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In This Edition

Norman Solomon concludes, "Trump's Climate Denial Gains Strength If We're In Denial About His Neo-Fascism."

Ralph Nader exclaims, "Trump's Broken Promises To His Voters-He Didn't Deliver!"

Barbara Lee joins us with, "It's Time To Repeal The President's License For Endless War."

Jim Hightower finds, "CEO Tricksters Cut Their Pay Without Bleeding."

William Rivers Pitt says, "Every Trump Lie Is A Confession."

Thom Hartmann asks, "How Should America Respond When Its President Commits Negligent?"

James Donahue wonders, "Do We Really Know What Happened In The Past?"

David Swanson reminds us we are an, "Unvanquishable Number."

David Suzuki says, "Our Children Shouldn't Have To Pay For Our Excesses."

Charles P. Pierce demands, "Scientists At These Agencies Should Stage A Walkout."

Juan Cole warns of, "Climate Emergency Overdrive: Our Age Of Compound Disasters As 10% Of Oregon Is Evacuated, California Burns, And Louisiana Sinks."

Political trickster Roger Stone wins this week's coveted, "Vidkun Quisling Award!"

Robert Reich examines, "Citizen Musk."

Jake Johnson returns with "Trump Voices Support For Extrajudicial Executions By Police."

And finally in the 'Parting Shots' department Andy Borowitz reports, "Trump Agrees To Be Interviewed For New Book By Joe Biden," but first Uncle Ernie exclaims, "Lying Donald Strikes Again, And Again!"

This week we spotlight the cartoons of Milt Priggee, with additional cartoons, photos and videos from, Brian McFadden, Tom Tomorrow, CIFOR, ABC 7 News, Steve Sack, Alex Guerrero, Carolyn Kaster, Ethan Miller, Kris Connor, Chip Somodevilla, Steve Sack, Mark Wilson, Kevork Djansezian, Drew Angerer, Robert Reich, Jim Hightower, AFP, Unsplash, Shutterstock, Reuters, Flickr, AP, Getty Images, Black Agenda Report, You Tube, and Issues & Alibis.Org.

Plus we have all of your favorite Departments-

The Quotable Quote-
The Vidkun Quisling Award-
The Cartoon Corner-
To End On A Happy Note-
Have You Seen This-
Parting Shots-

Welcome one and all to "Uncle Ernie's Issues & Alibis."














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Lying Donald Strikes Again, And Again!
By Ernest Stewart

We obviously feel very strongly that the hots are getting hotter, the drys are getting drier. When we're having heat domes the likes of which we've never seen in our history - the hottest August ever in the history of this state, the ferocity of these fires, the drought five-plus years, losing 163 million trees to that drought - something's happened to the plumbing of the world. And we come from a perspective, humbly, where we submit the science is in and observed evidence is self-evident that climate change is real and that is exacerbating this." ~~~ California Gov. Gavin Newsom

"We keep finding things that aren't in the climate models that are used to project the future. So that tells me that the projections for the future are really conservative. If climate stays at this temperature that it's been in the last decade, Greenland is, is going away." ~~~ Prof. Jason E. Box Climatologist Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland

"I do not advocate preventive detention, but people who commit crimes and think they can continue to get away with it because we have two-tier justice are just wrong." ~~~ Roger Stone

Help me if you can, I'm feeling down
And I do appreciate you being round
Help me get my feet back on the ground
Won't you please, please help me
Help ~~~ The Beatles


Every time Lying Donald holds an indoor rally he kills off or hospitalises some of his followers and I fail to see how this is a bad thing? Sure, they may bring it home and kill their parents, but again they were the ones that brought up and made this little nazi, so, again I fail to see the problem? Now that these scumbags have crawled out from under their rocks to support fascism and to kill or maim righteous people I say let's get them while we can before they go back under their rocks and plan their next attacks and murders!

Sure that may sound a little harsh but it is true, can you deny it? As he says Lying Donald suports killing protesters by his gestapo or by the local cops, without trial or judge and jury because they defy him and his plans to do to America what Hitler, his hero, did to Germany. His plans include killing the elderly, the sick and the poor if he can manage to steal another election and he will do it if we let him, and so far we've let him get away with treason and sedition. When is enough, enough?

California Gov. Gavin Newsom unsuccessfully pressed President Trump on Monday to acknowledge that climate change is making wildfires worse across much of the West Coast. Newsom said:

"We obviously feel very strongly that the hots are getting hotter, the drys are getting drier. When we're having heat domes the likes of which we've never seen in our history - the hottest August ever in the history of this state, the ferocity of these fires, the drought five-plus years, losing 163 million trees to that drought - something's happened to the plumbing of the world. And we come from a perspective, humbly, where we submit the science is in and observed evidence is self-evident that climate change is real and that is exacerbating this."
Lying Donald replied:
"We have to do a lot about forest management. Obviously forest management in California is very important, and now it extends to Washington and extends also to Oregon. There has to be good, strong forest management, which I've been talking about for three years with this state, so hopefully they'll start doing that."
Yes let's get the rakes out and get busy!

To which Wade Crowfoot, California's secretary of natural resources said:

"If we ignore that science and put our head in the sand and think it's all about vegetation management, we're not going to succeed at protecting Californians."
Lying Donald countered:

"It'll start getting cooler. You just watch."

"I wish science agreed with you," Crowfoot said.

"Well, I don't think science knows actually," Lying Donald said, laughing.

Your tax dollars at work, America! Oh and did I mention that 57 percent of the land in Calfiornia is federal forest land, and 3 percent is California's responsibility. So methinks Lying Donald should pick up a rake and get started!

In Other News

I see where satellite imagery from the European Space Agencies Copernicus has revealed that the front of Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden glacier in NE Greenland has disintegrated. Greenland has experienced a rapid temperature rise in the atmosphere by 5.5 Fahrenheit since 1980.

Mind-blowing melting has occurred in 2019 and 2020 as a result. The ice disintegration is an example of how a combination of an influx of warm water eating away at the underbelly of the glaciers marine extension while meltwater lakes on the surface splinter and shatter the ice all the way to the bedrock.

Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden is roughly 50 miles long by 12 1/2 miles wide and is the floating front end of the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream - where it flows off the land into the ocean to become buoyant.

At its leading edge, the 79N glacier splits in two, with a minor offshoot turning directly north. It's this offshoot, or tributary, called Spalte Glacier, that has now disintegrated.

The ice feature was already heavily fractured in 2019; this summer's warmth has been its final undoing. Spalte Glacier has become a flotilla of icebergs.

The Northeast Greenland Ice Stream drains about 15% of the interior ice sheet. The stream funnels its ice either down N79 or the glacial member just to the south, Zachariae Isstrom. Zachariae has already lost most of its floating ice shelf area.

Jason Eric Box is a professor in glaciology at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland who said that, "N79 could resist longer because it was penned in right at its forward end by some islands. This lends a degree of stability. But, he added, the shelf continues to thin, albeit mostly further back along the trunk.

"This will likely lead to N79 disintegrating from the middle, which is kind of unique. I guess, though, that won't happen for another 10 or 20 years. Who knows?" he told BBC News.

Ergo now might be a good time to get rid of your ocean front property and relocate to some inland mountain range. The Blue Ridge or Smokey Mountains might be a good choice!

And Finally

Political trickster and former Lying Donald aide Roger Stone says Lying Donald should declare Martial Law if he loses to Joe Biden and order the arrest of "Harry Reid, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, the Clintons and anybody else who can be proven to be involved in illegal activity" by invoking the Insurrection Act. I wonder if by saying "anybody else" he means himself?

You may recall that Roger was convicted of seven counts of lying to Congress under oath and having deals with Russia to get Lying Donald elected and you may also recall that Lying Donald pardoned Stone for these same acts of treason!

So guess what we did? Why do I always see the same hands? Those who said awarded Roger Stone this week's Vidkun Quisling Award may stay after class and clean the erasers, there will be Graham crackers and chocolate Almond milk to follow!

Keepin' On

If you think that what we do is important and would like to see us keep on, keeping on, please send us whatever you can, whenever you can, and we'll keep telling you the truth!

*****


12-08-1942 ~ 09-11-2020
Thanks for the music!


07-26-1930 ~ 09-12-2020
Thanks for the film!


01-22-1937 ~ 09-14-2020
Thanks for the music!


03-23-1943 ~ 09-17-2020
Thanks for the read!



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So how do you like Trump so far?
And more importantly, what are you planning on doing about it?

Until the next time, Peace!

(c) 2020 Ernest Stewart a.k.a. Uncle Ernie is an unabashed radical, philosopher, author, stand-up comic, DJ, actor, political pundit and managing editor and publisher of Issues & Alibis magazine. Visit me on Facebook. and like us when you do. Follow me on Twitter.







Trump's Climate Denial Gains Strength If We're In Denial About His Neo-Fascism
By Norman Solomon

Trump's Climate Denial Gains Strength If We're In Denial About His Neo-Fascism By Norman Solomon Spiking temperatures, melting glaciers, rising seas, catastrophic hurricanes and unprecedented wildfires are clear signs of a climate emergency caused by humans. Denying the awful reality makes the situation worse. The same can be said of denial about the current momentum toward fascism under Donald Trump.

Trump's right-wing base and leading Republicans are in lockstep with both types of denial. They embrace the most absurd claims about climate, such as Trump's recent comment during a visit to fire-ravaged California that "I don't think science knows, actually." And they refuse to recognize or deplore his autocratic moves.

On the left, hardly anyone doubts the climate crisis. And there's widespread recognition that Trump's presidency is a full-blown emergency. But -- with justified enmity toward the neoliberal corporatism and militarism of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party -- some question or pooh-pooh the importance of ousting Trump with Biden.

Yet no one can credibly dispute, for instance, that Trump is increasingly aligned with white supremacy. Or that Trump is enabling more repressive actions by "law enforcement" and the courts. Any ambivalence about defeating Trump goes against the left's historic responsibility to fight tooth and nail against the extreme right.

Winning that fight is a victory for humanity as a whole. It also allows space for the left to function instead of being crushed.

But -- after nearly four years of the Trump presidency -- a normalization process has made denial a real hazard.

The book How Fascism Works, by Yale professor Jason Stanley, describes the dynamic this way: "Normalization of fascist ideology, by definition, would make charges of 'fascism' seem like an overreaction, even in societies whose norms are transforming along these worrisome lines. Normalization means precisely that encroaching ideologically extreme conditions are not recognized as such because they have come to seem normal. The charge of fascism will always seem extreme; normalization means that the goalposts for the legitimate use of 'extreme' terminology continually move."

Even now, despite all that Trump has done and is threatening to do, some progressives still have trouble wrapping their minds around the reality of the neo-fascist threat right in front of us in real time. The current "encroaching ideologically extreme conditions are not recognized as such because they have come to seem normal."

One of the clearest voices about the intertwined perils of the climate emergency and the Trump regime is longtime Green Party activist Ted Glick, who has devoted decades of his life to organizing against climate disaster and a political system with corporate power dominating both major parties.

Nearly 20 years ago, Glick was the Green Party nominee for U.S. senator in New Jersey. In 2007 he went on a "climate emergency fast" (water-only for 25 days) to protest the federal government's failure to take action on global warming. In 2010, he hung banners inside a Senate office building that said "Green Jobs Now" and "Get to Work," risking up to three years in prison.

"There are an awful lot of reasons why it is so important for Trump to be defeated and removed from the White House, but I continue to believe that the most important one is the climate crisis," Glick wrote last week.

"There is no question but that the climate issue is very much connected to many other issues, among them the issues of jobs, poverty, immigration, health care, racism, and war and peace," he pointed out. "That is why the concept of and the organizing for a Green New Deal must be central not just to the climate movement but to the movement of movements which, alone, can make it happen once Trump is out of the White House."

And Trump will only be out of the White House four months from now if Biden receives enough votes in swing states this fall.

Glick's conclusion rings true: "Removing Trump is the prerequisite for everything else. Those who don't get that on the left should really ponder what will happen to the world's disrupted ecosystems and the billions of people reliant on those ecosystems under a second Trump administration and beyond. We must do all we can in the next two months to literally save the world."

Climate change is an emergency. And so is Trumpism. Flames are approaching what's left of democratic structures in the United States.

Stopping the advent of fascism doesn't offer any assurance of being able to create the kind of society and world that we want. But failing to stop the advent of fascism would assure that we won't.

(c) 2020 Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death" and "Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State."




President Donald Trump whispers with Vice President Mike Pence as members of the coronavirus task force
speak during a briefing in response to the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic in the James S. Brady
Press Briefing Room at the White House on Monday, April 13, 2020 in Washington, D.C.



Trump's Broken Promises To His Voters-He Didn't Deliver!
The list of broken promises could fill volumes.
By Ralph Nader

Trump voters are not inclined to change their minds. Some of them are forever Republicans and will only vote the GOP ticket; they are called hereditary voters. Others can't stand the Democratic Party nominees, won't vote for the Libertarian ticket, and will only vote for Trump. Some love Trump because of his anti-immigrant stance, deregulation of law enforcement on businesses, and nominations of anti-choice and right-wing corporatist federal judges.

Yet, polls show that the one area of widespread disappointment among Trump voters (not the rich ones) is that he didn't deliver the improvements for their livelihoods that he promised in the 2016 campaign. Many Trump voters are willing to overlook Trump's dangerous lies, coverups, self-enrichment, the surrender of Washington to Wall Street corruption, lethal incompetence, i.e., his bungling of the Covid-19 pandemic, and personal immorality (he has violated seven of the Ten Commandments). But Trump voters expected Trump to do a little bit more to further the legitimate self-interests of the families on Main Street.

Now come two Pulitzer-Prize-winning, famously accurate reporters, Hedrick Smith, executive editor of reclaimtheamericandream.org, and Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times with lists of Trump's broken promises. (Smith also mentions some promises Trump tried to keep, such as those which largely favor the wealthy and big businesses).

These include getting out of the Paris Climate Accord and the huge tax cut for himself and other wealthy Americans. But Trump has failed badly on many of his over 200 campaign promises in 2016 that were directed to working people.

Trump promised to create 25 million jobs over 10 years - 2.5 million jobs a year. Even before Covid-19, Trump didn't come close, because, in large part, he didn't push for a major infrastructure jobs bill in Congress to repair and upgrade public works in every American community.

Remember Trump's repeated promise to bring back 7.7 million lost manufacturing jobs? At its high last February, Trump's economy and trade policies didn't begin to deliver. In fact, Trump encouraged Apple CEO Tim Cook to keep the company's Chinese factories by waving tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Apple phones and computers imported from China.

Trump promised to raise wages then proceeded to keep the frozen federal minimum wage at $7.25 per hour. Under Trump's watch, taking inflation and loss of benefits into account, Smith concludes that "workers are net losers." But not the CEOs like the head of Walmart who makes about $12,000 per hour and benefits from Trump's tax cuts for the wealthy!

Smith refers to Princeton economist, "Alan Blinder, who pointed to academic studies that show 'For the first time in the past hundred years, the working class today pays higher tax rates than billionaires.'" Thanks to Trump.

Kristoff has reported additional broken promises - from Mexico not paying a peso for the "wall" to Trump inciting violence, breaking laws, and bringing disorder to our streets, to altering "the terms of student loan repayments" adding $200 billion over a decade; (he promised the opposite to "our students who are drowning in debt") to repealing and replacing "disastrous Obamacare," Trump has failed miserably.

On July 27, 2018, Trump said, "You're going to have a great health care at a much lower price. It will cost the United States nothing." Sure, tell that to the frontline Covid-19 workers who are being gouged when tested and still do not have adequate protective equipment under Trumpism. Many have no health insurance or are underinsured.

Two weeks before the 2016 election, Trump said he was "proposing a package of ethics reforms to make our government honest once again." Instead, Trump has given the American people the most relentlessly corrupt regime in reported American history. From the White House to key government agencies, Trump and his cronies daily twist and break the law.

The list of broken promises could fill volumes. Compare Trump's words and deeds and misdeeds. "We will honor the American people with the truth and nothing else." (Over 20,000 false or misleading statements so far by the Washington Post's reliable count). "We will end our chronic trade deficits." (The trade deficit is bigger now than in Obama's last year in office). That means the US is exporting jobs.

In contrast to Trump's pledge to get rid of the $19 trillion National debt "fairly quickly," he doesn't care at all about piling huge debts on the children and grandchildren of America so that he doesn't have to repeal his enormous tax cut for the wealthy and stop massive corporate welfare handouts and bailouts.

If you can endure more examples of deceitful Donald's seduction of believing voters, go to Smith's and Kristoff's websites (http://reclaimtheamericandream.org/ and https://www.nytimes.com/column/nicholas-kristof).

While visiting Smith's website note that one of his team's most important objectives is to "introduce you to multiple issues, multiple strategies, multiple organizations that can help you start a reform movement in your own community or join forces with others."

(c) 2020 Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His latest book is The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future. Other recent books include, The Seventeen Traditions: Lessons from an American Childhood, Getting Steamed to Overcome Corporatism: Build It Together to Win, and "Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us" (a novel).




We must reconceptualize how we build security both at home and abroad to uphold the
well-being and dignity of all people. Endless war has not made us, or the world, safer.



It's Time To Repeal The President's License For Endless War
Congress must rein in our government's ability to do harm in the world.
By Barbara Lee

More Americans have now died from COVID-19 than from the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Yet the United States is poised to continue spending more money on the Pentagon than the next 10 countries combined, with some 1 million troops deployed in about 175 countries. In other words, there's no end in sight for our forever wars.

Monday marked the 19th anniversary of the vote to pass the post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, a blank check to deploy U.S. military personnel anywhere in the world in the name of going after terrorists. Our country's response to that attack has had unintended and tragic consequences: war profiteering by military contractors, traumatic impact to our soldiers, and massive numbers of refugees and civilian casualties around the world.

And the high cost of waging these wars has diverted our resources and energy away from dealing with grave threats to our national security-for example, infectious diseases and the climate crisis, which is responsible for disasters, like the West Coast wildfires, that are killing more Americans every year.

Under the auspices of two laws that are now nearly 20 years old, the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs, the United States is militarily engaged in 80 countries, outside of the public eye and with little congressional oversight. The past four years have seen the Trump administration cite these laws as the legal justification to assassinate a foreign government official and take us to the brink of war with Iran, expand the U.S. military footprint in the African continent and indefinitely occupy eastern Syria.

Yet the past four years have also seen a growing recognition in Congress that-in order to rein in our excessive and reckless war-making-we must repeal these laws and reclaim the legislative branch's sole constitutional authority to declare war. Last year, that momentum culminated with the House of Representatives passing my amendments to repeal the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs in the defense appropriations bill and National Defense Authorization Act, respectively.

Continuing to build on the momentum, the House Appropriations Committee recently passed my amendment to repeal the 2001 AUMF 245 days after enactment of the legislation providing Congress ample time to debate and vote on any new authorization. Keeping this pressure on the Trump administration is not only important to show that Congress will guard against the president's ability to escalate endless war during his remaining time in office-it also helps frame the debate for a potential Biden administration.

Another important development that serves to frame future action is the Democratic platform committee's adoption of the Democratic platform. As a member of the platform drafting committee, I supported language acknowledging the widespread agreement within our party that we must repeal these decades-old authorizations, and that a replacement must be within a narrow and specific framework.

A framework must clearly define who we are at war with and where, must have a time limit and must have strict reporting requirements to Congress. Anything short of that would represent dangerous backsliding and another failure to reassert Congress' role as a coequal branch of government.

These parameters are crucial. For far too long, Congress has relied on the executive branch to tell us what does and does not constitute war, and that has led to our entanglement in conflicts from Yemen to Niger to the Philippines, at the cost of the lives of U.S. service members and hundreds of thousands of civilians.

It is clear to me that 20 years of endless war have led to massive levels of civilian harm, environmental destruction and militarization of our own and other societies around the world-not to mention an expansion of the number and influence of violent groups and conflict since these wars began. Let's make sure the public can be a part of this reckoning.

The current public awakening in response to the dual crises of a global pandemic and systemic racial injustices have exposed the gross inequity and institutionalized violence in our society. It also makes clear that we must reconceptualize how we build security both at home and abroad to uphold the well-being and dignity of all people. Endless war has not made us, or the world, safer.

Now is the time for Congress, and eventually the White House, to reckon with this reality, focus on broad reforms to end our government's ability to do harm in the world-such as by repealing the AUMFs and publicly debating any future use of military force-and finally reimagine what tools we employ to confront the threats of the 21st century.

(c) 2020 Congresswoman Barbara Lee is a Democrat representing California's 13th Congressional District. In 2001, Lee was the only member of Congress to vote against the original AUMF which authorized President George W. Bush to invade Afghanistan and has served as the legal basis of the so-called "Global War on Terror" ever since.







CEO Tricksters Cut Their Pay Without Bleeding
By Jim Hightower

COVID-19 has been a doubly-deadly disaster for millions of Americans, destroying both life and livelihoods. But one of the most heartening responses to the crisis has come from the least-expected place: Corporate executive suites.

This spring, numerous CEOs made headlines by showing some class solidarity. If we're having to wallop our workers because of a pandemic, these bosses told media interviewers, the least we can do is cut our own salaries. Yes - all in this together!

Only... not really. An analytical firm looked at the books of nearly all major US corporations, finding that a mere fraction had made any cuts to senior executive pay, and the few that did only made little nicks in the boss' take-home, rather than real cuts.

The trick is that the "sacrifices" only applied to official salaries. They are the tiniest part of a chief executive's compensation, which mostly is made up of bonuses, stock options, etc. For example, United Airlines, which is presently zeroing out the paychecks of 36,000 workers, docked its CEO's salary by nearly a third - sounds like a real gesture, but that works out to less than three percent of the $22 million he's getting in total pay. So middle-income workers get the boot, while the boss still has his job, gets more than $21 million in annual pay, and claims bragging rights for being an "ethical" corporate chieftain.

The ethical crime here is not merely in the cynical fudging of numbers, but that even in this unprecedented time of national crisis, the elites who've converted capitalism into a system of plutocratic plunder still feel entitled to cheat.

If a nation's economic system doesn't care about shared sacrifice in hard times and shared prosperity in good times, why should the majority who pay the price and are denied the gains care about that economic system?

(c) 2020 Jim Hightower's latest book, "If The Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates,"is available in a fully revised and updated paperback edition. Jim writes The Hightower Lowdown, a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America's ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org.




An insect flies by President Trump's mouth as he speaks on May 15, 2020, in Washington, D.C.




Every Trump Lie Is A Confession
A fly flies by donald trump's open mouth in a way that visually implies that it flew from there
By William Rivers Pitt

Donald Trump played host to what can only be described as a deliberate COVID super-spreader event in Nevada on Sunday. It is journalistically perilous to bandy words like "deliberate" and "super-spreader," but I watched every galling second of his rally at the Xtreme Manufacturing plant in Henderson, and those words deserve to share the same space as "water" and "wet" in the context of what went down in the desert yesterday.

A thousand of Trump's most avid devotees came from miles around to stuff themselves into an enclosed indoor space, where they stood packed like cattle in a high-density field, maskless almost to a person, screaming and sweating all over each other in an orgiastic celebration of the death of reason.

I picture a COVID-19 virion, its crowns bristling red, feet up and reclined on its Barcalounger after a hard day at work killing people, looking serenely over that mob of reckless idolators before leaning to a virion friend and saying, "Hold my beer." We will be hearing about the medical consequences from Sunday evening's event before the calendar page turns, if the pattern holds, which it has with nearly unfailing consistency since this dismal year began.

Trump's speech was an abomination of lies, distortions, exhortations and puling complaints. In other words, it was every speech he has given at every rally since he came down the golden escalator five years ago. It was a triumph of the mundane, proof itself of the banality of evil, so boring after endless repetition that none of the networks, not even C-SPAN, bothered to broadcast it. I had to work to find the thing.

As I let the bilge tide of Trump's gibberish wash over me, however, I found myself encased in a rare moment of clarity. It is difficult to think straight when the president is ruining your country in real time at the top of his voice and right in your face. That, of course, is the entire point of the exercise. "For those who have been beaten down by the Trumpian disaster porn," writes Tim Miller for The Bulwark, "rallies such as this don't really make a mark any longer."

As I watched this latest one, though, Trump seemed to me to be receding down a long hallway. I could hear him fine, but the mind-scrambling impact of his weaponized nonsense faded, and I found myself, for the first time in months, actually listening to what he was saying.

It came to me suddenly in a burst of inner light: Every accusation this man makes, every lie he tells, very nearly every word he speaks, is a public confession of his own corruption and venality. It is far beyond the Karl Rove tactic of using your opponent's best strength against them. With Trump, it is a bending of the light itself, of reality, a transference of personal responsibility so comprehensive as to be virtually seamless.

"Whether it's in North Carolina, whether it's in Michigan, whether it's in other states where they're sending out, they're going to be sending out 80 million ballots," said Trump yesterday in Nevada. "And it's Democrats. They're trying to rig this election, at every single place in the last year, year and a half, go modern day, forget about... Tiny amounts, a congressional race in New York, a small number of votes. If you go to New Jersey, if you go to Virginia, if you go to Pennsylvania, if you go to California, look at some of these races, every one of these races was a fraud, missing ballots. And I don't mean like 1 percent. I mean like 20 percent, 25 percent, they're trying to rig the election."

... says the man who is actively attempting to dismantle the United States Postal Service and the practice of mail-in voting itself, because he believes the only way he can win the election at this point is to steal it. That was a confession.

"Sleepy Joe Biden, who surrendered, you know where he is now, he's in his damn basement again," said Trump yesterday. "No, he's in his basement."

... says the man who himself surrendered utterly to COVID-19, because doing otherwise required hard work and a dollop of humility, neither of which this president would recognize if they pissed in his face. He surrendered to that COVID-bait crowd before him, to his belligerent base, because they believed him when he called the pandemic a "hoax" all those weeks ago, and now he must maintain that deadly illusion in order to maintain their loyalty. Another confession.

"Biden and his party of liberal hypocrites want to lock law-abiding Americans in their homes, which is what they're doing," said Trump. "And they want to keep them out of church."

... says the most irreligious president in U.S. history, whose use of the military and federal law enforcement against civilians - including snatching protesters off the street and stuffing them into unmarked vans - very nearly toppled the country into a constitutional crisis. Another confession.

"How about your gas prices?" asked Trump. "That's not too bad, right? You didn't think you'd ever see those prices, those under-two-dollar prices, did you? Thank you, President Trump, I appreciate it, sir."

... says the man whose lethal bungling of the pandemic brought about an economic tailspin that will take years to recover from. Want to know why gasoline is so cheap? Because the price of petroleum happily collapsed to literally less than zero after the pandemic locked down travel all around the world. This, I suppose, was his confession to being incomprehensibly oblivious to and uninterested in the ocean of suffering he has unleashed.

It's all one long stream-of-consciousness confession now. I hope I'm not the only one taking notes.

(c) 2020 William Rivers Pitt is a senior editor and lead columnist at Truthout. He is also a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of three books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know, The Greatest Sedition Is Silence and House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation. His fourth book, The Mass Destruction of Iraq: Why It Is Happening, and Who Is Responsible, co_written with Dahr Jamail, is available now on Amazon. He lives and works in New Hampshire.




U.S. President Donald Trump turns around to greet supporters after speaking at a campaign event
at Xtreme Manufacturing on September 13, 2020 in Henderson, Nevada. Trump's visit comes after Nevada
Republicans blamed Democratic Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak for blocking other events he had planned in the state.




How Should America Respond When Its President Commits Negligent? Homicide?
Holding giant rallies, as he did over the weekend, will lead to increased infection spreads and more deaths. There will be other Herman Cain's who will die in a few months because of what Trump is doing right now.
By Thom Hartmann

Bob Woodward interviewed Donald Trump back in January and February and now tells us that, way back then, Trump realized that the coronavirus was not only quite deadly and would infect even children, but also was airborne and highly contagious.

Right now it's fashionable to attack Bob Woodward for having sat on all that information, and debate whether he had a "duty to warn."

It's a reasonable discussion, but it misses the larger picture.

If Donald Trump knew how deadly Covid was, Bob Woodward could not have been the only person he told. Everybody in the Cabinet, the Vice President, the Health and Human Services Secretary, and pretty much everybody working around him in the White House had to have known.

He even put Mike Pence in charge of the coronavirus task force back then. They all knew. So rather than asking why Woodward didn't tell us, shouldn't we be asking why our government officials, who are paid to keep America safe, also didn't tell us or do anything about it?

We talk a lot about the "Trump Crime Family" but his entire Cabinet knew how bad this was last winter, too. Not only are Trump and his kids grifters and liars, but he put together an entire cabinet of grifters and liars.

In fact, it went beyond that. Senators Kelly Loeffler and Richard Burr, both Republicans, dumped stock after getting briefed about this knowledge.

A physician and professor at George Washington University has suggested that Donald Trump is guilty, at the least, of "negligent homicide." And certainly this is criminal political behavior.

Trump didn't just ignore what he knew about this virus, he actively lied about it to the American people. And he continues to lie about it to this day.

Holding giant rallies, as he did over the weekend, will lead to increased infection spreads and more deaths. There will be other Herman Cain's who will die in a few months because of what Trump is doing right now.

Other countries that took testing and contact tracing seriously are now able to return to something that resembles normalcy. Taiwan, for example, has not had a case of local transmission since April. Nobody is dying there.

We here in the United States are almost a year behind them, with our economy reduced to rubble, all because Donald Trump didn't want to "panic" the stock market.

The inaction and lies from Trump and those around him in the White House have lead to nearly a quarter-million dead Americans, more than in every war and conflict since 1945 combined.

Virtually all these deaths can be laid at the feet of those people in the White House and their leader, Donald Trump, who lied or remain silent.

How should America respond to leadership whose knowing, intentional lies and actions killed more Americans then "the enemy" in North Korea, North Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan over a 70 year period?

(c) 2020 Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program The Thom Hartmann Show.








Do We Really Know What Happened In The Past?
By James Donahue

The controversy not long ago in Texas involving the twisted adulterating of school textbooks by extreme right-wing conservative and Christian thinking members of the State Board of Education is a shining example of the distortion of world history that has been occurring.

Now with President Trump distorting the news and historical events, and introducing the concept of "fake news," the distortions are intensifying. The tearing down of the statues of people of historical significance is just one visible phase of the rewriting of history.

School and college textbooks, many of which are published in Texas, are laced with the political propaganda generated by the boards of directors that control the information that goes into the books used to instruct our children.

Among the best examples of misinformation pumped into the heads of our school children over the years has been the stories of Columbus and his discovery of America, the twisted description of the American-Indian wars, the first Thanksgiving feast at Plymouth Rock, the American Revolution, George Washington's cherry tree myth, that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, and Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman involved in the Kennedy Assassination. Then we teach the false stories that the German sinking of the Lusitania, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the 9-11 attacks all took America by surprise and led us into wars, and Saddam Hussein had to be removed from power because he was harboring weapons of mass destruction.

As a writer with a keen interest in history I have found in my research that all of these stories have been fabricated and brush-stroked to glorify the United States as a nation as well as the elected leadership in power at the time these events occurred. As a student of world history in college, I became aware that the same kind of distortions of recorded information has been occurring for centuries. It is thus logical to assume that the farther back into the past we look, the more distorted and incorrect the stories become.

For example, after great conflicts, the victorious kings and rulers usually always took it upon themselves to paint themselves as the "good guys" and the losers the evil villains. Often the records of the losing tribe or nationality were sponged as if they never existed. And we all know that tribes, nations and religious driven forces have been warring for as long as there has been documented historical record.

Powerful religious beliefs among the rulers at various moments in the past have played a major role in the distortion of facts. The Roman Catholic priests that accompanied Don Hernando Cortes and the Spanish conquistadors in the invasion of both the Aztec and Mayan nations of Central and South America succeeded in collecting and burning great libraries of written information that existed there. The priests considered these people evil spawns of Satan and had no interest in learning of their culture. Consequently all that we know of them has been learned from the few surviving manuscripts, the carved information on temple walls, and from archaeological research.

Some say the Roman Emperor Julius Caesar burned the Great Library of Alexandria, Egypt in 48 BC. Others say the church was involved in that great misdeed. Whatever the truth, it was said that this library contained a collection of all of the known manuscripts, parchments and scrolls gathered by the best scholars from all over the known world. That library and the great university established there was considered a major center of scholarship for over 300 years. Most of this wonderful information was lost to the world forever because of a strong religious doctrine that declared Christianity the only true religion. All writings by great men of other parts of the world were considered blasphemy against God.

There are many surviving documents by ancient historians depicting world history from the perspective of the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, Hebrews and even the Mesopotamians if we consider the clay tablets that contained The Epic of Gilgamesh an historical story. Were Homer's great songs, the Iliad and the Odyssey works of national pride or based on historical fact? The farther back we reach, the foggier the information becomes.

Then there are the myths that reach into ancient Greece that include the strange stories of the lost continents of Atlantis and Mu. Did they exist?

Archaeological discoveries have turned up evidence of great structures lying deep under the seas of the world. We have found other stone monuments, too massive for mere mortals to have constructed even with modern power tools. And then there have been the strange discoveries of things deep in the rock under our feet that should not be there . . . manufactured jewelry, iron nails, and a spark plug discovered in a California coal mine.

Maintaining the true historical record of who we are, where we have been, and the motives for what we have done to one another in the past is probably one of the most important things we should have been doing. The old adage: those that forget the past are bound to repeat it, appears to ring true. Yet we have been careless about keeping these important records. It was more important for those in power to rewrite history for their own personal glory than it was to preserve the truth.

Because of current financial troubles, the money for running our schools has been reduced. With Betsy DeVos now operating as national education director, her attacks on public education have been severe. Among the first classes to be cut from the high school curriculums has been history and cursive writing. What are they thinking?

Our failure to preserve and cherish the true historical record may be why humans have failed to evolve from the proud, plundering war-like animals we have always been. Until we learn better, we dare not consider ourselves truly civilized.

(c) 2020 James L. Donahue is a retired newspaper reporter, editor and columnist with more than 40 years of experience in professional writing. He is the published author of five books, all dealing with Michigan history, and several magazine articles.









Unvanquishable Number
By David Swanson

On September 21, the International Day of Peace, you will be able to watch online the new film "We Are Many," and you darn well should. The topic is the single biggest day of activism on earth: February 15, 2003 - an unprecedented statement against war, too often forgotten, and far too often misunderstood.

On every continent (yes, Antarctica included) in 72 countries and 789 cities people turned out by the tens of millions. In many cases, this was by far the largest demonstration ever seen in particular cities and countries, as well as on this particular planet. Its message was crystal clear: No to war. No to a U.S.-led war on Iraq.

Everything peace activists would tell you in subsequent years about the need to appeal to people's selfishness, to make it about dollars and veterans, to not sound too moralistic - none of that was anywhere to be found when extended families and neighbors flooded the streets. Like most activism, this was a passionate stand taken on behalf of unknown masses of people hundreds or thousands of miles away - faceless people whom most demonstrators never expected to meet or even to learn "humanizing" details about. This was a rejection of mass murder because rejecting mass murder is what decent people do.

There are faces and voices in this film of some of the most decent people one could ever hope to know, and I feel privileged to have known many of them in the struggle against war. Countless amazing activists and related details are necessarily missing, but many are in this film, including some no longer with us in the world. They speak in this film looking back from years later, but also in footage from that time. And it is the footage from that time that is most powerful. To have video of people clearly warning of catastrophe, with accurate detail, and to be able to play it back post-catastrophe; this is as powerful a use of video as capturing the crimes of police or the confessions of candidates.

The Iraq war lies were typical war lies in their dishonesty and malevolence. But they were atypical in how poorly they were told and in the length of the period over which they were told. The U.S. government spent many months escalating the bombing in Iraq, seeking to kickstart a war, hyping up pro-war sentiment, pretending to be trying to avoid war, and telling quintessentially obvious lies that would have justified nothing even if true. Nobody ever mentions it, but I think much of the public recognized that the lies about weapons and connections to 9/11 were, like all war lies, not just lies but also off-topic. The governments threatening war over weapons, themselves openly possessed those weapons. Participation in a crime is not typically grounds for committing a larger crime, but for criminal prosecution. So, people turned out en masse, not just to say "They're lying," but fundamentally to say "No war."

There was indignation, outrage, and, yes, anger at the politicians pushing the war. There was also belief that the war could be prevented. This was a response to activist organizing, but more so to the actions of governments as presented in corporate media. The global day of action planned for February 15th grew by word of mouth - it was not organized top-down by a global organization. In Rome that day there were so many marches, all marching for the same cause, that two of them ran head-on into each other.

Included in the film, importantly, are some who got it wrong - even some who have still got it wrong. People in power in the United States and United Kingdom proposed a war for democracy, while blatantly opposing anything resembling democracy. While millions marched against war, officials had the unfathomable arrogance to believe they knew better. And some of them, shown in this film, still keep up that pretense years later, either supporting the war or claiming they were fooled and would have acted more wisely if they'd known then what they know now. But how did I and all my friends and wall-to-wall crowds of people pressing through New York streets know then what people given special insider reports were incapable of knowing? Through the exact opposite of democracy, I would say.

Now, the crowds in the streets were not the whole of the United States. And they were certainly not given appropriate coverage in corporate media. And while we may have been many, we were not as many as we should have been. And we were constantly led to falsely believe we were not many at all. But that was the power of the huge marches. They showed people that they were many. There should have been another march every week, and on weekdays, and disruptive of business as usual, with creative and escalating nonviolent action. But to the limited - yet significant - extent that there were such follow-up actions, they were largely inspired by the big marches, not made possible by the failure to march another time.

When the war was launched despite all the protests, that was a moment to increase the activism, not give up. A lot of people, mainly those least involved, gave up, or latched onto the support-the-troops propaganda that makes it so much harder to stop a war than to prevent one. In the U.S., many opponents of a Republican war were maneuvered by Democrats into supporting the war. Only those who opposed war regardless of political party kept working against the wars.

The war on Iraq was launched. The war was horrific. This movie shows that horror. There can be no denying it. But there is little doubt the war would have been even worse without the resistance. There is no question that various additional nations would have joined in. Clearly, the United Nations refused to approve of the war because of the public pressure on various members of the United Nations. And it became possible to oppose numerous newly proposed wars more easily. "We Are Many" includes the 2013 drama in which the U.S. and British governments were again pushing similar propaganda for a similar crime, this one a war on Syria. The Parliament and Congress rejected that war, largely because of public pressure and the memory of and accountability for the votes on attacking Iraq. It had been 231 years since a British Parliament had said no to a war when it said no to war on Syria. A war on Iran has been similarly stopped more than once since the war on Iraq wasn't.

Countless other positive developments have come out of the activism shown here, some of them included in the film. February 15th inspired people in Egypt who held an unprecedented public demonstration the day after the war began, and who built from that new-found power straight to the overthrow of Mubarak in 2011. The struggle for justice in Egypt, as everywhere, is ongoing. It is understood by many of those in it as something no corporate media outlet would ever tell you: an offshoot of a global movement to prevent war.

One key lesson offered by "We Are Many" is this: If people ever again pack the world's streets and squares by the millions to say no to war, it will be difficult to ignore the fact that the first time they did it they were defying the political establishment and they were 100% indisputably and unvanquishably right.

(c) 2020 David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He is a 2015 and 2016 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.




Two children in masks due to pollution from peat farms the world's wealthiest 10 per cent
produces close to half the world's consumption-related emissions, compared
to just 10 per cent by humanity's poorest half.



Our Children Shouldn't Have To Pay For Our Excesses
By David Suzuki

This year, "Earth Overshoot Day" came later than it has in 15 years - on August 22. That's a mixed blessing. Increasing per capita consumption, population growth and rising greenhouse gas emissions had been moving the date earlier almost every year since the 1970s. It's fallen in late July or early August for the past few years.

"Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity's demand for ecological resources and services in a given year exceeds what Earth can regenerate in that year," according to the organization behind the concept, Global Footprint Network. Even with the later overshoot date, we burned through a year's resources in under eight months. That means we would need 1.6 Earths to support humanity's current demands on the planet's ecosystems.

Employing the many readily available and emerging solutions to "move the date" closer to year's end is the goal, but this later-than-expected overshoot day was largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic rather than direct measures to address the climate emergency and other crises.

According to the Network, the global pandemic slowdown helped drive the world's carbon footprint (that is, emissions) down by 14.5 per cent and the forest product footprint by 8.4 per cent from 2019, with an overall 9.3 per cent reduction in humanity's global ecological footprint.

Network president Mathis Wackernagel sees this year's result as an encouraging sign that progress is possible, but cautions that it must be made "by design not by disaster."

He compares our behaviour to a scam where current wealth must be repaid by others in the future: "Most countries have pretty strict laws about businesses running Ponzi schemes but somehow in the ecological domain we think it's okay," he says in the Guardian. "We've only got one planet and that's not going to change. We've got a very simple choice, one-planet prosperity or one-planet misery."

This further illustrates the need for a pandemic recovery that goes beyond returning to "normal" and for measures to address environmental crises that go beyond pandemic recovery.

Global Footprint Network focuses on five areas: planet, cities, energy, food and population. Its research and solutions align with the work of many organizations, including Project Drawdown and the David Suzuki Foundation. Everything starts from the recognition that humanity depends on fertile soil and clean air and water for our well-being and health.

Because cities already consume 78 per cent of the world's energy and produce more than 60 per cent of its greenhouse gas emissions, and we're becoming increasingly urban, "City planning and urban development strategies are instrumental to balancing the supply of natural capital and population's demand."

The David Suzuki Foundation's energy transition research concurs that decarbonizing the economy is critical to addressing climate disruption. Shifting to more local food systems and plant-based diets, avoiding processed foods and reforming agricultural practices are also important.

Rapid population growth is also unsustainable, although consumption is a much greater problem -evidenced by the fact that the world's wealthiest 10 per cent produces close to half the world's consumption-related emissions, compared to just 10 per cent by humanity's poorest half.

Research shows the best way to slow population growth is to empower women. With greater access to education and family-planning resources, as well as increased equality and better economic opportunities, women have fewer children and often have them later in life.

Project Drawdown estimates family-planning resources and education for girls (which, it notes, should be basic human rights) could slow human population growth by one billion by 2050, consequentially keeping more than 85 gigatonnes of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere.

Although slowing population growth is important, we can't resolve the climate crisis if we don't reduce the amount of resources we consume, especially in the developed world. As Global Footprint Network points out, we're consuming resources at a much faster rate than Earth is able to replenish them. That's led not just to the climate crisis, but also to a profound extinction and biodiversity crisis and continuing environmental devastation.

COVID-19 has put humanity on pause and exposed some of our current system's flaws. It has also shown that we can slow consumption and move on to something better than the old "normal." We're at a crossroads and we must act quickly.

(c) 2020 Dr. David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author, and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation.









Scientists At These Agencies Should Stage A Walkout
The Trump administration* is installing hacks throughout the government to barber reports on the climate crisis and the pandemic.
By Charles P. Pierce

The most recent outrage against good government and common sense involves the technique most popular down at Camp Runamuck. If it's not installing a useful tool at the U.S. Postal Service, it's making sure a hopeless hack is in a position to barber the reports on the pandemic at the Centers for Disease Control. And what better time than right now, when the climate crisis is contributing not only to the torching of the western third of the country, but also to a view of the Atlantic and Caribbean in which hurricanes, both full and developing, are lined up like overseas flights arriving at JFK, to install at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration a guy who doesn't believe in the climate crisis at all? From NPR:

David Legates, a University of Delaware professor of climatology who has spent much of his career questioning basic tenets of climate science, has been hired for a top position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Legates confirmed to NPR that he was recently hired as NOAA's deputy assistant secretary of commerce for observation and prediction. The position suggests that he reports directly to Neil Jacobs, the acting head of the agency that is in charge of the federal government's sprawling weather and climate prediction work...

Legates circled up with a group of like-minded individuals in 2016.

Legates has a long history of using his position as an academic scientist to publicly cast doubt on climate science. His appointment to NOAA comes as Americans face profound threats stoked by climate change, from the vast, deadly wildfires in the West to an unusually active hurricane season in the South and East. Global temperatures have already risen nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 19th century as a result of greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. Warming is happening the fastest at the Earth's poles, where sea ice is melting, permafrost is thawing and ocean temperatures are heating up, with devastating effects on animals and humans alike.

In 2007, Legates was one of the authors of a paper that questioned previous findings about the role of climate change in destroying the habitat of polar bears. That research was partially funded by grants from Koch Industries, the American Petroleum Institute lobbying group and ExxonMobil, according to InsideClimate News. The same year, Delaware Gov. Ruth Ann Minner sent a letter to Legates expressing concern about his opinions on climate change, given that he was the state climatologist at the time. Minner asked him to refrain from casting doubt on climate science when he was acting in his official role. Legates stepped down in 2011.

I get tired of asking this question, but where in the hell are the principled resignations? Who are these scientists that allow their reports to be edited by a meandering bag of flopsweat like Michael Caputo? There have been a number of whistleblowers who have emerged since this administration* infested the government. We all know who most of them are, and god save the good work. There appear to be a couple more every day. But there ought to be hundreds of them at this point.

The very deliberate strategy of staffing the federal government with unqualified hacks dedicated to crippling the very agencies they were appointed to run-a strategy, I might add, that is another example of how the prion disease acquired by the GOP during the Reagan years accounts for its full-blown madness under El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago needs to be countered with a strategy just as drastic. If ever there was a time for a general walk-out of public bureaucrats, this is it.

(c) 2020 Charles P. Pierce has been a working journalist since 1976. He is the author of four books, most recently 'Idiot America.' He lives near Boston with his wife but no longer his three children.







The Quotable Quote-



"You just breathe the air and that's how it's passed. And so, that's a very tricky one. Thats a very delicate one. It's also more deadly than even your strenuous flu. This is deadly stuff. "
~~~ Donald Trump ~ February 7, 2020





California Gov. Gavin Newsom tours area destroyed by North Complex fire on Friday, September 11, 2020.




Climate Emergency Overdrive: Our Age Of Compound Disasters As 10% Of Oregon Is Evacuated, California Burns, And Louisiana Sinks
Mother Nature is trying to tell us something but we are not listening.
By Juan Cole

It is astonishing to me that we still have 287 million gasoline vehicles on our roads and that 20 percent of our electricity comes from burning dirty coal. We just go on blithely pumping over 5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, a powerful and dangerous heat-trapping gas, into the atmosphere annually. It is like setting off atomic bombs in the atmosphere. We know this. And yet as a society we are virtually paralyzed. Our Neanderthal-in-chief actually promotes coal burning, and the Republican Party is a Siamese twin with Big Oil.

The presidential candidates aren't even talking about it much, and it was an issue largely excluded by the corporate press and the party machines from the primary debates.

While individuals with the resources can cut down on their carbon footprints with solar panels and electric cars (they are a good combination), the problem can't be tackled effectively without government action. And there, the United States has failed. It has been made to fail by Big Carbon and greedy politicians and ignorant journalists and an apathetic public that apparently doesn't care if their children or grandchildren face a choice of being burned up or drowning.

If you go back and look at the predictions of climate scientists about 2020, you'll see that they gave a range, of best- and worst-case scenarios. In every instance, it is the worst case scenario that has come to pass. Even the most jaded and alarmed scientists in 2000 were not pessimistic enough.

Mother Nature is trying to tell us something but we are not listening.

Diana Leonard and Andrew Freedman at WaPo write, "These wildfires are what is known as a compound disaster, in which more than one extreme event takes place at the same time, across a varied geography. While climate scientists have been warning that compound disasters are an inevitable result of human-caused climate change, a spate of simultaneously burning, rapidly expanding fires spanning the entire West Coast was not expected for several more decades if greenhouse gas emissions remain high."

1. 3.1 million acres of California have been scorched this year by wildfires, the largest number in recorded history, and thousands of homes have been destroyed. Some 200,000 are going without electricity in a bid to stop more fires. Christina Walker at CNN reports that California wildfires have increased 8x in size 1970, and the number of acres burned is up 500%.

CNN quotes Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research: "climate change has not just made the extreme heat waves that coincided with the fires worse. The bigger effect is the more subtle, long-term warming," he said. "That couple of degrees of (average) warming over decades ... you don't notice it as much, but it's still there lurking in the background, sucking extra moisture out of the vegetation and the soil."

A study has just demonstrated that the number of extreme-danger fire days has doubled since 1980 in California because of global heating.

2. Wildfires have burned a million acres in Oregon, and Timothy Bella, Marisa Iati and Hannah Knowles at WaPo report that state officials are worried about a "mass fatality incident" that will overwhelm local health care facilities. Fully 10 percent of the state's population, some 500,000 people, have been ordered evacuated.

3. Joseph O'Sullivan reports at the Seattle Times that Washington state has seen over 600,000 acres burned. It is also part of the expanding Compound Disaster. This is the most acreage burnt in recorded history except for 2015. Governor Jay Inslee, in keeping with the spirit of Compound Disaster, is trying to provide shelter to some of the 500,000 fleeing Oregonians.

4. Nature is not disconnected from human society or from the economy, as Trump and his ilk imagine. Jeff Dukes writes in the Chicago Tribune about the effect of global heating on the Midwest:

"In the Midwest, we regularly see crops ruined by droughts or floods. We expect wetter springs, bigger downpours and more variable precipitation during hotter summers to crash yields more often. The agricultural banks that many farmers depend on for credit are typically small and disproportionately exposed to these regional extreme weather events." The Midwest is facing the opposite problem from the West, of increased downpours and crop damage. What we seldom stop to think about is the rolling farm bankruptcies it will produce and hence the rolling bank failures.
5. Hurricane Laura visited devastation on Louisiana and struck up to Arkansas. It landed as nearly a Category 4 Hurricane, and it if had hit more populous areas it would have been an even bigger disaster. Sarah Gibbons at National Geographic lays out the dangers of such enormous storms. They are causing coastal erosion, literally just taking away the state's land. As the icecaps melt, the Gulf of Mexico is rising (and the water is heating, so it expands). That sea level rise is exacerbating the sinking of the Delta because levees no longer let the Mississippi lay down silt.

Hot sea water and extra moisture in the air from heat-driven evaporation is fueling super-hurricanes in the Gulf that are more powerful and cause more downpours than anything in recorded history. This heating is from us driving our cars and burning our coal and other ways we generate heat-trapping gases.

(c) 2020 Juan R.I. Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He has written extensively on modern Islamic movements in Egypt, the Persian Gulf and South Asia and has given numerous media interviews on the war on terrorism and the Iraq War. He lived in various parts of the Muslim world for nearly 10 years and continues to travel widely there. He speaks Arabic, Farsi and Urdu.







The Dead Letter Office-





Roger gives the corporate salute

Heil Trump,

Dear Politischer Betruger Stone,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling, and last year's winner Volksjudge Samuel (Sammy the con) Alito.

Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your suggestion that der Fuhrer should declare Marshall Law if he loses to Joe Biden and order the arrest of Harry Reid, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and the Clintons. Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Rethuglican Whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Trump at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 10-10-2020. We salute you Herr Stone Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Pence

Heil Trump





Citizen Musk
We're back to the excesses of the Gilded Age, and Elon Musk is a modern-day robber baron.
By Robert Reich

The problem isn't only that Elon Musk has a net worth of about $100 billion when tens of millions of Americans are barely getting by. It's that he's made this money while treating his workers so badly. His wealth quadrupled during the 4 months Tesla forced all workers to take a 10 percent pay cut.

Musk initially dismissed worries about the coronavirus as "dumb" and speculated there would be "probably close to zero new cases" in the United States by the end of April. He was obviously wrong. But even in April, Musk was still at it, tweeting "FREE AMERICA NOW" in response to stay-at-home orders. The next day, on the company's earnings call, he called quarantine measures "fascist": and demanded that officials return people's "freedom."

In May, Musk reopened the company's factory in Fremont, California - which employs about 12,000 people - in direct defiance of county orders. His defiance won the support of President Trump. Workers on the production line piled into cars they were building, standing and sitting next to each other as they installed components. Employees say equipment was not wiped down between shifts.

Just days later, the first Tesla workers tested positive for Covid-19.

Musk did tell workers that if they had reservations about working during a pandemic, they could remain home and take unpaid leave. But after county officials finally agreed to allow Tesla to officially reopen, Tesla fired workers who continued to take unpaid leave - even as Covid-19 cases continued to rise.

For years, Tesla workers have complained about high injury rates as a result of the company making them work long hours on machinery that isn't safe. They've also complained about low wages: Tesla employees are paid less than other employees in the auto industry. Not incidentally, Tesla is the only large US automaker without a unionized workforce.

Last year, a California judge ruled that Musk and other company executives were illegally sabotaging employee efforts to form a union - harassing workers passing out union pamphlets in the parking lot, banning employees from wearing pro-union T-shirts and buttons, repeatedly interrogating union organizers and eventually firing one of them, and distributing anti-union messages in tweets from Musk himself.

These are all unfair labor practices but there's no financial penalty for them. Tesla merely had to agree to stop it, hire back the fired employee, and pay lost wages. In other words, a slap on the wrist.

Musk makes a big deal about giving workers shares of stock in the firm. What he doesn't say is he's threatened to take away the stock if workers exercise their legal right to form a union - which is itself an unfair labor practice.

At least forty other workers' rights cases are pending against Musk and Tesla. Two former Tesla security employees have filed whistleblower complaints charging, among other things, that Tesla spied on workers. Another former employee alleges the company ignored black employees' reports of rampant racism. And on and on.

We're back to the excesses of the Gilded Age, and Elon Musk is a modern-day robber baron.

(c) 2020 Robert B. Reich has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. His latest book is "Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few." His web site is www.robertreich.org.




President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference at the White House on September 10, 2020.



Trump Voices Support For Extrajudicial Executions By Police
Where does pundit savviness end and an invitation to fascism begin?
By Jake Johnson

Discussing the recent police killing of a self-described anti-fascist suspected of fatally shooting a far-right activist in Portland, Oregon, President Donald Trump openly endorsed extrajudicial executions in a Fox News interview Saturday, declaring that "there has to be retribution."

"I put out, When are you going to go get him?' And the U.S. Marshals went in to get him," the president told Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, referring to Michael Forest Reinoehl. "This guy was a violent criminal, and the U.S. Marshals killed him. And I'll tell you something-that's the way it has to be. There has to be retribution."

Trump's comments came days after an ordained minister who lives in an apartment complex near where Reinoehl was shot and killed by members of a law enforcement task force earlier this month in Lacey, Washington said it was not at all clear that Reinoehl was armed when police gunned him down.

As the Washington Post reported, the witness alleges that "Reinoehl was clutching a cellphone and eating a gummy worm as he walked to his car... That's when officers opened fire without first announcing themselves or trying to arrest him." The witness account contradicts the law enforcement narrative that Reinoehl "produced a firearm" when officers attempted to arrest him. In VICE interview before he was killed by police, Reinoehl said he was acting in self-defense late last month when he fatally shot Aaron Danielson, a member of the far-right group Patriot Prayer.

Watch Trump's remarks:

Lawmakers and other observers immediately raised alarm at Trump's celebration of the police killing of Reinoehl, which the president explicitly characterized as retaliatory.

"State violence to advance the end of 'retribution' is death squad logic," tweeted Brian Beutler of Crooked Media.

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) noted that "extrajudicial killings are something many Republican U.S. senators oppose if they happen outside of the United States."

"But they won't say anything about this," Schatz added. "Every single member of the Senate who talks about the rule of law needs to speak up, or forever hold their peace."

(c) 2020 Jake Johnson is an author and staff writer for Common Dreams



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To End On A Happy Note-





Have You Seen This-






Parting Shots-






Trump Agrees To Be Interviewed For New Book By Joe Biden
By Andy Borowitz

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)-In a decision that surprised many political insiders, Donald J. Trump has agreed to be interviewed for a new book by Joe Biden.

According to Biden, the book will be "an in-depth examination of the Trump Presidency, with special emphasis on his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and his comments about the military."

Trump said that, when Biden approached him about the book project, "I moved on it very strongly."

"This is a fantastic opportunity for me, quite frankly," Trump said. "It's going to be a major book, and I think Joe is going to make me look really good in it."

Asked about the logistics of the interview, Trump said, "Joe told me to call him up late at night and just start rambling. This is the kind of thing I'm really, really good at, because I'm very smart."

Biden's book, titled "Don't Vote for Donald Trump," is set to go on sale a week before the election.

(c) 2020 Andy Borowitz




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Issues & Alibis Vol 20 # 38 (c) 09/18/2020


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