PAUL RYAN'S BUDGET CUTS?
CAN WE STOP PRETENDING?
THIS IS WHERE YOUR TAX DOLLARS ARE GOING: TO BUILD US EMPIRE!
The US can't re-build crumbling roads and bridges, can't feed hungry children, can't house the homeless, yet this defines the Moral Bankruptcy of the US:
Anatomy of the U.S. Empire
And where is this empire?
Each working day, 71,000 people across 191 countries representing twenty-seven different US government agencies wake and make their way past flags, steel fences and armed guards into one of the 276 fortified buildings that comprise the 169 embassies and other missions of the US Department of State.
They are joined in their march by representatives and operatives from twenty-seven other US government departments and agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the various branches of the US military.
http://middlebororeview.blogspot.com/2015/08/us-empire-your-tax-dollars-and-why.html
Robert Reich | Seven of Paul Ryan's Worst Ideas
Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page
Reich writes: "Now that Paul Ryan is Speaker of the House, keep a wary eye out for Ryan's 7 favorite ideas (they're also cropping up among Republican presidential candidates)."
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ow that Paul Ryan is Speaker of the House, keep a wary eye out for Ryan’s 7 favorite ideas (they’re also cropping up among Republican presidential candidates):
- Reduce the top income-tax rate to 25 percent from 35 percent (a huge windfall to the rich at a time when the rich take home a larger share of total income that at any time since the 1920s).
- Cut corporate taxes to 25 percent from 35 percent (a giant sop to corporations, the largest of which are already socking away $1.2 trillion in foreign tax shelters).
- Make these cuts without adding the budget deficit by slashing spending on domestic programs like food stamps and education for poor districts (now, 18% of the nation's children are in poverty, and these cuts would only make things worse).
- Also by turning Medicaid and other federal programs for the poor into block grants to the states, and let the states decide how to allocate them (in other words, give Republican state legislatures and governors slush funds to do with as they wish).
- And turning Medicare into vouchers that don’t keep up with increases in healthcare costs (which would in effect cut Medicare for the elderly).
- Deal with rising Social Security costs by raising the retirement age for Social Security (making Social Security even more regressive, since the poor don't live nearly as long as the rich).
- Finally, don’t raise the minimum wage but let it continue to decline as inflation makes it irrelevant; instead, provide poor workers with a larger Earned Income Tax Credit (enlarging the EITC is a good idea, but we need a higher minimum as well).
Bottom line: Beware Paul Ryan.
What do you think?
FBI Planes Conducted Extensive Electronic Surveillance Over Baltimore's Freddie Gray Protests
Sean Gallagher, Ars Technica
Gallagher writes: "The American Civil Liberties Union has obtained documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigations that detail the surveillance flights made by FBI-operated aircraft over Baltimore last May."
Jeb Bush's Stunning, Televised Implosion: How the Former Frontrunner's Campaign Came Unraveled
Heather Digby Parton, Salon
Parton writes: "He needed a moment to assuage donor fears and it backfired. As much as people may say the Bush name is a hindrance, the reality is that his last name is the only thing keeping him in the conversation right now."
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Hillary Clinton Protested by Black Lives Matter
Dan Merica, CNN
Merica writes: "Black Lives Matter protesters interrupted Hillary Clinton on Friday while she was speaking at a historically black university here."
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As Heroin Use by Whites Soars, Parents Urge Gentler Drug War
Katharine Q. Seelye, The New York Times
Seelye writes: "When Courtney Griffin was using heroin, she lied, disappeared, and stole from her parents to support her $400-a-day habit. Her family paid her debts, never filed a police report and kept her addiction secret - until she was found dead last year of an overdose."
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Israeli Soldiers to Palestinians: 'We Will Gas You Until You Die'
Megan Hanna, Ma'an News
Hanna writes: "Israeli military forces issued a disturbing message to residents of Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem on Thursday, telling them that unless they stopped throwing stones 'we will gas you until you die.'"
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Whistle-Blower Claims the USDA Suppressed Research on Bee-Killing Pesticide
Jason Best, TakePart
Best writes: "After a government scientist began raising serious questions about the environmental impact of a popular pesticide that experts widely believe is helping to drive the drastic decline in America's bee populations, he claims he got stung - and stung bad."
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fter a government scientist began raising serious questions about the environmental impact of a popular pesticide that experts widely believe is helping to drive the drastic decline in America’s bee populations, he claims he got stung—and stung bad.
Jonathan Lundgren, an 11-year entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, filed an official whistle-blower complaint this week, alleging he was harassed and retaliated against after speaking out in the media last year on research he conducted that points to the potentially insidious effects of a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, or neonics.
Since neonics began to be widely marketed in the mid-1990s, their use has exploded. Whereas but a scant amount was used by farmers in 1995, today an estimated 6 million pounds of the pesticides are applied to fields every year—and that doesn’t take into account the staggering amount of seeds planted that are pre-treated with the stuff. According to a
report from the Center for Food Safety, “almost all of the corn seed and approximately half of the soybeans in the U.S. are treated with neonicotinoids,” and upwards of 90 percent of canola planted in North America is as well.
Coincidentally, as the use of neonics has gone up, the populations of key pollinators such as bees and monarch butterflies have plummeted. Although neonics can kill bees outright, many scientists believe that it’s chronic exposure to the chemicals that imperils bees—by weakening their immune system, for example, or causing them to become disoriented and unable to find their way back to their hives.
But with an estimated $3 billion or more in neonic sales at stake on the global market, big agrichemical companies like Bayer and Syngenta have adamantly denied any link between their pesticides and the devastating declines of bees and other pollinators.
That may very well be what landed Lundgren in hot water.
The senior research scientist made headlines by discussing his work regarding neonics, including two studies that concluded that using neonic-treated seed did not lead to higher crop yields for farmers. After that, Lundgren claims, “USDA managers blocked publication of his research, barred him from talking to the media, and disrupted operations at the laboratory he oversaw,” according to
Harvest Public Media, which reviewed the complaint Lundgren’s attorneys filed with the federal Merit Systems Protection Board this week.
“Having research published in prestigious journals and being invited to present before the National Academy of Sciences should be sources of official pride, not punishment,” one of those attorneys, Laura Dumais, staff counsel at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, told
The Washington Post. “Politics inside USDA have made entomology into a most dangerous discipline.”
For its part, the USDA has declined to discuss Lundgren’s case, but the department issued a statement that read, in part, “We take the integrity of our scientists seriously, and we recognize how critical that is to maintaining widespread confidence in our research among the scientific community, policymakers and the general public.”
Yet word among the scientific community seems to be the USDA isn’t doing such a bang-up job fostering a sense of scientific “integrity.” As the
Post reported, a study by Scott W. Fausti from South Dakota State University on the unexpected environmental and economic consequences of the widespread adoption of genetically modified corn in the U.S., published in the most recent issue of
Environmental Science & Policy, carried this telling footnote from the author: “I would like to acknowledge Dr. Jonathan G. Lundgren's contribution to this manuscript. Dr. Lundgren is an entomologist employed by the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS). However, the ARS has required Dr. Lundgren to remove his name as joint first author from this article. I believe this action raises a serious question concerning policy neutrality toward scientific inquiry.”
