Upward Transfer of Wealth Alert! Upward Transfer of Power Alert! Look What Just Doubled! Enough To Make Everyone Sick!

Stories from The Guardian and Grayzone

There are different variations to the story, but almost everyone has heard one version of it or another.  A king or raja offers a reward to someone who has done him a favor, or won a bet, or game of chess.  Maybe the king offers anything that they might ask, even up to half his realm.  The offer is declined, seemingly modestly, with a request for just a grain of rice (or a grain of wheat) placed on the square of a chess board, two grains on the next, four on the next, etc.  Or the doubling of the amount is to occur daily for 30 days.  The point is the same: With a simple doubling the promise of the doubled grains far exceeds everything the king of raja has to give.

Look what just doubled!– The wealth of the world’s richest 10 men doubled since the start of the 2-year pandemic (as 160 million more people were pushed into poverty). That’s according to Oxfam in a just released report “Inequality Kills.”

The ten wealthiest men in the world have collectively singed a letter of thanks to the Corona Covid-19 virus— Just kidding, but I leave it to others to figure out exactly how the response to the pandemic around the world has helped bulk up the wealth of the wealthiest. One of the men, heavily invested in pharmaceuticals, is a poster boy for recommended virus response: Bill Gates.  It’s also obvious why Jeff Bezos made money on the pandemic.  And Mark Zuckerberg’s role in what information flows about our tactics responding to the virus is obvious.

The ten wealthiest men in the world are:

    1.    Elon Musk
    2.    Jeff Bezos
    3.    Bernard Arnault & family
    4.    Bill Gates
    5.    Larry Ellison
    6.    Larry Page
    7.    Sergey Brin
    8.    Mark Zuckerberg
    9.    Steve Ballmer
    10.    Warren Buffett

Use the link if you want to get specifics about their windfalls.

Important to recognize that, along with that upward transfer of wealth goes a more or less equivalent upward transfer of power.  Wealth is power.  The question is often asked, beyond a certain point where wealth takes care of your every need, why want or pursue more?  What good does it do you?  One answer is that what is being pursued is really just more power.

It’s a lot of power.  Remember that doubling the grains of rice exercise?

An Open Letter To Reverend Ana Levy-Lyons of The First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Brooklyn Requesting A Sermon About Peace

I have what is now a many year tradition with Noticing New York, another blog I write (about real estate development in New York and associated politics), of publishing a seasonal reflection about the year on Christmas Eve.  (More about the Noticing New York tradition here.)  This year I deviated from my pattern of previous years to publish, as Noticing New York's seasonal reflection, a letter I wrote to Reverend Ana Levy-Lyons, our minister at our First Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Brooklyn, requesting that she deliver a sermon about peace.   There is a little bit more about my decision at Noticing New York.
Because the letter I wrote concerns topics that have been central to the concerns pursued as national issues here in National Notice, perpetual war, the environment and the climate emergency, wealth and income inequality, censorship and information control, I am also publishing my letter to Reverend Ana requesting a sermon about peace here in National Notice.  So, on this Christmas Eve, following a few days after the winter solstice and coming not many days before the day that officially starts our country's new year, may we all move forward to a more blessed future and I hope that I have written something that is worth passing along so that it may have some beneficial effect.

December 19, 2019

Re:  An Open Letter Requesting A Sermon About Peace

Dear Reverend Ana,

Last spring my wife Carolyn and I invested heavily in our congregation’s fund raising lottery trying to win the prize of choosing a topic for a sermon you would give.  We didn’t win.  Had we won, we would have challenged you with what you might not have found an easy subject, speaking about Julian Assange, American war crimes, and the U.S. pursuit of empire.  Our choice of subject would not have been be to vex you with its difficulty, but to ask you to speak to what could be such a simple concept: Peace.  If, these days, conversations about peace are avoided as difficult, what better than address that difficulty in a sermon?

Giving it some consideration, I think that making a worthy case for a sermon topic is a good a way to gain the prize of having you speak on a topic we care about, as good a way as investing in fund raising lottery tickets.  Therefore I will try.

Is peace a spiritual thing?  Is talk about our common humanity, our common bonds, and about surmounting the blindness that fractures our relationships a proper thing to address in religious terms?  I acknowledge I’m being obvious here.  What I just referred to is supposed to be basic and elemental to the great faiths.

I grew up in the Vietnam War era and I remember churches and church people taking the lead in saying that the wars we waged in Indochina were wrong.  These days we, as country, are more military extended than ever.  My oldest daughter is now about to be twenty-nine years old.  We had already started bombing Iraq when she was born in January.  The war in Iraq is just one of the perpetual wars that has continued essentially for the entirety of her life.  All of our wars are long now.  As formally measured by some, the War in Afghanistan, with its later beginning, has surpassed the Vietnam War as our country’s longest war.

These days the United States has been bombing nine countries, ten if you include, as we should, all of the U.S. participation in the bombing of Yemen, the other nine countries being: Mali, Niger, Somalia, Libya, and then, in the Middle East, it’s Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. We have 800 military bases in other countries.  With practically no comment or attention from us, President Obama opened new military bases across Africa.

A peace symbol hangs prominently in our Unitarian Universalist congregation’s sanctuary where our sermons are given.  We begin every Sunday service singing the words: “let peace, good will on earth be sung through every land, by every tongue.”  Christmas comes every year, and every year we evoke and extol, as is customary in the Christian tradition, the image of Jesus as the “Prince of Peace.”  In our congregation’s Weaving Social Justice Committee we have discussed the prospect of rededicating the side chapel within the sanctuary that is known as the “Peace Chapel” to that cause.  In our list of candidate films for the social justice film series we are working on we have films about the injustice of war. . .

 . . . But, by and large, we hardly ever actually say anything about peace or the need to end the  perpetual wars for which our country is now responsible.  Has there been any sermon in our sanctuary on the subject of peace?  I can’t recall one.

I was not at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in June this summer, but I talked with people who went, and I looked over the multi-day program.  I was told and I saw that there were no sessions on the subject of peace.  Nor was anything said about the antithesis thereof, war, although we are deeply embroiled in wars to the point that they are inescapably always in the background our daily American lives.
 
Our congregation through its leaders including members of the social justice committee is now reaching out to other congregations in our city and to their social justice actors to coordinate collective activism on the issues important to all of us.  The importance of peace activism has not been mentioned in those discussions no matter that it is integrally related to virtually every other issue that is being discussed of common interest.  Has the subject of peace somehow been tagged as off-limits?  Is peace now too controversial to be discussed by and among religious communities?

Other social issues have attracted the attention of organizing Unitarians and have been the subject of multiple sermons. I understand and support that and among them are issues like the climate change chaos catastrophe emergency.  The climate emergency is an existential threat to all of humanity.  When the Democratic National Committee ordered that there be no debate focused on the single issue of climate change– the DNC actually forbade Democrats from participating in any such debate organized by anyone else– the case was made that the existential issue of climate is so fundamental that it is intertwines with and underlies virtually every other issue that’s important.  There are other issues like that; issues that are inextricably related to society’s other major issues.       

Our American wars together with the rest of our military interventions that stoke conflict in other countries are far too often wars which are very much about the extraction of oil and fossil fuels.  Moreover, overall our wars help keep in place the systems that continue to vandalize our planet, exterminating its ecosystems.  Further, the US military is one of the largest polluters in history, “the single-largest producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world,” and that the Pentagon is responsible for between “77% and 80% of all US government energy consumption” since 2001.  The US military is consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries, polluting more than 140 countries. Obscuring the reporting on this, the United States, which exempts its military from environmental laws, insisted on exemptions from reporting of the military emissions of all countries from climate agreements. The U.S., has itself escaped such reporting by exiting the Paris Climate Accord.

It is not clear, but these staggering figures about fossil fuel use probably don’t include the fossil fuel consumption related to the initial manufacture of weapons.  Consider also that replacement, or nonreplacement, of what is bombed, burned and incinerated also must entail substantial additional environmental costs.
                                     
It is not just greenhouse gas emission pollution that the military produces: In 2010, a major story that went largely unreported was that the U.S. Department of Defense, as the largest polluter in the world, was producing more hazardous waste than the five largest US chemical companies combined, and that just some of the pollutants with which it was contaminating the environment were depleted uranium, petroleum, oil, pesticides, defoliant agents such as Agent Orange, and lead, along with vast amounts of radiation. Following our bombings, birth defects reported in Iraq are soaring. A World Health Organization survey tells us that in Fallujah half of all babies were born with a birth defect between 2007 and 2010 with 45 per cent of all pregnancies ending in miscarriage in the two years after 2004.

Another thing we face that has been deadening to the human spirit has been the increasing “othering” of people who we are made to think are different from us.  Frequently now that’s immigrants from other countries who are black or brown.  Often that “othering,” as with Muslims, is stoked in ways that may cause us to support or tolerate wars in which those others suffer most and towards whom hostilities are often officially directed.  We may also forget how our wars and military activity push the flow of populations forcing people to migrate across boarders, as, for instance, with those leaving Honduras after our country helped bring about the military coup that replaced the government there.

Also basic and underlying so many of our problems are racial, income and wealth inequality with concomitant inequality in power and influence. These are things that Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who practiced ministry through activism and activism through ministry, labored to eliminate.  Not long before he was assassinated, King also began to speak out against the Vietnam war saying the great challenge facing mankind is to get rid of war.  Before he did so, he carefully weighed cautions urged on him that as a civil rights leader he shouldn’t do so, that it would undermine support for his civil rights work, split his coalition, and that these issues should not be joined together.  But King concluded that the issues were tied together and decided that he would address them on that basis.

When King expressed his opposition to the war in his very famous “Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence,” delivered in this city’s Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967, one year to the day before his assassination, he said he was “increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”  He spoke of the disproportionate toll that waging war exacted on the poor and spoke of the poisoning of America’s soul. . . So it is today.

War is profitable business.  It busies packs of lobbyists who know a great deal more about often secret budgets than we, as the public, will ever learn.  But that profit drains the resources of our society enfeebling our ability to accomplish so much else.  The Pentagon and military budget is about 57% of the nation’s discretionary budget.  If all of the unknowable black box spending that goes into the Military-Industrial-Surveillance Complex were included, that percentage could well bump up higher.  We spend more on military spending than the next ten countries combined (or seven, depending on the year and who calculates), and we spend much more than all the rest of the countries in the world left over after that.  Of course, much of that spending by other countries is on arms we supply making the world dangerous.

We may not fully know about or have a complete accounting of all the dollars we spend in these areas, but, in May of 2011 after the U.S. announced that it had killed Osama Bin Laden, the National Priorities Project calculated that, as of that time, “in all, the U.S. government has spent more than $7.6 trillion on defense and homeland security since the 9/11 attacks.”  Point of reference: a “trillion” is one million millions.

Just the increase in the military spending in the last two years since Trump came in is as much as Russia spends on its entire military budget ($66 billion).  Similarly just that increase is greater than the entire military budgets of Britain ($55 billion) or France ($51 billion). 

Our fixated disposition to keep spending more is entrenched: Even Elizabeth Warren, a senator from Massachusetts who promotes herself as a left wing progressive, voted in 2017 to increase the defense budget by $80 billion, surpassing the $54 billion increase requested by President Trump.  60% Of House Democrats voted for a defense budget far bigger than Trump requested.

Perhaps most disquieting and insidiously corrupting to our morality and our souls are the pretexts we adopt to justify going to war and to abide its horrors, particularly when we leave those pretexts dishonestly unexamined.  The public flailed and many among us continue in their confusion, unable to sort out that Iraq did not attack the United States or have weapons of mass destruction before the second war that we unilaterally and "preemptively" launched to invade that country.  Before our first Gulf War attack on that country there were no slaughtered `incubator babies’: That was just a brazen, cynically staged public relations scam.  Similarly, how few of us know and recognize that Afghanistan did not attack the United States on 9/11– We precipitously invaded that country because the government there was at that time asking that procedures be followed and proof furnished before it would assist in finding and turning Osama Bin Laden over to the United States.

The foreign country that was most involved in 9/11, and from where almost all of the men identified as the alleged 9/11 hijackers came, is Saudi Arabia.  Saudi Arabia is the country to which we are selling massive amounts of weapons (making it that world’s third biggest military spender) and it is the country with which we are deeply involved perpetrating war crimes against Yemen.

In the Vietnam War, our second longest war, it was the Gulf of Tonkin incident that, not being what it seemed nor reported to be, was the pretext for war.

Perhaps hardest and most challenging to our susceptibilities as caring people striving to be spiritual and attentive to justice are the pretextual manipulations to which we are subject in regard to what Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman spotlighted as the selective distinguishing between “worthy” versus “unworthy” victims.  “Worthy” victims are those who, whatever their number, deserve our outrage and are a basis for calls for the international community to mobilize toward war.  “Unworthy victims” are those who can die en mass without attention or recognition like the tens of thousands of Yemeni children who have died for lack of food, water and medicine because of Saudi Arabia’s blockade assisted by the U.S..  Often, as with Palestinians removed from their homelands, these victims are blamed for their own victimhood.

Additional layers of pretext pile up when we encounter journalists and whistleblowers willing to be the messengers of war crimes.  We punish those messengers while, concurrently, there is no consequence for those who perpetrate the war crimes.  Often the perpetrators are promoted to higher office. That includes those who illegally torture others to coerce useless, undependable, and likely false “confessions.”  Thus we punish and torture Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning for exemplifying what Daniel Ellsberg called “civil courage.” Thus we vindictively send CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou to prison for disclosing his agency’s torture program.

Wikileaks, Julian Assange’s organization has published much that is embarrassing to the United States and those in power, much of it is particularly embarrassing to the U.S. military.  Wikileaks has never published anything that was untrue, but the truth of what it has published is disruptive to the official narratives of the war establishment. That establishment has been seeking vengeance against and to neutralize Assange since events in 2010 when in April Wikileaks published documenting gunsight video footage, under the title of “Collateral Murder,” of a US drone strike on civilians in Bagdad provided by Chelsea Manning.  The New York Times and Washington Post did not respond to Manning’s attempts to publish that same footage through them or other evidence of U.S. war crime in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Anyone who wants proof of the pretextual nature of the United States’ persecution of Julian Assange and of the ghastly and sometimes illegal, abuse of inordinate power against Assange should watch or listen to Chris Hedges June 8, 1019 “On Contact” interview with UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer (“On Contact: Julian Assange w/UN Special Rapporteur on Torture”- Chris Hedges is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church).  The attacks against Assange began with a highly orchestrated campaign of character assassination.  They have progressed to things far worse.  Both Assange and Manning (who was pardoned from a 35-year sentence after seven years of confinement that included the torture of Manning) are now being held in prison, no end in sight, for no crimes of which they have been convicted.  I think we have to agree with the criticism of this as psychological torture.  The continued torture of Manning is an effort to get at Assange even if that were to involve forcing Manning to lie.

The United States wants Assange extradited to the Unites States to be tried for the crime of practicing journalism that was unflattering to the United States government. Somehow we have the highhandedness to conceptualize this journalism to be treason although Assange is a foreign national. Assange faces no other charges. Under the laws pursuant to which the U.S. would try him, Assange, like the exiled Edward Snowden, would not be permitted to introduce any evidence or argument that disclosing illegal U.S. activity or war crimes benefits the public.  It’s said that the United States wants nothing more than a show trial and I think that must be considered obvious.

When Assange sensed in 2012 that trumped up charges in Sweden would be used as a subterfuge to transfer him to United States custody for such a show trial he obtained political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. For this, a British judge sentenced Assange and had him serve 50 weeks in a high security prison for “bail jumping”; that’s just fourteen days short of the maximum possible sentence, although the obviously trumped up charges for which Assange had posted bail were withdrawn, negating the original bail terms as a result.  A normal, typical sentence for bail jumping would have entailed only a fine, in a grave case, a much shorter prison sentence.

Britain was able to send police officers into enter the Ecuadoran Embassy to arrest Assange for “bail jumping” and then later hold him, without other charge for pending extradition to the United States, because of a change in the Ecuadoran government that was evidently CIA assisted, and as the United States was dangling financial aid for that country.  Assange’s eviction from the embassy, along with his being simultaneously stripped of Ecuadoran citizenship, was done without due process.
 
The persecution of Assange casts a long shadow to intimidate other journalists, whistleblowers and activists as they themselves are being intimidated about disrupting the preferred narrative concerning America’s militarily asserted empire.  Other providers of news simply lay low not reporting things.  As neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post reported it, you may not have heard about the recent scary SWAT style arrest of journalist Max Blumenthal by Washington D. C. police hours after he reported about the United States government funding of the Venezuela Juan Guaidó coup team.  Blumenthal was shackled and held incommunicado for an extended period. Not long after that the D.C. police went out to similarly arrest activist and journalist Medea Benjamin when she publicized the U.S. backing of coups in Venezuela and Bolivia.

With silenced journalists, will we, based on unchallenged pretexts, send our military into to change the government of Venezuela as there is talk of doing?  In Bolivia the coup we sponsored has been successful without that.  Meanwhile, there is talk of pretexts for military actions against Iran, Russia, North Korea.

Journalists who still show courage, are subject to exile, sometimes self exile, from their journalistic homes, to alternative media outlets, where, like Assange, they are likely to be less heard and will be more vulnerable. Journalist Tareq Haddad just announced that he resigned from Newsweek because that publication has been suppressing a story of his.  His story was about the whistleblower revelations of buried evidence that the supposed 2018 Duoma chemical attacks by Syrian president Assad on his own people was fairly obviously a concocted fabrication when it was used as a justification for the U.S. to bomb Syria.  Remember our bombings of Syria?  The was another in 2017. It was for such bombings of Syria the press declared that Trump was finally `presidential,' and, as the cruise Tomahawk missiles launched, MSNBC’s Brian Williams spoke of being “guided by the beauty of our weapons” using the word “beautiful” three times in 30 seconds.

The strenuous suppression of these voices like Assange's that would disrupt official narratives shows how the conduct of war has a tight moral link to the choices we make to speak out against war and against the suppression of the voices that oppose war.  In his sermon against war at Riverside Church that day one year to the day before he was killed, Reverend Martin Luther Kings Jr. said that, “men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war.”

King also said that, when assuming the task of such opposition, it was difficult to break free of the “conformist thought” of the surrounding world.  Indeed, with the complicity of a much more conglomerately owned corporate media than in King’s time, it seems as if there is a secularly consecrated catechism of what we know we as Americans are not supposed to say, what we must veer away from and avoid.  We subscribe with almost religious ferocity to the belief that American exceptionalism justifies all our actions in the world.  It feels, as if in our bones, that we know that to violate this proposition and say something else would create a rumbling disturbance in the force (you know, “Star Wars”).  Or is our silence, merely something less profound than that, just the equivalent of what we think would be an exceptionally super-rude topic to bring up at a family Thanksgiving or holiday diner?
                               
Dr. King correctly foresaw that there would be significant prices he would have to pay for speaking out against our country’s war.  He concluded that he had to do so, that he had to `break the silence,’ despite the prices he knew he would have to pay. He felt that doing so was the only thing he could do and remain true to himself and his causes.

Ana, I have no doubt that there would be prices you would have to pay if you spoke out for peace; if you spoke out against war.  I also acknowledge that there are prices our congregation could face.  Relatively recently the FBI has raided the homes of public nonviolent peace activists who have long, distinguished careers in public service.  (And the FBI has also been investigating nonviolent climate activists and Black Lives Matters activists.)  But I urge you to deliver a sermon about peace because it would be the right thing to do.  Perhaps it could go along with a rededication of our sanctuary’s Peace Chapel. And, perhaps,  if you would give a sermon like Dr. King gave against our wars, it might do more than just be a good thing in its own right: It might serve as a model for the ministers of other congregations who would follow suit.

Maybe, as in Martin Luther King Jr.’s day, there can again be a time when people see the call for peace as a spiritual issue and our church’s, temples and congregations again take a lead role in calling for peace and an end to our wars.

Have I made the subject of peace sound as if it is complicated?  If so, I am sorry.  That can be a problem in itself.  At bottom, shouldn’t this all be so simple?  Peace, supporting peace, speaking out for peace. .  Something very simple.
 
            Last night I had the strangest dream
            I never dreamed before.
            I dreamed the world had all agreed
            To put an end to war.*

* From “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” by Ed McCurdy- 1950,
 a precursor of sorts to “Imagine” by John Lennon and Yoko Ono- 1971

 Sincerely,

Michael D. D. White

The “Criminal Mind” When It Comes to Income Tax Fraud, Political Crimes and Voting

Meshing headlines about tax fraud and influencing elections

Let’s talk about the kind of frightfully improper influence and interference with our political system and process the criminally minded might be inclined to wield, that we may need to fend off, including actions by those lawbreakers willing to commit tax fraud.  A warning however: This discussion is ultimately headed toward what you may find to be an unlikely turn.

First, we are forever bedeviled by Trump headlines in an increasingly Trump-centric media universe?  Let’s just surrender to the trend and general convention these days by starting with one . . .

There’s a new set of headlines burbling recent days, including in the New York Times, about Mr. Trump and his family being engaged in tax fraud.  The New York State Attorney General is suing Trump’s “charity,” essentially Trump himself together with family members involved, for, as we said, tax fraud.  Mixed into the stew of asserted misuses and self dealing to benefit Trump (using the charity to “settle legal claims against” Trump’s “various businesses, even spending $10,000 on a portrait of Mr. Trump that was hung at one of his golf clubs”) is the abuse of the charity to politically benefit Trump, to “curry political favor” giving control over the charity funds it raised to senior Trump campaign staff, who decided how to use them.  Among other things there was a disguised illegal campaign contribution to Florida’s attorney general, Pam Bondi.  Not mentioned by the Times in its article is that this was at the same time that Bondi’s office, like the New State Attorney General, was to consider investigating Trump’s sham university.

According to the Times:

The petition notes that Mr. Trump himself signed annual I.R.S. filings, under penalty of perjury, in which he attested that the foundation did not engage in political activity. “This statutory prohibition is absolute.”

The Times accompanied the story reporting the facts with an editorial run the same day drubbing Trump’s so-called charity with its “gifts to himself” calling it “just another of his grifts” and saying that from its pretenses of being “in the public interest” the charity is not “remotely what it purports to be.”

The main Times article includes, with an insert in its web version, an opportunity to read the lawsuit itself, but, as harshly as the Times express its sentiments about Trump grifting, it does not pick up the fraud language itself in those formally stated charges, that the Trump charity has conducted itself in a “persistently fraudulent and illegal manner.”  MSNBC did pick that up however, spicing up its coverage with a worthwhile interview with Trump biographer David Cay Johnston:  New York A.G. files fraud lawsuit against Trump family, foundation.

Johnston remarks that Trump has had two previous income tax fraud trials.

Headlines this last March reported that Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner was engaged in illegal activities in his real estate business, regularly falsifying filings for work permits by declaring “that the company had no rent-regulated tenants in the buildings, when in fact they had hundreds.”  This allowed Kushner to gentrify the buildings more quickly and likely subjected tenants to harassment as they tried to live with quiet enjoyment of their premises amidst construction work.  At the time, a lawyer friend of mine (actually a Trump-loathing Democrat) who does a great deal of work for another major developer in New York worried about possible unfairness if Trump’s son-in-law were to be selectively prosecuted for activities engaged that are actually part of a pattern widespread abuse across the city by many, many people in the real estate industry. 

Indeed, amongst the powerful, Trump is surely brazen and perhaps sometimes more extreme, but he does many of the same things that other powerful and wealthy people do that should be stopped when they do them too.  If you have read Jane Mayer’s “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right” you know that the Koch brothers and those in their club of billionaires exerting heavy influence on our national politics using charitable organizations to do so whenever they can.  In New York City where Trump hails from, charities are heavily intertwined with politics and were used by Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who has hoped to be a Republican nominee for president) to secure a third term as Mayor.  Forest City Ratner, a real estate developer, created New York charities for the purpose of developing its Atlantic Yards project and then used one of its charities to run a candidate (Ms. Delia Hunley-Adossa) against the local city council member opposing the project.

The point is that far too many of the wealthiest and most powerful do engage in such abuses.  In fact, they probably often also do cross the line where there should be prosecution and consequences.  Still, how often do we ever see them suffering such consequences?
   
As for such prevalence of abuse, try this for another taste, a very likely tax fraud by Trump where  “the available evidence suggests” that Donald Trump illegally sidestepped paying gift tax by “selling” two Manhattan condominiums to his son at what was apparently barely half their true value in order to masquerade a gift as a business transaction.  According to the Washington Post article reporting it, the “fraudulent failure to file” a gift tax return by Trump if it involves any “overt act of evasion” would make this a serious felony on his part normally entailing the possibility of serious fines and prison.  See: This Trump real estate deal looks awfully like criminal tax fraud, - Two tax lawyers break down the president’s sale of two condos to his son.  By David Herzig and Bridget Crawford August 4, 2017.

Most people reading this probably already have a pretty good grasp that there is much to be troubled by of this nature going on in the world.  But I am headed with somewhere different from what you expect.  I think it is terrible when the wealthy shamelessly cheat on their income taxes.  And it is awful when they change the laws to legalize what should be illegal cheating.  Worse still is the unequal political power and influence wielded by the wealthy by virtue of their retained and accumulated wealth. The so-called charities for which the wealthy take self-serving deductions although they are not true charities are abominable.

Part of what needs to be done is to cut the wealthy down to political size and strip them of some of this out-sized power. . . .  In fact, one of the things that the New York State State Attorney General lawsuit seeks as a remedy in its Trump Foundation tax fraud lawsuit is a court declaration that Mr. Trump’s three eldest children be banned from the boards of nonprofits based or operating in New York or operate in New York.

Nevertheless, in the unlikely case that Donald Trump or any of his minions are convicted of felonies and jailed for such abuses, including as the case may be, unfairly influencing the political system for their own benefit, there is one thing that I would not want to take away from them: Their right to vote.  While I may worry and be concerned about the disproportionate influence their wealth has in the political system,  I am not afraid of their right to express themselves politically by exercising their right to vote as individual citizens. . . . That is something that I would never take away from them, no matter how much their bad actions have connected them to abuse of the political system.   

The idea that Trump might be convicted of a felony may seem like an academic question to muse about, fanciful given that Trump has expressed a willingness to pardon himself for federal crimes, and given that he may actually be able to do so because he is president.  On the other hand, Trump’s violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clause (just another aspect of his self-serving, cheating-the-public brazenness) are surely, among other things, grounds for impeachment and removal from office if ever there is ever a congress willing to do so. At that point he wouldn’t be president with pardon power.  Also, his pardon power does not extend to state and local crimes.

All such speculation notwithstanding, this discussion is not really intended to be about Trump himself.  It has been perspicaciously observed that (sorry Bobby De Niro), `Trump negativity,’ facile and in isolation, does not, amount to any kind of coherent world view.  So rather than have this particular discussion be about Trump, it was intended only that Trump provide an easy to identify stand-in reference for what is going on more broadly in our culture and how extreme and flagrant it’s gotten.

With the forgoing as the juxtapatory context it was meant to provide, now let’s move on to what was meant to the key point of this little disquisition in most in need of attention. . . .

. . .  It also concerns someone charged with tax fraud.  It also involves efforts to proscribe as out-of-bounds and illegal that same someone’s attempted participatory influencing of the political system. . .  That effort at political influence is being severely punished.

Here’s how it was reported in the day’s headlines for Democracy Now (emphasis and bracketed insertion are mine):   

In Texas, a black woman sentenced to five years in prison for voter fraud has lost her bid for a new trial. Crystal Mason was convicted of illegal voting in March, after she cast a provisional ballot [A provisional ballot is used to record a vote when there are questions about a given voter's eligibility, and so that whether a provisional ballot is counted is contingent upon the planned verification of the voter's eligibility] in the 2016 presidential election despite having a past felony conviction for tax fraud that prevented her from voting. Mason says she did not know that she wasn’t allowed to vote in Texas due to her criminal record. According to a 2016 report by The Sentencing Project, policies restricting the voting rights of convicted felons disenfranchise more than 6 million people. Crystal Mason’s supporters are demanding charges be dropped, arguing that her conviction was racially biased. This follows a voter fraud conviction in Iowa, where Terri Lynn Rote—a white woman—was convicted of the same crime, after she tried to vote for President Trump twice. Rote was sentenced to two years’ probation and fined $750.

(According to what I have been reading and researching, this article that you are reading will Google higher if I include a link to the New York Times version of the story rather than only giving you the Democracy Now link that Google’s algorithm ranks lower.)

Whatever may happen to the likes of Trump, the Koch brothers, or those of their ilk who have good lawyers and connections if they ever get charged for income tax fraud in the first place, Crystal Mason, convicted of tax fraud, served three years in prison and was still serving out the rest of an even longer sentence on probation when “at the behest of her mother, she went to her local church to vote in the 2016 presidential election.”  Now she is being sent to prison for five more years for wanting to vote.

Within the Democracy Now headline telling of the story the far less serious consequence (in effect just a $750 fine) for the white woman consciously doing a far more execrable thing by voting twice for Trump makes this obviously a racial justice issue.  But with nationwide mass incarceration with arrests, prosecutions and convictions all disproportionately targeting and penalizing people of color across the board for the same or similar crimes, the entire criminal justice system is one giant racial justice issue.  And if race is inherently also politics, which it is, then it is also important to understand this population from a political prisoner standpoint.  That makes it all the more nefarious that these people who have been convicted should be deprived of their votes, and also thus voting power of people of color diminished overall. . . 

 . . . The flip side, of course (see the Ava DuVernay Documentary 13th), is to understand the political thirst of many to take these voting rights away: Arguably, without disenfranchisement of convicted felons, Florida would always be a blue state in national presidential elections.

It needn't be this way.  Allowing prisoners and convicted felons to vote could easily be the rule: Maine and Vermont permit prisoners to vote, and that’s the general rule followed by most countries in the world.  In Europe most countries respect the European Court of Human Rights ruling that automatic disenfranchisements resulting from convictions are against human rights, that a presumption of universal suffrage should obtain unless the government can specifically rebut it.  The United States is an outlier in placing the most voting restrictions on those convicted of crimes.

The logic is very thin for saying that loss of voting rights should be an automatic consequence of felony crime convictions.  The basic argument is usually: “If you aren't willing to follow the law, you can't claim the right to make the law for everyone else.”  That sort of side-steps the big-picture parallel that in a system that’s ever more rigged, when the privileged elite of our country “aren't willing to follow the law,” they do change the law with dismaying consequences “for everyone else.”

Conversely, those who do not see this as a basis to strip voting right point out the lack or proportion or relationship:

The argument rests on collapsing “the law” into a single entity: Because I violated a law, I am no longer allowed to affect any law, even if the law I violated was relatively trivial and the law I’d like to oppose is, say, a repeal of the First Amendment.

And what about unjust laws, laws that so arguably ought to be broken as a matter of conscience by whistle-blowers like Pvt. Manning or Edward Snowden, those who protested the Trump inauguration, or laws that are civilly disobeyed as Martin Luther King, Jr. suggested because they were in need of the repeal that only the visibility of civil disobedience would bring.  And how many of us have follow all laws strictly every day of our lives never erring?

That then is the juxtaposition offered. .   Tax fraud?  Criminally convicted?  Wanting to do something frightful to influence elections? . .  I am very afraid when Trump, the Kochs and the rest of their club manipulate our electoral systems, including when that manipulation extends to such things as income tax fraud concerning foundations and charities deployed for such purposes, but I would never seek to deprive them of their right to vote as individuals if they ever get convicted for such exploits. And I don’t fear their votes!  Conversely, Crystal Mason’s persecution for “voting while Black” will likely send a discouraging message to other potential voters of color and is part of an overall pattern of racially discriminatory voter suppression. . .  Why is that being allowed to happen?: Because the individual vote of Crystal Mason and the 6 million other United States citizens who might rise and vote along with her if duly re-enfranchised are feared by those in power seeking to prevent our elections from more democratic outcomes. 

Kochs Move To Acquire Ownership In Time/Life, Which On The Political Spectrum Was Previously. . . (Let Me Tell You) - Our Media, Never In a Good Place, Shifts Toward. . ??

Before we get to the "Time Goes Bye" part of this article (Koch Brothers stalking ownership of the once mighty Time Magazine), let's speak of "times gone by." 

I want to tell you a story that involves looking way back.

At the time of which I am speaking I was quite certainly in college, although when I think back remembering it feels almost as if I was still in high school, that I was so recently out of.  Since I was listening to WBAI on the radio, I had to have been in college and that means the year was probably 1970 or 1971.

On WBAI I heard a truly startling and appalling story about recent events in the Vietnam War.  I was sure it was going to be big news and probably would have a big influence on a lot of people when they too learned about it.  I wanted to see how else it would be reported, and I waited with eagerness for my weekly Time Magazine to come out and see how the story was featured.  When Time came out I scoured the week’s Vietnam War coverage and the event wasn’t there at all, not even a hint.  I was fit to be tied.

Once upon a time I had supported the Vietnam War, in high school seeing it in the basic good guy/bad guy terms in which my father had explained it to me: We were helping good guys against bad guys.  By the time of the story I am telling, I had shifted over in my thinking to oppose the war, having been chagrined to learn that by that time I did shift I was only just catching up with father’s own changed thinking to oppose the war.  Somehow, father and son, we had neglected to have that updating conversation before I told my father how increasingly troubled I was by the way I could not reconcile and sort through to believe that there were any truly good reasons for fighting a bad war.

My father, who voted for Lyndon Johnson instead of Barry Goldwater, was a Republican.  He was firmly against the war before he died at the end of 1968.  In addition, although I knew there were reasons my father had disliked Robert Kennedy based on my father's own early personal, youthful encounters with Kennedy (my father was from a similar Irish Catholic family that had contacts with the Kennedys), my father supported Robert Kennedy and his campaign for the White House that terminated with his assassination.  My father liked Kennedy’s stance on race relations (about which my father was growing increasingly passionate) and on the war.

Unfortunately, my memory is dim so I cannot tell you exactly what incident happened in Vietnam that went unreported by Time, but I was outraged and I was going to do something about it.  I called the Editor In Chief of Time Magazine to complain.

You might think this was absurdly presumptuous of me to do, and how could I possibly get through to someone of his stature.  I did get through, and I was encouraged to make the phone call by my mother.  My uncle, Ralph Delahaye Paine, Jr., had been an important man at Time/Life.  Among other things he had been Managing Editor and Publisher of Fortune Magazine, part of that Time/Life/Fortune triumvirate.  Part of our family lore (and there were many stories about my uncle) was how my uncle had been in charge of the Time/Life staff as they retreated back as the Nazis advanced through Europe and France and my uncle remembered vividly how vital it was for him to get everyone successfully out ahead of time.  Many of that Time/Life staff he sought to get out safely were Jewish.

The editor of Time Magazine took my call.  I am named after my uncle.  (And to be 100% complete, my daughter, born days after my uncle died in 1991, is now also.)  I played the relationship card, mentioning names, when I made my call as my mother encouraged me to do.  The editor’s secretary took my information and the editor picked up.  I am not going back at this time to check on that editor's name.  As I am telling a story after a long intervening time where my memory has some fogginess, it is probably better to leave names out.

What I remember was that the editor graciously took my call.  He probably enjoyed talking with me as an unusual break in his day.  I remember that he was more than polite, but I think I detected some bemusement on his part respecting my naive passion as he explained that there is lots of news to print and editorial decisions to be made and that not everything can always be printed.  It just doesn’t happen that way.  I was too young to have heard many of these kinds of explanations in my life and, no doubt I was out of my league knowing little about how best to express things in this kind of situation.  Some young people are savants and have natural instincts about these things at a very young age: Not me.

I don’t think my energy on the subject carried me over to write an official “letter to the editor” in hopes that it might get published.  I couldn’t have whipped one out at that point in my life and I certainly didn’t yet know the formula for quickly commanding attention, or tricks to succinctly synthesize the politically complicated.  My unwritten letter with respect to something that Time had not deigned to mention in the first place would not have been published, I’m sure.

I tell this story mostly to emphasize that, back in the day, Time Magazine and the Time/Life publishing empire were not exactly found on the left of the political spectrum in terms of the way they saw the world or what they chose to report.  I also tell the story to bring up and emphasize that where you get your news can powerfully affect your point of view because of what is and is not included.

After a few more years of reading both Time and Newsweek cover to cover every week (they were both weeklies for those who have forgotten or were not around), I finally terminated my subscription to Time because I found it so much more conservative than Newsweek when reporting on the same items.  Part of me felt a bit like a traitor.

And it also seemed as if I was acting against my own self interest: I owned a tiny amount of Time Incorporated stock that had been given to me as a baby present.  Escalating in value in those past decades, it was, in fact, my sole success with stock ownership.  My father had coached me in learning the benefits of investing in the stock market by encouraging me to buy Studebaker stock with some of my saved allowance combined with his contributed subsidy.  The purchase was not a good idea: Studebaker was an American automobile manufacturing company and in 1963 they closed the plant in South Bend, Indiana where they were based.  I learned then that what happens to stock when companies fail to thrive is not pretty.

Nowadays, what is happening to the stock of ever less profitable legacy news organizations like Time is not pretty, except that the stock of Time Magazine after a period of decline has reportedly just jumped up 25% percent because the Koch bothers, Charles and David, are circling around to engineer a takeover of the ownership.

This is yet more frightening news about the ownership of our news sources.  We are seeing that as income and wealth inequality become ever more pronounced, as the finances of news organizations grow increasingly anemic (reducing their relative price to that of play things), and as the government fails to enforce anti-monopoly laws and regulations, the sources of much of our news is increasingly supplied by just a few disproportionately wealthy men (or their corporate extensions) that hold some very peculiar ideas.  Those ideas include bizarre thoughts about how everyone else should sacrifice so that they can become wealthier, how we should continue to destroy the planet with exhumation and burning of fossil furls, and the glories of spending on weapons and waging wars.

But, to go back a bit, this is just the half of it, because however much worse it can be to have “news” provided by the likes of the Koch brothers, what I indicated at the outset with my story about Time Magazine and its previous conservative non-reporting about the Vietnam War, doesn’t do justice in giving you a true flavor for how biased-by-omission so much news media reporting has been in this country over the years.

Last week, Edward S. Herman died on November 11, 2017 at the age of 92.  Among other things, Mr. Herman was coauthor with Noam Chomsky of “Manufacturing Consent.” Some say he was the principal author.  That important and influential book was about how media cooperates with the powerful so that the electorate capitulates to what those in power want.  That consent manufacture includes a lot of non-reporting (and skewed reporting) of events that happen in our world.  In this vein, The New York Times virtually didn’t report Mr. Herman’s death.

The disregard was mutual. . .

. . . We understand that Mr. Herman’s last published work was about the New York Times.  It was about the Times' omissions and some very unreliable reporting on the part of the Times over multiple decades, a complete disaster if for those endeavoring to formulate their world view. His article ran in the July/August 2017 edition of Monthly Review: Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies- The New York Times, 1917-2017.  The article covers a lot of ground.  And, (to get around, in a sense, to where we began) it includes a section about misleading reporting about the Vietnam War by the Times, with criticisms you might not have thought of until you hear Mr. Herman express them eloquently with many others.

I suggest you read it next.  Consider your read of Mr. Herman's last solemn article as a commemorative mediation on things missing: the lost, the departing, and things lost when they were never included in the first place.

Big Changes!: And The More Things Change, The More They Are Changing In the WRONG Direction- GLOBAL WARMING and INCREASING WEALTH INEQUALITY

The news didn’t wait to come out on the day of Mr. Trump’s inauguration (if that’s what you were expecting): Last year we got the news on January 20th.  This year we got the news today. . . .

Last year, on January 20th, we learned that 2015 had set the record for the world’s warmest year ever, eclipsing 2014, which, in turn, had been the world’s warmest year ever.

This year we learned today: 2016 is the world’s warmest year ever.  That makes it three years in succession that the temperature has set escalating records.

When this was announced last year, we were told that the odds were starkly against the phenomenon of "two back-to-back record years," that they were only 1 out of 1,500 unless. . .  climate change with the ever present prospect of continually increasing temperatures is undeniably here. -

. . . so what are the odds of THREE successive years of annual increase?  What’s worse is that the New York Times reports that record-setting figures of 2016 were “trouncing” those set a year earlier.

Last year, National Notice looked at this frightful record setting with respect to our climate and connected it to another dismal trend in setting records: News had come out that world wealth inequality had increased to the point that just 62 of the world’s richest were as wealthy as as half of world's population.  See: Hot News Connection: 62 Billionaires Now Own More Than Half The Planet's Population And 2015 Far Outpaced 2014 as Planet's Hottest Ever Year (January 23, 2016).

Well, this week similarly brought news that last year’s record of wealth inequality has been trounced by this year’s record as well.  Now just eight individuals have as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population:  World's 8 Richest Have as Much Wealth as Bottom Half, Oxfam Says, by Gerry Mullany, January 16, 2017

Eight individuals (including Michael Bloomberg, who was hardly even on the map of wealth before becoming NYC mayor)?. .

. . .  Only six years ago in 2010 this power of holding as much wealth as half the world's population was dispersed among 388 multi-billionaires.

Are these racing increases in wealth inequality related to the fast racing increases in climate change?  Yes, they are.  That was exactly what I wrote and explained when I wrote last year in National Notice about those records being broken.. . .  Consider this just an update about how increasingly out of hand the situation is getting.

BTW: In a related vein, if you want to read about how one of the world’s most bizarrely wealthy man is buying a central destination library from the New York Public Library, which will be snuffing out its major science library just when what we need to know about climate change is vanishing from the libraries, there is a Noticing New York article you should read.

Hot News Connection: 62 Billionaires Now Own More Than Half The Planet’s Population And 2015 Far Outpaced 2014 as Planet’s Hottest Ever Year

Headlines and accompanying graphs that document significant progressions of some unwelcome change- Are hey related

This week brings two jaw-dropping headlines accompanied by graphs that document significant progressions of some unwelcome change.  With the news of each, arriving together, one must wonder about the possible relationships between the two. .

The Guardian reports that, according to a new report by Oxfam, our accelerating inequality means that the richest 62 people in the world are now as wealthy as half of world's population.  What's more, 1% of people on the world own more wealth than other 99% of the population combined.  See: Richest 62 people as wealthy as half of world's population, says Oxfam- Charity says only higher wages, crackdown on tax dodging and higher investment in public services can stop divide widening, by Larry Elliott, 18 January 18, 2016.

More than half the world's wealth held by just 1% and just 62 people owning as much as half the world's population?  If you believe that we live in a world where money is power and probably increasingly so, then an exceedingly small set of individuals hold an awful lot of power.  As for how fast this situation is getting worse, the Oxfam report tells us that only five years ago in 2010 this power of holding as much wealth as half the world's population was dispersed among 388 multi-billionaires.

On this side of the Atlantic the New York Times has just reported that 2015 was earth's warmest year by the widest margin on record; outstripping 2014, the previous record setter.  This means we have "two back-to-back record years," the odds against which are 1 out of 1,500 unless. . .  Yes, worsening climate change with the prospect of annually increasing temperatures is undeniably here.  See: 2015 Far Eclipsed 2014 As Wordls Hottest Year, Climate Scientists Say / 2015 Was Hottest Year in Historical Record, Scientists Say, by Justin Gillis January 20, 2016.

Climate change is definitely here.  It is phenomenally destructive to our planet and yet the world is doing very little about it.  Why?

The Oxfam report on the increasing concentration of wealth tells us a little bit about climate change:

. .  while the poorest people live in areas most vulnerable to climate change, the poorest half of the global population are responsible for only around 10 percent of total global emissions. Meanwhile, the average carbon footprint of the richest 1 percent of people globally could be as much as 175 times higher than that of the poorest 10 percent.

Another Oxfam report cited in a footnote to the above amplifies that, "The richest 10% of people produce half of Earth’s climate-harming fossil-fuel emissions,"  See:  World's richest 10% produce half of global carbon emissions, says Oxfam,  the Guardian, December 2, 2015.

Probably more important than the correlation between wealth accompanied by disproportionate consumption, and therefore much larger carbon footprints, is that the poorest in the world are the most vulnerable to the costs of climate change.  That's exceedingly relevant because, if money is power, then those worst affected by climate change are those least powerful to compel civilization to adjust and chart a better course.

It is clear that large carbon footprints and excessive consumption can be laid at the doorstep of the wealthiest, even citing the those amongst the tippy-top 1% with alarmingly cavalier consumption.  A recent hard-to-believe report, "Elite Emissions: How the Homes of the Wealthiest New Yorkers Help Drive Climate Change” by the Climate Works for All coalition concluded that with NYC buildings being responsible for "70% of New York City’s emissions" that generate the "greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming . . a mere two percent of the city’s one million buildings use 45% of all of the city’s energy."  See: New York Post- Rich New Yorkers' homes are ruining our air, by Hana R. Alberts, November 20, 2015.

Using the Forbes’ World’s Billionaires list to investigate The Elite Emissions report was able to present a list of  buildings with their high energy consumption figures.  It includes buildings with the homes of those ranking among the top 62 wealthiest people in the world, among them: The apartment building housing the home of David H. Koch (740 Park Avenue- the building made infamous by a book and an Alex Gibney documentary about it,) Alice Walton (515 Park Avenue in a a $25 million apartment), and Donald Trump (721 5th Avenue- "Trump Tower").  David Koch, along with is equally wealthy brother Charles, are, in whatever order you want, the sixth and seventh wealthiest multi-billionaires in the world.  Alice Walton is the eleventh.  Christy Walton and Jim Walton are higher up the list than Alice, right after the Kochs.  Climate science denying Donald Trump, with only an estimated $4.5 billion to his name, is way down the list of the world's wealthy at #405 with only a fraction of their wealth.

Of much more concern than whatever may be the aggregate personal carbon emissions are of these particular, exceedingly wealthy individuals, is the effect these individuals have on what systemically contributes to and establishes the societal infrastructure for climate change throughout the world.

An article in the New York Times wrote about how the richest multi-billionaires are now so wealthy that they are forming their own political parties: How Billionaire Oligarchs Are Becoming Their Own Political Parties,
by Jim Rutenberg, October 17, 2014.  Certainly, many already perceive the Tea Party, in view of its funding, as being essentially the party of Koch.

Of course, there is very visibly also Trump.  And, now, apparently, goaded or "galled by" the success of the relatively small-change Trump in this election cycle, Michael Bloomberg (multi-billionaire #14 on the Forbes list of the world's wealthiest) has disclosed renewed ambitions to run for Unite States President.  Mr. Bloomberg's credentials are environmentally dubious despite a lot of PR to the contrary.  Endorsed fracking he was  then appointed `Climate Change Envoy’ by the United Nations.  Bloomberg is looking to run as an independent candidate declaring that he would spend "at least $1 billion" of his estimated $35.5 billion fortune to run.  Mr. Bloomberg reportedly doesn't like the Wall Street-critical Sanders and 'laments' what he considers Hillary Clinton’s "lurch to the left" to keep pace with Sanders. See: Bloomberg, Sensing an Opening, Revisits a Potential White House Run, by Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman, January 23, 2016.

Trump, Koch and most particularly Bloomberg present examples of the cycle of how money and power reinforce each other.  Some may regard Bloomberg's $1 billion proposed to be spent on his campaign, or the cash similarly splashed around Trump as expenditures.  Others may view it as an investment that will more that repay itself no matter who is elected.  When Bloomberg declared his interest in politics to launch his career he was not exceptionally wealthy, but when he completed his third term as mayor he was, having for a time become the richest man in the city.  In the process he far outpaced the wealth increase of most others on Forbes list.

From Noticing New York: Two charts overlaid, showing how Bloomberg's increasing annual wealth makes the increasing annual average wealth of the rest of the "Forbes 400" look virtually flat by comparison

   
The question is what these multi-billionaires do with the huge influence they wield. In theory climate change will adversely affect everybody.  Indeed, we have heard some billionaires tell us they are mobilizing efforts to do what they think should be done to curtail climate change.  See: Bill Gates forms billionaires' super league against climate change- With the COP21 conference starting today in Paris, wealthy investors including Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Mark Zuckerberg team up to give governments a helping hand, by Adam Gale Monday, 30 November 2015 and Top 10 Billionaires Saving the Planet, by Sarah Backhouse, August 21, 2015.

That doesn't necessarily mean that one should agree with the solutions the multi-billionaires promote, or trust their motivations.  One reason to be skeptical about the solutions that get fielded when multi-billionaires mobilize is if you believe that, as we grapple with climate change, there won't be one "silver bullet" top-down solution.  Instead there will be a "mosaic of solutions" generated myriad fashion mostly from the bottom up. What's more Jane Jacobs ("The Economy of Cities") suggested that one upside to large populations is the multiplication of individuals and groups who can innovate to advance society and improve what we do.  If that's a theory you subscribe to, then leaving the half the world's population high and dry of a share of resources with which to participate negates that advantage.

Whatever good some billionaires like Tom Steyer may do with respect to climate battles like Mr. Steyer's opposing the Keystone XL oil pipeline there is all the weight of what is being done to counteract their better efforts.  Steyers is way down the Forbes list of the wealthy (#1190) and not even a multi-billionaire, with only an estimated $1.61 billion to his name.

We find this assessment of the fight between our financial giants at Bill Moyers' Moyers and Company site:

Fred Wertheimer, a long-time advocate of campaign finance reform, tells the Times that a political world where billionaires set the agenda is not a democracy. "This is about as far away as we can get from `representative government,'" he said. And when it comes to politically active billionaires, it would seem that there are more who profit from inaction on climate change than who want to see that action happen - not a good sign for those who agree with Steyer's politics.

See: Bill Moyers- The Billionaires on Both Sides of Climate Change, by John Light, February 19, 2014.

The Koch brothers are the prime example of such "politically active [multi-]billionaires."   With their combined wealth that exceeds that of any individual on the plant they are politically active, spending to fuel climate science denial and inaction about how we are raising the temperature of the earth and they are also fighting public health care (probably it's actually the same thing).

It is not just the first 62 multi-billionaires who are as wealthy as half the world.  What is remarkable is how many more multi-billionaires are up there on the Forbes list in the top sliver of the 1% fraction that holds more than half world's wealth.  You would probably not have to go far down the list before you had collected yet another small set of outrageously wealthy individuals who also collectively own and control more wealth than the poorest half of the world's population. The frightening thing is that many of those multi-billionaires also are either joining the Kochs in stymieing effective measures to address climate change, or they are doing little to prevent it.

For example at #100 on the list we find Stephen A. Schwarzman, head of the Blackstone Group, with an estimated personal wealth of $9.8 billion who lives in the same hugely energy inefficient building as David Koch.  (Great as Schwarzman's wealth is, it is just 8.76% of the combined wealth of the two Koch brothers, and far less than the $121.7 million which is the estimated combined fortune the three Waltons command.) Along with promoting fracking and a list of other objectionable activities, Mr. Schwarzman has been involved in selling off New York City Libraries.  The Oxfam report on escalating income inequality calls for a "three pronged approach" to counter that trend, one prong of which is "higher investment in public services."  Certainly the disinvestment of selling libraries (with Mayor Michael Bloomberg's approval) is the opposite of of such investment and what is otherwise called for if we are to start restoring equality.  The other two prongs called for by the report: are "a crackdown on tax dodging" and "higher investment in public services; and higher wages for the low paid.". .

. . .  As for tax dodging, Mr. Schwarzman has been famously aggressive in promoting what are viewed as dodgy tax loopholes. Mr. Schwarzman may be low on the Forbes list in terms of his wealth, but Forbes has compensatingly ranked him higher on another of its lists:  On the Forbes list of those with power in the world Forbes ranks Schwarzman as number 62.

It seems that Mr. Schwarzman has predilections to tilt the playing field on at least two fronts: Against those who could be trying to catch up and close the gap with him, and secondly, in favor of the tax system advantages that will continue to move him even further ahead.

Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary under Clinton, has a new book out, "Saving Capitalism For the Many, Not the Few," that addresses the escalating income inequality we see in the United States.  Median national household income is declining (after adjusting for inflation, an American family earns less in 2013 than it did in 1989) while productivity gains from economic growth collect at the top.  Mr. Reich tells us to remember these recent changes are not because of economics per se, but because of the way that the rules of the market are being written by those with wealth and power, people like Mr. Schwarzman.  . .

. . . Studying the law of property and property ownership in law school and urban planning school I was taught that the rules of property ownership are formulated based, in part, on concepts of what will ultimately benefit society, husband its resources and forestall waste.  The current decimation of our environment while wealth concentrates in the hands of a very few who mostly encourage this devastation or who sit idly by should be viewed as evidence that the rules we have now are not working and need to be rewritten.

De Blasio’s “Progressive Contract With America”: BIG PROBLEM- It looks Like A Plan to “Progressively Contract America” When He’s Selling NYC Libraries, Including The Tillary Clinton Library Next To Hillary’s Office!

During his campaign for mayor, de Blasio on NYC libraries: "once again we see, lurking right behind the curtain, real estate developers who are very anxious to get their hands on these valuable properties." He'd joined with Citizens Defending Libraries of which I am a co-founder.

Bill de Blasio, Mayor of New York, has a problem as he ventures out onto the national stage tomorrow . .

. .  Tuesday at 3:00 PM he intends to make political waves in Washington D.C. with a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol to announce his “Progressive Contract With America.”  But he’s faced with some really bad optics.  After all the fanfare and folderol that goes to pump up attention for his plan people may instead, very shortly, be talking about de Blasio’s “Plan to Progressively Contract America.” 

Why?  Because right now in his own city de Blasio is deliberately choosing to underfund and sell off New York City Libraries. . .  even against the advice of the New York Times editorial board.

What makes it even worse and what has it colliding directly with de Blasio’s desire to get widespread attention on in the national media as he interjects himself conspicuously into the 2016 presidential campaign debate is the fact that a key library he is setting up to sell off to a developer of luxury condominiums is none other than the Tillary Clinton Library, the second most important library in de Blasio’s home borough of Brooklyn. .   and it’s right next to Hillary Clinton’s new national campaign office!

Hillary Clinton's new national campaign headquarters, at the juncture of Tillary and Clinton, is beside and actually joined legally with the library there.  For more read: Thursday, May 7, 2015, Hillary Clinton's New National Campaign Office Next to the Tillary Clinton Brooklyn Heights Library: Why Everyone's Talking About Income Inequality From An Economy That Supports the 1%.

Ostensibly, de Blasio’s new “contract” with America is an exercise in pulling, or ‘nudging,’ America and the presidential debate to the left.  De Blasio’s contract goes out, garners attention, could even be looked at somewhat as a trial balloon, and then Hillary Clinton, for whom de Blasio once worked as a campaign manager, can react and make a show of confirming that she has shifted sufficiently to the left to appease those who wish they were voting for Elizabeth Warren or maybe Bernie Sanders.  De Blasio has right now not yet endorsed Hillary’s run for president, speaking instead about how he wants, for instance, issues of income inequality and an economy that preferentially benefits the wealthy paid more attention to first.. . .

Pay more attention to income and wealth inequality while selling off libraries to convert them into luxury condominiums?  That’s a stretch!

Mayor de Blasio official has a reason he is not properly funding libraries, a reason that, as the New York Times puts it, under de Blasio's tenure New York’s library expenditures lag:

embarrassingly behind Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio and San Diego. And the city's suburbs. And Albany.

Mayor de Blasio’s reason for not funding the city libraries is pessimism.

Although New York City is flush with cash this budget year with plenty of money to spare, and even though libraries cost the most infinitesimal fraction of the city’s budget and are very, very heavily used, an incredible bargain given their benefit, Mr. de Blasio has decided to leave in place drastic cuts his predecessor Mayor Michael Bloomberg made.  The reason that he gives is that we have to underfund and sell libraries, shedding the public’s wealth and investment in them, to save for a rainy day.

Doesn’t Mr. de Blasio realize that when libraries are so badly underfunded they have to be sold it is a rainy day?  Of course he does.

Usually pessimism, even when it's sensible, justified pessimism, is political poison.  In this case, there aren’t any good reasons for Mr. de Blasio’s bizarre thoughts about fearing the future.  The amount that can be set aside by starving and selling libraries won’t add up to much at all on a rainy day while the public benefit of libraries will mean a lot if those rainy days ever come.

The reason de Blasio would be so suicidal?  The method to de Blasio’s madness is that New York has a strong real estate industry that pretty much runs the city as well as the state’s capitol, Albany. . .  And this ties in with who Hillary Clinton’s new landlord is at her national campaign office next to the Tillary Clinton Library: It’s Forest City Ratner, a de Blasio ally and backer, a specialist in government subsidy collection that is likely to benefit mightily if de Blasio ever lands the featured role in implementing a nationwide urban policy that some people are talking about.. . .

. . . It’s the real estate industry in New York, and nobody else, that wants New York’s libraries recycled into luxury towers.

Mr. de Blasio said it best during his “Tale of Two Cities” campaign for mayor talking about what were then Bloomberg’s proposed library sales and the “public land and public facilities and public land under threat”:

and once again we see, lurking right behind the curtain, real estate developers who are very anxious to get their hands on these valuable properties.

So tomorrow, as Mr. de Blasio stands up in Washington to speak about “income inequality” as the “crisis of our times,” the need for more fairness and to an address an economy that’s skewed to support “the 1%,” the question will be: Why is he underfunding and selling libraries? 

Libraries are Democracy.  They are the great equalizer providing opportunity in the most essential way.

Provide “a universal pre-kindergarten program”?  That’s one of de Blasio’s new program `planks.’  But then take away the libraries those universal pre-k children might go on to use as the next step in their advancement?  Take the libraries away from their older brothers and sisters and everyone else in the community?

As we said at the outset, Mr. de Blasio does indeed have a huge problem.

An important PS: There’s another reason de Balsio’s library sales are likely to get a lot of focus just as he’s promoting his “Progressive Contract”: There’s a new book by Scott Sherman coming out about the push to sell New York’s libraries, “Patience and Fortitude- Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library.”