These Are the Cities That Will Drown First as the Seas Rise
How Big Tech Could Cause the Next Financial Crash ; 'Lock Him Up' Is the New 'Yes We Can' ; and More Picks
South Carolina Prisoners Appeal to UN for Relief From Torturous Conditions (Chris)
From Truthout: “Prisoners held in the state’s high-security prisons spend 20 to 24 hours a day in 9 by 11 cells with small windows that have been covered with steel plates. … [Prisoners] say guards have committed serious abuses, such as withholding water from prisoners and arbitrarily subjecting prisoners to solitary confinement. Prisoners also face deteriorating conditions, such as mold problems, rotting food, contaminated drinking water and a lack of access to showers.”
How Big Tech Is Dragging Us Toward the Next Financial Crash (Chris)
The author writes, “Like nearly every other large, rich company … [Apple] has parked most of its spare cash in offshore bond portfolios over the past 10 years. This is part of a Kafkaesque financial shell game that has played out since the 2008 financial crisis. Back then, interest rates were lowered and central bankers flooded the economy with easy money to try to engineer a recovery. But the main beneficiaries were large companies, which issued lots of cheap debt, and used it to buy back their own shares and pay out dividends, which bolstered corporate share prices and investors, but not the real economy. The Trump corporate tax cuts added fuel to this fire.”
Trump’s Interior Department Swamped By Corruption (DonkeyHotey)
From Public Citizen: “The Associated Press has reported that the U.S. Department of the Interior is proposing to award a permanent water supply contract to the Westlands Water District, a powerful California water agency that supplies water to large, corporate farming operations. Until 2016, the same water district employed David Bernhardt as a lobbyist, who became Interior Secretary earlier this year. Public Citizen waged a campaign to highlight Bernhardt’s many conflicts of interest and opposed his confirmation, and has filed an ethics complaint calling on the department to investigate whether Bernhardt, as acting secretary, violated an ethics executive order issued by President Donald Trump.”
Vote Like the Apocalypse Is Coming, Because It Might Be (Reader Jim)
The author writes, “In 2019, California’s fires and blackouts are an indicator of the reality we’re preparing to hand to our children. Climate change is laying bare the consequences of the way our society has operated for too long: Government and private industry have morphed into an oligarchy that measures success by whether the rich are continuing to increase their wealth, not whether the rest of us are living happy or even economically stable lives. We’re numbers on spreadsheets, and automation is making us increasingly expendable. As a result, decisions about things like critical infrastructure are too often based on what’s good for short-term corporate profits, not our long-term health and sustainability.”
‘Lock Him Up’ Is the New ‘Yes We Can’ (Reader Steve)
The author writes, “Granted, there are holdouts. Twenty-six percent of heart-eyed Americans believe Trump is so far superior to the rest of us that he shouldn’t even have to comply with subpoenas. But if you don’t quite believe Trump is above the law, you’re likely among the 44% solidly in favor of impeachment. Odds are good you even want him removed from office. And, yes, you might also crave handcuffs.”
