>>>> This sounds like very biased research. Karen
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Sent from my iPhone
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On Jul 14, 2015, at 2:34 PM, peter altschul via acb-l
>>>>> <acb-l@acblists.org> wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> My Retina Tracker Crowdsources Blind Research Participants
>>>>>>> Vision researchers are collecting data with the help of the
>>>>> people who know the most about blindness-patients.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Sean Captain
>>>>>>> Curing blindness is, in part, a data-crunching
>>>>> problem. Hundreds of genetic mutations, and ensembles of
>>>>> mutations, can cause vision loss. Sorting out cause and effect
>>>>> requires digging through patient data to find patterns and finding
>>>>> the right people for potential treatments, such as replacing
>>>>> defective genes or regrowing lost tissue with stem cells. An
>>>>> online patient registry, MyRetinaTracker.org, crowdsources this
>>>>> data collection by recruiting the people who know the most about
>>>>> blindness-the people who suffer from it.
>>>>>>> So far, only a few ailments that affect vision can be
>>>>> fixed. Doctors can transplant corneas (the outer lens of the eye),
>>>>> and even replace the lens inside the eye with a synthetic
>>>>> version. What they can't yet fix is the retina-a layer of cells
>>>>> less than half a millimeter thick in the back of the eye that turns
>>>>> light into signals in the brain that become images.
>>>>>>> Most challenging are about 20 rare inherited genetic diseases
>>>>> such as retinitis pigmentosa (RP), which starts by killing cells at
>>>>> the periphery of the retina and works its way inward. Any of at
>>>>> least 84 genes can cause RP (more keep being discovered). Just one
>>>>> gene seems to cause most cases of Stargardt's disease, which
>>>>> usually starts attacking the center of the retina and works its way
>>>>> outward. But it's a monster gene, containing 6,819 base pairs that
>>>>> code for proteins. Mutations on different parts of that gene
>>>>> affect the severity of Stargardt's and can even cause other
>>>>> diseases, including RP.
>>>>>>> "It comes down to which particular gene you have and which
>>>>> particular mutation on which gene you have," said Brian Mansfield,
>>>>> deputy chief research officer at the Foundation Fighting Blindness
>>>>> (FFB) in Baltimore.
>>>>>>> Mansfield is taking on the challenge of finding them with My
>>>>> Retina Tracker, an online registry for patients with retina
>>>>> diseases to store their medial records and provide anonymous data
>>>>> to researchers. FFB soft-launched My Retina Tracker in June 2014,
>>>>> with no press coverage beyond a few niche websites. Yet it
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> acb-l mailing list
>>>>>> acb-l@acblists.org
>>>>>> http://www.acblists.org/mailman/listinfo/acb-l
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> acb-l mailing list
>>>>> acb-l@acblists.org
>>>>> http://www.acblists.org/mailman/listinfo/acb-l
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> acb-l mailing list
>>>> acb-l@acblists.org
>>>> http://www.acblists.org/mailman/listinfo/acb-l
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> acb-l mailing list
>>> acb-l@acblists.org
>>> http://www.acblists.org/mailman/listinfo/acb-l
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> acb-l mailing list
>> acb-l@acblists.org
>> http://www.acblists.org/mailman/listinfo/acb-l
>>
>>
>
>
Monday, September 26, 2016
"They're not even given a chance." A closer look at our VR services
Sunday, 25 September 2016 00:00 By Meredith Kolodner , The Hechinger Report
| Report
Wendy Thompson always knew she wanted her son to go to college, but she
didn't realize so many people would disagree.
Her son was born with cerebral palsy, a disease that has him using a
wheelchair, but has little impact on his academic abilities. He graduated
from high school with a Regents diploma in 2013 -- a feat accomplished by
only 18 percent of students with disabilities in New York City that year,
compared to 70 percent of students without disabilities.
But when Thompson met with a counselor from the state agency that is
supposed to help people with disabilities get training or a degree that will
lead to a job, the counselor refused to sign off on her son's plan to go to
community college. That meant he wouldn't get wheelchair-accessible
transportation, tuition help or voice-activated software from the agency --
all of which he qualified for under federal law.
"I know too many young men with all kinds of disabilities just sitting
around at home doing nothing," said Thompson, who raised her son on her own.
"They're not even given a chance. I didn't want that for him."
Thompson's frustration is shared by people with disabilities and their
parents nationwide.
More than 800,000 people with disabilities found eligible for services
received no assistance between 2010 and 2014, according to federal data.
More than a dozen states failed to provide services to over 40 percent of
those they themselves deemed eligible. And many more states have left people
in limbo for months, despite laws that expressly forbid that.
"It's happening across the country, and it's inexcusable," said Ron Hager,
senior staff attorney at the National Disability Rights Network.
This despite $3 billion in tax dollars spent last year by the agencies
responsible, known as Vocational Rehabilitation (VR) offices. Created by the
Rehabilitation Act three decades ago, VRs are supposed to help people with
disabilities become independent. Some people need a hearing aid, for
example; others require voice-activated note-taking software or
screen-readers for college.
Studies have shown that people with disabilities benefit even more than the
general public from having a college degree, in terms of employment and
getting out of poverty -- people with disabilities with a bachelor's degree
are almost 50 percent more likely to have a job than those with just a high
school diploma. Yet, while 76 percent of people with disabilities have high
school diplomas, only 12 percent have college degrees.
Some VR agencies work well; counselors respond promptly to applications and
help clients further their education and secure employment. But in many
states the VR offices are understaffed, poorly run or hamstrung by political
battles. Staff turnover is high, successful job placement is fleeting and
money is spent without significant results.
Delays in service provision were so widespread that, in 2014, Congress
mandated that a person with a disability must receive a plan for employment
within 90 days of being deemed eligible for assistance. In 20 states, more
than one-third of cases stretched past the 90-day limit in 2015. Close to
14,000 cases stretched past a year.
Once an applicant gets an approved plan, the next step is to get the
services -- which often takes even longer. The delays lead to missed job and
educational opportunities and longer government dependence, all at a cost to
taxpayers.
Part of the problem, advocates say, is high caseloads. The situation is most
severe in urban centers. The recommended caseload per VR counselor is
between 80 and 100 clients. But in the Bronx, for example, the average
caseload rose to 270 in 2016, up from 222 in 2015. The current New York
statewide average is 185, according to state officials.
"VR is an underfunded ghetto for people with disabilities," said Susan
Dooha, executive director of the Center for Independence of the Disabled,
New York. "I don't understand why, given the large cost of maintaining
people with disabilities in poverty, in institutions, the state doesn't
invest more in VR services, but I cannot remember the last time that an
increase was proposed that would allow the hiring of more counselors."
Josh Greene, who has several learning disabilities, felt the impact of those
high caseloads firsthand. He lives in the Bronx, and in the fall of 2014, he
was brimming with hope. He had his first appointment with a counselor at the
Bronx VR agency. He was found eligible for services and was accepted that
spring to Guttman Community College in Manhattan.
It went downhill from there. Greene has dyslexia and needed software to help
him take notes without scrambling the letters. He also needed an audio
recorder so he could listen to lectures again at home, and some extra help
with writing.
He spent 10 months emailing, leaving messages and resubmitting forms, but by
the following September when he started classes, he still had received none
of the academic assistance for which he had been approved.
A spokeswoman for the Education Department, which oversees New York's VR
office, said the agency could not comment on individual cases, but
acknowledged that turnover among Bronx counselors was about 30 percent last
year.
New York isn't the only place struggling with high caseloads.
The backup in Milwaukee is so severe that it is not uncommon for people to
wait six weeks to get a first appointment to begin the eligibility process,
said Cathy Steffke, an advocacy specialist at Disability Rights Wisconsin.
"I feel very badly for a VR counselor stuck with a [high] caseload," said
Steffke. "Can you imagine going to school to help people and then find out
you can't help anyone?"
By law, VR caseworkers must have a master's degree, but in most states their
pay is lower than that of their counterparts at the veterans administration
or the department of education. The private sector pays even more, so many
people leave after just a few years, passing on their cases to
less-experienced counselors who already have their own loads.
"I think more people would stay, even with lower pay, if they felt like they
had the possibility of helping people," said a recently retired caseworker
who spent close to three decades at a Wisconsin VR office and asked to
remain anonymous because he still works with the agency. Of the 22
co-workers when he left his office less than two years ago, only two are
left, he said.
Statewide, 30 percent of casework-related staff left between 2012 and 2015,
according to a state audit.
"It's a caseload issue that's basically political," said Linda Vegoe, the
director of Wisconsin's client assistance program (CAP). State CAPs are also
federally funded and were established to help people having difficulty
getting services from the VR agencies. "They don't want to increase the
number of positions."
In 2013, Governor Scott Walker became the first Wisconsin governor in more
than a decade to put up the full amount of state matching funds for
Wisconsin's VR. Walker supported moving people from government assistance to
work. Nonetheless, the number of counselors in Wisconsin has stayed flat
since 2012, according to a state audit, although there has been an increase
in the number of counselors in training.
State officials say that new initiatives, including one that enlists the
counselors in training to handle some eligibility-related tasks, allowed
them to successfully close a record-number of cases last fiscal year. The
Wisconsin waiting list now averages only 150 people at a time (down from
4,900 in 2013), according to John Dipko, communications director at
Wisconsin's Department of Workforce Development, and the agency has
streamlined its intake process.
But advocates say that some of the changes have only pushed people off the
waitlists and into the system, where the waiting time isn't tracked but has
increased. "Waiting for service inside the system takes longer than waiting
on the outside," said Vegoe, who has worked at CAP for 25 years. "The
external waitlist basically became an internal one."
High caseloads translate into delays and lack of services for people like
Amy Kerzner.
Multiple sclerosis struck Kerzner relatively late in life, making it
impossible for her to keep working as a nurse.
"I knew one thing: I would never, ever live the rest of my life on
disability," said Kerzner, 49. "I would find a way to be a productive
citizen."
She met with a VR counselor in Calumet County, where she lived, who approved
her plan to attend Alverno College in Milwaukee so she could get training to
become a psychologist. She moved to Milwaukee in October 2010 and called her
new caseworker there -- repeatedly. Even though the paperwork had been
transferred and she was due to start classes in January, she couldn't get an
appointment until March. She began the program anyway.
"He kept making appointments and canceling, not returning emails," she
recalled.
When she finally met with the caseworker, he told her that he was denying
her request to attend Alverno. She called an advocacy hotline, appealed the
decision and won, although it took several more months before she was
reimbursed.
Kerzner graduated four years later with a GPA of 4.0 and is now working on a
master's degree. "Movement is painful, you ache and throb all the time, you
just get used to that level of pain," she said. "But I will take that pain
all day long, as long as I can be independent."
Wisconsin VR officials dispute Kerzner's account of her treatment. They say
they have requested but have not received permission from her that would
allow them to make the details of her case public.
Steffke says Kerzner's experience is not an anomaly.
"These people just want to work, they just want a job, they're not asking
for cars and boats and property," she said.
Yet high caseloads are not the only reason that some people leave the system
without receiving services, according to a U.S. Department of Education
spokesman. In light of a shortfall of funding, some states have created
waiting lists to prioritize the most disabled, so clients on the waitlist
who have been found eligible for VR services but whose needs are less
"significant" may be redirected to other agencies, such as a Veterans
program if the disability occurred due to military service.
"No one wants to say it, but I'll say it: funding, funding, funding,"
Steffke argued. "There's lots of people who can get off of social security,
or at least just partial social security, but the federal government has
never dealt with this well."
Federal funding for VR has dropped by 6 percent since 2009, accounting for
inflation. And 21 states did not put up enough state money in 2015 to get
the full amount of federal matching funds.
The failure to fund is shortsighted, say advocates. Not only does a
successful job placement reduce government assistance rolls, they argue, but
when services for clients are denied or delayed, the agency is still
spending time and money on those clients.
In 2012, VR agencies around the country spent close to $365 million on
people who left the system before they completed services, and that's up
from $326 million in 2009, according to a study from the University of
Montana.
In Louisiana, 44 percent of people found eligible for services never
received any in 2014. This year, statewide budget cuts forced an even worse
crisis -- the office ran out of money and stopped taking new clients on
February 29. In addition, hundreds of people who had been found eligible but
hadn't gotten approval for their employment plan also had their cases put on
hold. The office reopened its caseloads on June 1, and counselors are now
wading through the backlog.
"It's had a big impact on everyone," said David Gallegos, program director
at the Advocacy Center of Louisiana who has been working there for 17 years.
Caseloads in New Orleans are now between 150 and 200 clients, said Gallegos,
who is also the state's CAP director.
Similarly, in January 2015, Tennessee's agency also temporarily stopped
taking new clients. Although it has opened its doors again, a state report
found that 100 of the 243 positions that provide direct services to clients
were vacant last year. The result has been caseloads of up to 200 in
Knoxville and elsewhere, and many dropped clients, advocates say.
Tennessee is actively hiring, said Devin Stone, spokesperson for the state
Department of Human Services. Stone added that over the past four years, the
agency has increased the number of clients getting jobs each year; advocates
say things have gotten worse.
People with disabilities and their advocates in many states also say that
even when applicants do get plans and see counselors, the results are
disappointing due to the counselors' skepticism about their abilities.
Loria Richardson, a project specialist from the nonprofit advocacy group The
Arc Tennessee, said she has seen this happen on numerous occasions. She is
currently working with a young man who was accepted at the Tennessee College
of Applied Technology. He visited the school, met with instructors and
decided to enroll in its HVAC program. School officials said it was not a
problem that he had graduated high school with a special education diploma.
They assured him that others without regular diplomas had been successful
there, and that they would work with him to provide accommodations, such as
digital access to class readings so he could use headphones to hear the
required texts. Yet when he applied to VR, although he was immediately found
eligible for services, his case manager said she did not think he would be
able to complete the HVAC class. She was not moved by the school officials'
opinion, the young man's successful four-year employment history, or the
fact that he had a driver's license and could already perform basic car
mechanic tasks. Richardson is now trying to help the young man find other
forms of financial aid so he can enroll at TCAT. An HVAC assistant -- the
job he aspires to -- starts at about $15 an hour, which would be a big step
up from his current job where he makes minimum wage.
Similarly, in Ohio, a VR counselor determined that a woman with spina bifida
was incapable of handling college and refused her request for assistance.
The woman managed to cobble together financial aid from other public
agencies and got her associate's degree. Yet when she returned to the VR
office to seek help for a bachelor's degree, she was again deemed ineligible
for college. It took a lengthy appeal, but she eventually won and got the
assistance she needed. She graduated two years later and landed a job as a
social worker.
Many people with disabilities say that such bias is not only offensive but
also threatens the independence they desperately seek.
"There is still a profound ignorance about what it means to have a
disability," said Hager of the National Disability Rights Network. "The vast
majority of learning disabilities do not affect a person's ability to handle
a college curriculum."
The poverty rate for people with disabilities is 30 percent, twice that of
people without a disability. But a college degree makes a difference.
"Underemployment is a big problem for people with disabilities in VR," said
Gallegos, the CAP director in Louisiana. "College can help with that, but it
seems like we're having to advocate much harder for everything than we ever
have before."
| Report
Wendy Thompson always knew she wanted her son to go to college, but she
didn't realize so many people would disagree.
Her son was born with cerebral palsy, a disease that has him using a
wheelchair, but has little impact on his academic abilities. He graduated
from high school with a Regents diploma in 2013 -- a feat accomplished by
only 18 percent of students with disabilities in New York City that year,
compared to 70 percent of students without disabilities.
But when Thompson met with a counselor from the state agency that is
supposed to help people with disabilities get training or a degree that will
lead to a job, the counselor refused to sign off on her son's plan to go to
community college. That meant he wouldn't get wheelchair-accessible
transportation, tuition help or voice-activated software from the agency --
all of which he qualified for under federal law.
"I know too many young men with all kinds of disabilities just sitting
around at home doing nothing," said Thompson, who raised her son on her own.
"They're not even given a chance. I didn't want that for him."
Thompson's frustration is shared by people with disabilities and their
parents nationwide.
More than 800,000 people with disabilities found eligible for services
received no assistance between 2010 and 2014, according to federal data.
More than a dozen states failed to provide services to over 40 percent of
those they themselves deemed eligible. And many more states have left people
in limbo for months, despite laws that expressly forbid that.
"It's happening across the country, and it's inexcusable," said Ron Hager,
senior staff attorney at the National Disability Rights Network.
This despite $3 billion in tax dollars spent last year by the agencies
responsible, known as Vocational Rehabilitation (VR) offices. Created by the
Rehabilitation Act three decades ago, VRs are supposed to help people with
disabilities become independent. Some people need a hearing aid, for
example; others require voice-activated note-taking software or
screen-readers for college.
Studies have shown that people with disabilities benefit even more than the
general public from having a college degree, in terms of employment and
getting out of poverty -- people with disabilities with a bachelor's degree
are almost 50 percent more likely to have a job than those with just a high
school diploma. Yet, while 76 percent of people with disabilities have high
school diplomas, only 12 percent have college degrees.
Some VR agencies work well; counselors respond promptly to applications and
help clients further their education and secure employment. But in many
states the VR offices are understaffed, poorly run or hamstrung by political
battles. Staff turnover is high, successful job placement is fleeting and
money is spent without significant results.
Delays in service provision were so widespread that, in 2014, Congress
mandated that a person with a disability must receive a plan for employment
within 90 days of being deemed eligible for assistance. In 20 states, more
than one-third of cases stretched past the 90-day limit in 2015. Close to
14,000 cases stretched past a year.
Once an applicant gets an approved plan, the next step is to get the
services -- which often takes even longer. The delays lead to missed job and
educational opportunities and longer government dependence, all at a cost to
taxpayers.
Part of the problem, advocates say, is high caseloads. The situation is most
severe in urban centers. The recommended caseload per VR counselor is
between 80 and 100 clients. But in the Bronx, for example, the average
caseload rose to 270 in 2016, up from 222 in 2015. The current New York
statewide average is 185, according to state officials.
"VR is an underfunded ghetto for people with disabilities," said Susan
Dooha, executive director of the Center for Independence of the Disabled,
New York. "I don't understand why, given the large cost of maintaining
people with disabilities in poverty, in institutions, the state doesn't
invest more in VR services, but I cannot remember the last time that an
increase was proposed that would allow the hiring of more counselors."
Josh Greene, who has several learning disabilities, felt the impact of those
high caseloads firsthand. He lives in the Bronx, and in the fall of 2014, he
was brimming with hope. He had his first appointment with a counselor at the
Bronx VR agency. He was found eligible for services and was accepted that
spring to Guttman Community College in Manhattan.
It went downhill from there. Greene has dyslexia and needed software to help
him take notes without scrambling the letters. He also needed an audio
recorder so he could listen to lectures again at home, and some extra help
with writing.
He spent 10 months emailing, leaving messages and resubmitting forms, but by
the following September when he started classes, he still had received none
of the academic assistance for which he had been approved.
A spokeswoman for the Education Department, which oversees New York's VR
office, said the agency could not comment on individual cases, but
acknowledged that turnover among Bronx counselors was about 30 percent last
year.
New York isn't the only place struggling with high caseloads.
The backup in Milwaukee is so severe that it is not uncommon for people to
wait six weeks to get a first appointment to begin the eligibility process,
said Cathy Steffke, an advocacy specialist at Disability Rights Wisconsin.
"I feel very badly for a VR counselor stuck with a [high] caseload," said
Steffke. "Can you imagine going to school to help people and then find out
you can't help anyone?"
By law, VR caseworkers must have a master's degree, but in most states their
pay is lower than that of their counterparts at the veterans administration
or the department of education. The private sector pays even more, so many
people leave after just a few years, passing on their cases to
less-experienced counselors who already have their own loads.
"I think more people would stay, even with lower pay, if they felt like they
had the possibility of helping people," said a recently retired caseworker
who spent close to three decades at a Wisconsin VR office and asked to
remain anonymous because he still works with the agency. Of the 22
co-workers when he left his office less than two years ago, only two are
left, he said.
Statewide, 30 percent of casework-related staff left between 2012 and 2015,
according to a state audit.
"It's a caseload issue that's basically political," said Linda Vegoe, the
director of Wisconsin's client assistance program (CAP). State CAPs are also
federally funded and were established to help people having difficulty
getting services from the VR agencies. "They don't want to increase the
number of positions."
In 2013, Governor Scott Walker became the first Wisconsin governor in more
than a decade to put up the full amount of state matching funds for
Wisconsin's VR. Walker supported moving people from government assistance to
work. Nonetheless, the number of counselors in Wisconsin has stayed flat
since 2012, according to a state audit, although there has been an increase
in the number of counselors in training.
State officials say that new initiatives, including one that enlists the
counselors in training to handle some eligibility-related tasks, allowed
them to successfully close a record-number of cases last fiscal year. The
Wisconsin waiting list now averages only 150 people at a time (down from
4,900 in 2013), according to John Dipko, communications director at
Wisconsin's Department of Workforce Development, and the agency has
streamlined its intake process.
But advocates say that some of the changes have only pushed people off the
waitlists and into the system, where the waiting time isn't tracked but has
increased. "Waiting for service inside the system takes longer than waiting
on the outside," said Vegoe, who has worked at CAP for 25 years. "The
external waitlist basically became an internal one."
High caseloads translate into delays and lack of services for people like
Amy Kerzner.
Multiple sclerosis struck Kerzner relatively late in life, making it
impossible for her to keep working as a nurse.
"I knew one thing: I would never, ever live the rest of my life on
disability," said Kerzner, 49. "I would find a way to be a productive
citizen."
She met with a VR counselor in Calumet County, where she lived, who approved
her plan to attend Alverno College in Milwaukee so she could get training to
become a psychologist. She moved to Milwaukee in October 2010 and called her
new caseworker there -- repeatedly. Even though the paperwork had been
transferred and she was due to start classes in January, she couldn't get an
appointment until March. She began the program anyway.
"He kept making appointments and canceling, not returning emails," she
recalled.
When she finally met with the caseworker, he told her that he was denying
her request to attend Alverno. She called an advocacy hotline, appealed the
decision and won, although it took several more months before she was
reimbursed.
Kerzner graduated four years later with a GPA of 4.0 and is now working on a
master's degree. "Movement is painful, you ache and throb all the time, you
just get used to that level of pain," she said. "But I will take that pain
all day long, as long as I can be independent."
Wisconsin VR officials dispute Kerzner's account of her treatment. They say
they have requested but have not received permission from her that would
allow them to make the details of her case public.
Steffke says Kerzner's experience is not an anomaly.
"These people just want to work, they just want a job, they're not asking
for cars and boats and property," she said.
Yet high caseloads are not the only reason that some people leave the system
without receiving services, according to a U.S. Department of Education
spokesman. In light of a shortfall of funding, some states have created
waiting lists to prioritize the most disabled, so clients on the waitlist
who have been found eligible for VR services but whose needs are less
"significant" may be redirected to other agencies, such as a Veterans
program if the disability occurred due to military service.
"No one wants to say it, but I'll say it: funding, funding, funding,"
Steffke argued. "There's lots of people who can get off of social security,
or at least just partial social security, but the federal government has
never dealt with this well."
Federal funding for VR has dropped by 6 percent since 2009, accounting for
inflation. And 21 states did not put up enough state money in 2015 to get
the full amount of federal matching funds.
The failure to fund is shortsighted, say advocates. Not only does a
successful job placement reduce government assistance rolls, they argue, but
when services for clients are denied or delayed, the agency is still
spending time and money on those clients.
In 2012, VR agencies around the country spent close to $365 million on
people who left the system before they completed services, and that's up
from $326 million in 2009, according to a study from the University of
Montana.
In Louisiana, 44 percent of people found eligible for services never
received any in 2014. This year, statewide budget cuts forced an even worse
crisis -- the office ran out of money and stopped taking new clients on
February 29. In addition, hundreds of people who had been found eligible but
hadn't gotten approval for their employment plan also had their cases put on
hold. The office reopened its caseloads on June 1, and counselors are now
wading through the backlog.
"It's had a big impact on everyone," said David Gallegos, program director
at the Advocacy Center of Louisiana who has been working there for 17 years.
Caseloads in New Orleans are now between 150 and 200 clients, said Gallegos,
who is also the state's CAP director.
Similarly, in January 2015, Tennessee's agency also temporarily stopped
taking new clients. Although it has opened its doors again, a state report
found that 100 of the 243 positions that provide direct services to clients
were vacant last year. The result has been caseloads of up to 200 in
Knoxville and elsewhere, and many dropped clients, advocates say.
Tennessee is actively hiring, said Devin Stone, spokesperson for the state
Department of Human Services. Stone added that over the past four years, the
agency has increased the number of clients getting jobs each year; advocates
say things have gotten worse.
People with disabilities and their advocates in many states also say that
even when applicants do get plans and see counselors, the results are
disappointing due to the counselors' skepticism about their abilities.
Loria Richardson, a project specialist from the nonprofit advocacy group The
Arc Tennessee, said she has seen this happen on numerous occasions. She is
currently working with a young man who was accepted at the Tennessee College
of Applied Technology. He visited the school, met with instructors and
decided to enroll in its HVAC program. School officials said it was not a
problem that he had graduated high school with a special education diploma.
They assured him that others without regular diplomas had been successful
there, and that they would work with him to provide accommodations, such as
digital access to class readings so he could use headphones to hear the
required texts. Yet when he applied to VR, although he was immediately found
eligible for services, his case manager said she did not think he would be
able to complete the HVAC class. She was not moved by the school officials'
opinion, the young man's successful four-year employment history, or the
fact that he had a driver's license and could already perform basic car
mechanic tasks. Richardson is now trying to help the young man find other
forms of financial aid so he can enroll at TCAT. An HVAC assistant -- the
job he aspires to -- starts at about $15 an hour, which would be a big step
up from his current job where he makes minimum wage.
Similarly, in Ohio, a VR counselor determined that a woman with spina bifida
was incapable of handling college and refused her request for assistance.
The woman managed to cobble together financial aid from other public
agencies and got her associate's degree. Yet when she returned to the VR
office to seek help for a bachelor's degree, she was again deemed ineligible
for college. It took a lengthy appeal, but she eventually won and got the
assistance she needed. She graduated two years later and landed a job as a
social worker.
Many people with disabilities say that such bias is not only offensive but
also threatens the independence they desperately seek.
"There is still a profound ignorance about what it means to have a
disability," said Hager of the National Disability Rights Network. "The vast
majority of learning disabilities do not affect a person's ability to handle
a college curriculum."
The poverty rate for people with disabilities is 30 percent, twice that of
people without a disability. But a college degree makes a difference.
"Underemployment is a big problem for people with disabilities in VR," said
Gallegos, the CAP director in Louisiana. "College can help with that, but it
seems like we're having to advocate much harder for everything than we ever
have before."
Friday, September 23, 2016
Re: [blind-democracy] Eugene V. Debs and the Urgent Need for a New Anti-War Movement
I hate to say it, but this article makes me feel very sad and very,
very forlorn. It forces me back to the real world. A world where the
powerful not only hold onto their power, but continue to expand it.
Meanwhile a few of us wander about pretending that things are "looking
up". We could insert today's names in place of those of Eugene
Debbs, Joe Hill and others, and their dreams and hopes would be as
current as today's news.
But after all, it's only been 100 years. One fine day the Working
Class will rise up...crap!
But at the same time, I most certainly can't join the Establishment,
and suck up to the Empire.
There are days when I wish I were a believer in a life after death.
Of course I'd go to that Promised Land where Eugene Debbs, Joe Hill,
Martin Luther King and so many great men and women were set about
building a true People's Government. Of course that would not be
Heaven,, since that dimension is already under the absolute rule of a
dictator who assures us that He is never wrong.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/22/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> Eugene V. Debs and the Urgent Need for a New Anti-War Movement
> Published on
> Thursday, September 22, 2016
> by
> Common Dreams
> Eugene V. Debs and the Urgent Need for a New Anti-War Movement
> by
> Jake Johnson
>
> Eugene Debs delivering a speech in Chicago in 1912. "I can see the dawn of
> the better day for humanity," the famous socialist leader once said. "The
> people are awakening. In due time they will and must come to their own."
> (Photo: Wikipedia)
> Eugene Debs became a socialist in prison.
> After being arrested for his leadership role in the Pullman Strike of 1894
> -
> for which he was deemed "an enemy of the human race" in the New York Times
> -
> Debs took to studying intensely the classics of socialist thought, from the
> utopian vision of Edward Bellamy to the analytical works of the influential
> Marxist Karl Kautsky.
> But, of course, the critical groundwork for Debs's conversion was already
> laid; as he recounted in an essay detailing his ideological transformation,
> the brutality with which striking workers were treated by the forces of the
> state in defense of the capitalist class was "his first practical lesson in
> Socialism" - "in the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle,"
> he wrote, "the class struggle was revealed."
> While still in prison, Debs granted interviews to multiple news outlets,
> making his newfound ideas known while skewering the then widespread faith
> in
> what he termed "the competitive system."
> "The competitive system has had its day," he told a correspondent for the
> Cincinnati Enquirer. "[I]t has blotted out all the stars of hope; filled
> the
> world with groans and reduced humanity to slavery. The strong have devoured
> the weak. The highways of the centuries are strewn with the bones of
> countless victims."
> Almost immediately upon his release, Debs began his rise within the ranks
> of
> America's radical circles, a rise that coincided with the formation of the
> Industrial Workers of the World and America's Social Democratic Party,
> which
> shortly thereafter became the Socialist Party.
> The fact that Debs would, in the next two decades, launch several failed
> yet
> still prominent presidential runs deserves less attention - as he himself
> emphasized - than his role as America's conscience in the midst of a class
> structure that seemed unshakable. As Debs acknowledged in 1898, "The few
> have come in possession of all, and the many have been reduced to the
> extremity of living by permission."
> Child labor was commonplace through the early years of the twentieth
> century; workers toiled in dangerous conditions, to which Upton Sinclair
> called attention in his novel The Jungle; and public policy was dictated by
> the interests of capital.
> Debs also confronted what he saw as an inevitable outgrowth of the
> expansion
> of industrial capitalism: Military conflict.
> "Wars and rumors of wars are of universal prevalence," Debs wrote in 1900,
> pointing to America's brutal occupation of the Philippines. "The picture,
> lurid as a chamber of horrors, becomes complete in its gruesome ghastliness
> when robed ministers of Christ solemnly declare that it is all for the
> glory
> of God and the advancement of Christian civilization."
> The picture would become infinitely more gruesome in the coming years with
> the onset of the First World War.
> Debs believed that the United States should stay out of the conflict - and
> so, at least at first, did Woodrow Wilson, who was reelected on a platform
> of peace in 1916. The very same Wilson would, just two years later, ensure
> Debs's imprisonment for the crime of defending that platform, a fact whose
> irony Debs didn't miss.
> The beginning of America's involvement in the war coincided with a swift
> crackdown on dissenting voices; it became, thanks to the Sedition Act of
> 1918 (an extension of the Espionage Act of 1917), a crime to speak out
> against the war effort, or to speak in any way that smacked of
> "disloyalty."
> Debs lamented in a speech in Canton, Ohio, "that it is extremely dangerous
> to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting
> to
> make democracy safe in the world."
> Two weeks after the Canton remarks, Debs was arrested.
> This past Sunday marked the 98th anniversary of what would become Debs's
> most famous speech, delivered after he was convicted on ten counts of
> sedition - a conviction that carried a ten-year prison sentence.
> "I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does
> absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of
> millions
> of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their
> lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence," Debs told the court.
> "This order of things cannot always endure. I have registered my protest
> against it. I recognize the feebleness of my effort, but, fortunately, I am
> not alone. There are multiplied thousands of others who, like myself, have
> come to realize that before we may truly enjoy the blessings of civilized
> life, we must reorganize society upon a mutual and cooperative basis."
> By highlighting the injustices of the capitalist order at home and the
> destruction wrought by war abroad, and by making clear the connections
> between the two, Debs established a framework of thought that would guide
> the radicalism of future decades.
> In his protests against the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King Jr. decried a
> system that let the poor die in the streets and sent the children of
> struggling families to die overseas.
> "I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in
> rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to
> draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube,"
> Dr. King said in 1967. "So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as
> an
> enemy of the poor and to attack it as such."
> But observing the radicalism of Debs and King also forces us to come to
> grips with the fact that the tradition they upheld - one of principled and
> persistent opposition to war - has faded rapidly in recent years.
> When historian Michael Kazin asked in 2015, "Why is there no antiwar
> movement?" the necessity of the question was plain: There is no mass,
> mobilized, and militant anti-war movement in the United States, and that
> fact should trouble us all.
> While the Vietnam War era was characterized by mass discontent and
> rebellion, the post-Vietnam War era has been shaped by a sprawling and
> increasingly secretive national security apparatus, complete with private
> militias and drones that do the dirty work of empire with little to no
> oversight and scattered opposition.
> "In the last six decades, the American national security state has
> succeeded
> strikingly at only one thing (other than turning itself into a growth
> industry): it freed itself of us and of Congress," summarizes Tom
> Engelhardt. "In the years following the Vietnam War, the American people
> were effectively demobilized, shorn of that sense of service to country,
> while war was privatized and the citizen soldier replaced by an
> 'all-volunteer' force and a host of paid contractors working for warrior
> corporations."
> The "sense of service to country" to which Engelhardt refers is not the
> blind, reactionary patriotism of the American right; rather, it is the
> sense
> that one has the duty to combat injustices, particularly those perpetrated
> by one's own supposed representatives.
> But as Engelhardt also notes, Americans have increasingly come to view -
> with copious supporting evidence - government as an entity entirely
> separate
> from the will of the public at large. Just as Debs excoriated a system
> under
> which a "few have come in possession of all," scholars today have
> documented
> the extent to which economic elites dominate decision-making, pushing
> "ordinary" people out of the process altogether.
> Americans have, in the years following the financial crisis, organized in
> an
> effort to combat this reality, one characterized by soaring inequities of
> influence, both political and economic. Occupy emerged and changed the
> national conversation; Fight for $15 is leading the way for higher wages;
> the nation's democratic socialists have used the presidential campaign of
> Bernie Sanders to expand their influence.
> We have also seen the growth and expansion of crucial movements responding
> to police killings, mass incarceration, the war on drugs, and systemic
> racism - most notably Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives.
> The same cannot be said of anti-war efforts. Though the consolidation of
> power among foreign policy officials and the impenetrable walls behind
> which
> they operate have resulted in devastating invasion after devastating
> invasion, the public has not responded with the proportionality necessary
> to
> cultivate effective resistance.
> Resistance during the Obama administration has arguably weakened further,
> as
> Democratic partisans remain silent in the interest of proper political
> etiquette and as the anti-war left remains marginalized, without a voice in
> the mainstream.
> This is so even as drones continue to maim and murder civilians, even as
> the
> war on whistleblowers is sustained, even as military efforts proceed in
> Iraq
> and Afghanistan and spill over into Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, and
> elsewhere.
> To say that the efforts of the entrenched foreign policy establishment have
> failed to make the world safer would be an outrageous understatement; the
> invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan sparked the rise of ISIS and other
> affiliated groups, which are using the chaos initiated by decades of
> intervention and occupation to spread terror.
> Neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton offer anything resembling an
> alternative; indeed, as Matthew Hoh has observed, "both Hillary Clinton and
> Donald Trump are unabashed militarists, seeing no shame or dysfunction in
> America's wars overseas, and seemingly promising to escalate current wars
> or
> begin new ones."
> But no matter who is elected in November, our hopes cannot remain tethered
> to presidential politics; the changes that are necessary to take on a
> military-industrial complex that has extended its reach beyond what
> Eisenhower could have envisioned cannot come from the top-down.
> Like all democratic projects of the past, the formation of a far-reaching
> and sustainable anti-capitalist, anti-war movement will take years of mass
> organization and mass action. The question of whether the creation of such
> a
> movement is practical is less important than whether such a movement is
> necessary. If Debs's words are any guide, the answer is clear.
> An egalitarian project, as Debs understood, cannot proceed in the midst of
> perpetual war. A government willing to sanction the bombing and subjugation
> of innocents abroad will not hesitate to exploit the most vulnerable at
> home.
> "I never so clearly comprehended as now the great struggle between the
> powers of greed and exploitation on the one hand and upon the other the
> rising hosts of industrial freedom and social justice," Debs said in 1918.
> "I can see the dawn of the better day for humanity. The people are
> awakening. In due time they will and must come to their own."
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
> License
> Jake Johnson
>
> Jake Johnson is an independent writer. Follow him on Twitter:
> @wordsofdissent
> Skip to main content
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> Eugene V. Debs and the Urgent Need for a New Anti-War Movement
> Published on
> Thursday, September 22, 2016
> by
> Common Dreams
> Eugene V. Debs and the Urgent Need for a New Anti-War Movement
> by
> Jake Johnson
> . 39 Comments
> .
> . Eugene Debs delivering a speech in Chicago in 1912. "I can see the
> dawn of the better day for humanity," the famous socialist leader once
> said.
> "The people are awakening. In due time they will and must come to their
> own." (Photo: Wikipedia)
> . Eugene Debs became a socialist in prison.
> . After being arrested for his leadership role in the Pullman Strike
> of 1894 - for which he was deemed "an enemy of the human race" in the New
> York Times - Debs took to studying intensely the classics of socialist
> thought, from the utopian vision of Edward Bellamy to the analytical works
> of the influential Marxist Karl Kautsky.
> . But, of course, the critical groundwork for Debs's conversion was
> already laid; as he recounted in an essay detailing his ideological
> transformation, the brutality with which striking workers were treated by
> the forces of the state in defense of the capitalist class was "his first
> practical lesson in Socialism" - "in the gleam of every bayonet and the
> flash of every rifle," he wrote, "the class struggle was revealed."
> . While still in prison, Debs granted interviews to multiple news
> outlets, making his newfound ideas known while skewering the then
> widespread
> faith in what he termed "the competitive system."
> "The competitive system has had its day," he told a correspondent for the
> Cincinnati Enquirer. "[I]t has blotted out all the stars of hope; filled
> the
> world with groans and reduced humanity to slavery. The strong have devoured
> the weak. The highways of the centuries are strewn with the bones of
> countless victims."
> Almost immediately upon his release, Debs began his rise within the ranks
> of
> America's radical circles, a rise that coincided with the formation of the
> Industrial Workers of the World and America's Social Democratic Party,
> which
> shortly thereafter became the Socialist Party.
> The fact that Debs would, in the next two decades, launch several failed
> yet
> still prominent presidential runs deserves less attention - as he himself
> emphasized - than his role as America's conscience in the midst of a class
> structure that seemed unshakable. As Debs acknowledged in 1898, "The few
> have come in possession of all, and the many have been reduced to the
> extremity of living by permission."
> Child labor was commonplace through the early years of the twentieth
> century; workers toiled in dangerous conditions, to which Upton Sinclair
> called attention in his novel The Jungle; and public policy was dictated by
> the interests of capital.
> Debs also confronted what he saw as an inevitable outgrowth of the
> expansion
> of industrial capitalism: Military conflict.
> "Wars and rumors of wars are of universal prevalence," Debs wrote in 1900,
> pointing to America's brutal occupation of the Philippines. "The picture,
> lurid as a chamber of horrors, becomes complete in its gruesome ghastliness
> when robed ministers of Christ solemnly declare that it is all for the
> glory
> of God and the advancement of Christian civilization."
> The picture would become infinitely more gruesome in the coming years with
> the onset of the First World War.
> Debs believed that the United States should stay out of the conflict - and
> so, at least at first, did Woodrow Wilson, who was reelected on a platform
> of peace in 1916. The very same Wilson would, just two years later, ensure
> Debs's imprisonment for the crime of defending that platform, a fact whose
> irony Debs didn't miss.
> The beginning of America's involvement in the war coincided with a swift
> crackdown on dissenting voices; it became, thanks to the Sedition Act of
> 1918 (an extension of the Espionage Act of 1917), a crime to speak out
> against the war effort, or to speak in any way that smacked of
> "disloyalty."
> Debs lamented in a speech in Canton, Ohio, "that it is extremely dangerous
> to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting
> to
> make democracy safe in the world."
> Two weeks after the Canton remarks, Debs was arrested.
> This past Sunday marked the 98th anniversary of what would become Debs's
> most famous speech, delivered after he was convicted on ten counts of
> sedition - a conviction that carried a ten-year prison sentence.
> "I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does
> absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of
> millions
> of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their
> lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence," Debs told the court.
> "This order of things cannot always endure. I have registered my protest
> against it. I recognize the feebleness of my effort, but, fortunately, I am
> not alone. There are multiplied thousands of others who, like myself, have
> come to realize that before we may truly enjoy the blessings of civilized
> life, we must reorganize society upon a mutual and cooperative basis."
> By highlighting the injustices of the capitalist order at home and the
> destruction wrought by war abroad, and by making clear the connections
> between the two, Debs established a framework of thought that would guide
> the radicalism of future decades.
> In his protests against the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King Jr. decried a
> system that let the poor die in the streets and sent the children of
> struggling families to die overseas.
> "I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in
> rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to
> draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube,"
> Dr. King said in 1967. "So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as
> an
> enemy of the poor and to attack it as such."
> But observing the radicalism of Debs and King also forces us to come to
> grips with the fact that the tradition they upheld - one of principled and
> persistent opposition to war - has faded rapidly in recent years.
> When historian Michael Kazin asked in 2015, "Why is there no antiwar
> movement?" the necessity of the question was plain: There is no mass,
> mobilized, and militant anti-war movement in the United States, and that
> fact should trouble us all.
> While the Vietnam War era was characterized by mass discontent and
> rebellion, the post-Vietnam War era has been shaped by a sprawling and
> increasingly secretive national security apparatus, complete with private
> militias and drones that do the dirty work of empire with little to no
> oversight and scattered opposition.
> "In the last six decades, the American national security state has
> succeeded
> strikingly at only one thing (other than turning itself into a growth
> industry): it freed itself of us and of Congress," summarizes Tom
> Engelhardt. "In the years following the Vietnam War, the American people
> were effectively demobilized, shorn of that sense of service to country,
> while war was privatized and the citizen soldier replaced by an
> 'all-volunteer' force and a host of paid contractors working for warrior
> corporations."
> The "sense of service to country" to which Engelhardt refers is not the
> blind, reactionary patriotism of the American right; rather, it is the
> sense
> that one has the duty to combat injustices, particularly those perpetrated
> by one's own supposed representatives.
> But as Engelhardt also notes, Americans have increasingly come to view -
> with copious supporting evidence - government as an entity entirely
> separate
> from the will of the public at large. Just as Debs excoriated a system
> under
> which a "few have come in possession of all," scholars today have
> documented
> the extent to which economic elites dominate decision-making, pushing
> "ordinary" people out of the process altogether.
> Americans have, in the years following the financial crisis, organized in
> an
> effort to combat this reality, one characterized by soaring inequities of
> influence, both political and economic. Occupy emerged and changed the
> national conversation; Fight for $15 is leading the way for higher wages;
> the nation's democratic socialists have used the presidential campaign of
> Bernie Sanders to expand their influence.
> We have also seen the growth and expansion of crucial movements responding
> to police killings, mass incarceration, the war on drugs, and systemic
> racism - most notably Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives.
> The same cannot be said of anti-war efforts. Though the consolidation of
> power among foreign policy officials and the impenetrable walls behind
> which
> they operate have resulted in devastating invasion after devastating
> invasion, the public has not responded with the proportionality necessary
> to
> cultivate effective resistance.
> Resistance during the Obama administration has arguably weakened further,
> as
> Democratic partisans remain silent in the interest of proper political
> etiquette and as the anti-war left remains marginalized, without a voice in
> the mainstream.
> This is so even as drones continue to maim and murder civilians, even as
> the
> war on whistleblowers is sustained, even as military efforts proceed in
> Iraq
> and Afghanistan and spill over into Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, and
> elsewhere.
> To say that the efforts of the entrenched foreign policy establishment have
> failed to make the world safer would be an outrageous understatement; the
> invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan sparked the rise of ISIS and other
> affiliated groups, which are using the chaos initiated by decades of
> intervention and occupation to spread terror.
> Neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton offer anything resembling an
> alternative; indeed, as Matthew Hoh has observed, "both Hillary Clinton and
> Donald Trump are unabashed militarists, seeing no shame or dysfunction in
> America's wars overseas, and seemingly promising to escalate current wars
> or
> begin new ones."
> But no matter who is elected in November, our hopes cannot remain tethered
> to presidential politics; the changes that are necessary to take on a
> military-industrial complex that has extended its reach beyond what
> Eisenhower could have envisioned cannot come from the top-down.
> Like all democratic projects of the past, the formation of a far-reaching
> and sustainable anti-capitalist, anti-war movement will take years of mass
> organization and mass action. The question of whether the creation of such
> a
> movement is practical is less important than whether such a movement is
> necessary. If Debs's words are any guide, the answer is clear.
> An egalitarian project, as Debs understood, cannot proceed in the midst of
> perpetual war. A government willing to sanction the bombing and subjugation
> of innocents abroad will not hesitate to exploit the most vulnerable at
> home.
> "I never so clearly comprehended as now the great struggle between the
> powers of greed and exploitation on the one hand and upon the other the
> rising hosts of industrial freedom and social justice," Debs said in 1918.
> "I can see the dawn of the better day for humanity. The people are
> awakening. In due time they will and must come to their own."
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
> License
> /author/jake-johnson
> /author/jake-johnson/author/jake-johnson
> Jake Johnson is an independent writer. Follow him on Twitter:
> @wordsofdissent
>
>
>
very forlorn. It forces me back to the real world. A world where the
powerful not only hold onto their power, but continue to expand it.
Meanwhile a few of us wander about pretending that things are "looking
up". We could insert today's names in place of those of Eugene
Debbs, Joe Hill and others, and their dreams and hopes would be as
current as today's news.
But after all, it's only been 100 years. One fine day the Working
Class will rise up...crap!
But at the same time, I most certainly can't join the Establishment,
and suck up to the Empire.
There are days when I wish I were a believer in a life after death.
Of course I'd go to that Promised Land where Eugene Debbs, Joe Hill,
Martin Luther King and so many great men and women were set about
building a true People's Government. Of course that would not be
Heaven,, since that dimension is already under the absolute rule of a
dictator who assures us that He is never wrong.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/22/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> Eugene V. Debs and the Urgent Need for a New Anti-War Movement
> Published on
> Thursday, September 22, 2016
> by
> Common Dreams
> Eugene V. Debs and the Urgent Need for a New Anti-War Movement
> by
> Jake Johnson
>
> Eugene Debs delivering a speech in Chicago in 1912. "I can see the dawn of
> the better day for humanity," the famous socialist leader once said. "The
> people are awakening. In due time they will and must come to their own."
> (Photo: Wikipedia)
> Eugene Debs became a socialist in prison.
> After being arrested for his leadership role in the Pullman Strike of 1894
> -
> for which he was deemed "an enemy of the human race" in the New York Times
> -
> Debs took to studying intensely the classics of socialist thought, from the
> utopian vision of Edward Bellamy to the analytical works of the influential
> Marxist Karl Kautsky.
> But, of course, the critical groundwork for Debs's conversion was already
> laid; as he recounted in an essay detailing his ideological transformation,
> the brutality with which striking workers were treated by the forces of the
> state in defense of the capitalist class was "his first practical lesson in
> Socialism" - "in the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle,"
> he wrote, "the class struggle was revealed."
> While still in prison, Debs granted interviews to multiple news outlets,
> making his newfound ideas known while skewering the then widespread faith
> in
> what he termed "the competitive system."
> "The competitive system has had its day," he told a correspondent for the
> Cincinnati Enquirer. "[I]t has blotted out all the stars of hope; filled
> the
> world with groans and reduced humanity to slavery. The strong have devoured
> the weak. The highways of the centuries are strewn with the bones of
> countless victims."
> Almost immediately upon his release, Debs began his rise within the ranks
> of
> America's radical circles, a rise that coincided with the formation of the
> Industrial Workers of the World and America's Social Democratic Party,
> which
> shortly thereafter became the Socialist Party.
> The fact that Debs would, in the next two decades, launch several failed
> yet
> still prominent presidential runs deserves less attention - as he himself
> emphasized - than his role as America's conscience in the midst of a class
> structure that seemed unshakable. As Debs acknowledged in 1898, "The few
> have come in possession of all, and the many have been reduced to the
> extremity of living by permission."
> Child labor was commonplace through the early years of the twentieth
> century; workers toiled in dangerous conditions, to which Upton Sinclair
> called attention in his novel The Jungle; and public policy was dictated by
> the interests of capital.
> Debs also confronted what he saw as an inevitable outgrowth of the
> expansion
> of industrial capitalism: Military conflict.
> "Wars and rumors of wars are of universal prevalence," Debs wrote in 1900,
> pointing to America's brutal occupation of the Philippines. "The picture,
> lurid as a chamber of horrors, becomes complete in its gruesome ghastliness
> when robed ministers of Christ solemnly declare that it is all for the
> glory
> of God and the advancement of Christian civilization."
> The picture would become infinitely more gruesome in the coming years with
> the onset of the First World War.
> Debs believed that the United States should stay out of the conflict - and
> so, at least at first, did Woodrow Wilson, who was reelected on a platform
> of peace in 1916. The very same Wilson would, just two years later, ensure
> Debs's imprisonment for the crime of defending that platform, a fact whose
> irony Debs didn't miss.
> The beginning of America's involvement in the war coincided with a swift
> crackdown on dissenting voices; it became, thanks to the Sedition Act of
> 1918 (an extension of the Espionage Act of 1917), a crime to speak out
> against the war effort, or to speak in any way that smacked of
> "disloyalty."
> Debs lamented in a speech in Canton, Ohio, "that it is extremely dangerous
> to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting
> to
> make democracy safe in the world."
> Two weeks after the Canton remarks, Debs was arrested.
> This past Sunday marked the 98th anniversary of what would become Debs's
> most famous speech, delivered after he was convicted on ten counts of
> sedition - a conviction that carried a ten-year prison sentence.
> "I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does
> absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of
> millions
> of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their
> lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence," Debs told the court.
> "This order of things cannot always endure. I have registered my protest
> against it. I recognize the feebleness of my effort, but, fortunately, I am
> not alone. There are multiplied thousands of others who, like myself, have
> come to realize that before we may truly enjoy the blessings of civilized
> life, we must reorganize society upon a mutual and cooperative basis."
> By highlighting the injustices of the capitalist order at home and the
> destruction wrought by war abroad, and by making clear the connections
> between the two, Debs established a framework of thought that would guide
> the radicalism of future decades.
> In his protests against the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King Jr. decried a
> system that let the poor die in the streets and sent the children of
> struggling families to die overseas.
> "I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in
> rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to
> draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube,"
> Dr. King said in 1967. "So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as
> an
> enemy of the poor and to attack it as such."
> But observing the radicalism of Debs and King also forces us to come to
> grips with the fact that the tradition they upheld - one of principled and
> persistent opposition to war - has faded rapidly in recent years.
> When historian Michael Kazin asked in 2015, "Why is there no antiwar
> movement?" the necessity of the question was plain: There is no mass,
> mobilized, and militant anti-war movement in the United States, and that
> fact should trouble us all.
> While the Vietnam War era was characterized by mass discontent and
> rebellion, the post-Vietnam War era has been shaped by a sprawling and
> increasingly secretive national security apparatus, complete with private
> militias and drones that do the dirty work of empire with little to no
> oversight and scattered opposition.
> "In the last six decades, the American national security state has
> succeeded
> strikingly at only one thing (other than turning itself into a growth
> industry): it freed itself of us and of Congress," summarizes Tom
> Engelhardt. "In the years following the Vietnam War, the American people
> were effectively demobilized, shorn of that sense of service to country,
> while war was privatized and the citizen soldier replaced by an
> 'all-volunteer' force and a host of paid contractors working for warrior
> corporations."
> The "sense of service to country" to which Engelhardt refers is not the
> blind, reactionary patriotism of the American right; rather, it is the
> sense
> that one has the duty to combat injustices, particularly those perpetrated
> by one's own supposed representatives.
> But as Engelhardt also notes, Americans have increasingly come to view -
> with copious supporting evidence - government as an entity entirely
> separate
> from the will of the public at large. Just as Debs excoriated a system
> under
> which a "few have come in possession of all," scholars today have
> documented
> the extent to which economic elites dominate decision-making, pushing
> "ordinary" people out of the process altogether.
> Americans have, in the years following the financial crisis, organized in
> an
> effort to combat this reality, one characterized by soaring inequities of
> influence, both political and economic. Occupy emerged and changed the
> national conversation; Fight for $15 is leading the way for higher wages;
> the nation's democratic socialists have used the presidential campaign of
> Bernie Sanders to expand their influence.
> We have also seen the growth and expansion of crucial movements responding
> to police killings, mass incarceration, the war on drugs, and systemic
> racism - most notably Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives.
> The same cannot be said of anti-war efforts. Though the consolidation of
> power among foreign policy officials and the impenetrable walls behind
> which
> they operate have resulted in devastating invasion after devastating
> invasion, the public has not responded with the proportionality necessary
> to
> cultivate effective resistance.
> Resistance during the Obama administration has arguably weakened further,
> as
> Democratic partisans remain silent in the interest of proper political
> etiquette and as the anti-war left remains marginalized, without a voice in
> the mainstream.
> This is so even as drones continue to maim and murder civilians, even as
> the
> war on whistleblowers is sustained, even as military efforts proceed in
> Iraq
> and Afghanistan and spill over into Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, and
> elsewhere.
> To say that the efforts of the entrenched foreign policy establishment have
> failed to make the world safer would be an outrageous understatement; the
> invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan sparked the rise of ISIS and other
> affiliated groups, which are using the chaos initiated by decades of
> intervention and occupation to spread terror.
> Neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton offer anything resembling an
> alternative; indeed, as Matthew Hoh has observed, "both Hillary Clinton and
> Donald Trump are unabashed militarists, seeing no shame or dysfunction in
> America's wars overseas, and seemingly promising to escalate current wars
> or
> begin new ones."
> But no matter who is elected in November, our hopes cannot remain tethered
> to presidential politics; the changes that are necessary to take on a
> military-industrial complex that has extended its reach beyond what
> Eisenhower could have envisioned cannot come from the top-down.
> Like all democratic projects of the past, the formation of a far-reaching
> and sustainable anti-capitalist, anti-war movement will take years of mass
> organization and mass action. The question of whether the creation of such
> a
> movement is practical is less important than whether such a movement is
> necessary. If Debs's words are any guide, the answer is clear.
> An egalitarian project, as Debs understood, cannot proceed in the midst of
> perpetual war. A government willing to sanction the bombing and subjugation
> of innocents abroad will not hesitate to exploit the most vulnerable at
> home.
> "I never so clearly comprehended as now the great struggle between the
> powers of greed and exploitation on the one hand and upon the other the
> rising hosts of industrial freedom and social justice," Debs said in 1918.
> "I can see the dawn of the better day for humanity. The people are
> awakening. In due time they will and must come to their own."
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
> License
> Jake Johnson
>
> Jake Johnson is an independent writer. Follow him on Twitter:
> @wordsofdissent
> Skip to main content
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> Eugene V. Debs and the Urgent Need for a New Anti-War Movement
> Published on
> Thursday, September 22, 2016
> by
> Common Dreams
> Eugene V. Debs and the Urgent Need for a New Anti-War Movement
> by
> Jake Johnson
> . 39 Comments
> .
> . Eugene Debs delivering a speech in Chicago in 1912. "I can see the
> dawn of the better day for humanity," the famous socialist leader once
> said.
> "The people are awakening. In due time they will and must come to their
> own." (Photo: Wikipedia)
> . Eugene Debs became a socialist in prison.
> . After being arrested for his leadership role in the Pullman Strike
> of 1894 - for which he was deemed "an enemy of the human race" in the New
> York Times - Debs took to studying intensely the classics of socialist
> thought, from the utopian vision of Edward Bellamy to the analytical works
> of the influential Marxist Karl Kautsky.
> . But, of course, the critical groundwork for Debs's conversion was
> already laid; as he recounted in an essay detailing his ideological
> transformation, the brutality with which striking workers were treated by
> the forces of the state in defense of the capitalist class was "his first
> practical lesson in Socialism" - "in the gleam of every bayonet and the
> flash of every rifle," he wrote, "the class struggle was revealed."
> . While still in prison, Debs granted interviews to multiple news
> outlets, making his newfound ideas known while skewering the then
> widespread
> faith in what he termed "the competitive system."
> "The competitive system has had its day," he told a correspondent for the
> Cincinnati Enquirer. "[I]t has blotted out all the stars of hope; filled
> the
> world with groans and reduced humanity to slavery. The strong have devoured
> the weak. The highways of the centuries are strewn with the bones of
> countless victims."
> Almost immediately upon his release, Debs began his rise within the ranks
> of
> America's radical circles, a rise that coincided with the formation of the
> Industrial Workers of the World and America's Social Democratic Party,
> which
> shortly thereafter became the Socialist Party.
> The fact that Debs would, in the next two decades, launch several failed
> yet
> still prominent presidential runs deserves less attention - as he himself
> emphasized - than his role as America's conscience in the midst of a class
> structure that seemed unshakable. As Debs acknowledged in 1898, "The few
> have come in possession of all, and the many have been reduced to the
> extremity of living by permission."
> Child labor was commonplace through the early years of the twentieth
> century; workers toiled in dangerous conditions, to which Upton Sinclair
> called attention in his novel The Jungle; and public policy was dictated by
> the interests of capital.
> Debs also confronted what he saw as an inevitable outgrowth of the
> expansion
> of industrial capitalism: Military conflict.
> "Wars and rumors of wars are of universal prevalence," Debs wrote in 1900,
> pointing to America's brutal occupation of the Philippines. "The picture,
> lurid as a chamber of horrors, becomes complete in its gruesome ghastliness
> when robed ministers of Christ solemnly declare that it is all for the
> glory
> of God and the advancement of Christian civilization."
> The picture would become infinitely more gruesome in the coming years with
> the onset of the First World War.
> Debs believed that the United States should stay out of the conflict - and
> so, at least at first, did Woodrow Wilson, who was reelected on a platform
> of peace in 1916. The very same Wilson would, just two years later, ensure
> Debs's imprisonment for the crime of defending that platform, a fact whose
> irony Debs didn't miss.
> The beginning of America's involvement in the war coincided with a swift
> crackdown on dissenting voices; it became, thanks to the Sedition Act of
> 1918 (an extension of the Espionage Act of 1917), a crime to speak out
> against the war effort, or to speak in any way that smacked of
> "disloyalty."
> Debs lamented in a speech in Canton, Ohio, "that it is extremely dangerous
> to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting
> to
> make democracy safe in the world."
> Two weeks after the Canton remarks, Debs was arrested.
> This past Sunday marked the 98th anniversary of what would become Debs's
> most famous speech, delivered after he was convicted on ten counts of
> sedition - a conviction that carried a ten-year prison sentence.
> "I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does
> absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of
> millions
> of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their
> lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence," Debs told the court.
> "This order of things cannot always endure. I have registered my protest
> against it. I recognize the feebleness of my effort, but, fortunately, I am
> not alone. There are multiplied thousands of others who, like myself, have
> come to realize that before we may truly enjoy the blessings of civilized
> life, we must reorganize society upon a mutual and cooperative basis."
> By highlighting the injustices of the capitalist order at home and the
> destruction wrought by war abroad, and by making clear the connections
> between the two, Debs established a framework of thought that would guide
> the radicalism of future decades.
> In his protests against the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King Jr. decried a
> system that let the poor die in the streets and sent the children of
> struggling families to die overseas.
> "I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in
> rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to
> draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube,"
> Dr. King said in 1967. "So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as
> an
> enemy of the poor and to attack it as such."
> But observing the radicalism of Debs and King also forces us to come to
> grips with the fact that the tradition they upheld - one of principled and
> persistent opposition to war - has faded rapidly in recent years.
> When historian Michael Kazin asked in 2015, "Why is there no antiwar
> movement?" the necessity of the question was plain: There is no mass,
> mobilized, and militant anti-war movement in the United States, and that
> fact should trouble us all.
> While the Vietnam War era was characterized by mass discontent and
> rebellion, the post-Vietnam War era has been shaped by a sprawling and
> increasingly secretive national security apparatus, complete with private
> militias and drones that do the dirty work of empire with little to no
> oversight and scattered opposition.
> "In the last six decades, the American national security state has
> succeeded
> strikingly at only one thing (other than turning itself into a growth
> industry): it freed itself of us and of Congress," summarizes Tom
> Engelhardt. "In the years following the Vietnam War, the American people
> were effectively demobilized, shorn of that sense of service to country,
> while war was privatized and the citizen soldier replaced by an
> 'all-volunteer' force and a host of paid contractors working for warrior
> corporations."
> The "sense of service to country" to which Engelhardt refers is not the
> blind, reactionary patriotism of the American right; rather, it is the
> sense
> that one has the duty to combat injustices, particularly those perpetrated
> by one's own supposed representatives.
> But as Engelhardt also notes, Americans have increasingly come to view -
> with copious supporting evidence - government as an entity entirely
> separate
> from the will of the public at large. Just as Debs excoriated a system
> under
> which a "few have come in possession of all," scholars today have
> documented
> the extent to which economic elites dominate decision-making, pushing
> "ordinary" people out of the process altogether.
> Americans have, in the years following the financial crisis, organized in
> an
> effort to combat this reality, one characterized by soaring inequities of
> influence, both political and economic. Occupy emerged and changed the
> national conversation; Fight for $15 is leading the way for higher wages;
> the nation's democratic socialists have used the presidential campaign of
> Bernie Sanders to expand their influence.
> We have also seen the growth and expansion of crucial movements responding
> to police killings, mass incarceration, the war on drugs, and systemic
> racism - most notably Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives.
> The same cannot be said of anti-war efforts. Though the consolidation of
> power among foreign policy officials and the impenetrable walls behind
> which
> they operate have resulted in devastating invasion after devastating
> invasion, the public has not responded with the proportionality necessary
> to
> cultivate effective resistance.
> Resistance during the Obama administration has arguably weakened further,
> as
> Democratic partisans remain silent in the interest of proper political
> etiquette and as the anti-war left remains marginalized, without a voice in
> the mainstream.
> This is so even as drones continue to maim and murder civilians, even as
> the
> war on whistleblowers is sustained, even as military efforts proceed in
> Iraq
> and Afghanistan and spill over into Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, and
> elsewhere.
> To say that the efforts of the entrenched foreign policy establishment have
> failed to make the world safer would be an outrageous understatement; the
> invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan sparked the rise of ISIS and other
> affiliated groups, which are using the chaos initiated by decades of
> intervention and occupation to spread terror.
> Neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton offer anything resembling an
> alternative; indeed, as Matthew Hoh has observed, "both Hillary Clinton and
> Donald Trump are unabashed militarists, seeing no shame or dysfunction in
> America's wars overseas, and seemingly promising to escalate current wars
> or
> begin new ones."
> But no matter who is elected in November, our hopes cannot remain tethered
> to presidential politics; the changes that are necessary to take on a
> military-industrial complex that has extended its reach beyond what
> Eisenhower could have envisioned cannot come from the top-down.
> Like all democratic projects of the past, the formation of a far-reaching
> and sustainable anti-capitalist, anti-war movement will take years of mass
> organization and mass action. The question of whether the creation of such
> a
> movement is practical is less important than whether such a movement is
> necessary. If Debs's words are any guide, the answer is clear.
> An egalitarian project, as Debs understood, cannot proceed in the midst of
> perpetual war. A government willing to sanction the bombing and subjugation
> of innocents abroad will not hesitate to exploit the most vulnerable at
> home.
> "I never so clearly comprehended as now the great struggle between the
> powers of greed and exploitation on the one hand and upon the other the
> rising hosts of industrial freedom and social justice," Debs said in 1918.
> "I can see the dawn of the better day for humanity. The people are
> awakening. In due time they will and must come to their own."
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
> License
> /author/jake-johnson
> /author/jake-johnson/author/jake-johnson
> Jake Johnson is an independent writer. Follow him on Twitter:
> @wordsofdissent
>
>
>
The wrong woman is running for president
Maybe Elizabeth Warren could coach Hillary Clinton...probably not.
But I sure would vote for Warren!
Carl
following is part of an article by Michael Hiltzik:
Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf offers a clinic in how to weasel out of
real accountability
Wells Fargo Chairman and CEO John G. Stumpf, who has been described as
"the Mr. Clean of banking," took his unflappable and well-groomed mien
Tuesday to
a hearing room on Capitol Hill to defend the bank against allegations
that it had massively defrauded millions of its customers.
Amazingly, he made himself and his bank look worse. This underscores
the question we asked just a day ago:
Why does he still have a job?
The context of this question is the disclosure that Wells Fargo
bankers opened as many as 2 million fake accounts in the names of
existing customers and
others, without their knowledge and permission, and stonewalled their
inquiries and complaints. The scam went on from at least 2011 through
2015, though
Stumpf revealed that the bank is now reexamining accounts from as
early as 2009. On Sept. 8, it announced an agreement to pay $185
million in fines and
penalties to two federal regulators and the Los Angeles City Attorney's office.
You should resign. You should give back the money that you took while
this scam was going on, and you should be criminally investigated.—
Sen. Elizabeth
Warren confronts Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf
The bank's explanation has been that this was all a scheme
mysteriously concocted by "rogue" employees coast-to-coast, of whom
5,300 have been fired. Stumpf
denied on the stand, as he has in interviews, that the root cause of
the outbreak of dishonesty was Wells Fargo's relentless pressure on
low-level bankers
to "cross-sell" products — push credit cards, personal loans and other
deals — upon all customers. He stoutly denied that the company's
"culture" contributed
to the problem.
The company's sales goal was as high as eight accounts per customer,
vastly more than rival banks thought reasonable, and it ceaselessly
boasted to investors
of its cross-selling success as evidence of its expertise in retail
banking. Let's call this by its proper name, as did committee ranking
member Sherrod
Brown (D-Ohio): "I call it fraud because I got tired of the euphemisms
a long time ago."
On the whole, Stumpf's performance Tuesday followed the standard
playbook for beleaguered CEOs: He mechanically offered contrite
apologies, swore to rectify
the fraud and not let it happen again, and vowed personally to "accept
full responsibility for all unethical sales practices in our retail
banking business."
The hollowness of this pledge was promptly punctured by Sen. Elizabeth
Warren (D-Mass.). Here's how that went:
"Since this massive years-long scam came to light, you have said
repeatedly, quote: 'I am accountable,' " she observed. "But what have
you actually done
to hold yourself accountable? Have you resigned as CEO or chairman of
Wells Fargo?"
He started to reply, "The board — "
"Have you resigned?"
"No, I have not."
"All right. Have you returned one nickel of the millions of dollars
that you were paid while this scam was going on?"
"Well, first of all," Stumpf blustered, "this was by 1% of our people,
and— and — "
"That's not my question," Warren interrupted. "My question is about
responsibility. Have you returned one nickel of the millions of
dollars that you were
paid while this scam was going on?"
"The board will take care of that."
"Have you returned one nickel of the money you earned while this scam
was going on?"
"The board will — "
"I will take that as a 'no,' then."
Warren further probed whether Stumpf had fired a single senior
executive over the scam. The answer was no.
"OK. So you haven't resigned, you haven't returned a single nickel of
your personal earnings, you haven't fired a single senior executive.
Instead, your
definition of accountable is to push the blame to your low-level
employees who don't have the money for a fancy PR firm to defend
themselves. It's gutless
leadership."
She concluded her questioning with the bluntest assessment of the day:
"You should resign. You should give back the money that you took while
this scam
was going on, and you should be criminally investigated by both the
Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission."
As Warren and other committee members on both sides of the aisle
pointed out, Wells Fargo didn't seem to take serious steps to rectify
the damage done
to customers,
first revealed in 2013 by The Times,
until it started to face pressure from regulators. Stumpf touted the
bank's decision to hire consultants at PricewaterhouseCoopers to help
determine the
scope of the problem — but that happened in August 2015, years after
it knew a problem existed.
Under Brown's questioning, Stumpf revealed that it took that step not
on its own, but "in consultation" with federal regulators and the L.A.
City Attorney's
office, which was investigating. In other words, Wells Fargo had to be
goaded into seeking outside help.
"It never occurred to you to bring in somebody?" Brown asked.
"It was early in 2015," Stumpf replied, "that we finally connected a dot."
Nor has the bank ever disclosed in its public filings to the SEC that
its activities were under investigation. Stumpf explained that it
considered the
problem immaterial. In strictly financial terms, that may be true: The
bank collects revenue of about $90 billion a year and profits of more
than $20 billion.
But the damage to its reputation and future profitability may be
enormous; treating this as "immaterial" and sweeping it under the rug
was clearly a bad
and dishonest call. But Wells Fargo still wishes to trivialize the
matter. "I disagree with the fact that this is a massive fraud,"
Stumpf said.
The questions from Senate Banking Committee members that Stumpf
refused to answer directly may have outnumbered those to which he did
offer a response.
Asked whether he thought fraud had been committed, he pleaded that he
is not a lawyer. He was vague about when he first learned of his
bankers' "unethical"
conduct, although he met weekly with Carrie Tolstedt, the much-lauded
executive who led the division where the conduct occurred.
But I sure would vote for Warren!
Carl
following is part of an article by Michael Hiltzik:
Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf offers a clinic in how to weasel out of
real accountability
Wells Fargo Chairman and CEO John G. Stumpf, who has been described as
"the Mr. Clean of banking," took his unflappable and well-groomed mien
Tuesday to
a hearing room on Capitol Hill to defend the bank against allegations
that it had massively defrauded millions of its customers.
Amazingly, he made himself and his bank look worse. This underscores
the question we asked just a day ago:
Why does he still have a job?
The context of this question is the disclosure that Wells Fargo
bankers opened as many as 2 million fake accounts in the names of
existing customers and
others, without their knowledge and permission, and stonewalled their
inquiries and complaints. The scam went on from at least 2011 through
2015, though
Stumpf revealed that the bank is now reexamining accounts from as
early as 2009. On Sept. 8, it announced an agreement to pay $185
million in fines and
penalties to two federal regulators and the Los Angeles City Attorney's office.
You should resign. You should give back the money that you took while
this scam was going on, and you should be criminally investigated.—
Sen. Elizabeth
Warren confronts Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf
The bank's explanation has been that this was all a scheme
mysteriously concocted by "rogue" employees coast-to-coast, of whom
5,300 have been fired. Stumpf
denied on the stand, as he has in interviews, that the root cause of
the outbreak of dishonesty was Wells Fargo's relentless pressure on
low-level bankers
to "cross-sell" products — push credit cards, personal loans and other
deals — upon all customers. He stoutly denied that the company's
"culture" contributed
to the problem.
The company's sales goal was as high as eight accounts per customer,
vastly more than rival banks thought reasonable, and it ceaselessly
boasted to investors
of its cross-selling success as evidence of its expertise in retail
banking. Let's call this by its proper name, as did committee ranking
member Sherrod
Brown (D-Ohio): "I call it fraud because I got tired of the euphemisms
a long time ago."
On the whole, Stumpf's performance Tuesday followed the standard
playbook for beleaguered CEOs: He mechanically offered contrite
apologies, swore to rectify
the fraud and not let it happen again, and vowed personally to "accept
full responsibility for all unethical sales practices in our retail
banking business."
The hollowness of this pledge was promptly punctured by Sen. Elizabeth
Warren (D-Mass.). Here's how that went:
"Since this massive years-long scam came to light, you have said
repeatedly, quote: 'I am accountable,' " she observed. "But what have
you actually done
to hold yourself accountable? Have you resigned as CEO or chairman of
Wells Fargo?"
He started to reply, "The board — "
"Have you resigned?"
"No, I have not."
"All right. Have you returned one nickel of the millions of dollars
that you were paid while this scam was going on?"
"Well, first of all," Stumpf blustered, "this was by 1% of our people,
and— and — "
"That's not my question," Warren interrupted. "My question is about
responsibility. Have you returned one nickel of the millions of
dollars that you were
paid while this scam was going on?"
"The board will take care of that."
"Have you returned one nickel of the money you earned while this scam
was going on?"
"The board will — "
"I will take that as a 'no,' then."
Warren further probed whether Stumpf had fired a single senior
executive over the scam. The answer was no.
"OK. So you haven't resigned, you haven't returned a single nickel of
your personal earnings, you haven't fired a single senior executive.
Instead, your
definition of accountable is to push the blame to your low-level
employees who don't have the money for a fancy PR firm to defend
themselves. It's gutless
leadership."
She concluded her questioning with the bluntest assessment of the day:
"You should resign. You should give back the money that you took while
this scam
was going on, and you should be criminally investigated by both the
Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission."
As Warren and other committee members on both sides of the aisle
pointed out, Wells Fargo didn't seem to take serious steps to rectify
the damage done
to customers,
first revealed in 2013 by The Times,
until it started to face pressure from regulators. Stumpf touted the
bank's decision to hire consultants at PricewaterhouseCoopers to help
determine the
scope of the problem — but that happened in August 2015, years after
it knew a problem existed.
Under Brown's questioning, Stumpf revealed that it took that step not
on its own, but "in consultation" with federal regulators and the L.A.
City Attorney's
office, which was investigating. In other words, Wells Fargo had to be
goaded into seeking outside help.
"It never occurred to you to bring in somebody?" Brown asked.
"It was early in 2015," Stumpf replied, "that we finally connected a dot."
Nor has the bank ever disclosed in its public filings to the SEC that
its activities were under investigation. Stumpf explained that it
considered the
problem immaterial. In strictly financial terms, that may be true: The
bank collects revenue of about $90 billion a year and profits of more
than $20 billion.
But the damage to its reputation and future profitability may be
enormous; treating this as "immaterial" and sweeping it under the rug
was clearly a bad
and dishonest call. But Wells Fargo still wishes to trivialize the
matter. "I disagree with the fact that this is a massive fraud,"
Stumpf said.
The questions from Senate Banking Committee members that Stumpf
refused to answer directly may have outnumbered those to which he did
offer a response.
Asked whether he thought fraud had been committed, he pleaded that he
is not a lawyer. He was vague about when he first learned of his
bankers' "unethical"
conduct, although he met weekly with Carrie Tolstedt, the much-lauded
executive who led the division where the conduct occurred.
Tuesday, September 20, 2016
Re: [blind-democracy] There's No Debate
"The candidates and the media have thoroughly corrupted the presidential
debates. Our democracy deserves better." So says Bill Moyers. But
it's far more than the debates that should concern Americans. The
entire election process has been corrupted. As long as Americans
allow the Corporate Empire's Ruling Class to control elections through
their mass media, we can be assured that there will be no free
election.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/19/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> There's No Debate
> Published on
> Monday, September 19, 2016
> by
> BillMoyers.com
> There's No Debate
> The candidates and the media have thoroughly corrupted the presidential
> debates. Our democracy deserves better. There's still time for a change.
> by
> Bill Moyers, Michael Winship
>
> Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump during primary debates. (Left: Patrick T.
> Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images; Right: Geoff Robins/AFP/Getty Images)
> Let's call the whole thing off.
> Not the election, although if we only had a magic reset button we could
> pretend this sorry spectacle never happened and start all over.
> No, we mean the presidential debates - which, if the present format and
> moderators remain as they are, threaten an effect on democracy more like
> Leopold and Loeb than Lincoln and Douglas.
> The official presidential debates coming up are dominated by the candidates
> and the media, and therein lurk both the problems and the reasons to scrap
> this fraudulent nonsense for something sane and serious.
> We had a humiliating sneak preview Sept. 7, when NBC's celebrity
> interviewer
> Matt Lauer hosted a one-hour "Commander-in-Chief Forum" in which Hillary
> Clinton and Donald Trump spoke with Lauer from the same stage but in
> separate interviews. The event was supposed to be about defense and
> veterans
> issues, yet to everyone's bewilderment (except the Trump camp, which must
> have been cheering out of camera range that Lauer was playing their song),
> Lauer seemed to think Clinton's emails were worthy of more questions than,
> say, nuclear war, global warming or the fate of Syrian refugees.
> Of course, that wasn't a debate per se but neither are the sideshows that
> we
> call the official debates, even though the rules put in place by the
> nonprofit Commission on Presidential Debates are meant to insure a certain
> amount of fairness and decorum - unlike the trainwreck of "debates" during
> the primary season, which were run solely by the parties and media sponsors
> with no adult supervision.
> But despite the efforts of the commission, the official presidential
> debates
> coming up also are dominated by the candidates and the media, and therein
> lurk both the problems and the reasons to scrap this fraudulent nonsense
> for
> something sane and serious.
> A little history: From 1976, when President Gerald Ford faced off against
> Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter, the three presidential debates and one vice
> presidential debate were administered by the League of Women Voters, which
> did an admirable job under trying circumstances. But then, as historian
> Jill
> Lepore writes in an excellent New Yorker article on the history of
> presidential debates, the Reagan White House wanted to wrest control from
> the League and give it to the networks. According to Lepore:
> "During Senate hearings, Dorothy Ridings, the president of the League of
> Women Voters, warned against that move: 'Broadcasters are profit-making
> corporations operating in an extremely competitive setting, in which
> ratings
> assume utmost importance.' They would make a travesty of the debates, she
> predicted, not least because they'd agree to whatever terms the campaigns
> demanded. Also: 'We firmly believe that those who report the news should
> not
> make the news.'"
> Ridings' prescience proved correct and then some. In 1988, the League
> pulled
> out of the Bush-Dukakis debates, declaring in a press release, "It has
> become clear to us that the candidates' organizations aim to add debates to
> their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and
> answers to tough questions. The League has no intention of becoming an
> accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public."
> The giant media conglomerates - NBCUniversal (Comcast), Disney, CBS Corp.,
> 21st Century Fox, Time Warner - have turned the campaign and the upcoming
> debates into profit centers that reap a huge return from political trivia
> and titillation.
> Walter Cronkite agreed. That same year, he wrote, "The debates are part of
> the unconscionable fraud that our political campaigns have become. Here is
> a
> means to present to the American people a rational exposition of the major
> issues that face the nation, and the alternate approaches to their
> solution.
> Yet the candidates participate only with the guarantee of a format that
> defies meaningful discourse. They should be charged with sabotaging the
> electoral process."
> But as Ridings said, it's not just the candidates involved in this criminal
> hijacking of discourse. The giant media conglomerates - NBCUniversal
> (Comcast), Disney, CBS Corp., 21st Century Fox, Time Warner - have turned
> the campaign and the upcoming debates into profit centers that reap a huge
> return from political trivia and titillation. A game show, if you will - a
> farcical theater of make-believe rigged by the two parties and the networks
> to maintain their cartel of money and power.
> "Debating," Jill Lepore writes, "like voting, is a way for people to
> disagree without hitting one another or going to war: it's the key to every
> institution that makes civic life possible, from courts to legislatures.
> Without debate, there can be no self-government." But the media monoliths
> have taken the democratic purpose of a televised debate - to inform the
> public on the issues and the candidates' positions on them - and reduced it
> to a mock duel between the journalists who serve as moderators - too often
> surrendering their allegedly inquiring minds - and candidates who know they
> can simply blow past the questions with lies that go unchallenged, evasions
> that fear no rebuke and demagoguery that fears no rebuttal.
> Remember that it was CBS CEO Leslie Moonves who whooped about the cash to
> be
> made from the campaign, telling an investors conference in February, "The
> money's rolling in and this is fun. I've never seen anything like this, and
> this going to be a very good year for us. Bring it on, Donald. Keep going.
> Donald's place in this election is a good thing." Oh, yes, good for
> Moonves'
> annual bonus, but good for democracy? Don't make us laugh. Elaine Quijano
> of
> CBS News will be moderating the vice presidential candidates' debate on
> Oct.
> 4, with Moonves looking over her shoulder.
> Remember, too, that both Lauer and Trump are NBCUniversal celebrities who
> have earned millions from and for the networks. (Vanity Fair magazine even
> reported that NBCUniversal boss Steve Burke had spoken hypothetically with
> Trump about continuing The Apprentice from the White House.) Moderating the
> first presidential debate on Sept. 26 is NBC anchorman Lester Holt, a nice
> and competent fellow, but facing the same pressure as his fellow teammate
> Matt Lauer to not offend their once-and-possibly-future NBC star Donald
> Trump.
> And remember that Anderson Cooper of Time-Warner's CNN, the
> all-Trump-all-the-time network, and Martha Raddatz of Disney's ABC News
> will
> anchor the second presidential debate (to her credit, Raddatz did a good
> job
> during the 2012 vice presidential debate) - and that the final, crucial
> close encounter between Trump and Clinton will be moderated by Chris
> Wallace
> of Fox, the very "news organization" that joined with Donald Trump to
> gleefully spread the Big Lie of Birtherism that served Trump so well with
> free publicity (and Fox so well with ratings) and that Trump now
> conveniently and hypocritically repents.
> We wait breathlessly to see if during that debate Wallace inquires of
> Trump:
> "Did you really believe that lying about Barack Obama's birth was good for
> the country?" And: "What is your source for saying Hillary Clinton started
> the rumor that Obama was not born in America?" And: "How do we know you
> won't change your mind again and raise further doubts about whether the
> president is an American?" And - to pick up on a suggestion from The
> Washington Post's David Fahrenthold, who has been reporting on Trump's
> charitable giving - or lack thereof: "Mr. Trump, will you now follow
> through
> on your promise to donate $5 million to charity once you were given proof
> that President Obama was born in the United States? What charity do you
> have
> in mind? One of your own, perhaps?"
> Wallace has already admitted he is in no position to hold Trump accountable
> for the lies he tells in the "debate" - that "it's not my job" to fact
> check
> either Trump or Clinton during the course of their appearance with him.
> That
> should be pleasing to Roger Ailes, who was fired as head of the Fox News
> empire for scandalous sexist behavior but who is now giving Trump debate
> tips. Wallace is on record saying how much he admired and loved Ailes, to
> whom he owes his stardom at Fox - "The best boss I've had in almost a half
> a
> century in journalism," Wallace said.
> Such conflicts of interest at the core of the debates reminds us of what
> Woody Allen said back in one of his earlier, funnier films - that the whole
> thing is a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of
> two
> mockeries of a sham. And why are we so complacent about the hijacking of
> our
> political process - that it has descended to this level where the two
> parties and the media giants pick as the only surrogates of the American
> people the minions of an oligarchic media riddled with cronyism and
> conflicts of interest?
> So yes, scrap the debates as they are and rebuild. Even with a few days
> left
> until the first one there's time to call everyone together, announce that
> our democracy deserves better and change the rules.
> Why not put the League of Women Voters back in charge, with just the two
> candidates and a ruthless timekeeper on the stage insisting that they keep
> to stringent time limits and behave like human beings?
> John Donvan of ABC News, moderator of public broadcasting's excellent
> Intelligence Squared US debates, has been making the media rounds urging
> that the debate format be changed to Oxford rules - to formally argue
> resolutions like "Resolved: The United States Should Withdraw from NATO,"
> in
> which the candidates would make brief opening and closing statements and in
> the time remaining question one another about the issue at hand, under
> strict time guidelines At Change.org, 60,000 have signed a petition urging
> this be done. You have to wonder what would happen if those 60,000 and more
> turned up outside the first debate at Hofstra University on Sept. 26,
> exercising their constitutional right of assembly and demanding, not just
> urging, this better way.
> Or why not put the League of Women Voters back in charge, with just the two
> candidates and a ruthless timekeeper on the stage insisting that they keep
> to stringent time limits and behave like human beings? If they don't, on
> their heads be it. The timekeeper could even pull the plug early if things
> got out of hand.
> Which brings us to the #1 Question: How can anyone keep Trump in bounds? He
> makes up the rules as he goes along. He is a pathological liar and
> overweening narcissist who, as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo reminds
> us in a chilling take on the man, has more than once hinted at the murder
> of
> Hillary Clinton. Says the astute Marshall:
> "The salient fact about Trump isn't his cruelty or penchant for aggression
> and violence. It's his inability to control urges and drives most people
> gain control over very early in life. There are plenty of sadists and
> sociopaths in the world. They're not remarkable. The scariest have a high
> degree of impulse control (iciness) which allows them to inflict pain on
> others when no one is looking or when they will pay no price for doing so.
> What is true with Trump is what every critic has been saying for a year:
> the
> most obvious and contrived provocation can goad this thin-skinned charlatan
> into a wild outburst. He's a 70-year-old man with children and
> grandchildren
> and he has no self-control."
> Does anyone really believe a candidate so unstable can or will engage in
> serious debate? And if our first line of defense against his volcanic lies
> -
> journalists supposedly committed to truth - crumbles, how will we ever
> clean
> up the contamination?
> Something's got to give. We can't go on like this. We can no longer leave
> the electoral process to the two parties or the media conglomerates with
> whom they're in cahoots. The stakes are too high.
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
> License.
> Bill Moyers
>
>
> Skip to main content
> //
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>
> Monday, September 19, 2016
> . Home
> . World
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> . Bernie Sanders
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> . Donald Trump
> There's No Debate
> Published on
> Monday, September 19, 2016
> by
> BillMoyers.com
> There's No Debate
> The candidates and the media have thoroughly corrupted the presidential
> debates. Our democracy deserves better. There's still time for a change.
> by
> Bill Moyers, Michael Winship
> . 9 Comments
> .
> . Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump during primary debates. (Left:
> Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images; Right: Geoff Robins/AFP/Getty
> Images)
> . Let's call the whole thing off.
> . Not the election, although if we only had a magic reset button we
> could pretend this sorry spectacle never happened and start all over.
> . No, we mean the presidential debates - which, if the present format
> and moderators remain as they are, threaten an effect on democracy more
> like
> Leopold and Loeb than Lincoln and Douglas.
> . The official presidential debates coming up are dominated by the
> candidates and the media, and therein lurk both the problems and the
> reasons
> to scrap this fraudulent nonsense for something sane and serious.
> We had a humiliating sneak preview Sept. 7, when NBC's celebrity
> interviewer
> Matt Lauer hosted a one-hour "Commander-in-Chief Forum" in which Hillary
> Clinton and Donald Trump spoke with Lauer from the same stage but in
> separate interviews. The event was supposed to be about defense and
> veterans
> issues, yet to everyone's bewilderment (except the Trump camp, which must
> have been cheering out of camera range that Lauer was playing their song),
> Lauer seemed to think Clinton's emails were worthy of more questions than,
> say, nuclear war, global warming or the fate of Syrian refugees.
> Of course, that wasn't a debate per se but neither are the sideshows that
> we
> call the official debates, even though the rules put in place by the
> nonprofit Commission on Presidential Debates are meant to insure a certain
> amount of fairness and decorum - unlike the trainwreck of "debates" during
> the primary season, which were run solely by the parties and media sponsors
> with no adult supervision.
> But despite the efforts of the commission, the official presidential
> debates
> coming up also are dominated by the candidates and the media, and therein
> lurk both the problems and the reasons to scrap this fraudulent nonsense
> for
> something sane and serious.
> A little history: From 1976, when President Gerald Ford faced off against
> Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter, the three presidential debates and one vice
> presidential debate were administered by the League of Women Voters, which
> did an admirable job under trying circumstances. But then, as historian
> Jill
> Lepore writes in an excellent New Yorker article on the history of
> presidential debates, the Reagan White House wanted to wrest control from
> the League and give it to the networks. According to Lepore:
> "During Senate hearings, Dorothy Ridings, the president of the League of
> Women Voters, warned against that move: 'Broadcasters are profit-making
> corporations operating in an extremely competitive setting, in which
> ratings
> assume utmost importance.' They would make a travesty of the debates, she
> predicted, not least because they'd agree to whatever terms the campaigns
> demanded. Also: 'We firmly believe that those who report the news should
> not
> make the news.'"
> Ridings' prescience proved correct and then some. In 1988, the League
> pulled
> out of the Bush-Dukakis debates, declaring in a press release, "It has
> become clear to us that the candidates' organizations aim to add debates to
> their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and
> answers to tough questions. The League has no intention of becoming an
> accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public."
> The giant media conglomerates - NBCUniversal (Comcast), Disney, CBS Corp.,
> 21st Century Fox, Time Warner - have turned the campaign and the upcoming
> debates into profit centers that reap a huge return from political trivia
> and titillation.
> Walter Cronkite agreed. That same year, he wrote, "The debates are part of
> the unconscionable fraud that our political campaigns have become. Here is
> a
> means to present to the American people a rational exposition of the major
> issues that face the nation, and the alternate approaches to their
> solution.
> Yet the candidates participate only with the guarantee of a format that
> defies meaningful discourse. They should be charged with sabotaging the
> electoral process."
> But as Ridings said, it's not just the candidates involved in this criminal
> hijacking of discourse. The giant media conglomerates - NBCUniversal
> (Comcast), Disney, CBS Corp., 21st Century Fox, Time Warner - have turned
> the campaign and the upcoming debates into profit centers that reap a huge
> return from political trivia and titillation. A game show, if you will - a
> farcical theater of make-believe rigged by the two parties and the networks
> to maintain their cartel of money and power.
> "Debating," Jill Lepore writes, "like voting, is a way for people to
> disagree without hitting one another or going to war: it's the key to every
> institution that makes civic life possible, from courts to legislatures.
> Without debate, there can be no self-government." But the media monoliths
> have taken the democratic purpose of a televised debate - to inform the
> public on the issues and the candidates' positions on them - and reduced it
> to a mock duel between the journalists who serve as moderators - too often
> surrendering their allegedly inquiring minds - and candidates who know they
> can simply blow past the questions with lies that go unchallenged, evasions
> that fear no rebuke and demagoguery that fears no rebuttal.
> Remember that it was CBS CEO Leslie Moonves who whooped about the cash to
> be
> made from the campaign, telling an investors conference in February, "The
> money's rolling in and this is fun. I've never seen anything like this, and
> this going to be a very good year for us. Bring it on, Donald. Keep going.
> Donald's place in this election is a good thing." Oh, yes, good for
> Moonves'
> annual bonus, but good for democracy? Don't make us laugh. Elaine Quijano
> of
> CBS News will be moderating the vice presidential candidates' debate on
> Oct.
> 4, with Moonves looking over her shoulder.
> Remember, too, that both Lauer and Trump are NBCUniversal celebrities who
> have earned millions from and for the networks. (Vanity Fair magazine even
> reported that NBCUniversal boss Steve Burke had spoken hypothetically with
> Trump about continuing The Apprentice from the White House.) Moderating the
> first presidential debate on Sept. 26 is NBC anchorman Lester Holt, a nice
> and competent fellow, but facing the same pressure as his fellow teammate
> Matt Lauer to not offend their once-and-possibly-future NBC star Donald
> Trump.
> And remember that Anderson Cooper of Time-Warner's CNN, the
> all-Trump-all-the-time network, and Martha Raddatz of Disney's ABC News
> will
> anchor the second presidential debate (to her credit, Raddatz did a good
> job
> during the 2012 vice presidential debate) - and that the final, crucial
> close encounter between Trump and Clinton will be moderated by Chris
> Wallace
> of Fox, the very "news organization" that joined with Donald Trump to
> gleefully spread the Big Lie of Birtherism that served Trump so well with
> free publicity (and Fox so well with ratings) and that Trump now
> conveniently and hypocritically repents.
> We wait breathlessly to see if during that debate Wallace inquires of
> Trump:
> "Did you really believe that lying about Barack Obama's birth was good for
> the country?" And: "What is your source for saying Hillary Clinton started
> the rumor that Obama was not born in America?" And: "How do we know you
> won't change your mind again and raise further doubts about whether the
> president is an American?" And - to pick up on a suggestion from The
> Washington Post's David Fahrenthold, who has been reporting on Trump's
> charitable giving - or lack thereof: "Mr. Trump, will you now follow
> through
> on your promise to donate $5 million to charity once you were given proof
> that President Obama was born in the United States? What charity do you
> have
> in mind? One of your own, perhaps?"
> Wallace has already admitted he is in no position to hold Trump accountable
> for the lies he tells in the "debate" - that "it's not my job" to fact
> check
> either Trump or Clinton during the course of their appearance with him.
> That
> should be pleasing to Roger Ailes, who was fired as head of the Fox News
> empire for scandalous sexist behavior but who is now giving Trump debate
> tips. Wallace is on record saying how much he admired and loved Ailes, to
> whom he owes his stardom at Fox - "The best boss I've had in almost a half
> a
> century in journalism," Wallace said.
> Such conflicts of interest at the core of the debates reminds us of what
> Woody Allen said back in one of his earlier, funnier films - that the whole
> thing is a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of
> two
> mockeries of a sham. And why are we so complacent about the hijacking of
> our
> political process - that it has descended to this level where the two
> parties and the media giants pick as the only surrogates of the American
> people the minions of an oligarchic media riddled with cronyism and
> conflicts of interest?
> So yes, scrap the debates as they are and rebuild. Even with a few days
> left
> until the first one there's time to call everyone together, announce that
> our democracy deserves better and change the rules.
> Why not put the League of Women Voters back in charge, with just the two
> candidates and a ruthless timekeeper on the stage insisting that they keep
> to stringent time limits and behave like human beings?
> John Donvan of ABC News, moderator of public broadcasting's excellent
> Intelligence Squared US debates, has been making the media rounds urging
> that the debate format be changed to Oxford rules - to formally argue
> resolutions like "Resolved: The United States Should Withdraw from NATO,"
> in
> which the candidates would make brief opening and closing statements and in
> the time remaining question one another about the issue at hand, under
> strict time guidelines At Change.org, 60,000 have signed a petition urging
> this be done. You have to wonder what would happen if those 60,000 and more
> turned up outside the first debate at Hofstra University on Sept. 26,
> exercising their constitutional right of assembly and demanding, not just
> urging, this better way.
> Or why not put the League of Women Voters back in charge, with just the two
> candidates and a ruthless timekeeper on the stage insisting that they keep
> to stringent time limits and behave like human beings? If they don't, on
> their heads be it. The timekeeper could even pull the plug early if things
> got out of hand.
> Which brings us to the #1 Question: How can anyone keep Trump in bounds? He
> makes up the rules as he goes along. He is a pathological liar and
> overweening narcissist who, as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo reminds
> us in a chilling take on the man, has more than once hinted at the murder
> of
> Hillary Clinton. Says the astute Marshall:
> "The salient fact about Trump isn't his cruelty or penchant for aggression
> and violence. It's his inability to control urges and drives most people
> gain control over very early in life. There are plenty of sadists and
> sociopaths in the world. They're not remarkable. The scariest have a high
> degree of impulse control (iciness) which allows them to inflict pain on
> others when no one is looking or when they will pay no price for doing so.
> What is true with Trump is what every critic has been saying for a year:
> the
> most obvious and contrived provocation can goad this thin-skinned charlatan
> into a wild outburst. He's a 70-year-old man with children and
> grandchildren
> and he has no self-control."
> Does anyone really believe a candidate so unstable can or will engage in
> serious debate? And if our first line of defense against his volcanic lies
> -
> journalists supposedly committed to truth - crumbles, how will we ever
> clean
> up the contamination?
> Something's got to give. We can't go on like this. We can no longer leave
> the electoral process to the two parties or the media conglomerates with
> whom they're in cahoots. The stakes are too high.
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
> License.
> /author/bill-moyers
> http://www.commondreams.org/author/bill-moyers
>
>
>
debates. Our democracy deserves better." So says Bill Moyers. But
it's far more than the debates that should concern Americans. The
entire election process has been corrupted. As long as Americans
allow the Corporate Empire's Ruling Class to control elections through
their mass media, we can be assured that there will be no free
election.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/19/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> There's No Debate
> Published on
> Monday, September 19, 2016
> by
> BillMoyers.com
> There's No Debate
> The candidates and the media have thoroughly corrupted the presidential
> debates. Our democracy deserves better. There's still time for a change.
> by
> Bill Moyers, Michael Winship
>
> Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump during primary debates. (Left: Patrick T.
> Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images; Right: Geoff Robins/AFP/Getty Images)
> Let's call the whole thing off.
> Not the election, although if we only had a magic reset button we could
> pretend this sorry spectacle never happened and start all over.
> No, we mean the presidential debates - which, if the present format and
> moderators remain as they are, threaten an effect on democracy more like
> Leopold and Loeb than Lincoln and Douglas.
> The official presidential debates coming up are dominated by the candidates
> and the media, and therein lurk both the problems and the reasons to scrap
> this fraudulent nonsense for something sane and serious.
> We had a humiliating sneak preview Sept. 7, when NBC's celebrity
> interviewer
> Matt Lauer hosted a one-hour "Commander-in-Chief Forum" in which Hillary
> Clinton and Donald Trump spoke with Lauer from the same stage but in
> separate interviews. The event was supposed to be about defense and
> veterans
> issues, yet to everyone's bewilderment (except the Trump camp, which must
> have been cheering out of camera range that Lauer was playing their song),
> Lauer seemed to think Clinton's emails were worthy of more questions than,
> say, nuclear war, global warming or the fate of Syrian refugees.
> Of course, that wasn't a debate per se but neither are the sideshows that
> we
> call the official debates, even though the rules put in place by the
> nonprofit Commission on Presidential Debates are meant to insure a certain
> amount of fairness and decorum - unlike the trainwreck of "debates" during
> the primary season, which were run solely by the parties and media sponsors
> with no adult supervision.
> But despite the efforts of the commission, the official presidential
> debates
> coming up also are dominated by the candidates and the media, and therein
> lurk both the problems and the reasons to scrap this fraudulent nonsense
> for
> something sane and serious.
> A little history: From 1976, when President Gerald Ford faced off against
> Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter, the three presidential debates and one vice
> presidential debate were administered by the League of Women Voters, which
> did an admirable job under trying circumstances. But then, as historian
> Jill
> Lepore writes in an excellent New Yorker article on the history of
> presidential debates, the Reagan White House wanted to wrest control from
> the League and give it to the networks. According to Lepore:
> "During Senate hearings, Dorothy Ridings, the president of the League of
> Women Voters, warned against that move: 'Broadcasters are profit-making
> corporations operating in an extremely competitive setting, in which
> ratings
> assume utmost importance.' They would make a travesty of the debates, she
> predicted, not least because they'd agree to whatever terms the campaigns
> demanded. Also: 'We firmly believe that those who report the news should
> not
> make the news.'"
> Ridings' prescience proved correct and then some. In 1988, the League
> pulled
> out of the Bush-Dukakis debates, declaring in a press release, "It has
> become clear to us that the candidates' organizations aim to add debates to
> their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and
> answers to tough questions. The League has no intention of becoming an
> accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public."
> The giant media conglomerates - NBCUniversal (Comcast), Disney, CBS Corp.,
> 21st Century Fox, Time Warner - have turned the campaign and the upcoming
> debates into profit centers that reap a huge return from political trivia
> and titillation.
> Walter Cronkite agreed. That same year, he wrote, "The debates are part of
> the unconscionable fraud that our political campaigns have become. Here is
> a
> means to present to the American people a rational exposition of the major
> issues that face the nation, and the alternate approaches to their
> solution.
> Yet the candidates participate only with the guarantee of a format that
> defies meaningful discourse. They should be charged with sabotaging the
> electoral process."
> But as Ridings said, it's not just the candidates involved in this criminal
> hijacking of discourse. The giant media conglomerates - NBCUniversal
> (Comcast), Disney, CBS Corp., 21st Century Fox, Time Warner - have turned
> the campaign and the upcoming debates into profit centers that reap a huge
> return from political trivia and titillation. A game show, if you will - a
> farcical theater of make-believe rigged by the two parties and the networks
> to maintain their cartel of money and power.
> "Debating," Jill Lepore writes, "like voting, is a way for people to
> disagree without hitting one another or going to war: it's the key to every
> institution that makes civic life possible, from courts to legislatures.
> Without debate, there can be no self-government." But the media monoliths
> have taken the democratic purpose of a televised debate - to inform the
> public on the issues and the candidates' positions on them - and reduced it
> to a mock duel between the journalists who serve as moderators - too often
> surrendering their allegedly inquiring minds - and candidates who know they
> can simply blow past the questions with lies that go unchallenged, evasions
> that fear no rebuke and demagoguery that fears no rebuttal.
> Remember that it was CBS CEO Leslie Moonves who whooped about the cash to
> be
> made from the campaign, telling an investors conference in February, "The
> money's rolling in and this is fun. I've never seen anything like this, and
> this going to be a very good year for us. Bring it on, Donald. Keep going.
> Donald's place in this election is a good thing." Oh, yes, good for
> Moonves'
> annual bonus, but good for democracy? Don't make us laugh. Elaine Quijano
> of
> CBS News will be moderating the vice presidential candidates' debate on
> Oct.
> 4, with Moonves looking over her shoulder.
> Remember, too, that both Lauer and Trump are NBCUniversal celebrities who
> have earned millions from and for the networks. (Vanity Fair magazine even
> reported that NBCUniversal boss Steve Burke had spoken hypothetically with
> Trump about continuing The Apprentice from the White House.) Moderating the
> first presidential debate on Sept. 26 is NBC anchorman Lester Holt, a nice
> and competent fellow, but facing the same pressure as his fellow teammate
> Matt Lauer to not offend their once-and-possibly-future NBC star Donald
> Trump.
> And remember that Anderson Cooper of Time-Warner's CNN, the
> all-Trump-all-the-time network, and Martha Raddatz of Disney's ABC News
> will
> anchor the second presidential debate (to her credit, Raddatz did a good
> job
> during the 2012 vice presidential debate) - and that the final, crucial
> close encounter between Trump and Clinton will be moderated by Chris
> Wallace
> of Fox, the very "news organization" that joined with Donald Trump to
> gleefully spread the Big Lie of Birtherism that served Trump so well with
> free publicity (and Fox so well with ratings) and that Trump now
> conveniently and hypocritically repents.
> We wait breathlessly to see if during that debate Wallace inquires of
> Trump:
> "Did you really believe that lying about Barack Obama's birth was good for
> the country?" And: "What is your source for saying Hillary Clinton started
> the rumor that Obama was not born in America?" And: "How do we know you
> won't change your mind again and raise further doubts about whether the
> president is an American?" And - to pick up on a suggestion from The
> Washington Post's David Fahrenthold, who has been reporting on Trump's
> charitable giving - or lack thereof: "Mr. Trump, will you now follow
> through
> on your promise to donate $5 million to charity once you were given proof
> that President Obama was born in the United States? What charity do you
> have
> in mind? One of your own, perhaps?"
> Wallace has already admitted he is in no position to hold Trump accountable
> for the lies he tells in the "debate" - that "it's not my job" to fact
> check
> either Trump or Clinton during the course of their appearance with him.
> That
> should be pleasing to Roger Ailes, who was fired as head of the Fox News
> empire for scandalous sexist behavior but who is now giving Trump debate
> tips. Wallace is on record saying how much he admired and loved Ailes, to
> whom he owes his stardom at Fox - "The best boss I've had in almost a half
> a
> century in journalism," Wallace said.
> Such conflicts of interest at the core of the debates reminds us of what
> Woody Allen said back in one of his earlier, funnier films - that the whole
> thing is a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of
> two
> mockeries of a sham. And why are we so complacent about the hijacking of
> our
> political process - that it has descended to this level where the two
> parties and the media giants pick as the only surrogates of the American
> people the minions of an oligarchic media riddled with cronyism and
> conflicts of interest?
> So yes, scrap the debates as they are and rebuild. Even with a few days
> left
> until the first one there's time to call everyone together, announce that
> our democracy deserves better and change the rules.
> Why not put the League of Women Voters back in charge, with just the two
> candidates and a ruthless timekeeper on the stage insisting that they keep
> to stringent time limits and behave like human beings?
> John Donvan of ABC News, moderator of public broadcasting's excellent
> Intelligence Squared US debates, has been making the media rounds urging
> that the debate format be changed to Oxford rules - to formally argue
> resolutions like "Resolved: The United States Should Withdraw from NATO,"
> in
> which the candidates would make brief opening and closing statements and in
> the time remaining question one another about the issue at hand, under
> strict time guidelines At Change.org, 60,000 have signed a petition urging
> this be done. You have to wonder what would happen if those 60,000 and more
> turned up outside the first debate at Hofstra University on Sept. 26,
> exercising their constitutional right of assembly and demanding, not just
> urging, this better way.
> Or why not put the League of Women Voters back in charge, with just the two
> candidates and a ruthless timekeeper on the stage insisting that they keep
> to stringent time limits and behave like human beings? If they don't, on
> their heads be it. The timekeeper could even pull the plug early if things
> got out of hand.
> Which brings us to the #1 Question: How can anyone keep Trump in bounds? He
> makes up the rules as he goes along. He is a pathological liar and
> overweening narcissist who, as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo reminds
> us in a chilling take on the man, has more than once hinted at the murder
> of
> Hillary Clinton. Says the astute Marshall:
> "The salient fact about Trump isn't his cruelty or penchant for aggression
> and violence. It's his inability to control urges and drives most people
> gain control over very early in life. There are plenty of sadists and
> sociopaths in the world. They're not remarkable. The scariest have a high
> degree of impulse control (iciness) which allows them to inflict pain on
> others when no one is looking or when they will pay no price for doing so.
> What is true with Trump is what every critic has been saying for a year:
> the
> most obvious and contrived provocation can goad this thin-skinned charlatan
> into a wild outburst. He's a 70-year-old man with children and
> grandchildren
> and he has no self-control."
> Does anyone really believe a candidate so unstable can or will engage in
> serious debate? And if our first line of defense against his volcanic lies
> -
> journalists supposedly committed to truth - crumbles, how will we ever
> clean
> up the contamination?
> Something's got to give. We can't go on like this. We can no longer leave
> the electoral process to the two parties or the media conglomerates with
> whom they're in cahoots. The stakes are too high.
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
> License.
> Bill Moyers
>
>
> Skip to main content
> //
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>
> Monday, September 19, 2016
> . Home
> . World
> . U.S.
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> . Bernie Sanders
> . Hillary Clinton
> . Jill Stein
> . Donald Trump
> There's No Debate
> Published on
> Monday, September 19, 2016
> by
> BillMoyers.com
> There's No Debate
> The candidates and the media have thoroughly corrupted the presidential
> debates. Our democracy deserves better. There's still time for a change.
> by
> Bill Moyers, Michael Winship
> . 9 Comments
> .
> . Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump during primary debates. (Left:
> Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images; Right: Geoff Robins/AFP/Getty
> Images)
> . Let's call the whole thing off.
> . Not the election, although if we only had a magic reset button we
> could pretend this sorry spectacle never happened and start all over.
> . No, we mean the presidential debates - which, if the present format
> and moderators remain as they are, threaten an effect on democracy more
> like
> Leopold and Loeb than Lincoln and Douglas.
> . The official presidential debates coming up are dominated by the
> candidates and the media, and therein lurk both the problems and the
> reasons
> to scrap this fraudulent nonsense for something sane and serious.
> We had a humiliating sneak preview Sept. 7, when NBC's celebrity
> interviewer
> Matt Lauer hosted a one-hour "Commander-in-Chief Forum" in which Hillary
> Clinton and Donald Trump spoke with Lauer from the same stage but in
> separate interviews. The event was supposed to be about defense and
> veterans
> issues, yet to everyone's bewilderment (except the Trump camp, which must
> have been cheering out of camera range that Lauer was playing their song),
> Lauer seemed to think Clinton's emails were worthy of more questions than,
> say, nuclear war, global warming or the fate of Syrian refugees.
> Of course, that wasn't a debate per se but neither are the sideshows that
> we
> call the official debates, even though the rules put in place by the
> nonprofit Commission on Presidential Debates are meant to insure a certain
> amount of fairness and decorum - unlike the trainwreck of "debates" during
> the primary season, which were run solely by the parties and media sponsors
> with no adult supervision.
> But despite the efforts of the commission, the official presidential
> debates
> coming up also are dominated by the candidates and the media, and therein
> lurk both the problems and the reasons to scrap this fraudulent nonsense
> for
> something sane and serious.
> A little history: From 1976, when President Gerald Ford faced off against
> Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter, the three presidential debates and one vice
> presidential debate were administered by the League of Women Voters, which
> did an admirable job under trying circumstances. But then, as historian
> Jill
> Lepore writes in an excellent New Yorker article on the history of
> presidential debates, the Reagan White House wanted to wrest control from
> the League and give it to the networks. According to Lepore:
> "During Senate hearings, Dorothy Ridings, the president of the League of
> Women Voters, warned against that move: 'Broadcasters are profit-making
> corporations operating in an extremely competitive setting, in which
> ratings
> assume utmost importance.' They would make a travesty of the debates, she
> predicted, not least because they'd agree to whatever terms the campaigns
> demanded. Also: 'We firmly believe that those who report the news should
> not
> make the news.'"
> Ridings' prescience proved correct and then some. In 1988, the League
> pulled
> out of the Bush-Dukakis debates, declaring in a press release, "It has
> become clear to us that the candidates' organizations aim to add debates to
> their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and
> answers to tough questions. The League has no intention of becoming an
> accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public."
> The giant media conglomerates - NBCUniversal (Comcast), Disney, CBS Corp.,
> 21st Century Fox, Time Warner - have turned the campaign and the upcoming
> debates into profit centers that reap a huge return from political trivia
> and titillation.
> Walter Cronkite agreed. That same year, he wrote, "The debates are part of
> the unconscionable fraud that our political campaigns have become. Here is
> a
> means to present to the American people a rational exposition of the major
> issues that face the nation, and the alternate approaches to their
> solution.
> Yet the candidates participate only with the guarantee of a format that
> defies meaningful discourse. They should be charged with sabotaging the
> electoral process."
> But as Ridings said, it's not just the candidates involved in this criminal
> hijacking of discourse. The giant media conglomerates - NBCUniversal
> (Comcast), Disney, CBS Corp., 21st Century Fox, Time Warner - have turned
> the campaign and the upcoming debates into profit centers that reap a huge
> return from political trivia and titillation. A game show, if you will - a
> farcical theater of make-believe rigged by the two parties and the networks
> to maintain their cartel of money and power.
> "Debating," Jill Lepore writes, "like voting, is a way for people to
> disagree without hitting one another or going to war: it's the key to every
> institution that makes civic life possible, from courts to legislatures.
> Without debate, there can be no self-government." But the media monoliths
> have taken the democratic purpose of a televised debate - to inform the
> public on the issues and the candidates' positions on them - and reduced it
> to a mock duel between the journalists who serve as moderators - too often
> surrendering their allegedly inquiring minds - and candidates who know they
> can simply blow past the questions with lies that go unchallenged, evasions
> that fear no rebuke and demagoguery that fears no rebuttal.
> Remember that it was CBS CEO Leslie Moonves who whooped about the cash to
> be
> made from the campaign, telling an investors conference in February, "The
> money's rolling in and this is fun. I've never seen anything like this, and
> this going to be a very good year for us. Bring it on, Donald. Keep going.
> Donald's place in this election is a good thing." Oh, yes, good for
> Moonves'
> annual bonus, but good for democracy? Don't make us laugh. Elaine Quijano
> of
> CBS News will be moderating the vice presidential candidates' debate on
> Oct.
> 4, with Moonves looking over her shoulder.
> Remember, too, that both Lauer and Trump are NBCUniversal celebrities who
> have earned millions from and for the networks. (Vanity Fair magazine even
> reported that NBCUniversal boss Steve Burke had spoken hypothetically with
> Trump about continuing The Apprentice from the White House.) Moderating the
> first presidential debate on Sept. 26 is NBC anchorman Lester Holt, a nice
> and competent fellow, but facing the same pressure as his fellow teammate
> Matt Lauer to not offend their once-and-possibly-future NBC star Donald
> Trump.
> And remember that Anderson Cooper of Time-Warner's CNN, the
> all-Trump-all-the-time network, and Martha Raddatz of Disney's ABC News
> will
> anchor the second presidential debate (to her credit, Raddatz did a good
> job
> during the 2012 vice presidential debate) - and that the final, crucial
> close encounter between Trump and Clinton will be moderated by Chris
> Wallace
> of Fox, the very "news organization" that joined with Donald Trump to
> gleefully spread the Big Lie of Birtherism that served Trump so well with
> free publicity (and Fox so well with ratings) and that Trump now
> conveniently and hypocritically repents.
> We wait breathlessly to see if during that debate Wallace inquires of
> Trump:
> "Did you really believe that lying about Barack Obama's birth was good for
> the country?" And: "What is your source for saying Hillary Clinton started
> the rumor that Obama was not born in America?" And: "How do we know you
> won't change your mind again and raise further doubts about whether the
> president is an American?" And - to pick up on a suggestion from The
> Washington Post's David Fahrenthold, who has been reporting on Trump's
> charitable giving - or lack thereof: "Mr. Trump, will you now follow
> through
> on your promise to donate $5 million to charity once you were given proof
> that President Obama was born in the United States? What charity do you
> have
> in mind? One of your own, perhaps?"
> Wallace has already admitted he is in no position to hold Trump accountable
> for the lies he tells in the "debate" - that "it's not my job" to fact
> check
> either Trump or Clinton during the course of their appearance with him.
> That
> should be pleasing to Roger Ailes, who was fired as head of the Fox News
> empire for scandalous sexist behavior but who is now giving Trump debate
> tips. Wallace is on record saying how much he admired and loved Ailes, to
> whom he owes his stardom at Fox - "The best boss I've had in almost a half
> a
> century in journalism," Wallace said.
> Such conflicts of interest at the core of the debates reminds us of what
> Woody Allen said back in one of his earlier, funnier films - that the whole
> thing is a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of
> two
> mockeries of a sham. And why are we so complacent about the hijacking of
> our
> political process - that it has descended to this level where the two
> parties and the media giants pick as the only surrogates of the American
> people the minions of an oligarchic media riddled with cronyism and
> conflicts of interest?
> So yes, scrap the debates as they are and rebuild. Even with a few days
> left
> until the first one there's time to call everyone together, announce that
> our democracy deserves better and change the rules.
> Why not put the League of Women Voters back in charge, with just the two
> candidates and a ruthless timekeeper on the stage insisting that they keep
> to stringent time limits and behave like human beings?
> John Donvan of ABC News, moderator of public broadcasting's excellent
> Intelligence Squared US debates, has been making the media rounds urging
> that the debate format be changed to Oxford rules - to formally argue
> resolutions like "Resolved: The United States Should Withdraw from NATO,"
> in
> which the candidates would make brief opening and closing statements and in
> the time remaining question one another about the issue at hand, under
> strict time guidelines At Change.org, 60,000 have signed a petition urging
> this be done. You have to wonder what would happen if those 60,000 and more
> turned up outside the first debate at Hofstra University on Sept. 26,
> exercising their constitutional right of assembly and demanding, not just
> urging, this better way.
> Or why not put the League of Women Voters back in charge, with just the two
> candidates and a ruthless timekeeper on the stage insisting that they keep
> to stringent time limits and behave like human beings? If they don't, on
> their heads be it. The timekeeper could even pull the plug early if things
> got out of hand.
> Which brings us to the #1 Question: How can anyone keep Trump in bounds? He
> makes up the rules as he goes along. He is a pathological liar and
> overweening narcissist who, as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo reminds
> us in a chilling take on the man, has more than once hinted at the murder
> of
> Hillary Clinton. Says the astute Marshall:
> "The salient fact about Trump isn't his cruelty or penchant for aggression
> and violence. It's his inability to control urges and drives most people
> gain control over very early in life. There are plenty of sadists and
> sociopaths in the world. They're not remarkable. The scariest have a high
> degree of impulse control (iciness) which allows them to inflict pain on
> others when no one is looking or when they will pay no price for doing so.
> What is true with Trump is what every critic has been saying for a year:
> the
> most obvious and contrived provocation can goad this thin-skinned charlatan
> into a wild outburst. He's a 70-year-old man with children and
> grandchildren
> and he has no self-control."
> Does anyone really believe a candidate so unstable can or will engage in
> serious debate? And if our first line of defense against his volcanic lies
> -
> journalists supposedly committed to truth - crumbles, how will we ever
> clean
> up the contamination?
> Something's got to give. We can't go on like this. We can no longer leave
> the electoral process to the two parties or the media conglomerates with
> whom they're in cahoots. The stakes are too high.
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
> License.
> /author/bill-moyers
> http://www.commondreams.org/author/bill-moyers
>
>
>
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