A four-year-old dual Israeli-American citizen was among the 17 more hostages released by Hamas today. Israel released 39 Palestinian prisoners, all of whom were under 19 years old. Hamas has expressed interest in extending the truce; Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has echoed that interest so long as each day brings at least ten more hostages out of captivity. Officials from the U.S., Egypt, and Qatar continue to negotiate.
Along with these challenges ...which will not end......I want to praise the brilliant, freedom-loving men and women who sacrifice themselves....their gifts, talents, time (and for their precious families who sacrifice their presence) for working with other countries to maintain peace and a better goodness in this world.
It is easy to blame and "throw stones" but peace...negotiation is difficult. My heart is deeply moved by the leaders of other nations who have been a major part of these negotiations.
Peace is more profitable for everyone except for those who deal in weapons of war.
President Joe Biden and his team have demonstrated that negotion works. He has demonstrated that people of various faiths/beliefs can work together and want to work together for a more productive and profitable world for everyone.
President Joe Biden and his brilliant, hardworking team have shown us what is possible. Other powerful leaders in this world have demonstrated that peace and decency are possible.
Younger or older....who stands in higher regard at home or around the world, than our President Joe Biden and the USA's team of diplomats? (I do not believe the polls!)
Thank you, Emily, for this post especially your noting that negotiations are difficult. I have great impatience with those who persist on throwing stones. Also you note the profits of war which Mitch points out when he observes that help to Ukraine gives profit to defense industries here. I did love Heather noting how much we spend on beer and snacks in contrast to foreign aid. That is somehow disgusting.
The stats on beer and snacks were eye opening. So, we as an overweight nation could use to lose a few pounds, improve our health, and keep Russia from over powering Eastern Europe. What a win win opportunity..
Credit where it's due, Heather was quoting Tom Nichols on the beer and snacks numbers. Tom's article is well written and worth reading if you can access The Atlantic.
You should submit your statement to your newspaper(s). We certainly see very little press on all the good the Biden/Harris Team is doing on many different fronts, foreign and domestic. It’s up to each of us to spread the word.
How can you say Biden has done a great job of diplomacy? It took him over a month to get some progress. Yet in that time over 15,000 Gaza citizens, close half of them children, have been killed by Israeli bombings. Biden could have stopped this by telling the Israel right wing leaders to stope it immediately by telling them that the U.S. would stop giving them $Billion and weapons. I believe Joe has done a really good job as president in most other areas, but it's obvious he's afraid of AIPAC's influence on Congress and many Jewish voters. He may have cost himself the next presidential election by not stopping this awful war in its tracks. If he and Congress live in Hell, which is Gaza and the West Bank, and had no power to get out, they might actually understand the meaning of the word 'fear.' That is my opinion, and I am not an anti-Semite.
I get your point - though I believe that, unlike Trump, Biden chooses to engage by the rules - our checks and balances, influencing rather than demanding actions by sovereign states.
Thank you. I believe Biden is out of step and has been unsympathetic to Palestine all his life. He has the power to shut down this war but decided instead to allow Israel to kill 11,000 (6,000 of whom are children, according to Al Jazeera) people. Indeed, Biden blew it.
Yes, and Al Jazeera network has been the only network with journalists actually in Gaza reporting the real stories. Israel and the U.S. told them to stop telling the truth from Gaza. I believe Al Jazeera ignored those warnings and is continuing their reporting.
I believe one of Al Jazeera's journalists had his entire family blown up in Gaza. I recall the Iraq war where Bush had an air strike destroy Al Jazeera's Baghdad office, so nothing surprises me.
One thing I have read in several places is that the Palestinian Health Ministry is the only agency that has accurately reported on the number of casualties. Israel usually inflates the number of Israeli deaths and minimizes the number of Palestinians.
This is not really a war but an ongoing massacre. There is little point in it other than killing people with the excuse that they're looking for Hamas, who is probably running out of ammo, and Russia isn't able to send more. And this is not a ceasefire, but only a pause. When the hostages are exchanged, the bombing will resume. I wish people would stop calling it a ceasefire.
Maybe not an anti-semitre, but other deleterious adjectives describe you well; stupid, shortsighted, and COMPLETELY ill-informed. Why don’t YOU try some diplomacy with fold NOT MUCH INTERESTED in you OR working together AT ALL. Because that describes both Hamas a terrorist group AND Netanyahu, a bumbling, self- centered, and mostly criminal man - who recently invited Elon Musk to have a chat about APARTHEID. Get a grip. Richard Burrell.
Dana, you also have a right to comment here. Thanks for what you said. Perhaps you could go more deeply into what is happening in the Middle East. Have a great day!
Jeffery Sachs' opinions are somewhat limited. He neglects democratic aspirations of Syrians, Ukrainian, Libyans and Palestinians in favor of authoritarian regimes that unlike enlightened countries have no respect for the will of their populations and their neighbors borders.
I too have big questions around a lot of Sachs’ opinions and policies. He is, among many other “lauded” people also an apologist for Russia. I was encouraged to read his ideas by a family member who, after Russia invaded Ukraine stated that the world had absolutely nothing to fear in Putin. I was flabbergasted.
You were flabbergasted because you have been fed American propaganda from the cradle. We have far more to fear from our own government than from what Putin does.
Excuse me? We, and I’m talking America here, have wrecked the democratic aspirations of every one of the peoples you noted, via proxy war, coup/proxy war, assassination, and acquiescence to apartheid, respectively.
I heard that it's okay to annex Ukraine. Rule of law, 70% vote ousting your puppet president and treaties don't matter if you control an Army. Didn't matter in Georgia and Chechnya so it shouldn't matter in Ukraine, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, East Germany... sorry not the 18th century any more. NATO worked to preserve peace and prosperity for 75 years. It works!
The thing I admire about Sachs is that he learns from his mistakes. He helped wreck Russia in the 90s, but then realized the IMF/World Bank austerity/privatize path just opens the door to oligarchy.
Many high-placed Americans "helped wreck Russia in the 90s."
New Ivy League grads in finance, older, distinguished U.S. banks, and a U.S. Department of State eager to befriend and fund the most rotten of former Soviet and secret police officials.
Even then, this coddling of high-placed corruption wasn't new. U.S. Marine General Smedley Butler from his own lifetime experience spoke with disgust of it 90 years ago, at the same time Stalin was first trying mass murder on the Ukrainians, as Heather Cox Richardson today here commemorates.
Smedley Butler has many more admirers than just me. It horrifies me that all the modern generals and people appointed by Trump that are warning us about Trump aren't being listened to as Smedley Butler was. Perhaps, back then the plotters were more ashamed of being exposed.
Now, the Citizens United undercutting our ability to limit the ability of the rich and powerful to have domineering influence over who provides our news has put us seriously at a disadvantage to be heard (and have all our votes counted).
The plutocrats seem to be copying the acquiescence of the German industrialists that thought they would benefit from Hitler gaining power they thought hey could manage.
Maybe Musk could give former president George W. Bush a free ride to Mars. I believe when Bush was the prez, he made the statement that he would like to go to mars.
Tom High, thanks so much for sharing what Jeffrey Sachs said to the U.N. I agree with him wholeheartedly. We must hope that the world powers will listen to him. One wonders if they ever will.
Destroying grain at the very moment the Horn and East Africa are in dire need because climate change is making their harvest fail is a crime against humanity. Truly grotesque.
I'm so grateful to have a government that faces such crisis head on and does the hard work of trying to solve it. While many of us turn away, not wanting to face the harsh realities I have such respect for those who work on solutions. Politicians and the political establishment from think tanks to ambassadors to negotiators to policy makers are not just parasites and opportunists. Some actually care to govern.
Yes, "Netanyahu and Hamas have expiration dates". But there is absolutely no equivalence between the two in regard to accomplishments, errors, crimes, how they got in power, how they stay in power, what kind of relationships they have with the rest of the world, how they will "expire", and the kinds of possibilities open up after that ... And your words, suggesting equivalence, reflect Dr. Richardson's ignorance and bias in this letter, I'm afraid.
Do you really find equivalence between "a terrorist organization" and being "far from a beacon of humanity"?
Listen - I'm not saying that Netanyahu has committed no errors or crimes or misuses of power .... but the numbers and degrees of misdeeds are simply not on the same scale.
No - hard to describe. Someone who has no hesitation at ordering the bombing of hospitals, refugee camps and ambulances with no thought of the many children and women that were killed may not be on the same scale as Hamas, but really hes doing the same thing! And frankly, the 39 Palestinians released from prisons - none over 19 - all security threats? I read there are 6,000 Palestinians in those prisons. All security threats?
Thank you for highlighting the war in Ukraine in your letter. It has been pushed to out of the spotlight by the Hamas/Israel conflict and likely will be again by the renewed government funding crisis.
It seems like even the former papers of record like the New York Times and Washington Post now believe their readership can no longer think about two issues at once, and that we no longer deserve broad and deep coverage of events. Instead we are getting horse-race polling and no policy coverage. This has been documented in an article from the Columbia Journalism Review.
It is time for all of us to start making our outrage at this known to the Boards of Directors and editorial boards of these companies. They have turned to subscriber based revenue models so subscriber-based outrage can get attention.
As WaPo motto says, "Democracy Dies in Darkness." We all have to do our part to make sure that our news outlets are held accountable for biased coverage and placement and resource allocation decisions being made by editorial boards.
Yes, Georgia. The Post and the Times headlines get it wrong frequently. But there is a lot of information in those publications, that if it were lost, we would suffer. They are more than headlines - they are engines of information. If we don't like their focus, tell them. If we want more information about a subject, tell them. Our "media" has a lot of problems. The incessant Biden vs Trump obsession drives me nuts. The polls are ridiculously obsessed with what could be a non-existent match-up. Trump is fading. Joe could change his mind. And why would he announce his departure before he had to? He would only "lame duck" himself. President Johnson announced his decision on March 31, 1968. Let's stop the speculation and know that if Joe did step aside there are dozens of wonderful candidates who would rise to the occasion. Or...Biden could follow the Diane Francis suggestion of replacing Harris with Newsom - talk about a campaign booster! I digress...but please compare our media with that of the UK or other nations. We could be a lot better. But we are also a lot better.
And only "Two issues at once"? I think most of us can think about several issues during the day. What haunts me is that every minute there is a story about the horrors of Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, our House Of Clowns - we are not talking about the destruction of our home.
A recent PBS Newshour segment highlighted the hypocrisy and horror of our so-called "recycling" of plastics to other countries. In the story, an authority in Thailand said that 70 to 80% of the plastic it receives is not processed or repurposed. It is taken to landfills, burned or simply dumped into waterways that lead to the ocean. OUR plastic. This is a disaster.
A recent story revealed that the largest percentage of microplastics in our oceans comes from vehicle tires - tiny bits of the tires flying off as we drive - washed into our water ways. The resulting pollution is found in our food supplies and now us. We are now walking talking plastic people. BTW, the heavier the vehicle, the faster the wear. EVs generally weigh 30% more than conventional autos. With the right focus and the right science, we could fix this.
All of what Senator Schumer proposes should be easy peasy logical legislation. And then we could get back to saving our home - that we are currently treating like a dump.
Bill Alstrom, yesterday I wrote that in effect, cancelling the NYT is like cutting off your nose to spite your face. It got around 20 “likes.” (Sorry I don’t have an exact count.) Thank you for writing at length.
We aren't going to cancel ours, Virginia, because of the many aspects of the Times I enjoy. I confess to not reading the op ed pages or most of their news, but my husband reads that part of it.
Yes, I too enjoy a lot of the Times, but am often infuriated. I have written many letters stating this but nothing really changes. The huge spread they did the other day on who Trump might pick as is VP was one such article. I looked at the reader’s comments. Huge numbers of them were really furious!
I keep my blood pressure low by not looking at articles like that. And it is infuriating. The guy is a criminal with 91 indictments and hopefully will be in jail sometime next year. Also he is increasingly senile and it shows despite his handlers trying to hide it. He goes off script and then it's bonkers time.
I have a huge file of recipes from the NYT. I do sometimes cook them. I also belong to the Burlap and Barrel spice blog where people are cooking up astounding things. The WaPo now has a way to access their recipes.
Bill, that plastics/old -technology- parts story was also on CBS Sunday morning. It was a devastating indictment of our developed world's wasteful lifestyle. We dump our waste on other, poorer countries whose people( including lots of young men and children) do " urban mining" in very toxic landfills to find copper and other components which they sell for a pittance. It was such a disturbing and horrific story. One suggestion was that the makers of the products be held responsible for and reclaim the waste they produce. Samsung was the only company to give an interview and they have begun, and are extending, projects to do just that.
The "outsourcing" of our trash should be illegal. Maybe if we had to deal with it here, we would change our ways. Our recycling programs are not serious. There are very few restrictions on single use plastics. Our town does not permit single use plastic bags at retailers. The town next door will not allow the sale of bottle water in plastic containers (it's not really healthier, anyway). It's a small something.
The process of "single stream recycling" is a joke. There are places where glass, plastic and paper products are completely separated. It's easy to do. But we are lazy.
True. But we outsource our rubbish because we are a self-serving first world behemoth, of course. The outsourcing doesn't include the megatons of plastic trash we dump in the oceans. But it's all good because we've got wind farms and EVs. Next we'll ship our crap to other planets, no doubt.
I too am questioning the reporting of the "news." Why is it that at the beginning of this Israeli/Hamas mess, we were told that the Palestinian prisoners freed 3 to 1 Jew were terrorists and criminals and that just yesterday I learned that that many of the 3000 Palestinians detained by the Israeli authority are women and boys under the age of 18? Why were they abducted and detained and given no reason? Why is this group referred to as prisoners and not hostages? Why don't we hear about the pain the Palestinians feel after having their family members abducted? Why don't we hear how the Palestinians in the West Bank feel having Israeli soldiers running around with machine guns (a very powerful symbol BTW) harassing them? Why are Jewish settlers encouraged to land-grab in Palestinian neighborhoods? It is the Israeli government that is to blame for hate crimes against innocent Jews around the world and the US is complicit! No more 3 billion/year carte blanche for the Israeli government!
Its a truly awful disease - I had a cousin diagnosed at 80 and a friend who passed away last year after a fairly short time with it - it just completely wiped him out. And I'm not surprised that its linked to plastic pollution. I watched the story on Sunday morning too (Carol mentioned above). What destruction this technology brings down on other countries just so our consumption can keep on!
Georgia, I cancelled my subscription (after almost 40 years) to NYT last year just after the ‘22 elections. Their obviously biased polling, Red Wave nonsense and as you noted, lack of policy coverage, was dangerous to our democracy in my opinion, and I was done with their agenda.
You have to call in order to cancel a subscription and I was subjected to one of the worst marketing pushes I’ve ever endured - it took over 20 minutes just to cancel - Really? When asked why I was cancelling, the guy on the other end actually started arguing about the premise for my anger and subsequent decision to cancel. Talk about hubris!
I sent a scathing letter to the Board of Directors. I followed up with several letters to the editor.
Crickets.
Your ideas are valid and will definitely help long term. But after thinking about this a great deal myself, my choice is to spend whatever spare time I have helping get out the vote in 2024. And whatever extra money I have on good candidates, important campaigns, and the best Substack has to offer (HCR, Robert Hubbell, Bill McKibben, Joyce White Vance, Jessica Craven, more).
When I was in college, my J school professors insisted that students subscribe to one national paper and our home town newspaper.
I highly doubt they would recommend the New York Times these days.
Good you told them why your were canceling. But my fear is that cancelations just drive them further towards clickbait because it is more profitable because it is cheaper to produce. I just posted another article on my Substack on a huge essay that A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the NY Times ,wrote back in May on the independent press in the Columbia Journalism Review., the place that jsut published the damning statistics on coverage of policy a week ago. Sulzberger is self-justifying and completely misses the forest for the trees. It is breathtaking in how far off the mark and naive he is. We have to do more to protest or there will lose an independent free press forever.
NYT doesn't depend as much on its online subscriptions as it does its print newspaper, so clickbait isn't a reason to support a newspaper (realistically, subscribing to stop the influx of clickbait?). None of the content in the NYT is free - there's a paywall, so they get their money.
Protest? How? Newspapers have been dying off for decades. Don't worry about the NYT; the real tragedy is the loss of smaller, local papers.
Or you can hit them where it hurts and cancel your subscription. Just because you don't have access doesn't mean you won't know what they are writing as most outlets (including this one) report any "fit" to print news they might offer.
I personally subscribe to the "be part of the solution to make it better" school of thought. But if you do cancel, tell them why--and not just Sulzberger but the whole Corporate Board.
I unsubscribed a month ago! My long time habit of surfing the NYT has ended. I am happy to report the quality of my life is still very good! WAPO subscription ends in a couple weeks. I soldier on...
This Columbia University review looked at the New York Times coverage of the issues 3 months prior to the 2020 election and concluded “If voters had wanted to educate themselves on issues, they would not have learned much from reading the Times.” They said it was typical of other major outlets as well, but I trust that is not reassuring.
“We found that the Times and the Post shared significant overlap in their domestic politics coverage, offering little insight into policy. Both emphasized the horse race and campaign palace intrigue, stories that functioned more to entertain readers than to educate them on essential differences between political parties. The main point of contrast we found between the two papers was that, while the Post delved more into topics Democrats generally want to discuss—affirmative action, police reform, LGBTQ rights—the Times tended to focus on subjects important to Republicans—China, immigration, and crime."
I have been a long-time digital subscriber deeply interested in the issues and policies and I want to hear more about the substantive programs President Biden’s team is successfully reaching across the aisle to implement.
A colleague recently wrote...”Biden has worked for the working class; Trump worked for the oligarchs. Biden passed a massive infrastructure bill; Trump did not. Biden was part of the Obama administration and helped pass the ACA; Trump claimed he would “repeal and replace Obamacare” and failed to do either. Trump bullied NATO partners to organize without the help of the US; Biden reinforced our relationship with our European partners, as well as our Asian-Pacific partners with coalitions that strengthen the bargaining power of smaller countries with our influence. Through Trump’s reckless spending cuts to balance all the tax giveaways he offered to the rich, the Infectious Disease team stationed in Wuhan China was scrapped three months before the nexus of COVID 19. Biden coordinated and executed one of the largest US vaccination initiatives since the polio vaccine, bringing back a stronger, more sustainable economy to the USA and North America as a whole. Why isn’t anybody talking about this? “
I strongly encourage the board to in turn, encourage editors and writers to participate more positively, more actively in “deeply reporting” as you say in your editorial mission. Accurate information on policy in the days, weeks, and months ahead of the 2024 election are crucial. Thank you. "
Value Act is an activist investor group that likes to work with companies for the long term to improve profitability. The have recently established a sizeable position in NYT stock.
"It seems like even the former papers of record like the New York Times and Washington Post now believe their readership can no longer think about two issues at once..."
If that were the truth, democracy would indeed die in darkness. We cannot self-govern without sufficient information about what is going on. I suppose we still have that, if one digs; but we need it from "town criers" as well, so that few get left out. The "media" felt like a public asset during the Vietnam War and Watergate, but lately there has been far too much in-bedded journalism.
My local paper of record, The Dallas Morning News, does a decent job, considering that they are in crazy Texas. However, they have a delivery problem with their print edition. It only comes half the time. I have complained every way I know how, besides cancelling. The response is, “people just don’t want to work anymore.” What BS. Papers can’t be delivered on bikes anymore, so pay people enough to get the job done. Anyway, I have wondered if they want people to just go digital so they won’t have to bother with print anymore. I am trying to support my local paper, but they don’t support my need to get what I pay for. BTW, if people don’t want to work anymore, why are so many trying to hold down two jobs. Sorry for the early morning rant…
Jeri I can't find a neighborhood kid to help me with heavy outdoor work around the house for 25. an hour cash. Insane. We used to help our neighbors because they were our neighbors. Everything seems transactional today.
You can't work with your nose in your cell phone or other devices. At Thanksgiving we talked about problems in various institutions. Our neighbor's daughter is a cardiac nurse in Portland and she described how broken the health system is. She described one case where plain old red tape got in the way of the needs of the patient. We agreed that the pandemic has made everything much worse. One of the things we also talked about was getting an appointment with the vet. Ours is excellent, but very busy especially after a local clinic went corporate. If some corporation or hedge fund is involved, you can be sure that whatever they buy will go down hill. And everything is transactional because everything is a commodity. Read Braiding Sweetgrass for a view on this.
When I worked at high school, I always knew some kids who were happy to earn some money. Since then, nada. Yep, different world. Although grands work in fast food, hope temporary.
Also less social. Less in person interaction between neighbors period, in my experience, myself included. I think that hunger for community is part of what fuels the MAGA cult.
In all likelihood people don't want to work at a job where they can't make a living. We learned during the height of the Pandemic just how much we depend on social workers. Wages need to be adjusted and we need the very wealthy to show more patriotism by funding more of the cost of government. It's to their benefit more than anyone else's.
In assisted living where I live, many work two jobs. I'm sure they love it, NOT. Yep, the rich need to pay fair share. Which they have defined as nothing.
So, Jeri, what is the solution? From my vantage point, the workers need to unite and this means unions. Without the ability to bring strength in numbers to the negotiating table, they'll end up with subsistence wages, assuming that there is any such thing as a negotiating table. The other possibility is minimum wage laws. Good luck with this idea in Trump-dominated states.
…on the ‘Rich Getting Richer’ by not paying their fair share front…. The new guy joining the GOP race for the White House, Stuckenberg, making one of his major planks to eliminate inheritance tax. In NYS, I believe inheritance isn’t taxed until it is valued over 1 mil. Who’s that plank for?
Agreed. The wealthy just need to pay a fair share of taxes or pay them at all. The author of Poverty, by America says that if people just paid their taxes, we would be in much better shape.
The "Middle Class" was growing when taxes on the wealthy and corporations was much higher. It's complicated and while the the 1950's middle class was largely white and male, efforts at inclusion seems to expand up to Reagan; but who gained and who a suffered as a consequence of 40+ years of Reaganomic laws and policies? The truth is out there.
It is not original with me, but it has been observed that the one thing, perhaps the only thing, that one never has enough of is MONEY. There is absolutely no way in 1,000 years that a billionaire can spend that much money on consumables. We need to reimplement the practices of the past and force the ultra wealthy to be more patriotic.
Reaganomics is "Take from the poor and give to the rich." plain and simple; feudalism 2.0. The rich get the cash, the public gets the work and risk. It's like the collateralized debt obligations in the subprime crisis; put dogdoo in a blender, spray it up with golden paint, and call it gold; then find a sucker.
"Their BS" included claiming that the jobless in the "Great Recession" did not want to work. That (literally) the economic underpinning of our economy would collapse unless bankrupt bankers received bonuses, but by all means, tear up union contracts in a recession. That any aid to the poor was (again literally) "Moral Hazard" and that that the general public had to accept "austerity" and like it.
That the ultra wealthy are the "Job Creators", That any advantage allowed to workers is "Job Killing", while mergers and "downsizing", and shifting entire departments overseas in the midst of a recession is not. Things that you can only believe if you reject the evidence of your eyes and of your ears. It's their final, most essential command.
I’d like to segue about jobs for a moment. In the area I live there are help wanted signs all over the place! I asked my husband, “Do you really think no one wants to work?” He said, “Heck No! How many people do you think live around here! They’re all working! When we go out to dinner or shop everyone is working themselves silly.” I hadn’t thought of it that way. Everyone I know, even some retired from good jobs are working for something to do. We hire 2 great high school students to come every Saturday and help with our business/hobby. They want to work. We need more people in our area.
As to the newspaper delivery issue, more money is the answer.
my suggestion, but I don't think the paper wants to support print. Digital is pushed but it's not what I pay for. Guess I'm too old to appreciate screenshot news.
I hate the digital "paper." Dallas Morning News will be about $650 a year starting in Dec. They don't like to do print anymore. The ones in my family who stopped subscription had delivery problems, in addition to pathetic excuse for news.
People are eager to work and make a difference. People need to be compensated for their time. This is a very simple equation.
I am so psyched the unions are making noise, getting noticed, and making positive change. My whole working life I could not decide if unions were good or bad. I still really don't have my answer. I like what the unions are doing today though.
Unions can be hard to love. But let me tell you about a Hungarian immigrant who came to this country as a 12 year old boy and went to work in the coal mines of SWPA, my grandfather.
Or the woman who came as a young adult sponsored by a good Jewish family who treated her well until she married and moved to a small coal mining community where after having 5 children she made and sold moonshine until she saved enough money to buy property and open a grocery store and butcher shop to get her beloved husband out of the mines. My great-grandmother. My grandfather married their oldest daughter. The union made a huge difference in my grandparent’s lives. My mother and uncle were both college educated. My great-grandfather fought for the right to unionize until Grandma Haluska made enough money to open the store. Many lives were lost due to brutal coal barons and the dangerous mines.
Unions have crossed lines and made many people anti-union and that’s on them. But, look at all we gained in human rights because of unions.
I belonged to a union until I retired. Until teacher unions, there was no job security. Anybody on the school board who’s brother in law needed a job was given yours. You want that back? 7 days a week for 12 hours? No safety requirements? Yes, they can be hard to take at times, but look back just 100 odd years ago and see what’s what.
The power of unions comes from the support of the public as well as the solidarity of their workers, and I think a lot of union leaders lost track of that, but, just as you said, history shows that unionization made a hell of a difference to building a middle class and offering living wages to more (including non-union) workers"Gilder Age" "Robber Barons" were classic tyrants who exploited workers and corrupted government. That's the past the "GOP's" patrons are keen on recapturing. That's the unstated goal of "Reaganomics".
Unions won a lot of benefits and rights for all workers in the late 19th and 20th Centuries, though a number of those gains have been eroded since. Concentrated power tends to corrupt, and I have seen corrupt and unwise behavior on the part of some unions, but they serve us as a counterbalance to the concentration of capital, and other balances as well. Union and non-union workers might benefit by greater solidarity and greater accommodation than in the past. We are now seeing the consequences of too little balance in who gets to call the shots.
I had the same subscription - I cancelled because I was not impressed. My gripe with Dallas Morning News is because I couldn't opt out of home delivery for just the online edition.
But Jeri, people do not want to Deliver the Papers Anymore - I know this for a fact as I had a few family members do this job. Lots of reasons - pay, transportation expenses , and the dangers associated with being out delivering at odd hours. But then the pay cuts happened and that finished any opportunity to make a living..
I did that nasty job for a couple years long ago. Not one day off the whole time, a 3 am wake up call and a full time day job. It kept me out of debtors prison though ; ()
One thing that happened around here was that papers dropped their evening edition. Do people really prefer that? To me, it was a choice between read today's news in the evening, or yesterday's news in morning. Plus, I was too much of a night owl to get up any earlier than I had to to read the paper before leaving for work. One virtue of electronic media is it's fast (maybe too fast). Evening papers were easier for kids to deliver. Plus our society is now deemed too unsafe for kids to be on their own. I sold a lot of stuff door to door, for school, for YMCA, for Scouts by my lonely. I think part myth, part truth, our society is more predatory today.
We live in a small town in Michigan and most of the local paper comes from the Associated Press. There are a few local articles of interest and then lots of advertising. It costs over $200 a year to subscribe! My husband walks to the library to read it because we won't pay that kind of money for it...
Got an email saying price going up in Dec to about $650 a year. And they blame people not being interested. Deliberate effort to kill local news, by whoever is buying small papers, or who is influential for larger ones
Telephone land lines are treated the same way—price them so high that subscribers emigrate to VOIP or cell phones, then raise the prices because they allocate the maintenance costs among fewer subscribers. And so it goes.
My experience is that in the last decade corporations have broken new ground selling less and less product for more and more money. That includes dramatically shrinking the quantity and often the quality (many have been reformulated with cheaper ingredients) of packaged food in particular, spurious "junk fees", and just try to get telephone customer service. Some agents I have called admit to me that they are just contractors who know little about the problem and can't resolve a problem. Some of the largest companies want you to "chat" with a robot that knows even less that a random person would. I think of the old satirical line. "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company" back when AT&T was the only game in town.
I received multiple calls from them offering slightly lower rates. Then one day the newspaper advertised a special for online subscription a full year for $1. I took it. Sometimes you can wait them out and get a better deal.
Our home delivery subscription to the DMN is mostly a donation to local journalism and letters I sometimes respond to like:
LTE On ‘Christian nationalism’ Paul Kramer 11/25/2023 pg 13A
I doubt my response will get printed anywhere else but here. I hope you don't mind reading it.
According to the Council on Foreign Relations liberty, equality, individual rights, intellectual and religious freedom is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Key to the enlightenment is Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan Chapter 30 which specifies the Social Contract including:
1) “For since the right of nature permits those who are in extreme necessity to steal the goods of others, or even to take them by force, they ought to be maintained by the commonwealth and not left to the uncertain charity of private citizens lest they be troublesome to the commonwealth.”
2) “If the number of people who are poor but strong continues to grow, they should be transplanted into countries that are not sufficiently inhabited.”
3) “When a riotous insurrection occurs, the commonwealth can profit from the example of the punishment of its leaders and teachers, but not the punishment of the poor seduced people.”
4) “To be severe to the people is to punish their ignorance, which may be largely laid at the door of the sovereign, whose fault it is that they hadn’t been better instructed.”
So ... Public welfare, immigration and punishing the leaders and teachers of insurrection is a requirement. DMN please help us not be seduced.
Perhaps they think "social media" has supplanted them. You can't get an article about twice as long as necessary on "social media". (Yes, I'm ridiculing the term).
As long ago as the Iraq War the NYT was worried about losing readers. I remember hearing George Packer at the Chicago Humanities Festival during the period. I have specific writers I read in the Times, several of whom I see regularly on MSNBC. Given that the Chicago Tribune is now a “conglomerate,” haven’t time or funds for a paper I wouldn’t read when I have WaPo and NYT, plus RSM with its excellent choices.
I stopped watching TV news in the runup to W's Iraq War. All they needed was was the pom poms to lead the cheer. I found far more relevant and accurate information at the Guardian, which I support. I was paying $120 a year to the local paper just to keep it around, but finally went to their cheaper, digital version which I rarely read.
When I was in Berlin at the end of October, I saw an art exhibit that was really about the experiences of North Eurasians under the Soviet Union occupation and their struggles to regain their identities after the end of the Soviet Union, as well as the psychic pain they suffer from the occupation. A part of the exhibit was on the Holodomor. It was painful and powerful! The exhibit is at the House of World Cultures (Das Haus der Kulturen der Welt- HKW) until January 14, 2024. https://www.hkw.de/programme/as-though-we-hid-the-sun-in-a-sea-of-stories
Thank you for the link. I am a second generation Ukrainian American and am deeply concerned by how easily it is fading into the background in the mainstream media
I will say that in my art group here in Germany, one of the women is doing a series of art pieces about Ukraine. I would say this war is much more pressing. I have a niece and nephew who are Ukrainian German and in our family Ukraine is not forgotten. Their mom is married to my husband's cousin. Her parents were going to stay in their city in Ukraine but she talked them into coming to Germany. Her sister's family just moved to the USA about 3 years ago after living in China for 2 years. So, it was her parents who needed to get out, and Germany was closer. My daughter did an exchange in a school in Vienna that has adopted the war in Ukraine as their school project. That means that all classes have students from Ukraine in them, and many of them are living with families in the school as unaccompanied minors. My daughter is studying in Berlin and in her class the largest group are from Ukraine or Russia. In the beginning they were all friends because of speaking Russian, but now, there has been some separation because of some differences of values. My daughter's friendship group includes several progressive Ukrainian students. That is the males in her group are mainly gay, and she says that the ones who are offensive to them are not in her group. Still, in the beginning while language was a bond, after a while values have become the bond. Everyone in the class speaks English and German as well. So, while I am very concerned about this trucker situation with Poland, and the anger that Polish truckers and farmers are showing to Ukraine, I think the EU needs to help sort the situation out. I can understand why Polish farmers and Truckers do not need to be undercut by Ukrainian ones. However, some of this sentiment was stirred up by the falsely named "Law and Order" party in Poland. I am hoping that Biden's tying funding for border policing, etc... to Ukrainian aid, will force Republicans to pass the bill. We shall see. The Democrats seem to be starting to figure out how to work the Republican dysfunctional situation. Let us hope they get over their learning curve, because we need them to. Slava Ukraini!
When considering Americans' consumption of news, it is crucial to know where they get the news.
'News Platform Fact Sheet' (Pew Research Center)
'The transition of the news industry away from print, television and radio into digital spaces has caused huge disruptions in the traditional news industry, especially the print news industry. It is also reflected in the ways individual Americans say they are getting their news. Today, an overwhelming majority of Americans get news at least sometimes from digital devices.'
'News consumption across platforms'
'A large majority of U.S. adults (86%) say they often or sometimes get news from a smartphone, computer or tablet, including 56% who say they do so often. This is more than the 49% who said they often got news from digital devices in 2022 and the 51% of those who said the same in 2021. The portion that gets news from digital devices continues to outpace those who get news from television. The portion of Americans who often get news from television has stayed fairly consistent, at 31% in 2022 and 32% in 2023. Americans turn to radio and print publications for news far less frequently than to digital devices and television.'
'When asked which of these platforms they prefer to get news on, nearly six-in-ten Americans say they prefer a digital device (58%), more than say they prefer TV (27%). Even fewer Americans prefer radio (6%) or print (5%).'
'Who uses each news platform'
'News consumption across platforms varies by age, gender, race, ethnicity, educational attainment and political leaning. Americans ages 50 and older are more likely than younger adults to turn to and prefer television and print publications.'
'Digital news has become an important part of Americans’ news media diets, with social media playing a crucial role in news consumption. Today, half of U.S. adults get news at least sometimes from social media.'
'News consumption on social media'
'When it comes to where Americans regularly get news on social media, Facebook outpaces all other social media sites. Three-in-ten U.S. adults say they regularly get news there. Slightly fewer (26%) regularly get news on YouTube.'
'Smaller shares regularly get news on Instagram (16%), TikTok (14%), X (12%) or Reddit (8%). Even fewer Americans regularly get news on Nextdoor (5%), LinkedIn (5%), Snapchat (4%), WhatsApp (3%) or Twitch (1%).'
'(Seven-in-ten U.S. adults say they have seen or heard something about the renaming of Twitter as X. The platform’s name change took place in July 2023.)'
'Some social media sites – despite having relatively small overall audiences – stand out for having high shares of users who regularly go to the site for news. For example, roughly half of users on X (53%) get news there. On the other hand, only 15% of Snapchat users regularly get news on the app.'
'Who consumes news on each social media site'
'There are demographic differences, such as by gender, in who turns to each social media site regularly for news. Women make up a greater portion of regular news consumers on Nextdoor (66%), Facebook (62%), Instagram (59%) and TikTok (58%), while men make up a greater share on sites like Reddit (67%), X (62%) and YouTube (58%).'
'Some partisan differences also arise when it comes to who regularly gets news on some social media sites. The majority of regular news consumers on many sites are Democrats or lean Democratic. No social media site included here has regular news consumers who are more likely to be Republicans or lean Republican, though there is no significant partisan difference among news consumers on Facebook, X or Nextdoor. (Read the Appendix for data on U.S. adults in each demographic group and party who regularly get news from each social media site.)' (Pew Research Center) There is a good deal more information about where we turn for the 'news' from the Pew Center of Research. See a link below.
And this has been true for many years. A 30 something co-worker of mine gets "dinged" whenever a new story breaks. She subscribes to no newspapers and rarely watches TV, so whatever she sees on her phone is her reality of the world today.
She also spends a lot of time on Facebook and other social media platforms. My friends and I spend none. Of course, we're all old farts who are resistant to change.
Gary, call yourself an 'old fart', but leave me out of it. As for resisting change, that is true for some 'old farts' and others are thoughtfully selective about the changes they will make!
I think that anyone who reads and subscribes to this site is looking for strategic changes. I am aware in order age of some of the things I see changing and try to sort out which are inevitable and which might throw babies out with the bathwater. The other thing about this particular newsletter is it's connections to history, not just as quaint curiosity, but as a more holistic view of patterns impacting our lives, part of which is where things have gone wrong, but also what foundationally supports our desired ways of life. For example, I am repelled by Facebook and certainly "X", but I can see a place for it. I wish it were less exploitatively commercial and wonder if a "Wiki" version would be practical? I want to see far more discussion of what what kind of future we can extrapolate from trends we now see, and what kind of future we can imagine, with some attention to how we might get there, that we'd like to see. Rapidly emerging circumstances, such as our responses to resource management and climate change, not to mention the extended impact of AI on society and the world of work needs, I think, far more attention. Stuff like this: https://radiolab.org/podcast/40000-recipes-murder I'm distracted by such stuff to be something of a curmudgeon when it comes to cat videos, despite the fact (I'm forced to admit) some of them are pretty cute.
Is LFaA social media? I think yes and no; more evidence-based presentation and discussion, less fluff.
Gary, I am also an "old fart" and I am changing because I have to. And I want to. And it's entertaining. Haven't received a newspaper in decades - but I read them all day long digitally. More sources than I can count. Your 30 something co-worker is the new norm. Although if she is getting a notification for every new bit of news, I worry about her.
Our TV is a black screen all day until we watch BBC news and then the Newshour. But sometimes our chats are more interesting and we just skip it. Black screen. The nightly news is usually just a recap of what we have read through a news aggregator on our phones or tablets or Chromebook. After dinner, a movie or a series.
No FB or X for me. There is no "news" there. Just puppies, kittens, family pictures and insane political nonsense that some call "news". It's not. Of course, one can either customize the social media experience or let it capture you. My brilliant wife has allowed only family and friends connections to exist on he FB "feed". And she gets the local updates on "Nextdoor". Social media can be helpful if we own the experience.
It's all moving fast. Soon, we'll have a chip in our heads which will project a holographic news experience that we can wallow in. Hopefully it will come with an on'off switch :)
Increasingly software and "smart" appliances are doing things "for" me I don't want them to do, with no "escape" key. My printer got caught in a loop that I could only escape by pulling the plug. With an old fashioned motorized cam driven wash cycle I could run partial cycles of my washing machine, but with a digitally controlled one I can't. That's an engineering decision, not the technology. I want automation like a DSLR camera, like breathing; automatic when you want automatic, full control when you want what you want.
In Canada, Facebook withdrew ALL of its Canadian news postings, and won't let you share anything that seems to smack of being a new channel. Thanks to a fight with the Canadian government which now insists publishers be reimbursed by FB for postings of their material to it. FB is also arguing they want to turn toward social interaction etc but not be a news outlet. Oddly Wikipedia is still permitted! So is BBC
Fern: Thanks for adding to the conversation on this topic here. I just posted a more orderly analysis of the NY Times situation and leverage for change on my substack. May I copy this with attribution to you over there?
Thank you for the invitation to your substack, Georgia. Your opinions and research reports -- positive and negative concerning the value of the 'news' Americans read/watch and or listen to will be strengthened by your knowledge of the sources Americans are using and whether those outlets employ journalistic standards or not.
Interesting that there was no mention of the news feeds that pop up when using various search engines such as Microsoft Edge, Firefox, or Bing. Anyone logging onto a device to go to Facebook, X, or Reddit will likely see one of these feeds before going to their intended site. This is another example of the limits of research in general. To be effective with their inquiry, a researcher must be focused on a specific question/area, with a purposely limited scope set out to answer a specific question. Once reported, the data is applied to everything by those who do not understand the research process and don't know how to handle data.
The research you sited is excellent, but it will be used to answer questions out of its scope. That there was no mention of news feeds shows how difficult it is to ask the right questions to get a full picture of what we are trying to describe.
Steve, check out Pew Research Center on this subject for yourself. There are a good number of links. The sources they use are given as well as limitation to what can be known or may be available to the public.
I have no particular interest in defending the Times, and they have no interest in having my defense, but I sense this is a case of stoning the prophet because you don'l like the prophecy, in this case the results of their poling. Polls are not definitive, but they are also to be neglected at one's peril. I am certain that the Democrats are doing their own polling, and there is a good chance that it tracks the polling the Times does. Again, polls definitive, but they are one element used to look at probable statistical outcomes and they are not looking favorable. I'm almost, but not quite ready to make a $500 bet on a Trump victory in 2024, so that when I win I could donate the winnings to the ACLU. I'll paraphrase a previous post to say: if Biden loses to Trump, as now looks likely, history will remember him most for the fact that he held on in desperation when all the signs were against him, and he will be assigned shared blame for the disaster of the 2nd Trump administration. If Biden were to step aside now, even if Trump won a second term, he would be remembered as an effective president, perhaps even a heroic one.
"Please join the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence for an online event, Beyond the SCIF with House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner on Ukraine, on November 29, 2023, from 10:00 a.m. to 11:15 a.m. (ET) via Zoom.
Register to attend online
Hamas’ savage attack on Israeli civilians may have put the Kremlin’s aggression in Ukraine on the media’s back pages, but it has not diminished the threat that Russia poses to American security and prosperity. Putin’s aim today is to subdue Ukraine, but that is not the end of his ambitions. He aims to restore effective control over the countries that once made up the Soviet Union and to exert influence in the countries that were once part of the Kremlin-controlled Warsaw Pact. Put simply, he has designs on NATO allies whom we are obliged to defend.
As its support for Hamas makes clear, the damage Moscow does goes well beyond Europe. The place to stop Putin—to contain him—is in Ukraine. This is the smart and economical way to defend core US interests.
The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center gather a panel of experts for “Beyond the SCIF” to discuss US interests in Ukraine today and tomorrow as well as the importance of continued assistance, highlighting Ukraine’s priorities and needs in the fight, and the role the US and the West play in providing support. “Beyond the SCIF” (sensitive compartmented information facility) is an effort by House Intelligence Committee members to connect with experts and leaders in the national security field to create an open dialogue on threats facing the United States and ways committee members can counter the malign actions of our adversaries.
PANELISTS
Ian Brzezinski
Resident Senior Fellow
Atlantic Council
Rebeccah Heinrichs
Senior Fellow and Director, Keystone Defense Initiative
Hudson Institute
Ambassador John Herbst
Senior Director, Eurasia Center
Atlantic Council
Catherine Sendak
Director, Transatlantic Security and Defense Program
Thank you Georgia for your insight and suggestions. I went out and read all the articles that you sent links to...they were very telling! I also subscribed to CJR after reading their article on Warped Front Pages..really fascinating. I have been considering discontinuing my digital subscription to the NYT...the CJR article moved me much closer.
I hope Dr. Richardson will read this bombshell of a report in the Columbia Journalism Review and write about the effect of corporate power and right-wing propaganda on our nation's mindset.
How can we humans call ourselves civilized when we hate people for centuries and “solve” our problems by killing each other... even babies and children?
Long road "up" Molly! But remember while eg China/USA go on about being "worst enemies" mainly over Taiwan, both continue to trade by the billions. A couple stats sites i subscribe to post the numbers. By that , you'd never know there was anything like war warnings going on! As for Taiwan, even China still hugely depends on chips which pour out everywhere.
Excellent point Frank. We don’t hate when it is to our advantage. When will we see that hate and wars hold all of us back and the destruction harms our planet? We could put that energy into protecting our planet, emphasis on our. Thanks
I try to run on a hopeful basis, and i dont know enough to prognosticate how these "chapters" in the "human novel" are going to turn out. One of my kitties has just taken possession of my morning lap, part of a daily ritual. Say... totally out of left field, I have a little story where a 9 year old girl is going to be trial wakened after a day and a night of induced coma following surgery for a subdural haematoma with an ok result. Id be happy to provide an email. Ive already done the research on the major moves to this point. :)
Post Thanksgiving weekend, I could use help defending Biden’s 2024 candidacy. My “liberal” family claims he can’t win regardless of his accomplishments and that he appears too old, out of touch etc. and that young voters will stay home if he’s the candidate.
Can you write a summary for us on why he can and will win and will bring out the young vote? I’m running out of ideas and patience.
The answer is that Biden's accomplishments are not being publicized due to biased editorial decisions on choice of coverage, space, and resource allocation in the media. The times has moved to revenue model based on subscriptions and they have moved away from being the media of record to clickbait farms. You can find out more in a comment below and on my substack.
Geogia Fisanick, I don't know that your claims against newspapers of record, such as The Washington Post and The New York Times are responsible for Joe Biden not seeming to catch on with American voters. Several other factors merit consideration, and, perhaps, it is not too late for Americans to realize that Joe Biden and his administration have been bulwarks against the far-right.
'If there is one statistic that best captures the transformation of the American economy over the past half century, it may be this: Of Americans born in 1940, 92 percent went on to earn more than their parents; among those born in 1980, just 50 percent did. Over the course of a few decades, the chances of achieving the American dream went from a near-guarantee to a coin flip.'
'What happened?'
'One answer is that American voters abandoned the system that worked for their grandparents. From the 1940s through the ’70s, sometimes called the New Deal era, U.S. law and policy were engineered to ensure strong unions, high taxes on the rich, huge public investments, and an expanding social safety net. Inequality shrank as the economy boomed. But by the end of that period, the economy was faltering, and voters turned against the postwar consensus. Ronald Reagan took office promising to restore growth by paring back government, slashing taxes on the rich and corporations, and gutting business regulations and antitrust enforcement. The idea, famously, was that a rising tide would lift all boats. Instead, inequality soared while living standards stagnated and life expectancy fell behind that of peer countries. No other advanced economy pivoted quite as sharply to free-market economics as the United States, and none experienced as sharp a reversal in income, mobility, and public-health trends as America did. Today, a child born in Norway or the United Kingdom has a far better chance of outearning their parents than one born in the U.S.'
'This story has been extensively documented. But a nagging puzzle remains. Why did America abandon the New Deal so decisively? And why did so many voters and politicians embrace the free-market consensus that replaced it?'
'Since 2016, policy makers, scholars, and journalists have been scrambling to answer those questions as they seek to make sense of the rise of Donald Trump—who declared, in 2015, “The American dream is dead”—and the seething discontent in American life. Three main theories have emerged, each with its own account of how we got here and what it might take to change course. One theory holds that the story is fundamentally about the white backlash to civil-rights legislation. Another pins more blame on the Democratic Party’s cultural elitism. And the third focuses on the role of global crises beyond any political party’s control. Each theory is incomplete on its own. Taken together, they go a long way toward making sense of the political and economic uncertainty we’re living through.'
“The american landscape was once graced with resplendent public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands of swimmers at a time,” writes Heather McGee, the former president of the think tank Demos, in her 2021 book, The Sum of Us. In many places, however, the pools were also whites-only. Then came desegregation. Rather than open up the pools to their Black neighbors, white communities decided to simply close them for everyone. For McGhee, that is a microcosm of the changes to America’s political economy over the past half century: White Americans were willing to make their own lives materially worse rather than share public goods with Black Americans.'
'From the 1930s until the late ’60s, Democrats dominated national politics. They used their power to pass sweeping progressive legislation that transformed the American economy. But their coalition, which included southern Dixiecrats as well as northern liberals, fractured after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” exploited that rift and changed the electoral map. Since then, no Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority of the white vote.' (Atlantic Magazine) There is a good dear more to this argument. See gifted link below.
Another great post Fern. Thank you. Very enlightening, at least for me.
So, in summary, this article appears to say that white Americans abandoned the New Deal in 1965,, which supported public spending on shared economic gains (for whites from 1932 to 1965), and then the Civil Rights Act was passed and black folks could, for the first time, maybe get a small piece of the public pie.
Wow. Who knew we were so evil Fern? Even I, with my jaded view of the past and present, born from my own scramble to make a living and watching my friends struggle, while watching the children of whites get jobs their parents found for them, no matter how unqualified or lazy they were. I did not see an overall, global picture so negative as the one presented in your post.
I am glad I am 63 Fern. For me, it was, and to some degree remains, a real slog of long hours, no raises, bosses giving promotions to people who spent more time kissing arse than working OR, worse, their own kids or kids of relatives. It would have been even worse if I had ever worked at a Military Contractor, but, they don't even look at the resume's of people with my name.
Thank the luck I had, and the iron work ethic i managed to keep in place that I managed to save some money, and, because of an older co worker who was Asian, and, taught me about the stock market when I was 28, I put a little money there and that helped me a lot.
But, I would not want to be young and have to slog through it again Fern. I cannot image what it must be like to be black in America and how hard that slog must be to exit poverty. The entire country is stacked against success for blacks.
And? I had dinner at a white friend's house not two weeks ago where he was complaining that his white son did not get a job because they "wanted a black guy". I asked how he knew that to be true (since hiring decisions are not public in corporations), and he said "my son could see it on the hiring managers face".
I was stunned Fern. A mature white, male American around 64 years old bought that story from his son after his son failed to meet the bar at an interview.
As if anyone can discern anything from anyone's "face".
What I COULD discern is the racism dripping from this guys mind as he sought to find ways to justify why his kid is unemployed. Surely, it cannot be because his kid had a lousy interview and lesser resume.
It's bad out there Fern. I am glad I am old now and have enough food to eat, a small home to live in and don't feel my heart pound every morning right after my eyes open anymore. Honestly, your post made me feel tired, and, I almost never feel tired.
We (humans) have to start balancing reproduction vs sustainability. Both of my kids say they will never have kids.
I do tell them that the best part of my life was raising them, never mind the endless hours of work, and hustle. I would not trade my memories holding them as babies and little kids for anything.
BUT, at 8 Billion humans and counting, and the rest of the natural world which sustains life on the planet nearly destroyed, we have to start awakening to the ecosystem itself.
So much of the world still depends on coal for energy, the planet's climate is on life support. It can't support all 8 billion of us now, and yet more demands are made on the ecosystem every day. Climate. Democracy. The Economy. Wars. The Border. Education. The News we don't get (except the news analyzed here by HCR), The Crazies. All The Precipices.
Mike, only this morning was I thinking again about how the world’s orphans (Gaza and Israel have done nothing if they haven’t reminded us of them) should result in everyone’s thinking about adoption instead of conception and wondering how and whether that enormous shift could be achieved. Your children are to be congratulated for their understanding. Meanwhile, as a parent who brought them up to think ahead, may I congratulate you?
Mike- saying “the entire country is stacked against success for blacks” is an understatement. Thanks for acknowledging the fact that racism is systemic and enduring.
America was built on the backs, blood, sweat and tears of Black people who were enslaved for centuries and then “segregated” and denied the same rights as others for decades.
Now some White people would rather “burn it all down” instead of insuring “justice and equality for all”. The common denominator among MAGA is not economics or religion-it’s a desire to keep racism intact.
Racism is considered a minor problem if it’s considered at all because we think it only affects people of color (especially Black folks), but in the end racism underlies most of our problems and it affects all of us.
Racism is a feature of American democracy and capitalism. It may very well be the cause of our nation’s decline.
Apparently the media of television and now the internet are very powerful influences on people's thinking. What news one chooses to access, based on personal bias is very reinforcing. Then, for all the people on social media, the bots come to you and influence you if you are not wary of them. How much media literacy does the average person have? I suspect not a lot. Our newpapers are not reporting like they used to. Is that that they have hired a lot of superficial thinkers? They cave to corporate sponsors? They promote an agenda that furthers the wealth of the owners? Or, all of the above. One has to be able to see through this GREED, often wrapped in Jesus.
Linda, I pose that the media has deemed that journalism is not as profitable as supporting conformation bias Its a business model run by billionaires; in other words, self interested owners
I agree with that. It is why I am daily wondering whether keeping in touch with what they are saying is worth it. I just as I told my daughter, who in her first year in uni, in a class with almost all but one being foreign students, that it is good that she is in class with people whose values she abhores, because it helps her to learn about it up close and personal. She has come from schools in the USA, where except for an occasional crank, with whom she also managed to get along, everyone was friends. Now, at 18, she is encountering people whose values she can not stand. It is made clearer and clearer with each class discussion. I told her she is fortunate to get this exposure to other points of view in person, because she can engage in dialogue. I have to merely suppose what makes people who tick differently tick from an intellectual point of view. Reading a study, is not like knowing. Frankly, I recall those experiences in uni too, and they were very broadening. I also watched a lot of conservatives freak out. So, this is what the NYT and WaPo offer me, and I know it is not like watching Fox News, which I am not going to do. They expose me to the point of view being sold to the mainstream, and helps me to understand why friends who do not read as much have the worries, or lack of worries, and points of view that they have.
Hello Bryan. My comment was based on an article in Atlantic Magazine, for which I provided a link. The magazine is now providing 5 gift shares on a test basis for their subscribers.
True. I did not read the link as I am busy revising an email to counsel for Substack Inc re their out of date 2023 Terms of Use, the 3 notorious trolls on LFAA on Thanksgiving Day, the appearance of a religious 501(c)3 as a Substack Author, user & loquacious commenter on JV's Civil Discourse & their general lack of preparemess for 2024 Platform mayhem.
Hello, Virginia. I don't know which journalist you are referring to. The journalists I am familiar with have not left The New York Times or Washington Post. The writers on the Atlantic are excellent as well.
The 1970’s were an unmitigated disaster. The end of the 60’s was beyond depressing. The unintended consequences of Great Society broke up and disassociated minority and poor families. America ran into a World of new labor competition. America exported, through both Republican and Democrat administrations, labor to emerging countries into a new global dream world.
Yearning for a progressive command economy America that wasn’t , alone in the world with capital, after a terrible World War, with little competition is not going to happen ever again.
We need a rational common sense approach that focuses on our own citizens and country and puts a stop to the Empire fantasy that now threatens to destroy us.
Take a read of Fern's post on how the successful, for whites, New Deal investment economy and shared investment fell apart after the Civil Rights movement.
This is the best explanation of the downward spiral of living standards in the US, since Reagan's "bluster and BS" economic programs, I have ever seen.
In fact, there was a "progressive economy" that was successful, but only for whites. When it looked like that shared prosperity might be shared with blacks?
Americans abandoned the whole model for the Republican race to the bottom called "trickle down". LOL. yep, "trickle down". Sounds like the men's bathroom at a bar does it not? But? White folks bought it. Why? Because they did not want to share with blacks.
And "trickle" it was. Very little down. Which made everyone poor, not just blacks. Truly hilarious if you think about it!!
LOL. Who in their right mind would trade the post war era of prosperity for a "trickle"???
Ummm....white Americans DID. That's how. Take a read of Fern's outstanding post today. Amazing.
Best voting advice: Voting isn't marriage. It's public transport.
You're not waiting for "the one".
You're getting on the bus. And if there isn't one going exactly to your destination, you don't stay home and sulk. You take the one that's going closest to where you want to be.
Agreed. Take the bus that gets you closest to where you want to go. Another writer I follow says “you don’t get your shiny unicorn every time. Take the best thing out there, even if it’s not a magical beast.
I don't watch commercial TV and I'm retired and sort of out of it, so I know a lot goes on that I don't see, but I have not seen a the Democratic Party excite the young since Kennedy. The heavy-handed way the party inserted Humphrey, who had not run in the primaries, alienated younger people more affected by the war in a way I don't think the party ever quite recovered from. That's irrespective of whether one believes Humphrey was the right pick or not.
There are many constituencies and many aspects of a complex society to be balanced by the office of any president, but we need input from the young, and we need outreach to the young. Is that happening? Possibly more than I know, but so far I have not observed much of it the intervening years. I recall reading of an interview in the runup to the 2016 election:
"What do you tell voters who are new to the process who say this makes them feel like it's all rigged?" Tapper asked the DNC chair.
"Unpledged delegates exist really to make sure that party leaders and elected officials don't have to be in a position where they are running against grassroots activists," Wasserman Schultz calmly explained.
Tapper did not press her on her response. "I'm not sure that that answer would satisfy an anxious young voter, but let's move on," he said, and dropped the issue just when it was getting hot."
I know that there have been reforms to the Democratic delegate system, but I still have the impression that there is not sufficient effort to bring the young and their very legitimate concerns into the fold and pulling the same direction.
The interests of the young run counter to the interests of the corporate state, which owns the Ds just as much as the Rs. It figures, as long as the young have the latest digital device, they can be wedged/divided just like their parents/grandparents.
The Democratic Party will not respond in a serious way until enough of the youth vote bails and votes third party. Even then, it might not be able to throw off the corporate yoke. The rot is extensive in our political system.
The young want us to quit supporting proxy wars and genocide (Ukraine/Israel), and get serious about climate, guns, and economic inequality. They see Democrats as unserious in addressing any of the aforementioned issues. And they are right.
Dont forget to mention what has become chronic political gridlock by a GOP which denied climate change, has fought "Obamacare" tooth and nail, and generally calls social support legislation "communism" when picking on Dems. Perhaps most of all, Evangelicals which induced Trump (McConnell the masterful manipulator) to get rid of Roe v Wade, want religion back in the schools, the right which attacks everything "woke"...
Frank, that’s obvious, it doesn’t require mentioning. I feel we have a better chance of getting somewhere by returning the Democratic Party to its FDR roots than in changing the GOP.
And hell, I fought Obamacare once the Dem senators killed the public option; then it just became a handout to health insurers and Big Pharma.
Whatever, seems Dems have a greater youth effort than anybody else. We might remember there is a huge inbuilt social cynicism which has got to be a huge wall against participation. Funny but in small town New Brunswick, Canada, i remember hearing a lot about the same complaints 60+ years ago as circulate now, just more on steroids these days. https://yda.org/
Tell your family that no one in the world could accomplish what Biden has in dealing with all of these international crises. Also, his administration is full of very capable people running their departments in ways that help America function and protects us for the greedy fraudsters who have corrupted the Republican Party. Also, make sure your relatives realize that Trump is old also, and that he has lost his mind and is a danger to all of us. Why don’t they put their efforts into stopping him from running?
Thank you Professor, for keeping us up to date and informed about our human rights and military commitments. I wish the way we connect with adversity didn’t include direct war and death. I always ask why violence and hate instead of compassion, cooperation and peace-making decisions. I am not naive. I am hopeful that someday the words of great leaders will come to pass. A web search leads to abundant antiwar voices, but Albert Einstein (1879-1955) gave a warning that should make anyone pause and think of the future, considering today’s lethal weapons and guaranteed loss of life. “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
That's quite the quote. At one level Oppenheimer's and other's fears came true. Both the Americans and Russians outbuilt each other in nuclear fire power to overkill heights even those guys would have baulked at. The good news... no one has "pulled the trigger"... despite all the fears and accidents, not once.... should i add... yet???
Heather AGAIN describes our US historical challenges whether in Ukraine or Israel or wherever. The need for a real two state solution in Palestine, the need for an effective Ukrainian defense…God willing we as a country can so provide…..but the price is constant vigilance, an informed electorate…and the WILL to deal with these challenges….the political will, the activist spirit…the commitment! God willing we have it!
Thanks a lot Tom…I listened to his address also checked out his very distinguished background …..I really appreciate this ‘heads up’ and suggest others check out his address too!
I note that very few comment on the imprisoned Palestinian women and children Israel has begun to release as part of the temporary pause deal. If anyone wants to learn some about them, see Bethan McKerman’s Guardian piece (Nov. 22, 2023) “300 Palestinian women and children in Israeli jails listed before prisoner release.” Spoiler alert: While it is not stated in this particular piece, I understand from CNN reporting that Israel has arrested a million Palestinians in the West Bank (a territory of about 5 million) since 1967 largely to suppress resistance to occupation.
Thank you Barb, I don't seem to have time to open the Guardian, I have too many subscriptions. I'll get into it in the morning. You're up late back there.
Will it succeed in obliterating Hamas, while destroying Gaza and killing many, many innocent children and adults who live there?
Does Netanyahu owe the Palestinians an apology as well as the Israelis?
'Gaza Civilians, Under Israeli Barrage, Are Being Killed at Historic Pace' (NYTimes)
'Even a conservative assessment of the reported Gaza casualty figures shows that the rate of death during Israel’s assault has few precedents in this century, experts say.'
'Israel has cast the deaths of civilians in the Gaza Strip as a regrettable but unavoidable part of modern conflict, pointing to the heavy human toll from military campaigns the United States itself once waged in Iraq and Syria.'
'But a review of past conflicts and interviews with casualty and weapons experts suggest that Israel’s assault is different.'
'While wartime death tolls will never be exact, experts say that even a conservative reading of the casualty figures reported from Gaza shows that the pace of death during Israel’s campaign has few precedents in this century.'
'People are being killed in Gaza more quickly, they say, than in even the deadliest moments of U.S.-led attacks in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, which were themselves widely criticized by human rights groups.'
'Precise comparisons of war dead are impossible, but conflict-casualty experts have been taken aback at just how many people have been reported killed in Gaza — most of them women and children — and how rapidly.'
'It is not just the scale of the strikes — Israel said it had engaged more than 15,000 targets before reaching a brief cease-fire in recent days. It is also the nature of the weaponry itself.'
'Israel’s liberal use of very large weapons in dense urban areas, including U.S.-made 2,000-pound bombs that can flatten an apartment tower, is surprising, some experts say.'
“It’s beyond anything that I’ve seen in my career,” said Marc Garlasco, a military adviser for the Dutch organization PAX and a former senior intelligence analyst at the Pentagon. To find a historical comparison for so many large bombs in such a small area, he said, we may “have to go back to Vietnam, or the Second World War.” (NYTimes) See gifted link below.
Hamas is responsible for all the casualties. They began by killing Israelis. They keep their military hardware in houses and hospitals, in Gaza. As their elected representatives what have they done for them in all these years?
The Palestinian prisoners are not innocent kids and women.
'Gaza’s hospitals have played a central role in the dueling narratives surrounding the war.' (AP)
'Hospitals enjoy special protected status under the international laws of war. But they can lose that status if they are used for military purposes.'
'Israel has long claimed that Hamas uses hospitals, schools, mosques and residential neighborhoods as human shields. In particular, it says Hamas has hidden command centers and bunkers underneath the sprawling grounds of Shifa. The United States says its own intelligence corroborates those claims. Hamas denies the allegations.'
'Israel says other hospitals are similarly used for military purposes. It has ordered the evacuations of a number of Gaza hospitals, including Shifa, as it presses ahead with its ground operation against Hamas.'
'The U.N. and other international organizations say these evacuations have endangered patients and overwhelmed the remaining hospitals in the besieged territory.'
'With Israel already facing mounting international criticism of its offensive, a failure to uncover a significant Hamas presence could step up the pressure to halt the operation. Israel has vowed to press ahead until it destroys Hamas.'
'WHAT HASN’T ISRAEL FOUND?'
'Israeli officials described the underground bunker unveiled Wednesday as a smoking gun, a Hamas hideout. But there was no conclusive proof in the rooms that they had been used by Hamas militants. What’s more, the rooms — bare, small, and rusted — were a far cry from the elaborate command center officials originally said was underneath Shifa.'
'Hamdan, the Hamas leader, mocked the Israeli discoveries so far. “The Israelis said there was a command-and-control center, which means that the matter is greater than just a tunnel,” he said.'
'Israeli military officials say those initial illustrations were “conceptual” and not meant to be taken literally. They have also promised many more discoveries as troops continue the painstaking task of scouring a complex spread out over more than 10 acres (40,000 square meters).'
“It’s going to take time,” said Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, another military spokesman.' (AP) See link below.
Yeah, could be a real credibility problem here. Americans never did found those "weapons of mass destruction" upon which the invasion of Iraq was based. Oops! I still suspect neocons were as much about planting mis information as just making an intelligence error. Cheyney and company.
No, but remember the actual KILL ratio is far more Palestinians than Israelis. Even the crazy incursion by Hamas into Israel is not an existential threat to Israel, not by a long shot.
"On the Ukrainian remembrance day of Holodomor, Russia launched 75 drones at Kyiv, its largest drone strike against Ukraine since the start of its invasion in February 2022." Ukraine intercepted 74 of the 75 -- a very good batting average. Let's hope Chuck Schumer can do as well in achieving the goals of his letter (Not since WW II have we been defending democracy and the civilization democracy creates as we are now doing and must continue to do)
This comment is not directly about the Israeli- Hamas war. It is an observation. Since this began, we have heard virtually nothing of the Ukranian war from MSM. It is a defacto censorship. This war is arguably more consequential to the preservation of Democracy and the security of all western nations than is the middle east conflict. With declining coverage, our short attention span population loses interest, and the support for the war against the invading Russians falters.
Putin's game since his blitzkrieg failed has been to wait us out, and wait for us to lose interest. There is ample evidence that he will be successful at this.
The MSM HAS TO understand that their choice of what to put on the air has a profound effect on the way the US population responds to issues. I cannot understand putting every tiny detail of the middle east war on a 4 hour repeption cycle, to the exclusion of information about Ukraine. In the days of a sinlge 30 minute broadcast in the evening, that woudl be understandable, but with the 24 hour coverage that the news outlets now have, I simply cannot figure this out.
It IS obviously a conscious choice. and in my opinion, a bad choice to exclude any significant coverage of Ukraine.
Totally agree. The MSM is a heatseeking bottom line animal. The war on Ukraine by Russia is much more concerning and consequential. But our attention to the crisis in Israel is not indicative hopefully of aid for Ukrainians and progress against Russia. I hope.
The same statistical argument works when calling for building infrastructure instead of providing weaponry. But note how it is almost always used to defend sending more death and destruction abroad.
And it does shut mouths, especially those who should be demanding peace instead of endless war.
I have to wonder how much staying power Netanyahu really has. It's an understatement to say he is unpopular among his people.
The fighting in that sector of the world won't end in my lifetime. There is no kumbaya or magic pill to fix it.
Other than humanitarian efforts, various countries including the US, need to stop getting into the middle of this dog fight.
I have spoken to far too many lifelong Democrats that are backing away from Biden over this. The common thread in the conversations I have had, is that when Netanyahu made his point clear that he was only out for blood, Biden didn't call him on it.
Even my friend who's grandchildren are living in Gaza, feels the indifference from Biden has drawn the line for her.
Who knows what Biden actually said to Netanyahu? Publicly he did what he had to do, and I expect what the world expected of America. Privately he’s been banging away daily on getting the hostages out. Remember Netanyahu coming to speak to Congress during the Obama administration and snubbing the President? He has no love for him, but the attack on Israel has to be answered.
Black and white thinking belongs to the radical right. On the left we understand nuance. On the left we care about everyone. I reminded my Thanksgiving companions, whom to a person condemned religious extremism ( in this case the topic was Utah and Mormons), that a lot of the science denial was cultural, and it’s the same with your “liberal” friends. It’s jump on Joe time.
He isn’t too old. I wouldn’t ask him to explain ChatGPT (although he might do a creditable job), but I’m glad he’s the one driving the military.
Let's not fall into the Biden is taking care of everything ditch. He isn't. He has an exemplary team of people who are handling negotiations of all sorts. That's how a good Presidency should work.
We have no idea what he may have said to Netanyahu in private. It matters what the optics are to the viewing public.
Just a question but, when you say "on the left we care about everyone". Does that include the people who have a different opinion?
In my line of work, I have to listen to all sides. Sometimes the outlandish theories I hear make my ears bleed, but that is their world and I respect them as long as they respect me in return.
So to be clear my "liberal" friends are simply long standing Democrats. Some are the same age as Biden, if not older. Age isn't the issue they have with Biden.
I clearly worry in the directions you are pointing. I’m reminded of a comedian Murray Roman’s album titled “You Can’t Beat People up and Have them say I Love You”. He was pointing to the riots in Watts in the late 60s. Anyway, I hope Biden can push in the direction needed. Thanks HCR & Linda.
Biden is trying to help solve the problem. Chump would solve it in a flash, he and Bebe would unite and deal done. What the hell, people. It’s not like there is a young, white Obama in the wings. BTW, love the Album name
"Frankly, I don't have a moral come back for that."
There is no "moral" come back because Biden was, at the time, thinking clearly about only one thing: Campaign donations for his next run at President.
Palestinian Americans make a tiny fraction of the campaign donations compared with people with relatives in Israel. So, Biden had no need to try to stop the bloodbath sponsored by Netanyahu in Gaza. Really, pretty simple. .
Jen, cynicism is an overly negative assessment of a reality.
I can never be certain, but, it is likely that Biden’s full on support for saturation bombing Gaza, early on, was associated with his perception of potential campaign support. If that is true, then, it is not cynical.
The ‘hostage pause’ is an agonizing interlude in the murderous Israeli/Palestinian human chess board.
Hamas is dribbling out a few Israeli hostages, women and children ranging in age from 4 to 85 with released foreigners overwhelmingly agricultural workers from Thailand.
Israeli is selecting from about 9,000 Arab prisoners.
Meanwhile, a minimal amount of food, water, and fuel is being brought into Gaza after more than a month of total cut off. Starvation, massive disease, and no safe refuge are facing 2,000,000 Gaza residents, who anticipate the prospect of a return of a massive Israeli military engagement.
While Netanyahu, some members of the ‘war cabinet,’ and the Israeli Defense Forces seem intent on a swift end to the ‘hostage pause,’ many world leaders, including President Biden and the UN secretary general, are pressing for a ‘cease fire.’
It is unclear what will transpire for the remaining hostages (especially the Israeli soldiers), for Gaza residents, and for Hamas.
Netanyahu is a wily politician who has ruled for much of the past two decades. He is desperately endeavoring to remain in power despite his personal culpability for the pressure cooker Hamas murderous explosion and Israel’s brutal revenge.
Given the mood in Israel, I find it possible that Netanyahu will be replaced, though I don’t envisage a moderate successor capable of pursuing some sort of ‘two-state’ amelioration.
Hamas, apart from its military arm, seems an amorphous governing entity. Since its election over Fatah in 2007, Hamas and Netanyahu had been engaged in a dangerous tit-for-tat game in which Israel maintained Gaza Palestinians under prison-like conditions.
I don’t envisage a Hamas ‘surrender,’ however long Israel maintains a full court military press. Nor do I envisage a viable Gaza Palestinian leadership emerging in the weeks and months ahead.
My hope is that the ‘hostage pause’ will morph into a cease fire in which the killings will end and some sense of post-war rationality will emerge.
More likely is that Israel will resume its military air strikes and boots on the ground assaults, there will be greater suffering for the 2,000,000 Gaza residents, and Hamas will experience serious personnel losses, while Gaza will remain a breeding ground for a new generation of ‘terrorists.’
Although Israel is the product of Western European colonial aggression and a combination of post WW2 guilt and desire to put Jews some place else, it does exist. The only solution is to get rid of all Israeli settlements in the West Bank and allow it and Gaza to become sovereign states.
If this were to happen and be accepted, these states would eventually realize that working and trading with eachother would be to their mutual benefit.
James In looking for a model of this ‘two state’ Israeli/Palestinian solution, should they seek to replicate how American settlers imposed a ‘two-state’ solution in dealing with Native Americans and their land?
James Various Native American tribes thought it was their land, as acknowledged in various federal treaties. Some of this is recognized in federal courts today.
"More likely is that Israel will resume its military air strikes and boots on the ground assaults, there will be greater suffering for the 2,000,000 Gaza residents, and Hamas will experience serious personnel losses, while Gaza will remain a breeding ground for a new generation of ‘terrorists.’"
Yes, very sadly, Hamas gave Israel a "reason" to accelerate Israel's stated, existing plans for the extermination and displacement of all Palestinians from Palestinian lands, replaced by Israeli people. Plans which were fully developed a couple of weeks after the Balfour Declaration in 1917.
When God is on your side, man, you can do anything you want to anyone you want. God approves !!
A very neat trick indeed. Invent a God from a burning bush (that only one person witnessed) that gives you permission and justification to kill anyone you want, period.
It does not get any better than that Dr. Wheelock. Moses was a genius.
Mik s Yeah! I can’t remember what I did yesterday before I shouted Holy Moses. 400 years was about the time of the first Thanksgiving, of which I have scant memory.
Yea Keith, I can’t look at the TV and what it shows from Gaza and not think that many of those children and young people are going to be radicalized against Israel. Hamas may be gone but the anger will remain. Anger and hatred are what motivated the thousands of Palestinians who crossed into Israel and did unthinkable things to the people they found there, including infants, that just screams WRONG, and yet thousands participated in the killing. The natural human response when seeing an infant in any kind of danger is to want to protect it. An infant has made no choices that would induce anger, so something must have snapped in those people to allow them to do what they did. Bibi and his ilk set the stage for the anger and hatred that visited those communities near the Gaza border, of that I have no doubt.
The staid BBC newsreader nearly choked this morning whilst telling us that two hostage/prisoners just released were three-year-old twins. (Which side released them? Does it matter?) (Come to think of it, have you ever tried to get a three-year-old to be quiet?)
I watched President Zelenskyy's address on Holodomor. It was dignified and moving. He is the right person to be leading Ukraine at this time. And we must pass aid to Ukraine! We cannot allow the mad GOP/Trump Party to hand Ukraine over to Putin.
The US is only important to him for his image. Remember how he sprinted up the staircase, after his very brief stay in the Reed hospital, and posed floodlit on the Truman balcony, saluting at some length? for the cameras, because there was nobody else there, and the helicopter was at that moment flying away. Putin is his puppetmaster.
Remember too that Putin is one of Trump’s idols! He loves the autocratic leadership style. We must not lose our focus on winning in 2024! Trump and his MAGA cult must be defeated!
If America and the West allow Putin to succeed in Ukraine we can all throw our hat at ever standing up for freedom again....anywhere.
His invasion and bullying since 2014 must be reversed and Russia's population must be shown that there is a crippling price to be paid for such wanton destruction of lives and property.
You mean that by the USA lying, to the world, about "Weapons of Mass Destruction" in order to invade an entire country, Iraq, that offered zero threat to the United States, Putin learned to use a lie to invade another country?
No way! Say it ain't so Tom! Not the good old US of A?
Wait, but, we ALSO did the same thing with Vietnam. We lied about Ho Chi Minh being a threat while Ho was just trying to free his people from French slavery colonialism.
And WAIT, we also did the same thing with Afghanistan (not a single participant in 911 was an Afghan citizen and Osama Bin Laden was in Pakistan, not Afghanistan).
You mean Putin learned his tricks from US of A. No way!
Mike HORRORS! Don’t you remember the saying “Do what I say, not what I do?” Often we set an example of what not to do—-ask various Latin American countries.
Annie Actually Putin was rather tame in the first years he succeeded Ysltsin in 2000. Then he got worse and worse—-more czar like. Now he is glorifying the ‘good old days of Stalin.’
Thank you Heather.
These things linger:
* Netanyahu and Hamas have expiration dates
* Funding our government and defending democracy
* Stalin and now Putin’s attempts to erase the Ukrainian identity
Such a dynamic time we live in. We truly are living at the precipice.
Jean-Pierre Garau,
Agree with these major challenges!
Along with these challenges ...which will not end......I want to praise the brilliant, freedom-loving men and women who sacrifice themselves....their gifts, talents, time (and for their precious families who sacrifice their presence) for working with other countries to maintain peace and a better goodness in this world.
It is easy to blame and "throw stones" but peace...negotiation is difficult. My heart is deeply moved by the leaders of other nations who have been a major part of these negotiations.
Peace is more profitable for everyone except for those who deal in weapons of war.
President Joe Biden and his team have demonstrated that negotion works. He has demonstrated that people of various faiths/beliefs can work together and want to work together for a more productive and profitable world for everyone.
President Joe Biden and his brilliant, hardworking team have shown us what is possible. Other powerful leaders in this world have demonstrated that peace and decency are possible.
Younger or older....who stands in higher regard at home or around the world, than our President Joe Biden and the USA's team of diplomats? (I do not believe the polls!)
I would like to share your post on the WH fb page. The MAGA s are posting in full force & I think we need to show them there are more of us than them!
Yes!
Excellent idea Carole!
Thank you, Emily, for this post especially your noting that negotiations are difficult. I have great impatience with those who persist on throwing stones. Also you note the profits of war which Mitch points out when he observes that help to Ukraine gives profit to defense industries here. I did love Heather noting how much we spend on beer and snacks in contrast to foreign aid. That is somehow disgusting.
You can drop the modifier “somehow”, or replace it with “completely”.
The stats on beer and snacks were eye opening. So, we as an overweight nation could use to lose a few pounds, improve our health, and keep Russia from over powering Eastern Europe. What a win win opportunity..
Credit where it's due, Heather was quoting Tom Nichols on the beer and snacks numbers. Tom's article is well written and worth reading if you can access The Atlantic.
We do subscribe to the online Atlantic which I read nearly every day.
Tom's articles are a high point, but it's a daily must for me too.
Emily,
Beautifully stated.
You should submit your statement to your newspaper(s). We certainly see very little press on all the good the Biden/Harris Team is doing on many different fronts, foreign and domestic. It’s up to each of us to spread the word.
How can you say Biden has done a great job of diplomacy? It took him over a month to get some progress. Yet in that time over 15,000 Gaza citizens, close half of them children, have been killed by Israeli bombings. Biden could have stopped this by telling the Israel right wing leaders to stope it immediately by telling them that the U.S. would stop giving them $Billion and weapons. I believe Joe has done a really good job as president in most other areas, but it's obvious he's afraid of AIPAC's influence on Congress and many Jewish voters. He may have cost himself the next presidential election by not stopping this awful war in its tracks. If he and Congress live in Hell, which is Gaza and the West Bank, and had no power to get out, they might actually understand the meaning of the word 'fear.' That is my opinion, and I am not an anti-Semite.
I get your point - though I believe that, unlike Trump, Biden chooses to engage by the rules - our checks and balances, influencing rather than demanding actions by sovereign states.
Thank you. I believe Biden is out of step and has been unsympathetic to Palestine all his life. He has the power to shut down this war but decided instead to allow Israel to kill 11,000 (6,000 of whom are children, according to Al Jazeera) people. Indeed, Biden blew it.
Yes, and Al Jazeera network has been the only network with journalists actually in Gaza reporting the real stories. Israel and the U.S. told them to stop telling the truth from Gaza. I believe Al Jazeera ignored those warnings and is continuing their reporting.
I believe one of Al Jazeera's journalists had his entire family blown up in Gaza. I recall the Iraq war where Bush had an air strike destroy Al Jazeera's Baghdad office, so nothing surprises me.
One thing I have read in several places is that the Palestinian Health Ministry is the only agency that has accurately reported on the number of casualties. Israel usually inflates the number of Israeli deaths and minimizes the number of Palestinians.
This is not really a war but an ongoing massacre. There is little point in it other than killing people with the excuse that they're looking for Hamas, who is probably running out of ammo, and Russia isn't able to send more. And this is not a ceasefire, but only a pause. When the hostages are exchanged, the bombing will resume. I wish people would stop calling it a ceasefire.
Maybe not an anti-semitre, but other deleterious adjectives describe you well; stupid, shortsighted, and COMPLETELY ill-informed. Why don’t YOU try some diplomacy with fold NOT MUCH INTERESTED in you OR working together AT ALL. Because that describes both Hamas a terrorist group AND Netanyahu, a bumbling, self- centered, and mostly criminal man - who recently invited Elon Musk to have a chat about APARTHEID. Get a grip. Richard Burrell.
Dana, you also have a right to comment here. Thanks for what you said. Perhaps you could go more deeply into what is happening in the Middle East. Have a great day!
Very well said, Jean-Pierre and Emily.
And agree w/ Carole, would like to share with attribution.
Yes, standing at the precipice, looking into the abyss, shining a light on the enablers and the perpetrators.
As long as we’re talking about shining a light, and enablers and perpetrators. Sachs at the UN.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm4qLWc_Co0&t=0s
Jeffery Sachs' opinions are somewhat limited. He neglects democratic aspirations of Syrians, Ukrainian, Libyans and Palestinians in favor of authoritarian regimes that unlike enlightened countries have no respect for the will of their populations and their neighbors borders.
I too have big questions around a lot of Sachs’ opinions and policies. He is, among many other “lauded” people also an apologist for Russia. I was encouraged to read his ideas by a family member who, after Russia invaded Ukraine stated that the world had absolutely nothing to fear in Putin. I was flabbergasted.
https://youtu.be/D_3itcQ9wqQ?si=WJBPFgts-yQNNaRO
Time 10:19 Salman Rushdie at his Peace Prize acceptance explains the different definitions of peace and freedom.
Worth the time if you have it.
Fabulous talk, beautifully illustrated with fables which help us see the complexity of truth. THANK YOU!
You were flabbergasted because you have been fed American propaganda from the cradle. We have far more to fear from our own government than from what Putin does.
Excuse me? We, and I’m talking America here, have wrecked the democratic aspirations of every one of the peoples you noted, via proxy war, coup/proxy war, assassination, and acquiescence to apartheid, respectively.
Get a clue.
What does your opinion of the US' foreign policy have to do with a subscriber's opinion of Jeffery Sachs?
You’re a smart guy, Fern. I’m sure you can figure it out. Might have something to do with ‘democratic aspirations’.
Aaron, I wonder if we both heard what Jeffrey Sachs said.
I heard that it's okay to annex Ukraine. Rule of law, 70% vote ousting your puppet president and treaties don't matter if you control an Army. Didn't matter in Georgia and Chechnya so it shouldn't matter in Ukraine, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, East Germany... sorry not the 18th century any more. NATO worked to preserve peace and prosperity for 75 years. It works!
Thank You.
Sachs is a brilliant man.
The thing I admire about Sachs is that he learns from his mistakes. He helped wreck Russia in the 90s, but then realized the IMF/World Bank austerity/privatize path just opens the door to oligarchy.
Many high-placed Americans "helped wreck Russia in the 90s."
New Ivy League grads in finance, older, distinguished U.S. banks, and a U.S. Department of State eager to befriend and fund the most rotten of former Soviet and secret police officials.
Even then, this coddling of high-placed corruption wasn't new. U.S. Marine General Smedley Butler from his own lifetime experience spoke with disgust of it 90 years ago, at the same time Stalin was first trying mass murder on the Ukrainians, as Heather Cox Richardson today here commemorates.
Smedley Butler has many more admirers than just me. It horrifies me that all the modern generals and people appointed by Trump that are warning us about Trump aren't being listened to as Smedley Butler was. Perhaps, back then the plotters were more ashamed of being exposed.
Now, the Citizens United undercutting our ability to limit the ability of the rich and powerful to have domineering influence over who provides our news has put us seriously at a disadvantage to be heard (and have all our votes counted).
The plutocrats seem to be copying the acquiescence of the German industrialists that thought they would benefit from Hitler gaining power they thought hey could manage.
See https://www.rsn.org/001/billionaires-are-lining-up-to-fund-donald-trumps-antidemocratic-agenda.html
Musk is going to visit the Israeli president to be scolded for his antisemitism too.
I wish Musk would fly into a black hole.
I wish he'd set up his Mars biodome for billionaires already, and settle there for good.
Maybe Musk could give former president George W. Bush a free ride to Mars. I believe when Bush was the prez, he made the statement that he would like to go to mars.
Tom High, thanks so much for sharing what Jeffrey Sachs said to the U.N. I agree with him wholeheartedly. We must hope that the world powers will listen to him. One wonders if they ever will.
Which precipice are you referring to?
WWIII, the end of democracy in America and elsewhere, mass starvation thanks to Russia blocking and destroying grain.......
Maybe precipices, or will one do…
Definitely plural.
Destroying grain at the very moment the Horn and East Africa are in dire need because climate change is making their harvest fail is a crime against humanity. Truly grotesque.
Yes.
Must deal with the end of '23 & the start of 2024 now.
I'm so grateful to have a government that faces such crisis head on and does the hard work of trying to solve it. While many of us turn away, not wanting to face the harsh realities I have such respect for those who work on solutions. Politicians and the political establishment from think tanks to ambassadors to negotiators to policy makers are not just parasites and opportunists. Some actually care to govern.
Yes, "Netanyahu and Hamas have expiration dates". But there is absolutely no equivalence between the two in regard to accomplishments, errors, crimes, how they got in power, how they stay in power, what kind of relationships they have with the rest of the world, how they will "expire", and the kinds of possibilities open up after that ... And your words, suggesting equivalence, reflect Dr. Richardson's ignorance and bias in this letter, I'm afraid.
more of an equivalence than not - Netanyahu - his corruption - wasnt he indicted for it?
Yes Hamas is a terrorist organization - Netanyahu is far from a beacon of humanity.
Do you really find equivalence between "a terrorist organization" and being "far from a beacon of humanity"?
Listen - I'm not saying that Netanyahu has committed no errors or crimes or misuses of power .... but the numbers and degrees of misdeeds are simply not on the same scale.
No - hard to describe. Someone who has no hesitation at ordering the bombing of hospitals, refugee camps and ambulances with no thought of the many children and women that were killed may not be on the same scale as Hamas, but really hes doing the same thing! And frankly, the 39 Palestinians released from prisons - none over 19 - all security threats? I read there are 6,000 Palestinians in those prisons. All security threats?
I would add the figures regarding the amounts spent on snacks and beer. Speaks volumes about our real priorities, and it is embarrassing.
We may well be living in dynamic times but personally, I’d appreciate a little less dynamism in my life.
Thank you for highlighting the war in Ukraine in your letter. It has been pushed to out of the spotlight by the Hamas/Israel conflict and likely will be again by the renewed government funding crisis.
It seems like even the former papers of record like the New York Times and Washington Post now believe their readership can no longer think about two issues at once, and that we no longer deserve broad and deep coverage of events. Instead we are getting horse-race polling and no policy coverage. This has been documented in an article from the Columbia Journalism Review.
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/election-politics-front-pages.php
It is time for all of us to start making our outrage at this known to the Boards of Directors and editorial boards of these companies. They have turned to subscriber based revenue models so subscriber-based outrage can get attention.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/new-york-times-revenue-chart/#google_vignette
Below is the link to the corporate board of the NY Times.
https://www.nytco.com/board-of-directors/
As WaPo motto says, "Democracy Dies in Darkness." We all have to do our part to make sure that our news outlets are held accountable for biased coverage and placement and resource allocation decisions being made by editorial boards.
The stakes couldn't be higher.
For $46.45 you can buy a share of NYT and go to shareholders meetings and make your feelings known in a venue with more clout.
Yes, Georgia. The Post and the Times headlines get it wrong frequently. But there is a lot of information in those publications, that if it were lost, we would suffer. They are more than headlines - they are engines of information. If we don't like their focus, tell them. If we want more information about a subject, tell them. Our "media" has a lot of problems. The incessant Biden vs Trump obsession drives me nuts. The polls are ridiculously obsessed with what could be a non-existent match-up. Trump is fading. Joe could change his mind. And why would he announce his departure before he had to? He would only "lame duck" himself. President Johnson announced his decision on March 31, 1968. Let's stop the speculation and know that if Joe did step aside there are dozens of wonderful candidates who would rise to the occasion. Or...Biden could follow the Diane Francis suggestion of replacing Harris with Newsom - talk about a campaign booster! I digress...but please compare our media with that of the UK or other nations. We could be a lot better. But we are also a lot better.
And only "Two issues at once"? I think most of us can think about several issues during the day. What haunts me is that every minute there is a story about the horrors of Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, our House Of Clowns - we are not talking about the destruction of our home.
A recent PBS Newshour segment highlighted the hypocrisy and horror of our so-called "recycling" of plastics to other countries. In the story, an authority in Thailand said that 70 to 80% of the plastic it receives is not processed or repurposed. It is taken to landfills, burned or simply dumped into waterways that lead to the ocean. OUR plastic. This is a disaster.
https://youtu.be/kXpzWWv0b0U
A recent story revealed that the largest percentage of microplastics in our oceans comes from vehicle tires - tiny bits of the tires flying off as we drive - washed into our water ways. The resulting pollution is found in our food supplies and now us. We are now walking talking plastic people. BTW, the heavier the vehicle, the faster the wear. EVs generally weigh 30% more than conventional autos. With the right focus and the right science, we could fix this.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/08/16/world/tyre-collective-microplastic-rubber-waste-climate-hnk-spc-intl/index.html
And what about drinking water? Need I go on?
All of what Senator Schumer proposes should be easy peasy logical legislation. And then we could get back to saving our home - that we are currently treating like a dump.
Bill Alstrom, yesterday I wrote that in effect, cancelling the NYT is like cutting off your nose to spite your face. It got around 20 “likes.” (Sorry I don’t have an exact count.) Thank you for writing at length.
We aren't going to cancel ours, Virginia, because of the many aspects of the Times I enjoy. I confess to not reading the op ed pages or most of their news, but my husband reads that part of it.
Yes, I too enjoy a lot of the Times, but am often infuriated. I have written many letters stating this but nothing really changes. The huge spread they did the other day on who Trump might pick as is VP was one such article. I looked at the reader’s comments. Huge numbers of them were really furious!
I keep my blood pressure low by not looking at articles like that. And it is infuriating. The guy is a criminal with 91 indictments and hopefully will be in jail sometime next year. Also he is increasingly senile and it shows despite his handlers trying to hide it. He goes off script and then it's bonkers time.
For the first time online I have the recipes! May not cook any, but they’re lovely to read!
I have a huge file of recipes from the NYT. I do sometimes cook them. I also belong to the Burlap and Barrel spice blog where people are cooking up astounding things. The WaPo now has a way to access their recipes.
Bill, that plastics/old -technology- parts story was also on CBS Sunday morning. It was a devastating indictment of our developed world's wasteful lifestyle. We dump our waste on other, poorer countries whose people( including lots of young men and children) do " urban mining" in very toxic landfills to find copper and other components which they sell for a pittance. It was such a disturbing and horrific story. One suggestion was that the makers of the products be held responsible for and reclaim the waste they produce. Samsung was the only company to give an interview and they have begun, and are extending, projects to do just that.
The "outsourcing" of our trash should be illegal. Maybe if we had to deal with it here, we would change our ways. Our recycling programs are not serious. There are very few restrictions on single use plastics. Our town does not permit single use plastic bags at retailers. The town next door will not allow the sale of bottle water in plastic containers (it's not really healthier, anyway). It's a small something.
The process of "single stream recycling" is a joke. There are places where glass, plastic and paper products are completely separated. It's easy to do. But we are lazy.
True. But we outsource our rubbish because we are a self-serving first world behemoth, of course. The outsourcing doesn't include the megatons of plastic trash we dump in the oceans. But it's all good because we've got wind farms and EVs. Next we'll ship our crap to other planets, no doubt.
Well done.
I too am questioning the reporting of the "news." Why is it that at the beginning of this Israeli/Hamas mess, we were told that the Palestinian prisoners freed 3 to 1 Jew were terrorists and criminals and that just yesterday I learned that that many of the 3000 Palestinians detained by the Israeli authority are women and boys under the age of 18? Why were they abducted and detained and given no reason? Why is this group referred to as prisoners and not hostages? Why don't we hear about the pain the Palestinians feel after having their family members abducted? Why don't we hear how the Palestinians in the West Bank feel having Israeli soldiers running around with machine guns (a very powerful symbol BTW) harassing them? Why are Jewish settlers encouraged to land-grab in Palestinian neighborhoods? It is the Israeli government that is to blame for hate crimes against innocent Jews around the world and the US is complicit! No more 3 billion/year carte blanche for the Israeli government!
And then there is this. I now know several people who have (or who had)
Parkinson
https://www.sciencealert.com/nanoplastics-linked-to-changes-in-brain-proteins-associated-with-parkinsons-study-finds
My brother-in-law lost his Dad to Parkinson’s, and I have a friend whose Parkinson’s set in at 60.
Its a truly awful disease - I had a cousin diagnosed at 80 and a friend who passed away last year after a fairly short time with it - it just completely wiped him out. And I'm not surprised that its linked to plastic pollution. I watched the story on Sunday morning too (Carol mentioned above). What destruction this technology brings down on other countries just so our consumption can keep on!
Georgia, I cancelled my subscription (after almost 40 years) to NYT last year just after the ‘22 elections. Their obviously biased polling, Red Wave nonsense and as you noted, lack of policy coverage, was dangerous to our democracy in my opinion, and I was done with their agenda.
You have to call in order to cancel a subscription and I was subjected to one of the worst marketing pushes I’ve ever endured - it took over 20 minutes just to cancel - Really? When asked why I was cancelling, the guy on the other end actually started arguing about the premise for my anger and subsequent decision to cancel. Talk about hubris!
I sent a scathing letter to the Board of Directors. I followed up with several letters to the editor.
Crickets.
Your ideas are valid and will definitely help long term. But after thinking about this a great deal myself, my choice is to spend whatever spare time I have helping get out the vote in 2024. And whatever extra money I have on good candidates, important campaigns, and the best Substack has to offer (HCR, Robert Hubbell, Bill McKibben, Joyce White Vance, Jessica Craven, more).
When I was in college, my J school professors insisted that students subscribe to one national paper and our home town newspaper.
I highly doubt they would recommend the New York Times these days.
Good you told them why your were canceling. But my fear is that cancelations just drive them further towards clickbait because it is more profitable because it is cheaper to produce. I just posted another article on my Substack on a huge essay that A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the NY Times ,wrote back in May on the independent press in the Columbia Journalism Review., the place that jsut published the damning statistics on coverage of policy a week ago. Sulzberger is self-justifying and completely misses the forest for the trees. It is breathtaking in how far off the mark and naive he is. We have to do more to protest or there will lose an independent free press forever.
NYT doesn't depend as much on its online subscriptions as it does its print newspaper, so clickbait isn't a reason to support a newspaper (realistically, subscribing to stop the influx of clickbait?). None of the content in the NYT is free - there's a paywall, so they get their money.
Protest? How? Newspapers have been dying off for decades. Don't worry about the NYT; the real tragedy is the loss of smaller, local papers.
Or you can hit them where it hurts and cancel your subscription. Just because you don't have access doesn't mean you won't know what they are writing as most outlets (including this one) report any "fit" to print news they might offer.
I personally subscribe to the "be part of the solution to make it better" school of thought. But if you do cancel, tell them why--and not just Sulzberger but the whole Corporate Board.
I unsubscribed a month ago! My long time habit of surfing the NYT has ended. I am happy to report the quality of my life is still very good! WAPO subscription ends in a couple weeks. I soldier on...
I did the same last year. I got tired of the opinion section, mostly. Toxic and salacious, especially the right wing goons on WaPo.
Thank you Georgia, this is helpful and I will encourage their participation in the democratic awakening of citizens everywhere.
Her it goes out the door...
To: New York Times Board of Directors,
A.G. Sulzberger
Amanpal S. Bhutani
Manuel Bronstein
Beth Brooke
Rachel Glaser
Arthur Golden
Hays N. Golden
Meredith Kopit Levien
Brian P. McAndrews
David Perpich
John W. Rogers, Jr.
Anuradha B. Subramanian
Rebecca Van Dyck
New York Times Bureau
New York City, NY
November 26, 2023
Re: Warped Front Pages
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/election-politics-front-pages.php
– Columbia Journalism Review, Nov 20, 2023
I write to strongly encourage the New York Times to be more of an active participant in the "Awakening of Democracy" in America.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/07/democracy-awakening-review-heather-cox-richardson-us-history
This Columbia University review looked at the New York Times coverage of the issues 3 months prior to the 2020 election and concluded “If voters had wanted to educate themselves on issues, they would not have learned much from reading the Times.” They said it was typical of other major outlets as well, but I trust that is not reassuring.
“We found that the Times and the Post shared significant overlap in their domestic politics coverage, offering little insight into policy. Both emphasized the horse race and campaign palace intrigue, stories that functioned more to entertain readers than to educate them on essential differences between political parties. The main point of contrast we found between the two papers was that, while the Post delved more into topics Democrats generally want to discuss—affirmative action, police reform, LGBTQ rights—the Times tended to focus on subjects important to Republicans—China, immigration, and crime."
I have been a long-time digital subscriber deeply interested in the issues and policies and I want to hear more about the substantive programs President Biden’s team is successfully reaching across the aisle to implement.
A colleague recently wrote...”Biden has worked for the working class; Trump worked for the oligarchs. Biden passed a massive infrastructure bill; Trump did not. Biden was part of the Obama administration and helped pass the ACA; Trump claimed he would “repeal and replace Obamacare” and failed to do either. Trump bullied NATO partners to organize without the help of the US; Biden reinforced our relationship with our European partners, as well as our Asian-Pacific partners with coalitions that strengthen the bargaining power of smaller countries with our influence. Through Trump’s reckless spending cuts to balance all the tax giveaways he offered to the rich, the Infectious Disease team stationed in Wuhan China was scrapped three months before the nexus of COVID 19. Biden coordinated and executed one of the largest US vaccination initiatives since the polio vaccine, bringing back a stronger, more sustainable economy to the USA and North America as a whole. Why isn’t anybody talking about this? “
I strongly encourage the board to in turn, encourage editors and writers to participate more positively, more actively in “deeply reporting” as you say in your editorial mission. Accurate information on policy in the days, weeks, and months ahead of the 2024 election are crucial. Thank you. "
Done
It is cheaper to buy one share of the NYT than to subscribe for one year!
And here is a link to what is likely the best pressure point to write to get action NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/11/business/media/new-york-times-valueact-stock.html
Value Act is an activist investor group that likes to work with companies for the long term to improve profitability. The have recently established a sizeable position in NYT stock.
Follow the money, profitability rules, and we are the fools
"It seems like even the former papers of record like the New York Times and Washington Post now believe their readership can no longer think about two issues at once..."
If that were the truth, democracy would indeed die in darkness. We cannot self-govern without sufficient information about what is going on. I suppose we still have that, if one digs; but we need it from "town criers" as well, so that few get left out. The "media" felt like a public asset during the Vietnam War and Watergate, but lately there has been far too much in-bedded journalism.
My local paper of record, The Dallas Morning News, does a decent job, considering that they are in crazy Texas. However, they have a delivery problem with their print edition. It only comes half the time. I have complained every way I know how, besides cancelling. The response is, “people just don’t want to work anymore.” What BS. Papers can’t be delivered on bikes anymore, so pay people enough to get the job done. Anyway, I have wondered if they want people to just go digital so they won’t have to bother with print anymore. I am trying to support my local paper, but they don’t support my need to get what I pay for. BTW, if people don’t want to work anymore, why are so many trying to hold down two jobs. Sorry for the early morning rant…
No people don't want to work, for a pittance, that is.
exactly, my bros delivered papers on their bikes. Different world
Jeri I can't find a neighborhood kid to help me with heavy outdoor work around the house for 25. an hour cash. Insane. We used to help our neighbors because they were our neighbors. Everything seems transactional today.
You can't work with your nose in your cell phone or other devices. At Thanksgiving we talked about problems in various institutions. Our neighbor's daughter is a cardiac nurse in Portland and she described how broken the health system is. She described one case where plain old red tape got in the way of the needs of the patient. We agreed that the pandemic has made everything much worse. One of the things we also talked about was getting an appointment with the vet. Ours is excellent, but very busy especially after a local clinic went corporate. If some corporation or hedge fund is involved, you can be sure that whatever they buy will go down hill. And everything is transactional because everything is a commodity. Read Braiding Sweetgrass for a view on this.
When I worked at high school, I always knew some kids who were happy to earn some money. Since then, nada. Yep, different world. Although grands work in fast food, hope temporary.
Also less social. Less in person interaction between neighbors period, in my experience, myself included. I think that hunger for community is part of what fuels the MAGA cult.
"Living wage" jobs seem popular.
In all likelihood people don't want to work at a job where they can't make a living. We learned during the height of the Pandemic just how much we depend on social workers. Wages need to be adjusted and we need the very wealthy to show more patriotism by funding more of the cost of government. It's to their benefit more than anyone else's.
In assisted living where I live, many work two jobs. I'm sure they love it, NOT. Yep, the rich need to pay fair share. Which they have defined as nothing.
So, Jeri, what is the solution? From my vantage point, the workers need to unite and this means unions. Without the ability to bring strength in numbers to the negotiating table, they'll end up with subsistence wages, assuming that there is any such thing as a negotiating table. The other possibility is minimum wage laws. Good luck with this idea in Trump-dominated states.
…on the ‘Rich Getting Richer’ by not paying their fair share front…. The new guy joining the GOP race for the White House, Stuckenberg, making one of his major planks to eliminate inheritance tax. In NYS, I believe inheritance isn’t taxed until it is valued over 1 mil. Who’s that plank for?
Fair share for those who pay zip is not a new idea.
Agreed. The wealthy just need to pay a fair share of taxes or pay them at all. The author of Poverty, by America says that if people just paid their taxes, we would be in much better shape.
The "Middle Class" was growing when taxes on the wealthy and corporations was much higher. It's complicated and while the the 1950's middle class was largely white and male, efforts at inclusion seems to expand up to Reagan; but who gained and who a suffered as a consequence of 40+ years of Reaganomic laws and policies? The truth is out there.
It is not original with me, but it has been observed that the one thing, perhaps the only thing, that one never has enough of is MONEY. There is absolutely no way in 1,000 years that a billionaire can spend that much money on consumables. We need to reimplement the practices of the past and force the ultra wealthy to be more patriotic.
Reaganomics is "Take from the poor and give to the rich." plain and simple; feudalism 2.0. The rich get the cash, the public gets the work and risk. It's like the collateralized debt obligations in the subprime crisis; put dogdoo in a blender, spray it up with golden paint, and call it gold; then find a sucker.
Those may be the most eloquent words I've ever read with dog poo as the subject.
me too. And I can't get that image out of my mind.
dont want to work? 3% or so unemployment?
Their bs
"Their BS" included claiming that the jobless in the "Great Recession" did not want to work. That (literally) the economic underpinning of our economy would collapse unless bankrupt bankers received bonuses, but by all means, tear up union contracts in a recession. That any aid to the poor was (again literally) "Moral Hazard" and that that the general public had to accept "austerity" and like it.
That the ultra wealthy are the "Job Creators", That any advantage allowed to workers is "Job Killing", while mergers and "downsizing", and shifting entire departments overseas in the midst of a recession is not. Things that you can only believe if you reject the evidence of your eyes and of your ears. It's their final, most essential command.
We are being "Orwelled."
I’d like to segue about jobs for a moment. In the area I live there are help wanted signs all over the place! I asked my husband, “Do you really think no one wants to work?” He said, “Heck No! How many people do you think live around here! They’re all working! When we go out to dinner or shop everyone is working themselves silly.” I hadn’t thought of it that way. Everyone I know, even some retired from good jobs are working for something to do. We hire 2 great high school students to come every Saturday and help with our business/hobby. They want to work. We need more people in our area.
As to the newspaper delivery issue, more money is the answer.
my suggestion, but I don't think the paper wants to support print. Digital is pushed but it's not what I pay for. Guess I'm too old to appreciate screenshot news.
Same, Jeri, although my local paper sold to Gannett awhile back, and covers the Willamette Valley now; maybe 2 or 3 Eugene stories any more.
So far I find computerized information great for searching, lousy for browsing, at least of the same material rendered in print.
I hate the digital "paper." Dallas Morning News will be about $650 a year starting in Dec. They don't like to do print anymore. The ones in my family who stopped subscription had delivery problems, in addition to pathetic excuse for news.
People are eager to work and make a difference. People need to be compensated for their time. This is a very simple equation.
I am so psyched the unions are making noise, getting noticed, and making positive change. My whole working life I could not decide if unions were good or bad. I still really don't have my answer. I like what the unions are doing today though.
Unions can be hard to love. But let me tell you about a Hungarian immigrant who came to this country as a 12 year old boy and went to work in the coal mines of SWPA, my grandfather.
Or the woman who came as a young adult sponsored by a good Jewish family who treated her well until she married and moved to a small coal mining community where after having 5 children she made and sold moonshine until she saved enough money to buy property and open a grocery store and butcher shop to get her beloved husband out of the mines. My great-grandmother. My grandfather married their oldest daughter. The union made a huge difference in my grandparent’s lives. My mother and uncle were both college educated. My great-grandfather fought for the right to unionize until Grandma Haluska made enough money to open the store. Many lives were lost due to brutal coal barons and the dangerous mines.
Unions have crossed lines and made many people anti-union and that’s on them. But, look at all we gained in human rights because of unions.
I belonged to a union until I retired. Until teacher unions, there was no job security. Anybody on the school board who’s brother in law needed a job was given yours. You want that back? 7 days a week for 12 hours? No safety requirements? Yes, they can be hard to take at times, but look back just 100 odd years ago and see what’s what.
The power of unions comes from the support of the public as well as the solidarity of their workers, and I think a lot of union leaders lost track of that, but, just as you said, history shows that unionization made a hell of a difference to building a middle class and offering living wages to more (including non-union) workers"Gilder Age" "Robber Barons" were classic tyrants who exploited workers and corrupted government. That's the past the "GOP's" patrons are keen on recapturing. That's the unstated goal of "Reaganomics".
Always saw the downside, but Samuel Gompers saw the upside. He was for the workers, period.
Unions won a lot of benefits and rights for all workers in the late 19th and 20th Centuries, though a number of those gains have been eroded since. Concentrated power tends to corrupt, and I have seen corrupt and unwise behavior on the part of some unions, but they serve us as a counterbalance to the concentration of capital, and other balances as well. Union and non-union workers might benefit by greater solidarity and greater accommodation than in the past. We are now seeing the consequences of too little balance in who gets to call the shots.
There may or may not be a labor shortage in the US, but there is certainly a shortage of decent jobs.
Can't argue that; Joe is working his arse off on that problem.
I had the same subscription - I cancelled because I was not impressed. My gripe with Dallas Morning News is because I couldn't opt out of home delivery for just the online edition.
But Jeri, people do not want to Deliver the Papers Anymore - I know this for a fact as I had a few family members do this job. Lots of reasons - pay, transportation expenses , and the dangers associated with being out delivering at odd hours. But then the pay cuts happened and that finished any opportunity to make a living..
I did that nasty job for a couple years long ago. Not one day off the whole time, a 3 am wake up call and a full time day job. It kept me out of debtors prison though ; ()
One thing that happened around here was that papers dropped their evening edition. Do people really prefer that? To me, it was a choice between read today's news in the evening, or yesterday's news in morning. Plus, I was too much of a night owl to get up any earlier than I had to to read the paper before leaving for work. One virtue of electronic media is it's fast (maybe too fast). Evening papers were easier for kids to deliver. Plus our society is now deemed too unsafe for kids to be on their own. I sold a lot of stuff door to door, for school, for YMCA, for Scouts by my lonely. I think part myth, part truth, our society is more predatory today.
“Pay cuts happened”
We live in a small town in Michigan and most of the local paper comes from the Associated Press. There are a few local articles of interest and then lots of advertising. It costs over $200 a year to subscribe! My husband walks to the library to read it because we won't pay that kind of money for it...
Got an email saying price going up in Dec to about $650 a year. And they blame people not being interested. Deliberate effort to kill local news, by whoever is buying small papers, or who is influential for larger ones
Jeri, the Houston Chronicle print edition priced themselves out of this family’s budget at almost $20 per week—we now get the digital edition.
I'm old enough to remember newspapers for five cents.
Must be another "oldie"
Loved the Houston Chronicle for many years. I think they all are doing that, then blaming the subscribers. Digital is so much less trouble.
Telephone land lines are treated the same way—price them so high that subscribers emigrate to VOIP or cell phones, then raise the prices because they allocate the maintenance costs among fewer subscribers. And so it goes.
Yes, and those of us who live in areas with crappy cell phone coverage are stuck!
Another follow the money
My experience is that in the last decade corporations have broken new ground selling less and less product for more and more money. That includes dramatically shrinking the quantity and often the quality (many have been reformulated with cheaper ingredients) of packaged food in particular, spurious "junk fees", and just try to get telephone customer service. Some agents I have called admit to me that they are just contractors who know little about the problem and can't resolve a problem. Some of the largest companies want you to "chat" with a robot that knows even less that a random person would. I think of the old satirical line. "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company" back when AT&T was the only game in town.
I remember that far back. It's the robber barons redux, but with more tricks up their corporate sleeves
Our local paper, The Denver Post costs $500 a year. I canceled. I was to support local news but It was just too high.
I received multiple calls from them offering slightly lower rates. Then one day the newspaper advertised a special for online subscription a full year for $1. I took it. Sometimes you can wait them out and get a better deal.
Was that for digital
That's absurd. And how do we provide an informed electorate when people can't afford a decent information service? No wonder total BS is flourishing.
DMN will be about $650 starting in Dec., and I get it about half the time. 6
Our home delivery subscription to the DMN is mostly a donation to local journalism and letters I sometimes respond to like:
LTE On ‘Christian nationalism’ Paul Kramer 11/25/2023 pg 13A
I doubt my response will get printed anywhere else but here. I hope you don't mind reading it.
According to the Council on Foreign Relations liberty, equality, individual rights, intellectual and religious freedom is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Key to the enlightenment is Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan Chapter 30 which specifies the Social Contract including:
1) “For since the right of nature permits those who are in extreme necessity to steal the goods of others, or even to take them by force, they ought to be maintained by the commonwealth and not left to the uncertain charity of private citizens lest they be troublesome to the commonwealth.”
2) “If the number of people who are poor but strong continues to grow, they should be transplanted into countries that are not sufficiently inhabited.”
3) “When a riotous insurrection occurs, the commonwealth can profit from the example of the punishment of its leaders and teachers, but not the punishment of the poor seduced people.”
4) “To be severe to the people is to punish their ignorance, which may be largely laid at the door of the sovereign, whose fault it is that they hadn’t been better instructed.”
So ... Public welfare, immigration and punishing the leaders and teachers of insurrection is a requirement. DMN please help us not be seduced.
Hobbes needs reworking but is certainly history. The notion of a social contract being central to our way of life. Not all seem to agree.
"https://www.ushistory.org/gov/1c.asp#:~:text=Nowhere%20is%20the%20word%20%22democracy,Founders%20actually%20feared%20democratic%20rule."
People don't agree on much but Hobbes' book was able to stop 20 years of bloody war that could have gone on for much longer.
Checks on authority by the "rule of law" I guess is the central feature of American life.
Perhaps they think "social media" has supplanted them. You can't get an article about twice as long as necessary on "social media". (Yes, I'm ridiculing the term).
As long ago as the Iraq War the NYT was worried about losing readers. I remember hearing George Packer at the Chicago Humanities Festival during the period. I have specific writers I read in the Times, several of whom I see regularly on MSNBC. Given that the Chicago Tribune is now a “conglomerate,” haven’t time or funds for a paper I wouldn’t read when I have WaPo and NYT, plus RSM with its excellent choices.
I stopped watching TV news in the runup to W's Iraq War. All they needed was was the pom poms to lead the cheer. I found far more relevant and accurate information at the Guardian, which I support. I was paying $120 a year to the local paper just to keep it around, but finally went to their cheaper, digital version which I rarely read.
You might be interested in the Substack of Tim Mak called Counteroffensive, who is working out of Ukraine and reporting on it. It keeps it alive.
https://counteroffensive.substack.com/
When I was in Berlin at the end of October, I saw an art exhibit that was really about the experiences of North Eurasians under the Soviet Union occupation and their struggles to regain their identities after the end of the Soviet Union, as well as the psychic pain they suffer from the occupation. A part of the exhibit was on the Holodomor. It was painful and powerful! The exhibit is at the House of World Cultures (Das Haus der Kulturen der Welt- HKW) until January 14, 2024. https://www.hkw.de/programme/as-though-we-hid-the-sun-in-a-sea-of-stories
Thank you for the link. I am a second generation Ukrainian American and am deeply concerned by how easily it is fading into the background in the mainstream media
I will say that in my art group here in Germany, one of the women is doing a series of art pieces about Ukraine. I would say this war is much more pressing. I have a niece and nephew who are Ukrainian German and in our family Ukraine is not forgotten. Their mom is married to my husband's cousin. Her parents were going to stay in their city in Ukraine but she talked them into coming to Germany. Her sister's family just moved to the USA about 3 years ago after living in China for 2 years. So, it was her parents who needed to get out, and Germany was closer. My daughter did an exchange in a school in Vienna that has adopted the war in Ukraine as their school project. That means that all classes have students from Ukraine in them, and many of them are living with families in the school as unaccompanied minors. My daughter is studying in Berlin and in her class the largest group are from Ukraine or Russia. In the beginning they were all friends because of speaking Russian, but now, there has been some separation because of some differences of values. My daughter's friendship group includes several progressive Ukrainian students. That is the males in her group are mainly gay, and she says that the ones who are offensive to them are not in her group. Still, in the beginning while language was a bond, after a while values have become the bond. Everyone in the class speaks English and German as well. So, while I am very concerned about this trucker situation with Poland, and the anger that Polish truckers and farmers are showing to Ukraine, I think the EU needs to help sort the situation out. I can understand why Polish farmers and Truckers do not need to be undercut by Ukrainian ones. However, some of this sentiment was stirred up by the falsely named "Law and Order" party in Poland. I am hoping that Biden's tying funding for border policing, etc... to Ukrainian aid, will force Republicans to pass the bill. We shall see. The Democrats seem to be starting to figure out how to work the Republican dysfunctional situation. Let us hope they get over their learning curve, because we need them to. Slava Ukraini!
Ukraine deserves our support, and it's idiotic to think that Putin wishes us anything but harm.
Thank you Georgia for sharing these again.
When considering Americans' consumption of news, it is crucial to know where they get the news.
'News Platform Fact Sheet' (Pew Research Center)
'The transition of the news industry away from print, television and radio into digital spaces has caused huge disruptions in the traditional news industry, especially the print news industry. It is also reflected in the ways individual Americans say they are getting their news. Today, an overwhelming majority of Americans get news at least sometimes from digital devices.'
'News consumption across platforms'
'A large majority of U.S. adults (86%) say they often or sometimes get news from a smartphone, computer or tablet, including 56% who say they do so often. This is more than the 49% who said they often got news from digital devices in 2022 and the 51% of those who said the same in 2021. The portion that gets news from digital devices continues to outpace those who get news from television. The portion of Americans who often get news from television has stayed fairly consistent, at 31% in 2022 and 32% in 2023. Americans turn to radio and print publications for news far less frequently than to digital devices and television.'
'When asked which of these platforms they prefer to get news on, nearly six-in-ten Americans say they prefer a digital device (58%), more than say they prefer TV (27%). Even fewer Americans prefer radio (6%) or print (5%).'
'Who uses each news platform'
'News consumption across platforms varies by age, gender, race, ethnicity, educational attainment and political leaning. Americans ages 50 and older are more likely than younger adults to turn to and prefer television and print publications.'
'Digital news has become an important part of Americans’ news media diets, with social media playing a crucial role in news consumption. Today, half of U.S. adults get news at least sometimes from social media.'
'News consumption on social media'
'When it comes to where Americans regularly get news on social media, Facebook outpaces all other social media sites. Three-in-ten U.S. adults say they regularly get news there. Slightly fewer (26%) regularly get news on YouTube.'
'Smaller shares regularly get news on Instagram (16%), TikTok (14%), X (12%) or Reddit (8%). Even fewer Americans regularly get news on Nextdoor (5%), LinkedIn (5%), Snapchat (4%), WhatsApp (3%) or Twitch (1%).'
'(Seven-in-ten U.S. adults say they have seen or heard something about the renaming of Twitter as X. The platform’s name change took place in July 2023.)'
'Some social media sites – despite having relatively small overall audiences – stand out for having high shares of users who regularly go to the site for news. For example, roughly half of users on X (53%) get news there. On the other hand, only 15% of Snapchat users regularly get news on the app.'
'Who consumes news on each social media site'
'There are demographic differences, such as by gender, in who turns to each social media site regularly for news. Women make up a greater portion of regular news consumers on Nextdoor (66%), Facebook (62%), Instagram (59%) and TikTok (58%), while men make up a greater share on sites like Reddit (67%), X (62%) and YouTube (58%).'
'Some partisan differences also arise when it comes to who regularly gets news on some social media sites. The majority of regular news consumers on many sites are Democrats or lean Democratic. No social media site included here has regular news consumers who are more likely to be Republicans or lean Republican, though there is no significant partisan difference among news consumers on Facebook, X or Nextdoor. (Read the Appendix for data on U.S. adults in each demographic group and party who regularly get news from each social media site.)' (Pew Research Center) There is a good deal more information about where we turn for the 'news' from the Pew Center of Research. See a link below.
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/news-platform-fact-sheet/
And this has been true for many years. A 30 something co-worker of mine gets "dinged" whenever a new story breaks. She subscribes to no newspapers and rarely watches TV, so whatever she sees on her phone is her reality of the world today.
She also spends a lot of time on Facebook and other social media platforms. My friends and I spend none. Of course, we're all old farts who are resistant to change.
Gary, call yourself an 'old fart', but leave me out of it. As for resisting change, that is true for some 'old farts' and others are thoughtfully selective about the changes they will make!
I think that anyone who reads and subscribes to this site is looking for strategic changes. I am aware in order age of some of the things I see changing and try to sort out which are inevitable and which might throw babies out with the bathwater. The other thing about this particular newsletter is it's connections to history, not just as quaint curiosity, but as a more holistic view of patterns impacting our lives, part of which is where things have gone wrong, but also what foundationally supports our desired ways of life. For example, I am repelled by Facebook and certainly "X", but I can see a place for it. I wish it were less exploitatively commercial and wonder if a "Wiki" version would be practical? I want to see far more discussion of what what kind of future we can extrapolate from trends we now see, and what kind of future we can imagine, with some attention to how we might get there, that we'd like to see. Rapidly emerging circumstances, such as our responses to resource management and climate change, not to mention the extended impact of AI on society and the world of work needs, I think, far more attention. Stuff like this: https://radiolab.org/podcast/40000-recipes-murder I'm distracted by such stuff to be something of a curmudgeon when it comes to cat videos, despite the fact (I'm forced to admit) some of them are pretty cute.
Is LFaA social media? I think yes and no; more evidence-based presentation and discussion, less fluff.
Gary, I am also an "old fart" and I am changing because I have to. And I want to. And it's entertaining. Haven't received a newspaper in decades - but I read them all day long digitally. More sources than I can count. Your 30 something co-worker is the new norm. Although if she is getting a notification for every new bit of news, I worry about her.
Our TV is a black screen all day until we watch BBC news and then the Newshour. But sometimes our chats are more interesting and we just skip it. Black screen. The nightly news is usually just a recap of what we have read through a news aggregator on our phones or tablets or Chromebook. After dinner, a movie or a series.
No FB or X for me. There is no "news" there. Just puppies, kittens, family pictures and insane political nonsense that some call "news". It's not. Of course, one can either customize the social media experience or let it capture you. My brilliant wife has allowed only family and friends connections to exist on he FB "feed". And she gets the local updates on "Nextdoor". Social media can be helpful if we own the experience.
It's all moving fast. Soon, we'll have a chip in our heads which will project a holographic news experience that we can wallow in. Hopefully it will come with an on'off switch :)
Increasingly software and "smart" appliances are doing things "for" me I don't want them to do, with no "escape" key. My printer got caught in a loop that I could only escape by pulling the plug. With an old fashioned motorized cam driven wash cycle I could run partial cycles of my washing machine, but with a digitally controlled one I can't. That's an engineering decision, not the technology. I want automation like a DSLR camera, like breathing; automatic when you want automatic, full control when you want what you want.
You pretty much just described my viewing news experience too.
Dings for the dingy. Walter, how we miss you!
In Canada, Facebook withdrew ALL of its Canadian news postings, and won't let you share anything that seems to smack of being a new channel. Thanks to a fight with the Canadian government which now insists publishers be reimbursed by FB for postings of their material to it. FB is also arguing they want to turn toward social interaction etc but not be a news outlet. Oddly Wikipedia is still permitted! So is BBC
It's complicated isn't it? Follow the money.
Fern: Thanks for adding to the conversation on this topic here. I just posted a more orderly analysis of the NY Times situation and leverage for change on my substack. May I copy this with attribution to you over there?
Georgia, I'm a newsnik and happy to pass it on. Please copy whatever you like, and forget the attribution.
Thank you! You are a strong voice on this medium. I hope you will stop b the porch!
Thank you for the invitation to your substack, Georgia. Your opinions and research reports -- positive and negative concerning the value of the 'news' Americans read/watch and or listen to will be strengthened by your knowledge of the sources Americans are using and whether those outlets employ journalistic standards or not.
Interesting that there was no mention of the news feeds that pop up when using various search engines such as Microsoft Edge, Firefox, or Bing. Anyone logging onto a device to go to Facebook, X, or Reddit will likely see one of these feeds before going to their intended site. This is another example of the limits of research in general. To be effective with their inquiry, a researcher must be focused on a specific question/area, with a purposely limited scope set out to answer a specific question. Once reported, the data is applied to everything by those who do not understand the research process and don't know how to handle data.
The research you sited is excellent, but it will be used to answer questions out of its scope. That there was no mention of news feeds shows how difficult it is to ask the right questions to get a full picture of what we are trying to describe.
Steve, check out Pew Research Center on this subject for yourself. There are a good number of links. The sources they use are given as well as limitation to what can be known or may be available to the public.
Fern,
Excellent post with clarity about how we consume information. Thank you.
I have no particular interest in defending the Times, and they have no interest in having my defense, but I sense this is a case of stoning the prophet because you don'l like the prophecy, in this case the results of their poling. Polls are not definitive, but they are also to be neglected at one's peril. I am certain that the Democrats are doing their own polling, and there is a good chance that it tracks the polling the Times does. Again, polls definitive, but they are one element used to look at probable statistical outcomes and they are not looking favorable. I'm almost, but not quite ready to make a $500 bet on a Trump victory in 2024, so that when I win I could donate the winnings to the ACLU. I'll paraphrase a previous post to say: if Biden loses to Trump, as now looks likely, history will remember him most for the fact that he held on in desperation when all the signs were against him, and he will be assigned shared blame for the disaster of the 2nd Trump administration. If Biden were to step aside now, even if Trump won a second term, he would be remembered as an effective president, perhaps even a heroic one.
Polls are never prophecy.
Thankyou for making your suggestion easy to do!
"Please join the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence for an online event, Beyond the SCIF with House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner on Ukraine, on November 29, 2023, from 10:00 a.m. to 11:15 a.m. (ET) via Zoom.
Register to attend online
Hamas’ savage attack on Israeli civilians may have put the Kremlin’s aggression in Ukraine on the media’s back pages, but it has not diminished the threat that Russia poses to American security and prosperity. Putin’s aim today is to subdue Ukraine, but that is not the end of his ambitions. He aims to restore effective control over the countries that once made up the Soviet Union and to exert influence in the countries that were once part of the Kremlin-controlled Warsaw Pact. Put simply, he has designs on NATO allies whom we are obliged to defend.
As its support for Hamas makes clear, the damage Moscow does goes well beyond Europe. The place to stop Putin—to contain him—is in Ukraine. This is the smart and economical way to defend core US interests.
The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center gather a panel of experts for “Beyond the SCIF” to discuss US interests in Ukraine today and tomorrow as well as the importance of continued assistance, highlighting Ukraine’s priorities and needs in the fight, and the role the US and the West play in providing support. “Beyond the SCIF” (sensitive compartmented information facility) is an effort by House Intelligence Committee members to connect with experts and leaders in the national security field to create an open dialogue on threats facing the United States and ways committee members can counter the malign actions of our adversaries.
PANELISTS
Ian Brzezinski
Resident Senior Fellow
Atlantic Council
Rebeccah Heinrichs
Senior Fellow and Director, Keystone Defense Initiative
Hudson Institute
Ambassador John Herbst
Senior Director, Eurasia Center
Atlantic Council
Catherine Sendak
Director, Transatlantic Security and Defense Program
Center for European Policy Analysis
Moderator
The Honorable Mike Turner
United States Representative (R-OH);
Chairman
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence"
Thank you Georgia for your insight and suggestions. I went out and read all the articles that you sent links to...they were very telling! I also subscribed to CJR after reading their article on Warped Front Pages..really fascinating. I have been considering discontinuing my digital subscription to the NYT...the CJR article moved me much closer.
I hope Dr. Richardson will read this bombshell of a report in the Columbia Journalism Review and write about the effect of corporate power and right-wing propaganda on our nation's mindset.
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/election-politics-front-pages.php
How can we humans call ourselves civilized when we hate people for centuries and “solve” our problems by killing each other... even babies and children?
Not much humanity in us humans, at least at a distance. But sometimes the goal seems more up close and personal.
Long road "up" Molly! But remember while eg China/USA go on about being "worst enemies" mainly over Taiwan, both continue to trade by the billions. A couple stats sites i subscribe to post the numbers. By that , you'd never know there was anything like war warnings going on! As for Taiwan, even China still hugely depends on chips which pour out everywhere.
Excellent point Frank. We don’t hate when it is to our advantage. When will we see that hate and wars hold all of us back and the destruction harms our planet? We could put that energy into protecting our planet, emphasis on our. Thanks
I might take a long shot here, but I'd say trade is generally a form of mutualism, a form of symbiosis.
Now my non-snarky response. Yes, at my age i will take any sliver of hope for peace.
Politics makes strange bedfellows. Ask Bibi Netanyahu and Hamas.
I try to run on a hopeful basis, and i dont know enough to prognosticate how these "chapters" in the "human novel" are going to turn out. One of my kitties has just taken possession of my morning lap, part of a daily ritual. Say... totally out of left field, I have a little story where a 9 year old girl is going to be trial wakened after a day and a night of induced coma following surgery for a subdural haematoma with an ok result. Id be happy to provide an email. Ive already done the research on the major moves to this point. :)
Thank you Heather for all you do.
Post Thanksgiving weekend, I could use help defending Biden’s 2024 candidacy. My “liberal” family claims he can’t win regardless of his accomplishments and that he appears too old, out of touch etc. and that young voters will stay home if he’s the candidate.
Can you write a summary for us on why he can and will win and will bring out the young vote? I’m running out of ideas and patience.
Thanks again, Heather. You are our North Star.
The answer is that Biden's accomplishments are not being publicized due to biased editorial decisions on choice of coverage, space, and resource allocation in the media. The times has moved to revenue model based on subscriptions and they have moved away from being the media of record to clickbait farms. You can find out more in a comment below and on my substack.
Geogia Fisanick, I don't know that your claims against newspapers of record, such as The Washington Post and The New York Times are responsible for Joe Biden not seeming to catch on with American voters. Several other factors merit consideration, and, perhaps, it is not too late for Americans to realize that Joe Biden and his administration have been bulwarks against the far-right.
'If there is one statistic that best captures the transformation of the American economy over the past half century, it may be this: Of Americans born in 1940, 92 percent went on to earn more than their parents; among those born in 1980, just 50 percent did. Over the course of a few decades, the chances of achieving the American dream went from a near-guarantee to a coin flip.'
'What happened?'
'One answer is that American voters abandoned the system that worked for their grandparents. From the 1940s through the ’70s, sometimes called the New Deal era, U.S. law and policy were engineered to ensure strong unions, high taxes on the rich, huge public investments, and an expanding social safety net. Inequality shrank as the economy boomed. But by the end of that period, the economy was faltering, and voters turned against the postwar consensus. Ronald Reagan took office promising to restore growth by paring back government, slashing taxes on the rich and corporations, and gutting business regulations and antitrust enforcement. The idea, famously, was that a rising tide would lift all boats. Instead, inequality soared while living standards stagnated and life expectancy fell behind that of peer countries. No other advanced economy pivoted quite as sharply to free-market economics as the United States, and none experienced as sharp a reversal in income, mobility, and public-health trends as America did. Today, a child born in Norway or the United Kingdom has a far better chance of outearning their parents than one born in the U.S.'
'This story has been extensively documented. But a nagging puzzle remains. Why did America abandon the New Deal so decisively? And why did so many voters and politicians embrace the free-market consensus that replaced it?'
'Since 2016, policy makers, scholars, and journalists have been scrambling to answer those questions as they seek to make sense of the rise of Donald Trump—who declared, in 2015, “The American dream is dead”—and the seething discontent in American life. Three main theories have emerged, each with its own account of how we got here and what it might take to change course. One theory holds that the story is fundamentally about the white backlash to civil-rights legislation. Another pins more blame on the Democratic Party’s cultural elitism. And the third focuses on the role of global crises beyond any political party’s control. Each theory is incomplete on its own. Taken together, they go a long way toward making sense of the political and economic uncertainty we’re living through.'
“The american landscape was once graced with resplendent public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands of swimmers at a time,” writes Heather McGee, the former president of the think tank Demos, in her 2021 book, The Sum of Us. In many places, however, the pools were also whites-only. Then came desegregation. Rather than open up the pools to their Black neighbors, white communities decided to simply close them for everyone. For McGhee, that is a microcosm of the changes to America’s political economy over the past half century: White Americans were willing to make their own lives materially worse rather than share public goods with Black Americans.'
'From the 1930s until the late ’60s, Democrats dominated national politics. They used their power to pass sweeping progressive legislation that transformed the American economy. But their coalition, which included southern Dixiecrats as well as northern liberals, fractured after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” exploited that rift and changed the electoral map. Since then, no Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority of the white vote.' (Atlantic Magazine) There is a good dear more to this argument. See gifted link below.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/new-deal-us-economy-american-dream/676051/?utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
Another great post Fern. Thank you. Very enlightening, at least for me.
So, in summary, this article appears to say that white Americans abandoned the New Deal in 1965,, which supported public spending on shared economic gains (for whites from 1932 to 1965), and then the Civil Rights Act was passed and black folks could, for the first time, maybe get a small piece of the public pie.
Wow. Who knew we were so evil Fern? Even I, with my jaded view of the past and present, born from my own scramble to make a living and watching my friends struggle, while watching the children of whites get jobs their parents found for them, no matter how unqualified or lazy they were. I did not see an overall, global picture so negative as the one presented in your post.
I am glad I am 63 Fern. For me, it was, and to some degree remains, a real slog of long hours, no raises, bosses giving promotions to people who spent more time kissing arse than working OR, worse, their own kids or kids of relatives. It would have been even worse if I had ever worked at a Military Contractor, but, they don't even look at the resume's of people with my name.
Thank the luck I had, and the iron work ethic i managed to keep in place that I managed to save some money, and, because of an older co worker who was Asian, and, taught me about the stock market when I was 28, I put a little money there and that helped me a lot.
But, I would not want to be young and have to slog through it again Fern. I cannot image what it must be like to be black in America and how hard that slog must be to exit poverty. The entire country is stacked against success for blacks.
And? I had dinner at a white friend's house not two weeks ago where he was complaining that his white son did not get a job because they "wanted a black guy". I asked how he knew that to be true (since hiring decisions are not public in corporations), and he said "my son could see it on the hiring managers face".
I was stunned Fern. A mature white, male American around 64 years old bought that story from his son after his son failed to meet the bar at an interview.
As if anyone can discern anything from anyone's "face".
What I COULD discern is the racism dripping from this guys mind as he sought to find ways to justify why his kid is unemployed. Surely, it cannot be because his kid had a lousy interview and lesser resume.
It's bad out there Fern. I am glad I am old now and have enough food to eat, a small home to live in and don't feel my heart pound every morning right after my eyes open anymore. Honestly, your post made me feel tired, and, I almost never feel tired.
Another “glad to be old.” But my grands will slog through so much
Jeri,
We (humans) have to start balancing reproduction vs sustainability. Both of my kids say they will never have kids.
I do tell them that the best part of my life was raising them, never mind the endless hours of work, and hustle. I would not trade my memories holding them as babies and little kids for anything.
BUT, at 8 Billion humans and counting, and the rest of the natural world which sustains life on the planet nearly destroyed, we have to start awakening to the ecosystem itself.
Before said ecosystem is gone.
So much of the world still depends on coal for energy, the planet's climate is on life support. It can't support all 8 billion of us now, and yet more demands are made on the ecosystem every day. Climate. Democracy. The Economy. Wars. The Border. Education. The News we don't get (except the news analyzed here by HCR), The Crazies. All The Precipices.
Couldn’t agree more.
Mike, only this morning was I thinking again about how the world’s orphans (Gaza and Israel have done nothing if they haven’t reminded us of them) should result in everyone’s thinking about adoption instead of conception and wondering how and whether that enormous shift could be achieved. Your children are to be congratulated for their understanding. Meanwhile, as a parent who brought them up to think ahead, may I congratulate you?
Mike- saying “the entire country is stacked against success for blacks” is an understatement. Thanks for acknowledging the fact that racism is systemic and enduring.
America was built on the backs, blood, sweat and tears of Black people who were enslaved for centuries and then “segregated” and denied the same rights as others for decades.
Now some White people would rather “burn it all down” instead of insuring “justice and equality for all”. The common denominator among MAGA is not economics or religion-it’s a desire to keep racism intact.
Racism is considered a minor problem if it’s considered at all because we think it only affects people of color (especially Black folks), but in the end racism underlies most of our problems and it affects all of us.
Racism is a feature of American democracy and capitalism. It may very well be the cause of our nation’s decline.
Well said.
Excellent summary of impacts of racism. Thank you.
Apparently the media of television and now the internet are very powerful influences on people's thinking. What news one chooses to access, based on personal bias is very reinforcing. Then, for all the people on social media, the bots come to you and influence you if you are not wary of them. How much media literacy does the average person have? I suspect not a lot. Our newpapers are not reporting like they used to. Is that that they have hired a lot of superficial thinkers? They cave to corporate sponsors? They promote an agenda that furthers the wealth of the owners? Or, all of the above. One has to be able to see through this GREED, often wrapped in Jesus.
Linda, I pose that the media has deemed that journalism is not as profitable as supporting conformation bias Its a business model run by billionaires; in other words, self interested owners
I agree with that. It is why I am daily wondering whether keeping in touch with what they are saying is worth it. I just as I told my daughter, who in her first year in uni, in a class with almost all but one being foreign students, that it is good that she is in class with people whose values she abhores, because it helps her to learn about it up close and personal. She has come from schools in the USA, where except for an occasional crank, with whom she also managed to get along, everyone was friends. Now, at 18, she is encountering people whose values she can not stand. It is made clearer and clearer with each class discussion. I told her she is fortunate to get this exposure to other points of view in person, because she can engage in dialogue. I have to merely suppose what makes people who tick differently tick from an intellectual point of view. Reading a study, is not like knowing. Frankly, I recall those experiences in uni too, and they were very broadening. I also watched a lot of conservatives freak out. So, this is what the NYT and WaPo offer me, and I know it is not like watching Fox News, which I am not going to do. They expose me to the point of view being sold to the mainstream, and helps me to understand why friends who do not read as much have the worries, or lack of worries, and points of view that they have.
FERN, please submit your essay to one of the papers of record :)
Accurate macroeconomics followed by three (3) schools of post 1970 analyses. As to the latter, I will choose ... (d) - All of the above.
Hello Bryan. My comment was based on an article in Atlantic Magazine, for which I provided a link. The magazine is now providing 5 gift shares on a test basis for their subscribers.
Cool as we septegenarians say.
True. I did not read the link as I am busy revising an email to counsel for Substack Inc re their out of date 2023 Terms of Use, the 3 notorious trolls on LFAA on Thanksgiving Day, the appearance of a religious 501(c)3 as a Substack Author, user & loquacious commenter on JV's Civil Discourse & their general lack of preparemess for 2024 Platform mayhem.
You know Stuff.
Am I correct in thinking that several of our best writers are now writing for the Atlantic? And I no longer see Packer in the Times.
Hello, Virginia. I don't know which journalist you are referring to. The journalists I am familiar with have not left The New York Times or Washington Post. The writers on the Atlantic are excellent as well.
The 1970’s were an unmitigated disaster. The end of the 60’s was beyond depressing. The unintended consequences of Great Society broke up and disassociated minority and poor families. America ran into a World of new labor competition. America exported, through both Republican and Democrat administrations, labor to emerging countries into a new global dream world.
Yearning for a progressive command economy America that wasn’t , alone in the world with capital, after a terrible World War, with little competition is not going to happen ever again.
We need a rational common sense approach that focuses on our own citizens and country and puts a stop to the Empire fantasy that now threatens to destroy us.
David,
Take a read of Fern's post on how the successful, for whites, New Deal investment economy and shared investment fell apart after the Civil Rights movement.
This is the best explanation of the downward spiral of living standards in the US, since Reagan's "bluster and BS" economic programs, I have ever seen.
In fact, there was a "progressive economy" that was successful, but only for whites. When it looked like that shared prosperity might be shared with blacks?
Americans abandoned the whole model for the Republican race to the bottom called "trickle down". LOL. yep, "trickle down". Sounds like the men's bathroom at a bar does it not? But? White folks bought it. Why? Because they did not want to share with blacks.
And "trickle" it was. Very little down. Which made everyone poor, not just blacks. Truly hilarious if you think about it!!
LOL. Who in their right mind would trade the post war era of prosperity for a "trickle"???
Ummm....white Americans DID. That's how. Take a read of Fern's outstanding post today. Amazing.
Thank you Fern.
Thank you, Marj, for your attention to this important subject.
Under Regan in Ca the tide did not rise!
You can find out what Biden is trying to accomplish at
https://www.whitehouse.gov/
Nothing like getting it straight from the horse's mouth!
Simple URL, too. Clearly laid-out website.
WH fb page is filled with negative maga people of the most vile sort.
it's not the FB site--it is the link above and you can get to releases and statements from there. No comments at all.
And it shows
Best voting advice: Voting isn't marriage. It's public transport.
You're not waiting for "the one".
You're getting on the bus. And if there isn't one going exactly to your destination, you don't stay home and sulk. You take the one that's going closest to where you want to be.
Agreed. Take the bus that gets you closest to where you want to go. Another writer I follow says “you don’t get your shiny unicorn every time. Take the best thing out there, even if it’s not a magical beast.
Brilliant Joanne! Thank you 🗽
I don't watch commercial TV and I'm retired and sort of out of it, so I know a lot goes on that I don't see, but I have not seen a the Democratic Party excite the young since Kennedy. The heavy-handed way the party inserted Humphrey, who had not run in the primaries, alienated younger people more affected by the war in a way I don't think the party ever quite recovered from. That's irrespective of whether one believes Humphrey was the right pick or not.
There are many constituencies and many aspects of a complex society to be balanced by the office of any president, but we need input from the young, and we need outreach to the young. Is that happening? Possibly more than I know, but so far I have not observed much of it the intervening years. I recall reading of an interview in the runup to the 2016 election:
"What do you tell voters who are new to the process who say this makes them feel like it's all rigged?" Tapper asked the DNC chair.
"Unpledged delegates exist really to make sure that party leaders and elected officials don't have to be in a position where they are running against grassroots activists," Wasserman Schultz calmly explained.
Tapper did not press her on her response. "I'm not sure that that answer would satisfy an anxious young voter, but let's move on," he said, and dropped the issue just when it was getting hot."
https://www.salon.com/2016/02/13/un_democratic_party_dnc_chair_says_superdelegates_ensure_elites_dont_have_to_run_against_grassroots_activists/
I know that there have been reforms to the Democratic delegate system, but I still have the impression that there is not sufficient effort to bring the young and their very legitimate concerns into the fold and pulling the same direction.
The interests of the young run counter to the interests of the corporate state, which owns the Ds just as much as the Rs. It figures, as long as the young have the latest digital device, they can be wedged/divided just like their parents/grandparents.
The Democratic Party will not respond in a serious way until enough of the youth vote bails and votes third party. Even then, it might not be able to throw off the corporate yoke. The rot is extensive in our political system.
The young want us to quit supporting proxy wars and genocide (Ukraine/Israel), and get serious about climate, guns, and economic inequality. They see Democrats as unserious in addressing any of the aforementioned issues. And they are right.
Dont forget to mention what has become chronic political gridlock by a GOP which denied climate change, has fought "Obamacare" tooth and nail, and generally calls social support legislation "communism" when picking on Dems. Perhaps most of all, Evangelicals which induced Trump (McConnell the masterful manipulator) to get rid of Roe v Wade, want religion back in the schools, the right which attacks everything "woke"...
Frank, that’s obvious, it doesn’t require mentioning. I feel we have a better chance of getting somewhere by returning the Democratic Party to its FDR roots than in changing the GOP.
And hell, I fought Obamacare once the Dem senators killed the public option; then it just became a handout to health insurers and Big Pharma.
Tom, since so many comments were negative on Dems, i figured the other side needs more looking at.
But a 25 year-old got elected to Congress in 2022 by Democrats and I predict more in 2024. David Hogg, if he runs?
I welcome some younger candidates but the inclusiveness of the political conversation is another matter.
"I don't see, but I have not seen a the Democratic Party excite the young since Kennedy.
JL, read Fern's post today. Your observations lines up with her posted theory on WHY the Democratic party does not excite young white kids.
Pretty ugly. Be ready to be depressed.
Whatever, seems Dems have a greater youth effort than anybody else. We might remember there is a huge inbuilt social cynicism which has got to be a huge wall against participation. Funny but in small town New Brunswick, Canada, i remember hearing a lot about the same complaints 60+ years ago as circulate now, just more on steroids these days. https://yda.org/
Need no more
Tell your family that no one in the world could accomplish what Biden has in dealing with all of these international crises. Also, his administration is full of very capable people running their departments in ways that help America function and protects us for the greedy fraudsters who have corrupted the Republican Party. Also, make sure your relatives realize that Trump is old also, and that he has lost his mind and is a danger to all of us. Why don’t they put their efforts into stopping him from running?
Thank you Professor, for keeping us up to date and informed about our human rights and military commitments. I wish the way we connect with adversity didn’t include direct war and death. I always ask why violence and hate instead of compassion, cooperation and peace-making decisions. I am not naive. I am hopeful that someday the words of great leaders will come to pass. A web search leads to abundant antiwar voices, but Albert Einstein (1879-1955) gave a warning that should make anyone pause and think of the future, considering today’s lethal weapons and guaranteed loss of life. “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
That's quite the quote. At one level Oppenheimer's and other's fears came true. Both the Americans and Russians outbuilt each other in nuclear fire power to overkill heights even those guys would have baulked at. The good news... no one has "pulled the trigger"... despite all the fears and accidents, not once.... should i add... yet???
Heather AGAIN describes our US historical challenges whether in Ukraine or Israel or wherever. The need for a real two state solution in Palestine, the need for an effective Ukrainian defense…God willing we as a country can so provide…..but the price is constant vigilance, an informed electorate…and the WILL to deal with these challenges….the political will, the activist spirit…the commitment! God willing we have it!
Americans need to listen to people like Jeffery Sachs instead of politicians who are bought and paid for by the corporate weapons industry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm4qLWc_Co0&t=0s
Thanks a lot Tom…I listened to his address also checked out his very distinguished background …..I really appreciate this ‘heads up’ and suggest others check out his address too!
Here’s a 30-min interview with Sachs, conducted after the UN address.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC9BmXxnK58&t=6s
I note that very few comment on the imprisoned Palestinian women and children Israel has begun to release as part of the temporary pause deal. If anyone wants to learn some about them, see Bethan McKerman’s Guardian piece (Nov. 22, 2023) “300 Palestinian women and children in Israeli jails listed before prisoner release.” Spoiler alert: While it is not stated in this particular piece, I understand from CNN reporting that Israel has arrested a million Palestinians in the West Bank (a territory of about 5 million) since 1967 largely to suppress resistance to occupation.
Thank you Barb, I don't seem to have time to open the Guardian, I have too many subscriptions. I'll get into it in the morning. You're up late back there.
There is little advocacy for the Palestinians.
What is this war that is being waged?
Will it succeed in obliterating Hamas, while destroying Gaza and killing many, many innocent children and adults who live there?
Does Netanyahu owe the Palestinians an apology as well as the Israelis?
'Gaza Civilians, Under Israeli Barrage, Are Being Killed at Historic Pace' (NYTimes)
'Even a conservative assessment of the reported Gaza casualty figures shows that the rate of death during Israel’s assault has few precedents in this century, experts say.'
'Israel has cast the deaths of civilians in the Gaza Strip as a regrettable but unavoidable part of modern conflict, pointing to the heavy human toll from military campaigns the United States itself once waged in Iraq and Syria.'
'But a review of past conflicts and interviews with casualty and weapons experts suggest that Israel’s assault is different.'
'While wartime death tolls will never be exact, experts say that even a conservative reading of the casualty figures reported from Gaza shows that the pace of death during Israel’s campaign has few precedents in this century.'
'People are being killed in Gaza more quickly, they say, than in even the deadliest moments of U.S.-led attacks in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, which were themselves widely criticized by human rights groups.'
'Precise comparisons of war dead are impossible, but conflict-casualty experts have been taken aback at just how many people have been reported killed in Gaza — most of them women and children — and how rapidly.'
'It is not just the scale of the strikes — Israel said it had engaged more than 15,000 targets before reaching a brief cease-fire in recent days. It is also the nature of the weaponry itself.'
'Israel’s liberal use of very large weapons in dense urban areas, including U.S.-made 2,000-pound bombs that can flatten an apartment tower, is surprising, some experts say.'
“It’s beyond anything that I’ve seen in my career,” said Marc Garlasco, a military adviser for the Dutch organization PAX and a former senior intelligence analyst at the Pentagon. To find a historical comparison for so many large bombs in such a small area, he said, we may “have to go back to Vietnam, or the Second World War.” (NYTimes) See gifted link below.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/25/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-death-toll.html?unlocked_article_code=1.BU0.THNm.6UYhvx9GEAXh&smid=url-share
Hamas is responsible for all the casualties. They began by killing Israelis. They keep their military hardware in houses and hospitals, in Gaza. As their elected representatives what have they done for them in all these years?
The Palestinian prisoners are not innocent kids and women.
'Gaza’s hospitals have played a central role in the dueling narratives surrounding the war.' (AP)
'Hospitals enjoy special protected status under the international laws of war. But they can lose that status if they are used for military purposes.'
'Israel has long claimed that Hamas uses hospitals, schools, mosques and residential neighborhoods as human shields. In particular, it says Hamas has hidden command centers and bunkers underneath the sprawling grounds of Shifa. The United States says its own intelligence corroborates those claims. Hamas denies the allegations.'
'Israel says other hospitals are similarly used for military purposes. It has ordered the evacuations of a number of Gaza hospitals, including Shifa, as it presses ahead with its ground operation against Hamas.'
'The U.N. and other international organizations say these evacuations have endangered patients and overwhelmed the remaining hospitals in the besieged territory.'
'With Israel already facing mounting international criticism of its offensive, a failure to uncover a significant Hamas presence could step up the pressure to halt the operation. Israel has vowed to press ahead until it destroys Hamas.'
'WHAT HASN’T ISRAEL FOUND?'
'Israeli officials described the underground bunker unveiled Wednesday as a smoking gun, a Hamas hideout. But there was no conclusive proof in the rooms that they had been used by Hamas militants. What’s more, the rooms — bare, small, and rusted — were a far cry from the elaborate command center officials originally said was underneath Shifa.'
'Hamdan, the Hamas leader, mocked the Israeli discoveries so far. “The Israelis said there was a command-and-control center, which means that the matter is greater than just a tunnel,” he said.'
'Israeli military officials say those initial illustrations were “conceptual” and not meant to be taken literally. They have also promised many more discoveries as troops continue the painstaking task of scouring a complex spread out over more than 10 acres (40,000 square meters).'
“It’s going to take time,” said Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, another military spokesman.' (AP) See link below.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-gaza-shifa-hospitals-a017ba154c816c8d565393917dadd9ee
Yeah, could be a real credibility problem here. Americans never did found those "weapons of mass destruction" upon which the invasion of Iraq was based. Oops! I still suspect neocons were as much about planting mis information as just making an intelligence error. Cheyney and company.
No, but remember the actual KILL ratio is far more Palestinians than Israelis. Even the crazy incursion by Hamas into Israel is not an existential threat to Israel, not by a long shot.
Important to listen to Sam Harris podcasts 340 and 341 for a world overview of Jihadism, and its aims.
The U.S. is responsible for thousands. Our bombs.
We, and the Israelis, are responsible for Hamas.
Checkmate.
"On the Ukrainian remembrance day of Holodomor, Russia launched 75 drones at Kyiv, its largest drone strike against Ukraine since the start of its invasion in February 2022." Ukraine intercepted 74 of the 75 -- a very good batting average. Let's hope Chuck Schumer can do as well in achieving the goals of his letter (Not since WW II have we been defending democracy and the civilization democracy creates as we are now doing and must continue to do)
This comment is not directly about the Israeli- Hamas war. It is an observation. Since this began, we have heard virtually nothing of the Ukranian war from MSM. It is a defacto censorship. This war is arguably more consequential to the preservation of Democracy and the security of all western nations than is the middle east conflict. With declining coverage, our short attention span population loses interest, and the support for the war against the invading Russians falters.
Putin's game since his blitzkrieg failed has been to wait us out, and wait for us to lose interest. There is ample evidence that he will be successful at this.
The MSM HAS TO understand that their choice of what to put on the air has a profound effect on the way the US population responds to issues. I cannot understand putting every tiny detail of the middle east war on a 4 hour repeption cycle, to the exclusion of information about Ukraine. In the days of a sinlge 30 minute broadcast in the evening, that woudl be understandable, but with the 24 hour coverage that the news outlets now have, I simply cannot figure this out.
It IS obviously a conscious choice. and in my opinion, a bad choice to exclude any significant coverage of Ukraine.
They are waiting, just like Putin is, maybe all waiting for Nov 2024
This commentary is about both.
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/hamas-isnt-the-target-its-the-excuse
Are you on her payroll
Totally agree. The MSM is a heatseeking bottom line animal. The war on Ukraine by Russia is much more concerning and consequential. But our attention to the crisis in Israel is not indicative hopefully of aid for Ukrainians and progress against Russia. I hope.
Impressive statistics for snacks and beer. That should shut a few mouths. One way or another...
I was certainly enlightened by that statistic.
Unlike those who have been enfattened by it.
Propaganda.
The same statistical argument works when calling for building infrastructure instead of providing weaponry. But note how it is almost always used to defend sending more death and destruction abroad.
And it does shut mouths, especially those who should be demanding peace instead of endless war.
Thank you Heather.
I have to wonder how much staying power Netanyahu really has. It's an understatement to say he is unpopular among his people.
The fighting in that sector of the world won't end in my lifetime. There is no kumbaya or magic pill to fix it.
Other than humanitarian efforts, various countries including the US, need to stop getting into the middle of this dog fight.
I have spoken to far too many lifelong Democrats that are backing away from Biden over this. The common thread in the conversations I have had, is that when Netanyahu made his point clear that he was only out for blood, Biden didn't call him on it.
Even my friend who's grandchildren are living in Gaza, feels the indifference from Biden has drawn the line for her.
Frankly, I don't have a moral come back for that.
Be safe. Be well.
I am so tired of the left eating their own.
Who knows what Biden actually said to Netanyahu? Publicly he did what he had to do, and I expect what the world expected of America. Privately he’s been banging away daily on getting the hostages out. Remember Netanyahu coming to speak to Congress during the Obama administration and snubbing the President? He has no love for him, but the attack on Israel has to be answered.
Black and white thinking belongs to the radical right. On the left we understand nuance. On the left we care about everyone. I reminded my Thanksgiving companions, whom to a person condemned religious extremism ( in this case the topic was Utah and Mormons), that a lot of the science denial was cultural, and it’s the same with your “liberal” friends. It’s jump on Joe time.
He isn’t too old. I wouldn’t ask him to explain ChatGPT (although he might do a creditable job), but I’m glad he’s the one driving the military.
Let's not fall into the Biden is taking care of everything ditch. He isn't. He has an exemplary team of people who are handling negotiations of all sorts. That's how a good Presidency should work.
We have no idea what he may have said to Netanyahu in private. It matters what the optics are to the viewing public.
Just a question but, when you say "on the left we care about everyone". Does that include the people who have a different opinion?
In my line of work, I have to listen to all sides. Sometimes the outlandish theories I hear make my ears bleed, but that is their world and I respect them as long as they respect me in return.
So to be clear my "liberal" friends are simply long standing Democrats. Some are the same age as Biden, if not older. Age isn't the issue they have with Biden.
I was reminded the other day that Mandela became President of South Africa at the age of 76 and served for 5 years after. 1994-1999.
Chump will be better? Does anybody buy that. What the hell are we thinking???
I agree, Jeri. We could add:
Haley will be better? She would sign a bill to ban abortions after 6 weeks. And that's just one egregious stand.
She is just female, chump lite. Not ONE Repub has anything but power on their pea brains
Jeri, I don't think anyone in this room would think that.
It baffles me that millions of people think that way.
Me too
I clearly worry in the directions you are pointing. I’m reminded of a comedian Murray Roman’s album titled “You Can’t Beat People up and Have them say I Love You”. He was pointing to the riots in Watts in the late 60s. Anyway, I hope Biden can push in the direction needed. Thanks HCR & Linda.
Biden is trying to help solve the problem. Chump would solve it in a flash, he and Bebe would unite and deal done. What the hell, people. It’s not like there is a young, white Obama in the wings. BTW, love the Album name
"Frankly, I don't have a moral come back for that."
There is no "moral" come back because Biden was, at the time, thinking clearly about only one thing: Campaign donations for his next run at President.
Palestinian Americans make a tiny fraction of the campaign donations compared with people with relatives in Israel. So, Biden had no need to try to stop the bloodbath sponsored by Netanyahu in Gaza. Really, pretty simple. .
Just normal American Democracy in action.
Your cynicism is really not attractive.
Jen, cynicism is an overly negative assessment of a reality.
I can never be certain, but, it is likely that Biden’s full on support for saturation bombing Gaza, early on, was associated with his perception of potential campaign support. If that is true, then, it is not cynical.
Wow! And you know what was in Biden’s mind and motives? Care to give me the next winning lottery numbers...
58934178. Saturday night.
:-)
Netanyahu was OUT. Then suddenly he was back in. Hm.
The ‘hostage pause’ is an agonizing interlude in the murderous Israeli/Palestinian human chess board.
Hamas is dribbling out a few Israeli hostages, women and children ranging in age from 4 to 85 with released foreigners overwhelmingly agricultural workers from Thailand.
Israeli is selecting from about 9,000 Arab prisoners.
Meanwhile, a minimal amount of food, water, and fuel is being brought into Gaza after more than a month of total cut off. Starvation, massive disease, and no safe refuge are facing 2,000,000 Gaza residents, who anticipate the prospect of a return of a massive Israeli military engagement.
While Netanyahu, some members of the ‘war cabinet,’ and the Israeli Defense Forces seem intent on a swift end to the ‘hostage pause,’ many world leaders, including President Biden and the UN secretary general, are pressing for a ‘cease fire.’
It is unclear what will transpire for the remaining hostages (especially the Israeli soldiers), for Gaza residents, and for Hamas.
Netanyahu is a wily politician who has ruled for much of the past two decades. He is desperately endeavoring to remain in power despite his personal culpability for the pressure cooker Hamas murderous explosion and Israel’s brutal revenge.
Given the mood in Israel, I find it possible that Netanyahu will be replaced, though I don’t envisage a moderate successor capable of pursuing some sort of ‘two-state’ amelioration.
Hamas, apart from its military arm, seems an amorphous governing entity. Since its election over Fatah in 2007, Hamas and Netanyahu had been engaged in a dangerous tit-for-tat game in which Israel maintained Gaza Palestinians under prison-like conditions.
I don’t envisage a Hamas ‘surrender,’ however long Israel maintains a full court military press. Nor do I envisage a viable Gaza Palestinian leadership emerging in the weeks and months ahead.
My hope is that the ‘hostage pause’ will morph into a cease fire in which the killings will end and some sense of post-war rationality will emerge.
More likely is that Israel will resume its military air strikes and boots on the ground assaults, there will be greater suffering for the 2,000,000 Gaza residents, and Hamas will experience serious personnel losses, while Gaza will remain a breeding ground for a new generation of ‘terrorists.’
There has never been a moderate Israeli Prime Minister. The goal of each has been to remove all Palestinians from what was Palestine until 1948.
And the total annihilation of Israel, well, the face-off that will need King Solomon
Although Israel is the product of Western European colonial aggression and a combination of post WW2 guilt and desire to put Jews some place else, it does exist. The only solution is to get rid of all Israeli settlements in the West Bank and allow it and Gaza to become sovereign states.
If this were to happen and be accepted, these states would eventually realize that working and trading with eachother would be to their mutual benefit.
James In looking for a model of this ‘two state’ Israeli/Palestinian solution, should they seek to replicate how American settlers imposed a ‘two-state’ solution in dealing with Native Americans and their land?
Of course not. At least not in the way it’s was realized as constantly shifting space with no true sovereignty.
James Various Native American tribes thought it was their land, as acknowledged in various federal treaties. Some of this is recognized in federal courts today.
Money and power have the means to "shift."
Jeri And there are shift money MAGATS.
Sounds like trying to divide up the USA into Magats and non-magats. Wish we could
Jeri Makes me regret the banning of DDT!
Too bad it won’t work on MAGAts. Just kidding. Rachel Carson is one of my all-time favorites
"More likely is that Israel will resume its military air strikes and boots on the ground assaults, there will be greater suffering for the 2,000,000 Gaza residents, and Hamas will experience serious personnel losses, while Gaza will remain a breeding ground for a new generation of ‘terrorists.’"
Yes, very sadly, Hamas gave Israel a "reason" to accelerate Israel's stated, existing plans for the extermination and displacement of all Palestinians from Palestinian lands, replaced by Israeli people. Plans which were fully developed a couple of weeks after the Balfour Declaration in 1917.
When God is on your side, man, you can do anything you want to anyone you want. God approves !!
A very neat trick indeed. Invent a God from a burning bush (that only one person witnessed) that gives you permission and justification to kill anyone you want, period.
It does not get any better than that Dr. Wheelock. Moses was a genius.
Mike S If there was a biblical Moses. The ‘book of Moses’ was written more than 400 years after his purported exploits.
Some pretty good memories!
Mik s Yeah! I can’t remember what I did yesterday before I shouted Holy Moses. 400 years was about the time of the first Thanksgiving, of which I have scant memory.
Yea Keith, I can’t look at the TV and what it shows from Gaza and not think that many of those children and young people are going to be radicalized against Israel. Hamas may be gone but the anger will remain. Anger and hatred are what motivated the thousands of Palestinians who crossed into Israel and did unthinkable things to the people they found there, including infants, that just screams WRONG, and yet thousands participated in the killing. The natural human response when seeing an infant in any kind of danger is to want to protect it. An infant has made no choices that would induce anger, so something must have snapped in those people to allow them to do what they did. Bibi and his ilk set the stage for the anger and hatred that visited those communities near the Gaza border, of that I have no doubt.
The staid BBC newsreader nearly choked this morning whilst telling us that two hostage/prisoners just released were three-year-old twins. (Which side released them? Does it matter?) (Come to think of it, have you ever tried to get a three-year-old to be quiet?)
I watched President Zelenskyy's address on Holodomor. It was dignified and moving. He is the right person to be leading Ukraine at this time. And we must pass aid to Ukraine! We cannot allow the mad GOP/Trump Party to hand Ukraine over to Putin.
Trump said, if re-elected he’d end that war in one day. We all know how he’d do that! Just remember the Helsinki conference!!!!
The one that was never reported.
It was disgusting seeing Trump suck up to Putin. He expressed his faith in Putin and lack of trust in the US! Scumbag!
The US is only important to him for his image. Remember how he sprinted up the staircase, after his very brief stay in the Reed hospital, and posed floodlit on the Truman balcony, saluting at some length? for the cameras, because there was nobody else there, and the helicopter was at that moment flying away. Putin is his puppetmaster.
Remember too that Putin is one of Trump’s idols! He loves the autocratic leadership style. We must not lose our focus on winning in 2024! Trump and his MAGA cult must be defeated!
If America and the West allow Putin to succeed in Ukraine we can all throw our hat at ever standing up for freedom again....anywhere.
His invasion and bullying since 2014 must be reversed and Russia's population must be shown that there is a crippling price to be paid for such wanton destruction of lives and property.
Putin probably learned everything he needed to know about bullying from us.
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/hamas-isnt-the-target-its-the-excuse
Tom,
You mean that by the USA lying, to the world, about "Weapons of Mass Destruction" in order to invade an entire country, Iraq, that offered zero threat to the United States, Putin learned to use a lie to invade another country?
No way! Say it ain't so Tom! Not the good old US of A?
Wait, but, we ALSO did the same thing with Vietnam. We lied about Ho Chi Minh being a threat while Ho was just trying to free his people from French slavery colonialism.
And WAIT, we also did the same thing with Afghanistan (not a single participant in 911 was an Afghan citizen and Osama Bin Laden was in Pakistan, not Afghanistan).
You mean Putin learned his tricks from US of A. No way!
:-)
:-)
Mike HORRORS! Don’t you remember the saying “Do what I say, not what I do?” Often we set an example of what not to do—-ask various Latin American countries.
Just like Hitler learned a lot from us about the process of ‘othering’.
And we think we be just exporting democracy.
The USA is not responsible for EVERYTHING as some would like to believe. Putin learned from Stalin and all who followed him until 1989.
Annie Actually Putin was rather tame in the first years he succeeded Ysltsin in 2000. Then he got worse and worse—-more czar like. Now he is glorifying the ‘good old days of Stalin.’