Bankers Caught in the Act. by John M Repp Since the financial crisis of 2007-2008, many people have taken a closer look at how that system works. The goal is to create a better monetary system, one more stable and one we don’t need to bail out from time to time, at great expense to ordinary people. I recently found an academic article on the web that proves empirically, with a scientific experiment, that individual banks create money out of thin air. This they do when they make a loan. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057521914001070 This is the idea Ellen Brown, a founder of the Public Banking Institute, has been writing about for years. Unless you like reading academic papers, I suggest at most,…

Why Is the “Force More Powerful” More Powerful? by John M Repp People coming to FORUSA’s one hundredth anniversary celebration at Seabeck, Washington, this coming July 1 through July 4, will get to hear Erica Chenoweth and Jamila Raqib, two of the most knowledgeable people on the planet on the subject of mass nonviolent civil resistance. http://forseabeck.org/ In 2006, Chenoweth was getting her PhD in political science, writing her dissertation on why and how people use violence to achieve political goals. Then she received an invitation to a week long workshop put on by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/ . She accepted the invitation as a challenge. At the workshop, she expressed scepticism, assuming violent methods of political…

How to Tell TPP Is a Bad Deal by Stan Sorscher Labor Representative, Society for Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace first posted on Huffington Post Jan 05, 2016, published with permission of the author How do you tell if the 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a good deal or a bad one? Consider the recent climate summit agreement in Paris. Nearly 200 countries negotiated the deal, more or less in public for the world to see. All signatory countries wanted a sustainable planet where their citizens could prosper. The climate change deal in Paris is not air-tight. Still, it is a significant political, social and moral commitment by leaders of most countries in the world to do better. TPP defines…

Short Reviews of Two Good Books on the Climate Crisis by John M Repp Atmosphere of Hope: Searching for Solutions to the Climate Crisis. Tim Flannery. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. 2015. Flannery, a scientist and writer, starts with a scientific assessment of the problem. He writes that the majority of the world’s population no longer needs graphs and charts to understand climate change. We have already experienced enough extreme and record-breaking weather to know that climate change is upon us and that it threatens us. Paraphrasing what Bernie Sanders said, “Only Republican candidates for President don’t get it!” Flannery wrote The Weather Makers ten years ago. Millions read it. It was translated in 23 languages. One of the readers…

Maybe the Way to Combat Groups like ISIS is to Examine our Assumptions about What Lures People to Pursue Violence By Bert Sacks  first published in Real Change, December 16th, 2015, reprinted by permission of the author The day after the terrorist attacks in Paris, I watched the Democratic presidential debate. The consensus I heard was the U.S. must join a coalition to defeat the Islamic State terrorist group known as ISIS. I agreed. But can we defeat ISIS with war? How well have recent U.S. wars in the Middle East worked? How many fighters have our wars recruited for ISIS? It has been almost 25 years since the U.S. assumed the title of the world’s sole superpower and began to…

What the COP21 Paris Climate Summit Accomplished, What it Failed to Do, And Our Next Steps by Glen Anderson ten days later on December 22, 2015 The global climate summit in Paris (the 21st Conference of the Parties – COP21) ran from November 30 to December 12, 2015 (lasting one day later than originally scheduled).  Within a week after adjournment, many articles have been written about: What COP21 accomplished What it failed to accomplish What next steps the climate movement to take, starting from the grassroots. The articles that had been written before COP21 varied widely in viewpoints and framing.  Some asserted that the Paris climate summit would be a “make or break” summit on which everything depends, so if…

Voices From the Appalachian Coalfields – A review by Larry Kerschner Voices From the Appalachian Coalfields by Mike and Ruth Yarrow with photographs by Douglas Yarrow (Published by Bottom Dog Press, Huron OH, 2015) is a book filled with the voices of the coal miners and their families that fill you in on the day to day health and safety issues found in the dangerous work of underground coal mining.  It shows the camaraderie that develops between people who “don’t care what a man’s religion is or what his politics is”. The voices of women miners and miner’s wives are well represented.  Woman Miner “Connie” “At first they didn’t like the idea of us women being in there. One crew…

Corporate Greed by Miner “Ed” (Interview by Mike Yarrow; arranged by Ruth Yarrow) Before we came out on strike, the owner asked us, “If you all go non-union, and you work for this one company, we can make you millionaires in 20 years.” We asked, “What happens if this one company shuts down?” “Your retirement starts over.” We asked, “How about our grandpas and our daddies that are on retirement?” “We don’t care about them. None of them work for us.” We told him flat “No.” He wanted the whole mines to have a decertification vote. But our grandparents and our daddies made this union, And without them you wouldn’t have the Social Security they helped push through, you wouldn’t…