Bernie Sanders Opening Statement to the Senate Budget Committee
Bernie Sanders Opening Statement to the Senate Budget Committee: April 5, 2022 Have you heard the words below on the mainstream media? If not, why not? Bernie Sanders, still the most popular politician in the United States, is calling the United States “an oligarchy”. While millions of workers are getting paid starvation wages, over the last 45 years there has been a huge transfer of wealth, to the tune of $50 trillion dollars, from the bottom 90% of Americans workers to the top 1%. The 1% use a little bit of their wealth to control the government through their donations to politicians which is essentially bribery and corruption. The 1% also have a control over much of the news media:…
A review of Democracy in Chains
A review of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (New York: Viking, 2017) Is the U.S. a democracy? by John M Repp There has been a lot of talk lately about democracy in the United States. We like to think we are a democratic nation and contrast our system with the other two great powers in the world, Russia and China. Nancy MacLean published Democracy in Chains in 2017. The main story focuses on a Nobel prize-winning economist who developed the “ideas” that the vast Koch network of organizations like ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), (the whole stealth network is larger than the Republican party) uses to undercut the will of most…
Book Review: “Revolutionary Nonviolence”
A review of James M. Lawson Jr., with Michael K. Honey and Kent Wong. Revolutionary Nonviolence: Organizing for Freedom (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022) by John M Repp This book is a transcript of recent talks by Reverend James M. Lawson, Jr. with a foreword by Angela Davis, an introduction by Michael Honey and a brief biography of Lawson by Kent Wong. Lawson is 93 and still working for justice, now in Los Angeles. Lawson was the workshop trainer in nonviolence in the campaign to desegregate downtown Nashville in 1960. The main tactic used there was the sit-in at lunch counters in the downtown stores. Lawson tells us that he spent months training people in nonviolence before the actions.…
Ukraine Maps Tell a Different Story Than Putin’s Claims
by Zoltan Grossman abridged from Common Dreams Feb 28, 2022 As a geographer who has studied and taught about interethnic conflict around the world, and as a U.S. citi-zen with family roots in East-Central Europe, I’ve always read the stories told in the maps.These two maps show how Putin got it wrong, and miscalculated in launching his war against Ukraine. In Ukraine’s past presidential elections, the electoral map would almost perfectly match the language map. Pro-Russian politicians would win the red region, Ukrain-ian nationalists would win the yellow region, and they’d split the difference in the orange region.But in the 2019 election, something different hap-pened, shown on the bottom map. Fed up with corrupt politicians of both ethnic groups, voters…
Disinformation: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Have a New Recruit
Who would have thought disinformation could turn a society upside down? An editorial by John M Repp, Pacific Call editor February 15, 2022 Mark Twain once said “a lie will fly around the whole world while the truth is getting its boots on”. He said that in the era of newspapers, books, and the telegraph. In those days, not everyone could publish a newspaper, write a book or even send a telegram. But today with the Internet, anyone who has a computer can post or pass on lies on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. These are some of the sites used to spread misinformation/disinformation now, and they make it easy for bad actors, even foreign governments, to intervene…
There is no planet B
Review of Kim Stanley Robinson. The Ministry of the Future (New York: Orbit Books, 2020) by John M Repp This sprawling novel with 106 chapters starts with a deadly heat wave in India. A heat dome combines with high humidity that is beyond human survival. Millions die. We have been hearing for years about sea level rise, and indeed we could lose all our beaches in a few years. However, we have barely heard about high humidity and heat combined to a level that could kill millions in some areas of the world, including the American southeast. Bill McKibben, a leader of the environmental group 350.org, wrote in his review of Robinson’s book in New York Review of Books that…
No More Profit-seeking Middlemen in Our Medicare
by John M Repp Medicare was passed in 1965 as a program to provide health care for seniors and disabled people. In the U.S. most people get their medical insurance from their employer as a benefit. But after retirement, or for those people who cannot work, the Medicare program has been a life saver. It was simple and efficient. 98% of its budget went to patient care. There were gaps from the very beginning. It did not provide for nursing home care, hearing aids, glasses, and dental care. In 1997, Medicare Advantage plans were allowed to be set up by traditional for-profit insurance companies to plug some of the gaps. Many of the Medicare Advantage plans are low-cost or…
Indigenous American’s Role in the American Revolution and other provocative ideas in The Dawn of Everything:
A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021), 692 pages. A short review by John M Repp of parts of the massive book. Before the French and Indian War, there had been several hundred years of French colonization in the New World around the Great Lakes. Many Jesuit missionaries learned the language of the natives to try and convert them to Christianity, and the missionaries reported back to the educated public in France. Several transcribed dialogues between the Jesuits and native intellectuals became best-selling books in France. This is at the time when the whole French branch of the movement we call the Enlightenment was being born in the…
Washington Poor People’s Campaign
Forward Together! Not One Step Back! by Dorothy Van Soest and Romy Garcia, Members of the Washington Poor People’s Campaign Coordinating Committee Our goal is to create a Beloved Community and this will require a qualitative change in our soul as well as a quantitative change in our lives. —Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. At the November program meeting of the Seattle Fellowship of Reconciliation Chapter, we began our presentation about the Washington Poor People’s Campaign with the vision of a beloved community, the concept first coined by philosopher and theologian, FOR founder Josiah Royce, and then popularized by Dr. King, himself a member of FOR. Dr. King’s beloved community philosophy centered on the belief that “racism, bigotry and…
Government Spending & MMT
The Truth about Money Can Allow Us to Spend More Federal Dollars to Help People Post-Pandemic – Without More Taxes by Vandana Whitney In 1971, President Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard. Fifty years later, the members of Congress seem convinced we’re still on the gold standard and they are not alone in that mistaken belief. While going off the gold standard made radical changes to our monetary system, the national conversation about how money works barely changed at all. Under the gold standard, the federal government was very restricted as to how much currency it could issue because dollars had to be backed up by a certain amount of gold. If the public or other trading countries…
