n2doc
n2doc's JournalHow America's rich betrayed their fellow citizens
The author F Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that the “rich are different than you and me”.
Fitzgerald’s observation rings especially true today. The growing divide between the wealthy and everyone else is one of the pre-eminent issues of the 2016 presidential election. A tidal wave of public anger over income inequality and the decline of the middle class has made the rich a popular target on the campaign trail. The best example is the remarkable success of Bernie Sanders, who has tapped into the populist spirit of the electorate by calling for a “political revolution” against the “billionaire class”.
Republicans routinely condemn such rhetoric as the reckless promotion of “class warfare” by irresponsible populists, but the reality is class conflict is a two-way street.
Sanders and other populists did not create the class tensions in American society. Instead, wealthy Americans themselves played a central role in creating the conditions that gave rise to the angry and populist mood of the 2016 election.
The economic data make clear why populism is the dominant theme of the 2016 campaign.
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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/25/america-wealthy-class-betrayed-inequality
White House sits down with marijuana law reformers today
Just a few weeks after staging a huge smoke-in at the White House gates, cannabis law reform advocates are getting a meeting with the Obama Administration today.
DC Marijuana Justice (DCMJ) co-founders Adam Eidinger and Nikolas Schiller, who led Washington D.C.’s successful marijuana legalization initiative in 2014, are scheduled to meet with an unnamed policy advisor this morning in the White House, according to DCMJ releases.
The goal: discuss why cannabis does not deserve to be federally designated as among the most dangerous substances on the planet.
That designation has increasingly come under fire by lawmakers, researchers, doctors and the public. About 61 percent of Americans support legalizing marijuana.
“This is an opportunity for the White House to meet with serious and committed cannabis activists and hear our case for why it’s in President Obama’s best interest to work with the attorney general to fully remove cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act, ” stated DCMJ communications director Schiller.
The meeting is scheduled for 1:30 p.m. today and is expected to last 30-45 minutes, and is considered groundbreaking. Members of the group Weed for Warriors, including former Paratrooper and Attorney Brandon Wyatt, will give interviews at a press conference on Pennsylvania Avenue after their meeting.
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http://blog.sfgate.com/smellthetruth/2016/04/25/white-house-sits-down-with-marijuana-law-reformers-today/
Desert dolphins: plan to bring animals to Arizona for show outrages activists
by Oliver Milman
A plan to transport a group of dolphins to the Arizona desert so tourists can pay to frolic with them has come under fire from animal welfare activists who claim the attraction will be harmful to people as well as the dolphins.
More than 100,000 people have signed a petition against a plan for a Dolphinaris to be established on tribal land near Scottsdale, Arizona. The facility would house dolphins in pools and allow people to swim with and ride the marine mammals.
Dolphinaris is already established in five locations in Mexico. Its parent company, Ventura Entertainment, is looking to expand to the US with the Arizona attraction, which will be near OdySea in the Desert – a 35-acre complex featuring sharks, turtles and penguins.
OdySea has denied that it is affiliated with the Dolphinaris project. According to reports in the Mexican media, the $20m Dolphinaris development is set to open in July. A protest against the attraction is planned for 7 May.
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http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/25/dolphins-arizona-dolphinaris-odysea-animal-rights-activists-outraged
Six Cases of Measles reported in Tennesee
By Tom Charlier of The Commercial Appeal
Shelby County health officials said Monday that six cases of measles have been confirmed — a threefold increase from the two announced late last week.
The cases involve a "very diverse" group of patients in terms of age and place of residence, said Dr. Helen Morrow, health officer for the Health Department. Some of the cases appear to be linked, she said, but health officials have not identified the source of the outbreak.
The patients, who live in "every quadrant" of the county, are expected to recover completely, Morrow said. But she declined to give further information, citing privacy laws.
Measles is a highly contagious viral infection that is preventable through vaccines that typically are administered to children as they turn 1 year old and before entering kindergarten. Usually, the infection causes only a minor illness, but it can trigger life-threatening complications.
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http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/six-cases-of-measles-confirmed-in-shelby-county-3151e759-0661-1cb5-e053-0100007f6283--376987051.html
“To me, time folds back on itself”: Prince squirreled away 26 albums’ worth of unreleased music
he musical legacy left behind by Prince, who died on Thursday (Apr. 21), might be even richer than previously imagined.
In addition to the 39 studio albums the artist released, his Minnesota mansion is home to a vault of 26 albums’ worth of unpublished music.
“I’ve vaulted so much stuff, going way back to the ’80s, because I didn’t want people to hear it—it wasn’t ready,” the musician told the New York Post last year. “One day I’ll go back and finish it, and it’ll feel like no time has passed. To me, time folds back on itself.”
“It’s an actual bank vault, with a thick door,” Susan Rogers, Prince’s former sound engineer, told the Guardian in 2015 ahead of a BBC radio documentary about the stash of music.
http://qz.com/668807/to-me-time-folds-back-on-itself-prince-squirreled-away-26-albums-worth-of-unreleased-music/
Kansas Governor Likens Destitute Food Stamps Recipients To Procrastinating College Kids
For over five years now, Kansas has served as an economic policy experiment for anti-tax, small-government conservatives. Their lab work is costing the state hundreds of millions of dollars, crippling public service budgets, and making life harder for low-income families without reducing the state’s poverty rate at all.
With his political star beginning to tarnish, Gov. Sam Brownback (R) came to Washington on Wednesday to discuss his poverty policies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. At one point, the embattled governor justified his policy of forcing people off of food stamps if they can’t find a job by likening low-income and jobless people to lazy college students.
The event was convened around a policy he pioneered: Reinstating a rigid 20-hour-per-week work requirement that federal law allowed him to waive because unemployment was still high at the time in his state. The rules are duplicative — federal law requires the able-bodied adults targeted by the move to accept reasonable job offers at all times, even when a weekly work-hours waiver is in place — and run counter to a lot of policy thinking about how best to get jobless food stamps recipients back to work.
“You probably went to college. You had a lot of papers you had to write. When do most people do their papers in college? My guess is most of you, if I polled you, you would say the night before it was due,” Brownback said. “That’s just kind of who we are as people. And the work requirement is much the same thing.”
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http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2016/04/25/3772113/brownback-aei-food-stamps-college-paper/
Seymour Hersh Weighs In on Sanders vs. Clinton: "Something Amazing Is Happening in This Country"
Legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh weighs in on the foreign policy positions of the 2016 presidential candidates. "For me to say who I’m going to vote for and all that … I’m not a political leader, that’s not what I’m into," Hersh says. "But I will say this: Something that’s amazing is happening in this country, and for the first time, I do think it’s going to be very hard for a lot of the people who support Sanders to support Hillary Clinton. … There’s a whole group of young people in America, across the board, all races, etc., etc., who have just had it with our system."
Please check back later for full transcript.
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/4/25/seymour_hersh_weighs_in_on_sanders
F.B.I. Says Killing Man Was Justified, but Not Shooting His Tire
WASHINGTON — When Jameel Harrison, a suspected drug dealer, attempted to escape from F.B.I agents trying to arrest him near a Baltimore shopping center two years ago, agents opened fire. Two bullets hit his Infiniti FX37’s left front tire. Six bullets struck him in the head and neck, killing him.
After investigating the case, a state prosecutor and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division declined to prosecute the agents. That left the F.B.I.’s shooting incident review group, a panel of officials who decide whether shootings comply with bureau policy on the use of lethal force and that rarely punishes agents. In 2013, The New York Times reported that of more than 150 episodes in which an agent shot another person dating back at least two decades, the group deemed every one justified.
In the case of the Baltimore shooting, however, the bureau took the unusual step of deeming part of that case a “bad shoot” in agents’ parlance. But the group did not fault the two agents who killed Mr. Harrison. Instead, it chastised only the agent who shot the tire, recommending that the agent be suspended for a day without pay, according to documents obtained by The Times in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
The review group’s reasoning was that the bureau’s policy on using lethal force forbids firing a gun to disable a vehicle, and it concluded that this had been the agent’s motive in shooting the tire. But the same policy permits firing a gun to protect people from danger, and the panel decided that the two agents who shot Mr. Harrison were trying to keep him from driving into bystanders.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/23/us/fbi-says-killing-man-was-justified-but-not-shooting-his-tire.html
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