Do you share my feeling that things have gone wrong? That we are having a tough time figuring out what is true and what is not? Even an itty bitty inkling?
The terrible loss of life resulting from flash flooding of the Guadalupe River in Texas is a recent example of “gone wrongness.”
Listen to the Trump people speak, the mainstream media reports, the social media comments, trying to explain why all those kids and adults died in Texas during the recent flood. Why weren’t National Weather Service warnings distributed by the county authorities by cellphone?
One likely reason is that the Trump people cut back staff and funding at the San Antonio office of the National Weather Service.
According to the Guardian, "Two senior meteorologists at the San Antonio NWS office, which is responsible for forecasting in the Hill Country region, were among the casualties of Musk’s buyouts and layoffs. This included the warning coordination meteorologist, who is usually responsible for liaising with local emergency managers to help translate NWS forecasts into likely impacts that inform local actions such as warnings and evacuation orders."
Still, even if reports had been sent to cellphones like it is done here in our Florida county, we now know the camp leadership would not have heard them because they prohibited cellphones. And the Texas community had not installed warning sirens either.
Further, Camp Mystic is located on a flood plain next to the Guadalupe River which has overflown its banks more than a dozen times since 1978.
While nothing can bring back those lost lives due to negligence, we can demand that the National Weather Service and FEMA employees be rehired, and funding restored.
That way, when the next disaster inevitably comes, text warnings can be issued so people might have a chance to evacuate.
Don’t you agree?
Camp Mystic is in the middle of "Flash Flood
Alley"
"Follow the money," the character, "Deep Throat," said in the Watergate scandal movie, All the President's Men.
Today, we need to heed the same directive to understand who financed the 1/6 Republican Fascist coup d'état and who is continuing to enable the seditionists one year later to overthrow the Constitutional government of the United States.
First, who are the 1/6 seditionists?
This recent article outs, "More than 1,000 Americans in positions of public trust acted as accomplices in Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn, the 2020 election result, participating in the violent insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January or spreading the “big lie” that the vote count had been rigged."
Go here for the Insurrection Index, compiled by Public Wise, “along with its partner organizations, has built an accessible online database of individuals and organizations involved in the deadly riots and insurrection at our nation’s capitol on January 6, 2021.”
As for following the corporate money trail and outing the Republican Fascist enablers, that task is being completed by CREW, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. CREW maintains this website.
Following the Bush/Cheney 9/11 false flag crimes and the 9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Congress voted your rights away by passing three, Bill of Rights busting laws: (a) the USA PATRIOT Act (Yes, Congress “repealed” the Patriot Act. But it was in name only. Now we must work to revise the Freedom Act.) (b) the Military Commission Act and (c) section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012.
This combined with several Supreme Court decisions favoring corporations over humans, and /or giving corporations rights previously only enjoyed by humans with souls, such as allowing corporations and special interest groups to spend unlimited amounts to influence elections. (Please see: Citizen's United vs. Federal Election Commission.)
One step toward rectifying these egregious decisions is coalescing in the Green New Deal.
Not only can wrongs be corrected, the process of doing so can be financed through an end run past obstructionist Republicans and their big, dark money corporate sponsors. It’s a move similar to the one that President Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) pulled off back in the 30s.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has presented an outstanding way for funding the Green New Deal. The idea worked in the past and it can work now, so says Ellen Brown, JD*, a banking expert who knows a thing or two about banking, the Federal Reserve, finance, and Public Banking. She is the author of 12 books, including best-selling book, Web of Debt, and hundreds of articles.
“With what author and activist Naomi Klein calls “galloping momentum,” the “Green New Deal” promoted by Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., appears to be forging a political pathway for solving all of the ills of society and the planet in one fell swoop. Her plan would give a House select committee “a mandate that connects the dots” between energy, transportation, housing, health care, living wages, a jobs guarantee and more. But even to critics on the left, it is merely political theater, because “everyone knows” a program of that scope cannot be funded without a massive redistribution of wealth and slashing of other programs (notably the military), which is not politically feasible.
“That may be the case, but Ocasio-Cortez and the 22 representatives joining her in calling for a select committee also are proposing a novel way to fund the program, one that could actually work. The resolution says funding will come primarily from the federal government, “using a combination of the Federal Reserve, a new public bank or system of regional and specialized public banks, public venture funds and such other vehicles or structures that the select committee deems appropriate, in order to ensure that interest and other investment returns generated from public investments made in connection with the Plan will be returned to the treasury, reduce taxpayer burden and allow for more investment.”
“A network of public banks could fund the Green New Deal in the same way President Franklin Roosevelt funded the original New Deal. At a time when the banks were bankrupt, he used the publicly owned Reconstruction Finance Corporation as a public infrastructure bank. The Federal Reserve could also fund any program Congress wanted, if mandated to do so. Congress wrote the Federal Reserve Act and can amend it. Or the Treasury itself could do it, without the need to even change any laws. The Constitution authorizes Congress to “coin money” and “regulate the value thereof,” and that power has been delegated to the Treasury. It could mint a few trillion-dollar platinum coins, put them in its bank account and start writing checks against them. What stops legislators from exercising those constitutional powers is simply that “everyone knows” Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation will result. But will it? Compelling historical precedent shows that this need not be the case.”
*Ellen Brown is the founder of the Public Banking Institute and the author of a dozen books and hundreds of articles. She developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In the best-selling Web of Debt (2007, 2012), she turned those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and “the money trust,” showing how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves and how we the people can get it back.
Harry Belafonte - Man Smart (Woman Smarter) - 1952
