The negative impact of plastics in our environment is worse than we thought. Earlier alarms had been sounded about plastics concentrating in large areas in oceans, though one must be cautious about how one describes it and calling them ‘giant garbage patches’ is misleading as discussed by the NOAA Marine Debris Program’s Carey Morishige.
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That is what Tom Tomorrow thinks.
There is a long and boring profile of former speaker John Boehner that will likely be of interest only to diehard political geeks who are interested in the minutiae of political maneuvering. But there is one interesting nugget about what happened when, as speaker, Boehner promised to get rid of ‘earmarks’, the practice by which money is allocated to fund the pet projects of congresspeople in their districts and are popularly seen as a means of bribing them for their votes and loyalty. This led to something that looks like it would be seen as too extreme even for the series House of Cards.
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David Dayen explains the complicated money-laundering schemes indulged in by Paul Manafort, former campaign chair for Donald Trump and one of the three people indicted today by special counsel Robert Mueller. What we are going to see in the days to come is increasing attention to the connections between corrupt US politicians, banks and businesspeople, foreign governments, and shady international organized crime figures.
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Using archival footage, Marshall Curry has produced a seven-minute documentary A Night at The Garden about a rally that was held in Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939 that drew 20,000 people. It was a highly disturbing event but even more extraordinary is how it has disappeared from public consciousness. I had never heard of it. It is better to simply watch the documentary and let it sink in than me trying to describe it.
In the wake of all the men who have been outed as sexual harassers and weak attempts at excusing their behavior by them and their apologists, Kate Harding sent out a tweet and that and the replies to it are well worth reading as beautiful examples of the power of role reversals to reveal hypocrisy.
While much of the attention regarding the documents that have been released about the Kennedy assassination has focused on the issue of whether Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole perpetrator or whether there was a larger conspiracy that was covered up, my attention was drawn to an item that did not get much attention and that was about one of the plans that the CIA developed to undermine Fidel Castro. We already knew that the US, the very country that is now up in arms about the possibility of the Russian government interfering in US elections by doing things such as the dastardly practice of buying ads on Facebook, tried many times to actually murder Castro.
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Now that the floodgates have opened and many women are coming forth with allegations of sexual harassment by powerful men, the question remains who else will be named. So far, the people involved have been in high-profile industries like films, TV, Silicon Valley, and politics. I have noticed that current members of Congress have not been named and wonder if that is only a matter of time. But the power dynamics that led to such abuse exist in other contexts as well and any business that really values its employees should take a pro-active role in ensuring that such things do not happen.
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While attention is focused on what Donald Trump is doing to the Republican party, whether he is splitting it into two, transforming it into his own image, leading it into the ditch, or successfully channeling all the racist, sexist, and xenophobic impulses that seems to be quite widespread in the nation, there are some interesting goings on within the Democratic party.
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We have recently seen three Republican senators (Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, and John McCain) voice harsh criticisms of Donald Trump. But each of them have almost unfailingly voted in favor of issues that Trump supports, such as voting to advance the Republican budget and in yesterday’s vote to reduce consumer protections against fraud by the banks that issue credit cards. This is not surprising. These senators are all solid conservatives and supporters of the oligarchy. What is surprising is that they are being lauded as heroic truth-tellers when they are not. All three are not running for re-election, the first two choosing to withdraw and the third due to ill-health. So only those people not interested in re-election feel free to say what they feel about Trump. That is not heroism, just face-saving.
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