Sam Pizzigati at Inequality.org writes—Confronting Climate Change in a Deeply Unequal World. The global reaction to two landmark new reports suggests the planet could well lose that confrontation:
Two meticulously sourced — and deeply disturbing — warnings about our shared global future have appeared over the past week. One has terrified much of the world. The other hasn’t, not yet at least, but most certainly should.
You’ve most likely already encountered the first of these warnings, a grim reportfrom the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a broad and distinguished panel of the world’s top climate scientists. They’re advising us that the level of global warming that governments once saw as “safe” would, if ever reached, trigger catastrophic dangers.
Humanity has, the scientists tell us, about a dozen years to get our environmental act together. Or else . . .
The second warning came from researchers at Oxfam, the global anti-poverty charity that has emerged as a top critic of our world’s increasingly concentrated income and wealth. Oxfam and the nonprofit Development Finance International have been working over recent years to develop an index that tracks how well the world’s nations are moving “to tackle the gap between rich and poor.”
Oxfam released what amounted to a “beta” version of this index last year. The just-released second version, entitled The Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index 2018, offers us a considerably clearer picture of what nations are and aren’t doing to make our world more equal.
The bottom line of the new Oxfam analysis: Nations aren’t doing nearly enough. Oxfam’s researchers examined the records of 157 nations. Of these 157, 112 “are doing less than half of what the best performers are managing to do.” [...]
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QUOTATION
“Entomologist Dr. Ovid Byron speaking to television journalist, Tina, who says, re: global warming, "Scientists of course are in disagreement about whether this is happening and whether humans have a role." He replies: "The Arctic is genuinely collapsing. Scientists used to call these things the canary in the mine. What they say now is, The canary is dead. We are at the top of Niagara Falls, Tina, in a canoe. There is an image for your viewers. We got here by drifting, but we cannot turn around for a lazy paddle back when you finally stop pissing around. We have arrived at the point of an audible roar. Does it strike you as a good time to debate the existence of the falls?”
~~Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior (2012)
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BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2007—The SEIU chessboard:
John Edwards took a serious hit when he failed to garner the SEIU endorsement. Rather than a national endorsement, the union decided to give each local the power to make their own endorsements.
This means, most importantly, that the national SEIU's significant war chest and its campaign operatives are out of commission in this primary. It also means members of locals can only campaign out of their state in places where those locals have endorsed the same candidate.
So the Iowa local endorsed Edwards. Yeay Edwards! Except that Iowa's SEIU is small, with just 2,000 members. But neighboring Illinois has one of the biggest SEIU locals—100,000. Also nearby Indiana has another 70,000. Obama scored a coup by getting their endorsement. They're off the table for the Iowa battle.
What about New Hampshire? 10,000 members, and another 70,000 in neighboring Massachusetts. But the regional mother lode is New York with 300,000 members. Edwards could sure use those guys and gals, but Hillary Clinton is the state's senator, and they're unlikely to piss off someone who might still be the state's senator after the primary. So she's the prohibitive favorite for the New York endorsement, again depriving Edwards of valuable boots on the ground and blunting the PR value of the endorsements he does get.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Republicans said tax cuts would pay for themselves, again. They didn't. Again. Is Mrs. Papadopoulos a Russian spy? Of course not! She's 34! Sound stupid? Armando thought so too. WH says DiFi leaked Ford's letter. More likely they did it. Sears vs The Man.
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