Go Hug a Tree — It’s Arbor Day!

Beautiful! Thank you!

Serenity Spell

I was just sittin’ here enjoyin’ the company. Plants got a lot to say, if you take the time to listen. -Eeyore

* * *

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live. -Hermann Hesse

* * *

Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven. -Rabindranath Tagore

* * *

Look at the trees, look at the birds, look at the clouds, look at the stars… and if you have eyes you will be able to see that the whole existence is joyful. Everything is simply happy…

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Truthout Daily Digest Friday April 25, 2014

Is the FCC Poised to Destroy Net Neutrality?

Mike Ludwig, Truthout: After a January court ruling on net neutrality that raised fears about radical changes to the internet, the Federal Communications Commission is floating new rules that are being attacked as insufficient.

Read the Article

Autism Nation: America’s Chemical Brain Drain

Dr. Brian Moench, Truthout: While autism rates in Europe have remained virtually flat for the last decade, the US has seen them rise from 1 in 10,000 in 1981 to 1 in 68 in 2014. Many studies point to the prevalence of toxins in our environment as the culprit.

Read the Article

Wall Street Greed: Not Too Big for a California Jury

Ellen Brown, Web of Debt: Sixteen of the world’s largest banks have been caught colluding to rig global interest rates. Why are we doing business with a corrupt global banking cartel?

Read the Article

Thinking Big: The Global Minimum Wage

David L. Wilson, Truthout: Let’s finally get globalization to work for people and begin – perhaps with anti-sweatshop campaigns – to organize for a global minimum wage.

Read the Article

A Walkout at UPS and Labor’s Old-School Future

Danny Katch, Truthout: The successful February fight at a UPS site in Queens by Teamsters Local 807 shows that worker solidarity and innovative online tactics to win public support can be used to enhance the oldest strategy in the union playbook: shutting down production.

Read the Article

Out-of-Control Transit Costs in Boston or Attack on Public Services?

Ellen Dannin, Truthout: ALEC affiliate Pioneer Institute is targeting both Massachusetts Sen. Marc Pacheco and the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority. They must be doing something right.

Read the Article

C.L.R. James: Back in Style, Black in Style – a Review and a Comic!

Paul Buhle and Milton Knight, Truthout: C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain opens up the issue of the Third World struggle in an elegant and memorable way.

Read the Review and View the Comic

Poverty Is Killing Us

The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Program: Study after study proves poverty has a very long list of negative effects. Thom Hartmann argues that a guaranteed minimum income works and would eliminate poverty in the United States.

Read the Article

Fighting for a Legitimate Democracy, By and For the People

Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, Popular Resistance: As more people awaken to the reality of the depth of corruption in our government and economy, and the mirage of US democracy, the movement will grow and the demands will get stronger.

Read the Article

Protecting Classrooms From Corporate Takeover: What Families Can Learn From Teachers’ Unions

Amy B. Dean, Yes! Magazine: Across the country, teachers’ unions are fighting back against corporate reform by working to educate children holistically. This means taking into account all the factors that influence students’ chances for success: families, homes, communities and often the effects of poverty.

Read the Article

An Apartheid of Dollars: Life in the New American Minimum-Wage Economy

Peter Van Buren, TomDispatch: Peter Van Buren took an unlikely fall into the minimum-wage world when he lost his job in 2012. He gives us a first-hand look at what it’s like to subsist in poverty-wage America.

Read the Article

From the War on Poverty to the War on the Poor

Joseph M. Schwartz, Dissent: Only mass mobilization by working and poor people can prevent further cuts to the social safety net and win the type of reforms that would keep many more out of poverty. That will involve legitimizing the word “socialism” in US politics.

Read the Article

Economic Update: Culture and Economics

Richard D. Wolff, Economic Update / Truthout: Updates on public power in Nebraska; Earth Day; Coca-Cola’s misleading advertisement; and closing hospitals. Richard Wolff interviews musician and music professor John Halle about culture and the economic crisis. Responses to listener questions on B-corporations and on a Wall Street sales tax.

Listen to the Radio Segment

BuzzFlash

The BuzzFlash commentary for Truthout will return soon.

GOP Rats Abandoning the Good Ship Cliven Bundy

Read the Article at Daily Kos

We Cannot Afford to Lose Another Decade, or Even Another Minute

Read the Article at BuzzFlash

The New Abolitionism: Averting Planetary Disaster

Read the Article at The Nation

The Right Is Wrong: The Original Intent of the Constitution Was Progressive

Read the Article at BuzzFlash

Vets Die on Secret Wait List

Read the Article at CNN

Charles P. Pierce | Things Are Not Ever What They Seem

Read the Article at Esquire

Vice President Biden Promotes Fracking on Ukraine Trip

Read the Article at DeSmogBlog

Daily Kos :: Cliven Bundy wants to tell you about ‘the Negro.’ I want to tell you about Cliven Bundy

Apologies to all those who will surely be offended-one way or another- by this but I believe it is important to tell the whole truth.

And I am tired of trying to laboriously explain the sociopolitical background and facts associated with this and other recent events.

It sickens me that good people I have associated with in spiritual community support not only this self absorbed idiot but also the idea that people bringing guns to “defend” this criminal from justice is the start of a positive change.

It is not. You cannot tear down the master’s house using the master’s tools!

You engage in the same low frequency negative attitudes and behaviors as the cabal/current criminals in charge and you perpetuate the system if violence, power over and greed that causes so much suffering.

It takes real courage to use nonviolence as a tactic because you are placing your faith in yourself, in God and in the innate goodness of your fellow humans.

It’s powerful because it challenges the current system in ways shooting back or threatening to, do not.
ohnwentsya

Cliven Bundy wants to tell you about ‘the Negro.’ I want to tell you about Cliven Bundy
by Laura Clawson Apr 24, 2014 6:49am PDT

When a 67-year-old white Republican begins a sentence with “I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” you know the sentence is not ending well. But deadbeat rancher and domestic terrorist Cliven Bundy wasn’t content to stop with mere racism, however undisguised. No, he went ahead and added a dose of flagrant hypocrisy to the mix:

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro … because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked.

Oh! Basically on government subsidy. Well, a man who’s been grazing his cattle on federal land for 20 years without even paying the ridiculously low (effectively: subsidized) rates he legally owed should know a thing or two about government subsidy. This is a man who sparked an armed standoff with the federal government in an effort to avoid paying themore than $1 million he owes. And he’s talking about how the effects of government subsidy on black people are that:

“They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

Does government subsidy somehow work differently for white ranchers with 14 children? Sorry! Stupid question, I realize. Cliven Bundy is a special snowflake to whom no rules apply, ever. He gets to illegally graze cattle on public land for decades and take up arms against the federal government, and then when the New York Times comes calling to write about them, he gets to hold forth about how the Negroes were better off under slavery and it not only doesn’t make the headline, you have to read down 11 paragraphs to get to what would seem to be significant information about who this guy is. But apparently the Times thought the more significant piece of information in the article was that Bundy “savors the audience that rallied to his side.” What a piece of hard-hitting news that is—deadbeat on ego trip savors ego trip.

http://m.dailykos.com/story/2014/04/24/1294275/-Cliven-Bundy-wants-to-tell-you-about-the-Negro-I-want-to-tell-you-about-Cliven-Bundy?