Renewable Revolution

 

 November 11, 2017




Written Transcript at liink:

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=20442

Quote from: knarf on November 23, 2017, 07:01:22 pm

Turkey Day usually represents a late-season reset for pro football, but myriad controversies portend a more serious tone this year.

//The top storyline in the NFL this season has not been Tom Brady’s continued excellence or Carson Wentz’s timely emergence or the surprising Rams and Jaguars. It has instead been the dozens of players across the league who have knelt, sat, or raised their fists during the national anthem in protest of police brutality and racial injustice. //

The former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick will not be anywhere near Thursday’s action, as he remains unsigned after initiating the wave of protests last fall, but his name will echo through living rooms every time, say, the Vikings quarterback Case Keenum throws an incomplete pass. Why, Kaepernick’s defenders will wonder, do retreads like Keenum continue to receive opportunities while a former NFC-champion quarterback sits at home?

//

Meanwhile, no one will loom over the NFL’s Thanksgiving more than the Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who has spent this fall sowing chaos on numerous fronts. //

As the protest issue simmers, Jones has feuded with the NFL commissioner Roger Goodell over Ezekiel Elliott’s suspension, which the running back began serving last week after months of injunction requests and appeals. ESPN reported that a furious Jones told Goodell he would “come after [him] with everything I have,” then later threatened to sue the league to hold up the commissioner’s contract negotiations.

On Thursday afternoon, Jones’s Cowboys will play the Los Angeles Chargers, who face a crisis of the existential variety. The franchise relocated this past summer from San Diego, a year after the Rams arrived in L.A. from St. Louis.

Meanwhile, since this article was published, Dolt 45 has rage-tweeted repeatedly, attempting to redefine the players' BLM-inspired protests into dishonoring the flag, or the troops, or some other manifestation of stolen valor. The point has always been about social injustice on African Americans and police brutality, to say nothing of open season/no bag limit on black Americans.

Case Keenum is inexplicably having an all star season. In the only football I watched yesterday, he led the Vikings to a convincing victory and played far better than a "game manager." Pretty good for a comparatively "old guy." Who knew?

jerry Jones' threatened lawsuits have folded like a tent, much like popular support for this Potempkin President... or the Cowboys, for that matter. They were beaten convincingly by the near-orphaned, aforementioned Chargers, as karma had a holiday. Even though I wasn't paying attention, I was pleased with the result.

And in other news, John Schplatter still makes shitty pizza. May worms take up residence in his head.

Trailer Trash Trump just does what he does.

Recent photo of Trailer Trash Trump having his morning Joe:

December 3, 2017


Rock Musician and Palestinian Rights Advocate Roger Waters discusses his recent concert tour in Canada

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=20449%27%20style=%27color:#000;

 

December 12, 2017




http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=20688%27%20style=%27color:#000;

Hint: It's not really about marijuana, itself.

SNIPPET:

What both of these white guys are making clear is that, for some Americans, being called a racist is worse than doing or saying racist things. (Or, you know, being discriminated against.) Almost no one in America today would consider themselves racist, even the self-described "white nationalists" feeling somewhat empowered by this political era. They take great offense when anyone suggests they are, even when they offer up a textbook example of racist rhetoric, as Alford did. He claimed that another race is genetically inferior, and prone to antisocial behavior on that basis. It means exactly nothing that Alford doesn't consider himself a racist, or that his (white) colleague doesn't think he's a racist.

Full article: 

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a14854270/republicans-hate-weed/

« on: January 11, 2018, 05:13:46 PM »



By John Woodrow Cox, Theresa Vargas and Justin Wm. Moyer January 11 at 7:40 PM

The man hurried up the Baltimore sidewalk with a camera in his hand as four black-clad hospital security guards walked toward him, then past him. One of them was pushing an empty wheelchair.

“So wait, y’all just going to leave this lady out here with no clothes on?” said Imamu Baraka, referring to a dazed woman wearing only a thin hospital gown who they had left alone at a bus stop Tuesday night in mid-30s temperatures. Her face appeared bloody, her eyes empty.

It was the latest incident of “patient dumping” that has sparked outrage around the country — one that, according to an expert, probably violated a 1986 federal law that mandates hospitals release those in their care into a safe environment.

“This kind of behavior is, I think, both illegal and I’m sure immoral,” said Arthur L. Caplan, founding head of the division of medical ethics at the New York University School of Medicine. “You don’t just throw someone out into the street who is impaired and may have injuries. You try to get them to the best place possible, and that’s not the bench in front of the hospital.”

The phenomenon was pervasive two decades ago, when the law was largely unenforced, Caplan said, but remains a problem from California to Virginia.

[Video  shows apparently incapacitated, half-naked woman put out in cold]

On Tuesday, the woman left outside the University of Maryland Medical Center Midtown Campus could barely walk and seemed unable to speak.

Still filming, Baraka turned and followed the guards back to an entrance.

“That is not okay,” he shouted.

“Due to the circumstances of what it was,” one of them said.

“Then you all need to call the police,” replied Baraka, a licensed counselor.

At the doorway, Baraka asked for a supervisor, demanding to know why they were leaving her outside.

“She was . . . medically discharged,” one of the guards said, before the camera captured them walking into the hospital, their backs turned.

What Baraka filmed next — the woman, staggering and screaming into a night so cold that the sidewalk remained speckled with salt and bits of unmelted snow — has been viewed more than 1.4 million times on Facebook, triggering a cascade of online fury and an apology from the hospital.

At a news conference Thursday afternoon, the hospital’s chief pledged to investigate what he described as “a failure of basic compassion and empathy.” He said it represented a wrenching departure for a widely respected medical institution — one that has embarked on a major expansion in Prince George’s County and southern Maryland.

“We firmly believe what occurred Tuesday night does not reflect who we are,” said Mohan Suntha, the hospital’s president and chief executive. “We are trying to understand the points of failure that led to what we witnessed on that video.”

Suntha would not provide details on the personnel involved, saying the review of the woman’s experience from arrival to discharge had just begun. Nor would he speak to her condition or treatment because of patient confidentiality, but he asserted that her care before being led into the cold was adequate and complete.

Suntha, who cited the hospital’s 136-year history of providing indigent care in Baltimore, said the woman’s insurance coverage or ability to pay played no role in the decision to discharge her.

“I share the community’s shock and anger at what occurred,” he said, although shock and anger haven’t ended patient dumping in the past.

Last year, court records show, a man sued Inova Fairfax Hospital in Virginia for $100 million after alleging that he had been prematurely discharged on a cold winter night — and was subsequently hit by car.

The suit, filed in Fairfax County Circuit Court, alleged that Donald Paul Ryberg came to Inova just after noon on Jan. 29, 2015, a day when temperatures barely edged above freezing.

Ryberg, then a 46-year-old diabetic, had a history of alcohol abuse that had led him to the emergency room before.

The complaint alleges that Ryberg was so weak that he couldn’t stand or walk. When hospital staff discharged him around 7 p.m. — without a diagnosis and over his daughter’s objections — Ryberg was alone and confused, the complaint said, but had been given bus tokens and directions home. He then stumbled into the street, where a car smashed into him.

An Inova spokesman declined to comment.

His daughter, Tabatha Ryberg, said she spent the final years of her high school career caring for her father, who fractured his skull and remained in a coma for weeks after the accident. He continues to have mobility and memory problems, she said, and he lost his job as a laborer at an engineering firm.

“My dad has just lost everything,” she said. “I want to bring some attention to this because this is ridiculous. . . . They didn’t contact us. If they had, we would have had a ride for him. This has ruined so many people’s lives.”

In California, a 78-year-old man, disoriented and suffering from arthritis, was discharged from a Sacramento hospital and sent in a taxi to a homeless shelter that had no room for him, the Sacramento Bee reported. A year ago, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, former patients at a state-run hospital in Nevada filed a federal lawsuit after they and others were allegedly placed on Greyhound buses and sent out of state.

In the Baltimore case that went viral this week, much remains unknown: Who the woman is, why she was hospitalized, what led staff to discharge her when she appeared to be incoherent and where she is now.

Baraka has not responded to multiple requests for comment or posted an update on his Facebook page, but he gave a short interview to CBS Baltimore, saying he had just left his office across the street when he came upon the scene and began filming.

The video’s release was just the latest in a string of painful moments for Baltimore, still reeling from the 2015 death of Freddie Gray and the riots that followed. The city endured 343 homicides last year, making it the bloodiest year, per capita, in its history.

Last week, amid a stretch of frigid weather, images spread of Baltimore students bundled in coats in unheated schools. One teacher described students shivering and able to see their own breath.

“Things are so broken here, so broken,” said Bronwyn Mayden, a Baltimore native and executive director of Promise Heights, an initiative established by the University of Maryland School of Social Work. “It’s like dominoes — one just knocks down the other. Can it get any worse, y’all?”

 
The city’s struggles have reached a point where there’s no outrage, she said. Instead, there’s simply acceptance.

“I think,” Mayden concluded, “people are numb in Baltimore.”
 

Steve Hendrix and Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report.

Agelbert Observation: You need to take your meds if you think this grotesque fascist/classist/racist behavior is limited to any single area of the United States of Trump.

The NEW YORKER

January 12, 2018


By John Cassidy 8:42 A.M.

SNIPPET:

After his comment about “shithole countries,” the arguments for being reticent about applying the R-word to President Trump seem absurd.Photograph by Mark Peterson / Redux

Donald Trump grew up in a wealthy white enclave in Queens, and he first came to public attention in 1973, when the Justice Department sued his father’s real-estate company for refusing to rent apartments to people “because of race and color.” (Trump strongly denied the charges, which eventually led to a consent decree.) In the nineteen-eighties, when Trump owned casinos in Atlantic City, some of his managers got the strong impression that he didn’t like black employees. In a 2015 story about the faded resort town, my colleague Nick Paumgarten quoted a former busboy at the Trump Castle, who said, “When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor.”

In a 1991 book about his experiences running Trump Plaza, in Atlantic City, “Trumped! The Inside Story of the Real Donald Trump—His Cunning Rise and Spectacular Fall,” John R. O’Donnell, a veteran casino executive, recalled a conversation that he had with his boss about an employee in the Plaza’s finance department who happened to be African-American. I cited the passage last fall, after Trump attacked Myeshia Johnson, the widow of a black soldier in the U.S. Special Forces who was killed in Niger, but it is worth reproducing it now. (The quote below begins with Trump speaking about the black employee. The “I” at the start of the second paragraph is O’Donnell.)

“Yeah, I never liked the guy. I don’t think he knows what the fu ck he’s doing. My accountants in New York are always complaining about him. He’s not responsive. And it isn’t funny. I’ve got black accountants at Trump Castle and at Trump Plaza. Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. Those are the kind of people I want counting my money. Nobody else.”

I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. But Donald went on, “Besides that, I’ve got to tell you something else. I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is. I believe that. It’s not anything they can control. . . . Don’t you agree?” He looked at me straight in the eye and waited for my reply.

“Donald, you really shouldn’t say things like that to me or anybody else,” I said. “That is not the kind of image you want to project. We shouldn’t even be having this conversation, even if it’s the way you feel.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “If anybody ever heard me say that . . . holy sh it . . . I’d be in a lot of trouble. But I have to tell you, that’s the way I feel.”

Is there any doubt that Trump still holds these kinds of views? Even before his latest racial slur—it was reported on Thursday that he referred to Haiti, El Salvador, and certain nations in Africa as “shithole countries” during a meeting with lawmakers in the Oval Office—the answer was clear. During the 2016 Presidential campaign, Trump described Mexican immigrants as “in many cases criminals, rapists, drug dealers, etc.”; questioned the fitness of a U.S.-born federal judge by referring to him as “Mexican”; mocked the mother of a Pakistani-American war hero; and, for a time, refused to condemn David Duke, the former Klansman.

full article:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/trump-shithole-comment-racist-in-the-oval-office

GLOBAL NEWS HOME

CONFRONTING THE ROOT CAUSES OF FORCED LABOR IN GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAINS

Wednesday January 10, 2018

Where does forced labor come from? What are the root causes? Often this is traced back to two explanations: poverty and globalization, but how exactly do they perpetuate “endemic labor exploitation” in global supply chains?

This week Beyond Trafficking and Slavery, part of Open Democracy, launched a 12-part report that breaks down the root causes of forced labor and what we can do about them. The report aims to “provide policymakers, journalists, scholars and activists with a road map for understanding the political economy of forced labour in today’s “global value chain (GVC) world.”

This report is organised around a metaphor – the classical economic metaphor of ‘supply and demand’. Within mainstream economic theory, the price of any particular good is not determined by the individuals who buy and sell it. Instead, the price results from a system-wide balance between how much of it is available in the world (supply), how many people want it, and how badly (demand). The price goes up as supply decreases or as demand increases, and down if the opposite applies.

This is a useful way of thinking about forced labour. Rather than a simple consequence of greed or the moral shortcomings of individuals , forced labour in global supply chains is a structural phenomenon that results when predictable, system-wide dynamics intersect to create a supply of highly exploitable workers and a business demand for their labour.

On the “supply side,” researchers identify four key factors that contribute to vulnerability among workers: Poverty, Identity and Discrimination, Limited Labor Protections, and Restrictive Mobility Regimes. On the “demand side,” or factors that “create pressure within the market for highly exploitable forms of labor,” are Concentrated Corporate Power and Ownership , Outsourcing , Irresponsible Sourcing Practices , and Governance Gaps  .

The research is grounded in several academic disciplines and draws on industry-specific cases, ethnographic investigations, and statistical studies from around the world. In sum, they paint a picture of how the global capitalist economy produces an “unjust status quo” and point out what is and what is not working to fix it.

To read the entire article, click here https://www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/genevieve-lebaron-neil-howard-cameron-thibos-penelope-kyritsis/confronting-root-causes

Agelbert NOTE: Okay, foced labor may not be the simple consequence of greed or the moral shortcomings of individuals, but that does NOT rule out the FACT, especially if we are going to address ROOT causes, not a causal chain of downstream effects (see: moral hazard), that ALL abuse of humans for profit is the somewhat complicated consequence of greed and the moral shortcomings of individuals.