Tag Archives: revolution

Donald Trump Can’t Fix Offshoring, But He’s Got Bigger Problems Anyway

by WoodrowMcCart Posted on December 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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Steven Pearlstein suggests that Donald Trump’s deal with Carrier is part of a larger strategy aimed at changing norms of behavior:

There was a time in America when there was an unwritten pact in the business world — workers were loyal to their companies and successful companies returned that loyalty….Then came the 1980s, and all that began to change as American industry began to falter because of foreign competition….So the social norm changed….Although the public never much liked the idea of closing plants and shipping jobs overseas, it no longer was socially unacceptable.

Now comes Donald Trump — in the public mind, a successful businessman — who as the new president, suddenly declares that the new norm is not longer acceptable, and he intends to do whatever he can to shame and punish companies that abandon their workers….He knows that he and his new commerce secretary will have to engage in a few more bouts of well-publicized arm twisting before the message finally sinks in in the C-Suite. He may even have to make an example of a runaway company by sending in the tax auditors or the OSHA inspectors or cancelling a big government contract. It won’t matter that, two years later, these highly publicized retaliations are thrown out by a federal judge somewhere. Most companies won’t want to risk such threats to their “brands.” They will find a way to conform to the new norm, somewhat comforted by the fact that their American competitors have been forced to do the same.

I mostly disagree with this. I think the “norm” Pearlstein is talking about here is actually just ordinary economic reality. During the postwar economic boom, American companies didn’t need to offshore jobs, so they didn’t. Nor did they need to lay off workers or downsize their companies frequently. America was the most efficient manufacturer around, and there was plenty of money sloshing around for everybody. So why invite trouble?

When the postwar boom came to an end, businesses changed. We learned that what we thought had been a permanent new norm, was no such thing. It was just a temporary, three-decade blip. Starting in the 80s, as economic growth leveled off, the business community returned to operating the same way businesses had operated ever since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

I suspect Pearlstein is right about what Trump is trying to do. He’ll engage in some naming and shaming, and on a few occasions he’ll try to set an example by going after companies in semi-legal or outright illegal ways. It might even work a little bit, and it will almost certainly work in a PR sense. But more generally, Trump can’t keep the tide from coming in any more than any other president. It’s not as if the offshoring phenomenon is peculiar to America, after all.

The good news, such as it is, revolves around automation. Within a decade or so, most manufacturing work will be so highly automated that it won’t matter much where it’s made. We’re already starting to see signs of this. That will put an end to large-scale offshoring, but unfortunately, it will be even worse for blue-collar workers. We’re on the cusp of an era when tens of millions of workers will be put out of jobs by automation, and we’d better figure out what we’re going to do about that. But one thing is certain: whatever the answer is, it’s not naming and shaming.

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Donald Trump Can’t Fix Offshoring, But He’s Got Bigger Problems Anyway

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High-Profile Right Wingers Declare "War" in Wake of Dallas Police Shootings

by ChantePuig9156 Posted on July 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Thursday night, at least one sniper in Dallas opened fire near a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest, killing five police officers and injuring seven others. The shooting marks the deadliest attack on law enforcement in the United States since 9/11. While there has been an outpouring of grief and anger on social media, some high-profile individuals—including a former congressman and a veteran policy adviser to Republican leaders—stirred threats of violence and impending “war” against the Black Lives Matter movement.

From former Illinois Rep. Joe Walsh, in a post that has since been deleted:

Twitter

More from Walsh:

From Alex Jones, conspiracy theorist and radio show host:

From Frank Gaffney, president of the right-leaning Center for Security Policy and former foreign policy adviser to Ted Cruz:

The New York Post‘s front page declared “Civil War”—which quickly drew a fierce backlash.

On his radio show today, right-wing host Rush Limbaugh called Black Lives Matter “a terrorist group committing hate crimes”:

The full transcript of Limbaugh’s remarks: “I found a story from March, I think, of 2015, in which President Obama welcomed two founders of Black Lives Matter to the White House and commemorated them and their efforts and praised them as being better organizers than he is. And… Black Lives Matter was just exactly who they are then as who they are today. They’re a terrorist group. They’re quickly becoming a terrorist group committing hate crimes.”

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High-Profile Right Wingers Declare "War" in Wake of Dallas Police Shootings

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8 ways humans were recording the climate before it was hot

by ClevelaWaggoner Posted on April 28, 2016

8 ways humans were recording the climate before it was hot

By on Apr 27, 2016Share

We like to think of climate science as extremely high-tech — satellites! recording conditions on Earth in extreme detail! from SPACE!!! But in fact, observing the climate is sometimes as easy as paying attention to what’s going on outside.

And what do you know — people around the world have been doing just that for centuries, by writing down what they see happening in the natural world, from floods to flower blooms to the migration patterns of animals.

1. Ice records in Japan

Way back in 1443, Japanese monks had the foresight to track when freezing temperatures caused an ice ridge to form in the Japanese Alps’ Lake Suwa each winter. A new study of those 700-year-old ice records shows that the lake’s cycle of freezing and thawing started going haywire as the Industrial Revolution set in, and — no surprise here — the lake is freezing a lot less often nowadays.

2. Ice breakup in Finland

A Finnish merchant began documenting the yearly breakup of ice on the Torne River in the spring of 1693, and we’ve more or less maintained that record to date. The same study compared this data to distant Lake Suwa to get a clearer picture of global ice patterns.

3. Floodstones in the U.K.

The U.K. Coastal Floodstone Project is hunting down ancient floodstones (plaques that record historic heights of high tides and flooding) to help predict how climate change will affect coastal flooding.

4. Animal migration patterns in California

Naturalist Joseph Grinnell took meticulous surveys of California mammal species in the early 1900s, National Geographic points out. Looking at these compared to modern surveys, it’s clear that wildlife species are relocating northward and uphill from their original territories — likely in response to warming temperatures.

5. Blooming flowers in Massachusetts

Scientists used Henry David Thoreau’s botanical notes from Walden Pond to show that flowers are blooming earlier than they did in Thoreau’s day.

6. Plains Indians winter counts

Great Plains Indian groups, such as the Lakotas, have kept calendar records called “winter counts” as early as the 17th century. These records document natural events like extreme climate conditions, in addition to depictions of conflicts and famines.

7. Whaling records in the Arctic

Years of maritime boredom have yielded detailed records of barometric pressure, temperature, and ice location in the logbooks from 19th century whaling ships. The Old Weather project enlisted volunteers to comb through these logs, helping put together a clearer picture of how the Arctic has changed since the 1800s.

8. Old weather reports

Boring old weather reports hiding in musty newspaper archives around the world have a use after all — they’re helping scientists create more reliable climate models.

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8 ways humans were recording the climate before it was hot

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This New Film Will Change the Way You Think About the Black Panthers

by ShanaLushwrjug Posted on February 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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Stanley Nelson had just returned from a screening of his new documentary “Black Panthers: Vanguard of a Revolution” at the Apollo Theatre, when he saw her—Beyoncé—backed by dancers adorned in jet black outfits, berets and blown out hair, dancing with authority before thousands of raucous fans at the centerpiece of mainstream American culture, the Super Bowl. “I was shocked and amazed by it,” Nelson recalled later. “But also, it was beautiful.”

The award-winning filmmaker had been swept up in a Black Panther moment. And in a way, so is the rest of the country. Much like during the late 1960s, protests over police brutality in the past year has given rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. The film serves as a reminder that the issues the Black Panthers combated—poverty, economic disparity, tensions between law enforcement and the black community—remain relevant today.

The film, told mainly through the voices of the Panthers’ rank and file, captures the group’s rise and long, steady fall as a cultural and political force, from its infamous gun-touting demonstration at the California statehouse to then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s efforts to disrupt and destroy the Panthers’ national influence. Nelson’s doc also gets at the internal struggles as women rising through the Panther ranks pushed for gender equality.

The film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last year, has largely been praised, although some insiders have taken issue with Nelson’s portrayal. Former Panther leader Elaine Brown dismissed the film as a “two-dimensional palliative for white people and Negroes who are comfortable in America’s oppressive status quo.” Nelson chose not to respond directly, saying simply, “I don’t think there’s anything about the Panthers that anybody can agree on. But I think in some ways, this film comes really close.”

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This New Film Will Change the Way You Think About the Black Panthers

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WTF Happened to Golden Rice?

by MikaylaU07 Posted on February 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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Like the hover boards of the Back to the Future franchise, golden rice is an old idea that looms just beyond the grasp of reality.

5 Surprising GM Foods

“This Rice Could Save a Million Kids a Year,” announced a Time Magazine cover back in 2000. Orange in color, the rice is genetically modified to contain a jolt of beta-carotene, the stuff that gives carrots their hue and that our bodies transform into vitamin A. Diets deficient in that key micronutrient are the leading cause of blindness of children in the global south, where rice tends to be a staple grain. A decade and a half since the Time article, golden rice has yet to be planted commercially—but it continues generating bumper crops of hype. “Is Golden Rice the Future of Food?” the great hipster-foodie journal Lucky Peach wondered last fall, adding that “it might save millions from malnutrition.”

If golden rice is such a panacea, why does it flourish only in headlines, far from the farm fields where it’s intended to grow? The short answer is that the plant breeders have yet to concoct varieties of it that work as well in the field as existing rice strains. This is made all the more challenging in the face of debates over genetically modified crops and eternal disputes about how they should be regulated.

After seed developers first create a genetically modified strain with the desired trait—in this case, rice with beta carotene—they then start crossing it into varieties that have been shown to perform well in the field. The task is tricky: When you tweak one thing in a genome, such as giving rice the ability to generate beta-carotene, you risk changing other things, like its speed of growth. The University of Washington anthropologist and long-time golden rice observer Glenn Stone describes this process as “bringing a superfood down to earth,” and it gets little attention in most media accounts.

The most serious effort to commercialize golden rice is centered at the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the globe’s most prestigious incubator of high-yielding rice varieties. Launched with grants from the Rockefeller and Ford foundations in 1960, IRRI spearheaded the Asian part of what became known as the Green Revolution—the effort to bring US-style industrial agriculture to the developing world. (My review of Nick Cullather’s excellent Green Revolution history The Hungry World is here.)

Today, IRRI coordinates the Golden Rice Network and has been working to develop a viable strain since 2006. And so far, it’s having trouble. On its website, IRRI reports that in the field latest trials, golden rice varieties “showed that beta carotene was produced at consistently high levels in the grain, and that grain quality was comparable to the conventional variety.” However, the website continues, “yields of candidate lines were not consistent across locations and seasons.” Translation: The golden rice varieties exhibited what’s known in agronomy circles as a “yield drag”—they didn’t produce as much rice as the non-GM varieties they’d need to compete with in farm fields. So the IRRI researchers are going back to the drawing board.

Via email, I asked IRRI how that effort is going. “So far, both agronomic and laboratory data look very promising,” a spokeswoman replied. But she declined to give a time frame for when IRRI thinks it will have a variety that’s ready for prime time. Washington University’s Stone says he visited IRRI’s campus in the Philippines in the summer of 2015 and heard from researchers that such a breakthrough is “at least several more years” off. The IRRI spokeswoman also declined to comment on Stone’s time-frame report.

That’s not a very inspiring assessment, given that researchers first successfully inserted the beta-carotene trait in the rice genome in 2000, and that the technology has been lavished with research support ever since—including from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative), USAID, the Syngenta Foundation, and others, according to the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board.

Of course, among people who think biotechnology has a crucial role to play in solving developing-world malnutrition, IRRI’s agronomic struggles are compounded by anti-GMO zealotry as well as what it sees as over-regulation of GMOs in the global south. David Zilberman, an agricultural economist at the University of California at Berkeley, points out that most developing-world nations, including the Philippines, have adopted the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, which stipulates a precautionary approach to introducing new GMO products, including restrictions on how trials are conducted. The Cartagena regime stands in sharp contrast to the much more laissez-faire one that holds sway in the United States, Zilberman says.

If the developing world embraced US-style regulation and treated vitamin A deficiency as a medical emergency solvable by golden rice, “it would have become available in 2000” Zilberman says. Based on that premise, he and German agricultural economist Justus Wesseler co-authored a 2014 paper claiming that golden rice has “been available since early 2000” and opposition to it has resulted in “about 1.4 million life years lost over the past decade in India” alone. Such claims abound in pro-GM circles. At a speech at the University of Texas last year, the Nobel laureate British biochemist Sir Richard Roberts accused gold rice opponents of have having committed a “crime against humanity.”

To be sure, opposition to golden rice has occasionally gone overboard. In 2013, activists destroyed one of of IRRI’s golden rice field trials in the Philippines, for example. “Anti-GMO activism has set back our work, in that we not only concentrate with our research, but we have to also spend time and resources to counter their propaganda,” the IRRI spokesperson told me. But the group makes clear that regulation and activism are only two of the challenges facing golden rice—getting it to perform well remains a major task.

Even if and when IRRI does come up with a high-yielding golden rice variety that passes regulatory muster, it remains unclear whether it can actually make a dent in vitamin A deficiency. As the Washington University’s Stone notes, vitamin A deficiency often affects people whose diets are also deficient in other vital nutrients. Vitamin A is fat soluble, meaning that it can’t be taken up by the body unless it’s accompanied by sufficient dietary fat, which isn’t delivered in significant quantities by rice, golden or otherwise.

According to Stone, only one feeding study (PDF) has ever showed a powerful uptake of vitamin A by subjects eating golden rice. The paper was much-cited by golden rice proponents, but Stone says it had a major flaw: The subjects were “well-nourished individuals” who already took in sufficient fat in their diets. The study “demonstrated only that Golden Rice worked in children who did not need it,” he writes. (The study has since been retracted on claims that the author failed to obtain proper consent from the parents of the participants).

Meanwhile, as IRRI scrambles to perfect golden rice, the prevalence of vitamin A deficiency is declining in the Philippines—according to IRRI itself— from 40 percent of children aged 6 months to 5 years in 2003, to 15.2 percent in 2008. “The exact reasons for these improvements have not been determined, but they may be the results of proven approaches to preventing vitamin A deficiency, such as vitamin A supplementation, dietary diversification, food fortification and promotion of optimal breastfeeding,” the group noted. That drop is part of a long-term trend that involves all of Southeast Asia. According to a 2015 Lancet study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, vitamin A deficiency plagued 39 percent of children in the region in 1991, but only 6 percent in 2013—without the help of golden rice.

But VAD, as the deficiency’s known, remains a huge scourge on the Indian sub-continent and in Africa, the study found, affecting more than 40 percent of children in both regions. Whether golden rice will ever help mitigate that ongoing tragedy won’t likely be known for some time. But the technology’s hardly the slam-dunk panacea its advocates insist it is.

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WTF Happened to Golden Rice?

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All those toxic chemicals in the ocean? Birds are pooping them back on shore

by VioletMata Posted on November 30, 2015

All those toxic chemicals in the ocean? Birds are pooping them back on shore

By on 30 Nov 2015commentsShare

You know all that pollution that we’ve been dumping into the oceans for decades? All the plastic, DDT, PCBs, mercury, etc. that we’ve been shamelessly washing away like the memories of too many tequila shots and poor decisions? Well, like those tequila shots the next morning, it looks like it’s all coming back up.

Here’s the rub: When we dump chemicals into the ocean, they get absorbed by microbes, which then get eaten by fish, which then get eaten by bigger fish and other animals until, over time, these chemicals accumulate in those larger animals.

Fulmars — seabirds that live in northern Canada — are one such animal. And according to Mark Mallory, a biologist at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, these fulmars eventually bring our discarded chemicals back on land … in the most disgusting way possible. Here’s more from Smithsonian:

[Mallory’s] studies found that fulmars are like the great cleaners of the ocean, ingesting a lot of plastic as well as chemicals that sometimes adhere to plastic. When the birds get back to Cape Vera, they vomit or defecate onto the cliffs, and the contaminants are then washed down into the freshwater pools beneath.

The nutrients from the fulmar guano bring algae and moss but also attract small midges and other aquatic insects — a tasty snack for snow buntings, largely terrestrial birds that will feed the bugs to their chicks.

Unfortunately for those adorable little snow buntings, their tasty snacks are also filled with chemicals, and thus, the game of pass-the-pollutant continues.

“We may think of the Arctic as this remote, pristine region, but it’s not,” adds Jennifer Provencher, a graduate student in eco-toxicology at Carleton University in Canada who frequently collaborates with Mallory. Provencher has found plastic and chemicals in the stomachs and livers of the thick-billed murres that live on the cliffs of Coats Island in the north of Hudson Bay. She has also found that great skuas can ingest plastic from preying on northern fulmars.

The winged predators aren’t the only things with an appetite for small birds. Provencher says that the Inuit in northern communities also eat murres. … That means the junk we dump into the oceans could be coming back to affect human health.

Veronica Padula, a researcher who studies seabirds off the Alaskan coast, told Smithsonian that she’s found significant concentrations of phthalates — chemicals used to make plastics flexible and harder to break — in kittiwakes, horned puffins, and red-faced cormorants. She says that these chemicals ultimately get into the birds’ reproductive tissue and perhaps even into their eggs, which could then infect egg-eaters like eagles and foxes.

And in case you’re still not convinced that our pollution is coming back to haunt us, a recent study found that three species of Canadian water fowl that humans hunt for food contained plastics and metals in their stomachs.

“It’s actually quite scary, especially when you start looking at what these chemicals do,” Padula told Smithsonian. “You kind of want to find a bunker and hide.”

You probably also wanted to find a bunker and hide the morning after that alcohol-soaked rager. But deep down, you knew that you were getting exactly what you deserved. That wasn’t your first rodeo, and, still, you downed those shots like a freshman at welcome week.

Likewise, bird shit laced with toxic chemicals is exactly what we deserve now — we had our rocky initiation at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and here we are again. So what say we cut back on the pollution, buy some fancy beers and play this drinking game to Planet Earth like grownups?

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Seabirds Are Dumping Pollution-Laden Poop Back on Land

, Smithsonian.

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What is Dirty Electricity and is it Harmful?

by JereLhotsky1481 Posted on November 23, 2015

Dirty electricity is a growing issue that can be easily misunderstood due to its complexity.

To help clear up any confusion, here are some answers to common questions about dirty electricity.

What is dirty electricity?

Electricity enters homes and other buildings at a constant frequency, typically 50 or 60 hertz (Hz,) depending on which country you live in. This is considered clean energy as it enters your home.

The problem starts when the electricity reaches appliances, computers or other electronic devices. Many of these devices require a transformer to convert the voltage and/or current, which disrupts the flow of electricity.

These power disruptions create irregular, high frequency surges of dirty electricity that travel along a buildings normal wiring, which should only contain 50 or 60 Hz electricity. The surges are also known as high frequency voltage transients.

Is dirty electricity harmful to our health?

Electrical wires and any devices that use electricity emit electromagnetic fields (EMF), also known as electromagnetic radiation (EMR). These fields will easily pass through most common materials. They are strongest close to the source and diminish with distance.

A growing body of evidence is showing that EMF exposure can be linked to various health conditions. And the stronger an electrical frequency is, the stronger the EMF will be. Thats why the high frequency transients associated with dirty electricity are of particular concern.

The World Health Organization has recognized that there are potentially both short term and long term health risks associated with EMF exposure.

Also, in 2012, a group of independent scientists, researchers and public health policy professionals, called The BioInitiative Working Group, published the BioInitiative Report. Their goal was to give an overview of whats known about the biological effects of EMF exposure. They reviewed over 2,000 scientific studies and concluded that there is substantial scientific evidence showing that even low levels of EMF have biological effects.

Laboratory studies showed that EMF exposure was linked to genotoxic effects, including DNA damage, as well as adverse effects on immune function, neurology, human behavior and melatonin production. There were also various population studies that found connections between EMF exposure and brain tumors, acoustic neuromas, salivary gland tumors, leukemia, Alzheimers disease, Lou Gehrigs disease and breast cancer.

For instance, one study published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine looked at a cancer cluster in a southern California school exposed to high frequency voltage transients in their electrical system. The researchers found that a single year of employment at this school increased a teachers cancer risk by 21 percent, and teachers there more than 10 years increased their risk by 610 percent. They concluded that these high frequency transients may also be a universal carcinogen, not isolated to a single school.

What EMF levels are safe?

Despite the growing research showing the health risks of EMF, a challenge arises when governing agencies try to determine what levels are actually safe.

There are many different aspects of EMF to consider, such as the electrical voltage, frequency and pulse variations, as well as the duration of a persons exposure and any cumulative exposure over time. All these factors make it difficult to set exact safety standards for EMF in our homes.

Currently, most safety regulations only consider levels of EMF that are high enough to increase the temperature of an object. This is also known as ionizing radiation, such as x-rays.

Any lower energy frequencies that are considered non-ionizing, or do not heat objects, are assumed to be safe to use. These are the types of frequencies we are regularly exposed to from dirty electricity and were found to have detrimental effects in the BioInitiative Report.

In fact, The BioInitiative Working Group feels there may be no lower limit where exposure does not affect us. Until we can find a lower limit where its proven that bioeffects do not occur, they recommend limiting exposure to EMF whenever possible.

How can you avoid dirty electricity?

You have many options for reducing your exposure to dirty electricity and EMF.

There are meters you can buy that measure the levels of EMF in your home. EMF is typically measured either in milligauss (mG) or microTesla (T), depending on your country.

You can also download a phone application that will measure EMF, either for an Android or iPhone.

Some main sources of dirty electricity are:

Computers
Television sets
Cordless phones
Entertainment units
Energy efficient lighting
Energy efficient appliances
Dimmer switches
Power tools
Arcing on power lines, caused by loose wires or tree branches touching the lines

Try measuring the EMF levels near any of your suspect appliances, computers or other electrical devices. Replace any of these devices where possible, such as replacing cordless phones with corded phones, or energy efficient lighting (compact fluorescent or LED bulbs) with incandescent or AC halogen light bulbs.

If youre finding high levels in your house, you can install one or more dirty electricity filters. These are available from various online companies. Electrical filters have been shown to control high frequency currents in home electrical systems, but do your research to make sure the company youre buying from is legitimate.

You can tell if the filters are working when you have an EMF meter because you can take before and after measurements.

Many cities also have professional EMF consultants who can come to your home to measure EMF and suggest ways to reduce your exposure.

Sources
Dirty Electricity, by Samuel Milham
Public Health SOS: The Shadow Side of the Wireless Revolution, by Camilla Rees and Magda Havas
Overpowered, by Martin Blank

Related
5 Gadgets That Can Slash Costly Vampire Energy Use
Is Your Cell Phone a Health Hazard?
Shocking State of the Worlds Antibiotic Resistance

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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What is Dirty Electricity and is it Harmful?

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Miami Nice: Are Florida’s Power Brokers Mellowing on Cuba?

by CharoletteCambe Posted on August 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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For decades, Florida’s Cuban exile community has ensured that the United States maintained its tough policy toward the island nation. From Miami, these fierce opponents of Fidel Castro plotted to overthrow the Cuban dictator and channeled funds to dissidents. This made them logical allies of communism-denouncing Republicans, and the exile community’s wealth and political savvy made it a crucial voting bloc, not to be crossed by either party, in a state that can decide presidential elections. But attitudes have shifted. The embargo doesn’t hold the same importance for younger Cubans and those who left Cuba for economic reasons. The major players now fall into three categories: hardliners who continue to oppose any change in policy until the Castros are out of power; reformers who have long pushed for normalization; and converts whose views have softened.

The Hardliners

Sen. Marco Rubio, though his parents came to Florida before the Cuban Revolution, has made anti-Castro opposition central to his political career. He vows to roll back Obama’s efforts to normalize relations once he is in the White House.

Jeb Bush, whose political roots lie in Miami’s Cuban exile community, has called Obama’s policy a “tragedy.” But his opposition has been less aggressive than Rubio’s, a reflection of changing attitudes in Florida and disagreement among his own advisers.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who fled Havana when she was eight, began her political career in the Florida Legislature in 1982, when a tough position on Cuba was a political necessity. The Republican has slammed normalization with Cuba as a “propaganda coup for the Castro brothers.”

Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, another Republican, hails from a powerful Miami family—his father was a Cuban politician before Fidel Castro seized power, and his aunt was Fidel’s first wife. A member of the House appropriations committee, he has tried to undermine Obama’s policy by attaching riders to spending bills—including a provision blocking flights and cruise ship routes to Cuba.

Gus Machado, a wealthy Miami auto dealer and Republican donor, is the treasurer of the US-Cuba Democracy PAC, the main political advocacy group opposing normalization.

Remedios Diaz-Oliver, the Miami-based CEO of a major plastic container company and a board member of that PAC, has called Obama’s policy of normalization “Bay of Pigs II.”

Mel Martinez, a former GOP senator from Florida who fled Cuba as a teenager, supported Obama’s 2009 decision to lift travel restrictions for people visiting relatives in Cuba, but he has blasted the president’s decision to normalize relations.

Al Cardenas, the former head of the Florida GOP, is now a lobbyist and adviser to Jeb Bush. His opposition to normalizing relations has put him at odds with others in Bush’s inner circle.

The Reformers

Ricardo Herrero, the onetime executive director of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party, cofounded #CubaNow in 2014 to pressure the White House to normalize relations with Cuba—part of a lobbying campaign spearheaded by the Trimpa Group.

Mike Fernandez, a Cuban exile billionaire, is a big GOP donor and an ally of the Bush clan. But on Cuba, he’s in Obama’s corner. “I am not a fan of President Obama, but after 50-plus years, this is long overdue.”

Manny Diaz, a lawyer who was born in Cuba, rose to prominence representing the Miami relatives of Elián González, thereafter becoming the city’s mayor.

Jorge Pérez, Florida’s “Condo King,” supports lifting the embargo and says doing so may lead to a real estate boom on the island: “Demand for second homes will be much bigger than the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, or Dominican Republic.”

The Converts

Carlos Saladrigas, a Miami millionaire who was once a fierce advocate of the embargo, now says the old policy has held the Cuban people back. In 2000, he cofounded the Cuba Study Group, an organization of Cuban business leaders to promote engagement.

Carlos Gutierrez, who fled Cuba as a child, was George W. Bush’s commerce secretary and is now a Jeb supporter. Gutierrez recently embraced normalization, penning a New York Times op-ed titled, “A Republican Case for Obama’s Cuba Policy.”

Alfonso Fanjul leads a vast sugar and real estate empire with his brothers. For decades they bankrolled anti-Castro efforts. But Alfonso shocked the exile community last year when he said he was open to doing business in Cuba. His brother Andres has also mellowed, and is on the board of the Cuba Study Group, which calls for normalization. Meanwhile, his brother Pepe, a major GOP donor, has not joined his brothers in calling for change.

Link:  

Miami Nice: Are Florida’s Power Brokers Mellowing on Cuba?

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Here’s Another Vital Conversation That Donald Trump Is Ruining

by GonzaloTen93 Posted on August 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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Albert H. Teich/Shutterstock

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Over at Vox, David Roberts investigates Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump’s views on climate change and finds that they are thoughtful, nuanced, and carefully grounded in science.

Kidding, kidding. Trump’s proclamations on climate change are as sweeping, bombastic, and asinine as his shocking claim that Mexican immigrants are a bunch of rapists. Here are a couple of typical tweets:

Trump thinks cold weather in the US in winter disproves the demonstrable fact that global average temperatures have been steadily rising since the Industrial Revolution. Roberts’ pithy conclusion is that Trump’s opinions are wrong, but, “They are, for the most part, mainstream Republican positions.” That depends on how you look at it. Rejecting climate science is the norm among Republican politicians. (Republican voters are more evenly split between climate science acceptance and denial.) But Trump’s specific approach to climate change represents a more rare and particularly disturbing species of climate science denialism.

Most other Republican presidential candidates do not actually deny that the Earth is getting warmer. Rather, they hem and haw about whether humans and greenhouse gas emissions are the cause of it, and to what extent. Here are some examples:

Jeb Bush: “I think global warming may be real…It is not unanimous among scientists that it is disproportionately manmade.”

And Rick Perry: “I don’t believe man-made global warming is settled in science enough.”

And just yesterday, John Kasich: “I think that man absolutely affects the environment, but as to whether, what the impact is…the overall impact—I think that’s a legitimate debate.”

They argue that the science of human-induced climate change is incomplete, but they accept that warming is measured by data and that NASA’s temperature readings are accurate.

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Some more extreme conservatives, like Ted Cruz, question whether the data actually even shows the Earth is warming. The more mainstream way of doing this, which Cruz did in his appearance at the Koch brothers’ recent confab in California, is to selectively and misleadingly present very specific facts in order to create a false impression. The more fringey, conspiracist approach, which Cruz also engaged in at that event, is to claim that the temperature measurements are being manufactured by scientists with an agenda. Cruz said, “If you look at satellite data for the last 18 years, there’s been zero recorded warming…They’re cooking the books. They’re actually adjusting the numbers.”

That’s pretty out there, but less so still than Trump because Cruz does accept that one would establish warming by measuring the temperature, and by doing so not just on one day in one place, but all over the Earth for years. Trump doesn’t selectively present the data or assert that it’s been rigged, he just ignores it. If it’s cold outside in New York in the winter, Trump says, then there is no global warming. His problem is twofold: He does not understand the difference between weather (still often cold in New York in the winter) and climate (gradually warming on average over the entire Earth), and he does not respect the difference between data and anecdote. Trump is hardly unique in this regard—remember Senate Environment Committee Chair James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and his snowball—but Trump is the only top-tier Republican presidential candidate who subscribes to it.

So the fact that Trump is in first place in the GOP presidential polls, with more than twice as high a percentage as his nearest competitor, Jeb Bush, reveals some alarming things about a large segment of the Republican voter base (not smart) and the prospects for reaching consensus on the need for climate action (not good).

Trump isn’t merely another extremist who rejects climate science. Trump isn’t really a conservative at all. He’s a reactionary populist who has elevated ignorance to a political philosophy. Call it ignorantism.

Even if Trump hadn’t said anything about climate change in particular, his dismissiveness toward objective fact-finding processes would bode ill for the environment. Government policies—economic, public health, environmental—require an accurate measurement of data to inform policymakers who write laws and regulators who enforce them. And a plurality of the Republican electorate currently supports a presidential candidate who does not accept that data, rather than personal anecdote, is how one measures empirical fact.

Despite the widespread opinion that Trump performed poorly in the first Republican debate last week, the only poll to come out since shows him still in the lead with 23 percent of Republican voters. The same poll shows 29 percent of respondents saying Trump did worst in the debate. But a lot of Republicans find his buffoonery and belligerent ignorance compelling.

Even though Trump will not be the GOP nominee, whoever it is will need to keep Trump’s supporters on board. And all those climate hawks hoping the GOP will stop being “the party of stupid” will be disappointed.

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Here’s Another Vital Conversation That Donald Trump Is Ruining

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The Point of Democracy Is to Keep Powerful Elites From Becoming Complete Jackasses

by AlbertinaHollins Posted on June 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Daniel Bell has written a new book making the case that “Chinese-style meritocracy is, in important respects, a better system of governance than western liberal democracy.” That’s possible, I suppose. Tyler Cowen noodles over the arguments and tosses out a few thoughts. Here’s one:

4. Most humans in history seem to have favored meritocratic rule over democracy, and before the 19th century democracy was rare, even in the limited form of male-dominated or property owner-dominated republics. It is possible that the current advantage of democracy is rooted in technology, or some other time-specific factor, which ultimately may prove temporary. That said, I still observe plenty of democracies producing relatively well-run countries, so I don’t see significant evidence that a turning point against democracy has been reached.

I know Cowen is just throwing out some ideas to be provocative, not seriously backing any of them. Still, I think you have to take a pretty blinkered view of “most humans” to throw this one out at all. It’s true that humans are hairless primates who naturally gravitate to a hierarchical society, but there’s little evidence that “most humans” prefer non-democratic societies. There’s loads of evidence that powerful elites prefer elite-driven societies, and have gone to great lengths throughout history to maintain them against the masses. Whether the masses themselves ever thought this was a good arrangement is pretty much impossible to say.

Of course, once the technologies of communication, transportation, and weaponry became cheaper and more democratized, it turned out the masses were surprisingly hostile to elite rule and weren’t afraid to show it. So perhaps it’s not so impossible to say after all. In fact, most humans throughout history probably haven’t favored “meritocratic” rule, but mostly had no practical way to show it except in small, usually failed rebellions. The Industrial Revolution changed all that, and suddenly the toiling masses had the technology to make a decent showing against their overlords. Given a real option, it turned out they nearly all preferred some form of democracy after all.

Which brings us to the real purpose of democracy: to rein in the rich and powerful. Without democracy, societies very quickly turn into the Stanford Prison Experiment. With it, that mostly doesn’t happen. That’s a huge benefit, even without counting free speech, fair trials, and all the other gewgaws of democracy. It is, so far, the only known social construct that reliably keeps powerful elites from becoming complete jackasses. That’s pretty handy.

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The Point of Democracy Is to Keep Powerful Elites From Becoming Complete Jackasses

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