EFTA00853935.pdf

From: Gregory Brown To: undisclosed-recipients:; Bcc: [email protected] Subject: Greg Brown's Weekend Reading and Other Things.. 06/21/2015 Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2015 06:10:37 +0000 Attachments: 2015. docx; This_Is_Where_Humans_Have_Made_Our_Oceans_Most_Acidic_Brian_Merchant_Mother board_Nov._ I 0„2014.docx; Low Wages_Cost_U.S._Taxpayers_$153_Billion_A_Year_Emily_Cohn_Huff Post_April_l 3,_20I5.docx; With_one_billion_prescriptions_written_every_year,it's_time_to_wean_ourselves_off the_ drugs_JANET_STREET-PORTER_Theindependent_May_15„2015.docx; Justice,interrupted_The_Economist_May_23,2015.docx; 3_Of The_5_Big_Bank_Guilty_Pleas_ArentAll_That_They_Seem_To_Be_Ben_Walsh+S hahien_Nasiripour_Huff Post_May_22„20 I 5.docx; George_Michael_bio.docx; Why_We_Need_To_Stop_Calling_All_Unhealthy_Foods_Erin_Schumaker Huff Post_May _26„2015.docx; Donald_Trump's_presidential_candidacy_is_great_entertainment._It's_terrible_for_politics_ Chris_Cillizza_TWP_June_16,2015.docx; Donald_Trump_Tramples_Facts_In_2016_Campaign_Kickoff Speech_Fact_Checker June_ 17„2015.docx; The_Growing_Right- Wing_Terror_Threat_CHARLES_K_URZMAN & DAVID SCHANZER_NYT_June_16,_ 2015.docx; wing_white_men_Alex_Henderson_Raw_Story_June_18,_2015.docx Inline-Images: image.png; image(I).png; image(2).png; image(3).png; image(4).png; image(5).png; image(6).png; image(7).png; image(8).png; image(9).png; image(10).png; image(11).png; image(12).png; image(I3).png; image(14).png; image(I5).png; image(16).png; image(17).png; image(18).png; image(19).png; image(20).png; image(21).png; image(22).png; image(23).png; image(24).png; image(25).png; image(26).png; image(27).png; image(28).png; image(29).png; image(30).png; image(31).png; image(32).png; image(33).png DEAR FRIEND The Changing Attitudes on Marijuana EFTA00853935  Inline image 2 For more than an hundred years in America anti-drug messaging has been powerful. And to illustrate the point, the Pew Research organization has compiled new data on Americans' attitudes toward legalizing marijuana. As you might imagine there is a big split by party -- Democrats and independents are more receptive to legalization than Republicans -- but that may be linked to the overlap of politics and age. The graph below shows the generational attitudes toward legalization, from Millennials (now 18 to 35) to the pre-Boomer "Silent" generation (70 and up). The older you get, the more you oppose legalization. Inline image 3 When I was a kid, drug propaganda -- not differentiating between marijuana and everything else -- looked like this: EFTA00853936  Inline image 5 Web Link: https.//voutu.be/ub a2t0Zflis By the time the Millennials came around, anti-pot propaganda looked like this: Inline image 6 Web Link: https://youtu.be/r2Okhlow984 EFTA00853937 Pew asked why people oppose legalization. The answers they got often reflect more of the intensity of the former attitude than the mellowness of the latter. cl' Inline image 7 Highlighted are two reasons/answers that have been at the center of anti-marijuana rhetoric for years. Is marijuana addictive? Yes, says the government ... adding that it is "linked to a mild withdrawal syndrome." Is marijuana a gateway drug to other substances? Yes, says the government ... technically, sort of, but "most people who use marijuana do not go on to use other, 'harder' substances. " Except that the "gateway drug" argument has been debunked by most experts. Yet still: 11 percent of those who oppose marijuana legalization focus on it being a gateway. The war on drugs has not been much of a success in keeping people from using drugs. But it seems to have been very good at making people think the war on drugs is necessary. And to keep criminalizing the use and thus the sale of marijuana is stupid policy especially when every expert will acknowledge that hundreds of thousands of Americans die from the use of prescription drugs and alcohol every year, while few if not any die from using marijuana. Finally how dangerous marijuana can be, when mainstream doctors prescribe it for medical purposes? To date, 23 states and the District of Columbia have legalized marijuana for medical purposes, and 13 others have legalized the use of limited marijuana extracts for certain conditions. Also there is currently pending legislation on the books in another nine states. Multiple studies have shown a range of potential medical benefits, suggesting marijuana combats aggressive cancer, slows the spread of HIV and stunts the progression of Alzheimer's disease. This piece was written by someone who has never smoked a joint or ate a hash brownie yet believes that even recreational marijuana should be legalized. ****** Low Wages Cost U.S. Taxpayers $153 Billion A Year EFTA00853938  Inline image 2 Poverty wages cost U.S. taxpayers about $153 billion each year, according to a recent report from the University of California, Berkeley. That's because, when families depend on low-wage jobs to survive, they're forced to rely on government programs like Medicaid and food stamps to make ends meet. The Berkeley report looks at how much states and the federal government are spending on programs like Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program, the Temporary Aid to Needy Families program, the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps. The report found that the federal government spends about $127.8 billion per year, and states collectively spend about $25 billion per year, on public assistance programs for working families. Currently, the federal minimum wage is stalled at a paltry $7.25 an hour. A parent working full-time at that rate over the course of the year won't bring in enough money to live above the poverty line for a family of two, which means leaning on government assistance. So when a company like McDonald's, for instance, pays a worker the minimum wage, you, the taypayer end up subsidizing her pay. A 2013 analysis from the National Employment Law Project found that the 10 largest fast food companies cost taxpayers about $3.8 billion per year. More than half of fast-food workers rely on public assistance, in fact. But that's not the only sector desperate for a raise. The Berkeley report also found that child-care and home-care workers also rely on public assistance to get by. On April 15, workers across the U.S. are planning to protest for better pay and union representation for low-wage workers. The protests are being organized by Fight for 15, a national labor movement fighting to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Here's a look at what percentage of low-wage workers across the following fields rely on public assistance: EFTA00853939  Inline image 1 Many low-wage employers, from Walmart to McDonald's, have announced pay raises in recent months, but workers say it isn't enough. For example, McDonald's plan to raise wages by to percent will only affect a small percentage of the company's workers. Most McDonald's workers are employed by franchisees, and the company has said it can't control how those workers are paid. These companies and franchisees should raise salaries for their workers because it is beyond shameful that in the richest country in the world — millions of Americans work sometimes two and three jobs and still live in poverty. ****** Totally Out of Control Medication has reached a shocking level in the UK Inline image 1 While recently reading the U.K. Independent newspaper I came across an article by Janet Street- Porter - With one billion prescriptions written every year, it's time to wean ourselves off the drugs - that was difficult to believe. The article said that one in four adults in the United Kingdom takes at least three different prescription drugs a week and that the National Health Service (NHS) in England dishes out 2.7 million items every single day. EFTA00853940 Critics claim that this overuse of the prescription pad is crippling the NHS financially and could even be shortening our lives. A distinguished group of senior doctors (the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges) say the vast number of drugs we consume is cause for concern. They want the NHS to wind back from "too much medicine" and replace it with a culture where patients ask "what happens if I do nothing?" and get told the realistic benefits and potential drawbacks of any treatment or procedure. Medication has reached a shocking level in the UK: the NHS in England dishes out one billion prescriptions a year to half of the population, 2.7 million items every single day. Add to that the cost of blood tests and millions of routine exploratory procedures and you can see how the NHS could be chucking away money it can't afford. One reason for this surge in costs is the way the NHS is structured: hospitals receive funds based on the number of procedures they perform, and GPs get rewarded according to the number of people they diagnose and treatments they prescribe. This seems utterly misguided. Surely it encourages patients to expect miracle cures when (a lot of the time) we could be adopting healthier lifestyles and better pain management. Every time we go to the doctors we want a magic bit of paper or another appointment, instead of being more realistic. It's time for doctors to say no every time we ask for a pill or a placebo, and we must start asking whether an X-ray or MRI scan, a blood test or a load of physiotherapy is going to make us feel any better than a hot bath, a glass of wine and a cuddle from a close friend. Almost three-quarters of adults aged over 70 take more than three medicines a week (including statins), but are they effective? Increasingly, critics say this is debatable. Now the debate about unnecessary medication has sparked off a row about whether psychiatric drugs are effective. More than one in 10 women takes antidepressants, almost twice as many as men. Writing in the British Medical Journal, Professor Peter Gotzsche claims that they can cause up to half a million deaths a year in the Western world, and that drug companies routinely overstate the benefits and play down their side effects. He says that in the US, there are 15 times more suicides as a result of these drugs than official statistics show. He wants prescriptions to be given only in acute situations, with a plan in place to taper off consumption, agreed by the patient. Antibiotics is another area of gross over-prescription. No new drugs have been developed for more than 25 years and many are now ineffective against superbugs. This week, the Government's adviser has announced he would like countries to work together and set up an international fund to pay for the development of new antibiotics, whose usage should be carefully controlled. The over prescribing of prescription drugs has reached an epidemic proportion. Other than dying from natural causes, accidental prescription drug overdoses are the number one cause of death in the United States. In fact, more people died from accidental prescription overdoses in 2012 than homicides, suicides, and fatal car accidents combined. In 2014 pharmacies filled out 4,002,661,750 retail prescription drugs in the United States. And since 1999, the amount of prescription painkillers prescribed and sold in the U.S. has nearly quadrupled, yet there has not been an overall change in the amount of pain that Americans report. EFTA00853941  • 52 Million people in the US, over the age of 12, have used prescription drugs non- medically in their lifetime. • 6.1 Million people have used them non-medically in the past month.2 5 percent of the United States is the world's population and consumes 75 percent of the world's prescription drugs. • In 2010, enough prescription painkillers were prescribed to medicate every American adult every 4 hours for 1 month. The number of prescription medicine abusers in 2010 was 8.76 million. Most abused prescription drugs fall under 3 categories: ➢ Painkillers: 5.1 million ➢ Tranquilizers: 2.2 million ➢ Stimulants: 1.1 million In the 1970s, spending on drugs totaled roughly 5% of total US healthcare costs. Today, that has doubled and is rising quickly. Admittedly, new drugs used to treat conditions once treated with surgery may actually bring down costs, since surgery is generally more expensive. Simply citing increases in spending on drugs and ignoring the offset in surgical costs gives a misleading picture of the overall costs of prescription medicines. Still, spending on prescription medications has increased by a staggering $20obn in two decades. The misuse and abuse of prescription medications in the United States is out of control, yet few people are aware of just how big the problem really is. We need to acknowledge that there is a prescription drug abuse epidemic in America as well as in the U.K. as it demands our attention. Finally we need to treat the major prescription drug companies and the doctors who over-sell their products like the drug dealers that they are and no different to the sellers of cocaine, heroin and marijuana. ****** What A Joke Inline image I ; Ili EFTA00853942 Pledging the be the "Greatest Jobs President in History" celebrity hotelier Donald Trump officially announced his campaign for president on June 16, 2015, promising to restore America's standing in the world in a rambling speech that strongly resembled performance art. "Our country needs a truly great leader," the reality TV star told supporters gathered at Trump Tower in New York City. "We need a leader that wrote The Art of the Deal," he added, making sure to mention his book. "We need a leader that can bring back our jobs, bring back our manufacturing, bring back our military and take care of our vets." As Chris Cillizza wrote last week in The Washington Post, "Donald Trump's presidential candidacy is great entertainment. It's terriblefor politics." Entering the stage via escalator -- one of the most unusual entrances in the history of presidential announcements -- Trump eschewed his prepared remarks and launched into a long-winded tirade against just about everybody: President Barack Obama, Democrats, Republicans and multiple foreign nations. "I beat China all the time. All the time," he boasted. While the joke is that almost everyone in China considers Donald Trump as a joke. Addressing the cost and problems with the administration's health care reform website, Trump crowed that his business background would have aided the government greatly. "I have so many websites, I have them all over the place," he said. Obama's golf hobby, which Trump frequently derides, also acted as a perfect plug for his extensive golf courses. "He might be on one of my courses; I have some of the best courses in the world," he said. Trump who says that his business background will allow him to put the country's finances in order forgets to mention that he filed for corporate bankruptcy four times, 1991, 1992, 2004 and 2009. Again... What a joke... Scanning across the assembled crowd of supporters, some of whom frequently cheered the newly declared candidate on, Trump again bragged: "This is beyond anybody's expectations. There's been no crowd like this." At one point, Trump held up a sheet of paper and read off his net worth ($10 billion, according to his campaign). But he assured the audience he wasn't doing so merely "to brag." Trump's speech included some populist proposals, too -- proposals that could create problems for his fellow Republican rivals down the road. "Let's save Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security without cuts," Trump said, because "now many of these candidates want to cut it." And somehow he is not going to raise taxes. The real-estate mogul has openly flirted with throwing his hat into the ring for years. In 2012, he endorsed then-Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who was forced to appear in a surreal press conference to kiss the ring of New York's dealer-in-chief. But his overt skepticism of Obama's birthplace, among other off-the-wall remarks he regularly dishes out through his Twitter feed, will be sure to cause headaches for Republicans in the 2016 presidential primary. In his speech, Trump announced that he would be meeting with three other Republican candidates in the next week. According to a CNN poll released last month, Trump is tied for lath place among the 2016 GOP field, possibly guaranteeing him a spot in the first GOP debate in August. "Sadly, the American dream is dead," Trump proclaimed, summing up a speech that ran almost an hour. "But if I get elected president, I will bring it back, bigger, and better than ever." EFTA00853943 Like a snake oil salesman who is selling himself as the cure for all of the Country's problems, Trump who has never formally run for president before, but has often talked about it is now literally running for president with nothing but bravado and promises. Few people expected it to happen — he's gone through the motions many times before - and his political rants up until now have been roundly derided as a joke. But this time he actually said the words, and he seems like he means it. With campaign staff in key early voting states and a net worth he puts at more than $8.5bn, he has the resources to roil the Republican presidential field and at least hang in until it becomes too embarrassing. Polling high enough to get a spot on the stage in the forthcoming Republican debates, and he's already proven a willingness to take swings at his opponents. Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio "don't have a clue", he said in his announcement speech. "How are these people going to lead us?' he asked. If he says that enough times during a debate — or in a multi-million dollar television advertising spree — a lot of people are going to stop laughing and take notice. And that's probably just what Trump wants. Thank God that all that might happen is that currently polling with only 3% he makes it on the GOP debates which is limited to ten. And as Laura Clawson wrote this week in The Daily Kos — If you thought the Republican presidential primary couldn't get any more entertaining, think again: Donald Trump and his epic combover are IN. Trump's announcement speech was a word salad of outrage (Mexican immigrants "bringing drugs, bringing crime, they're rapists, and some, I assume, are good people"), fear-mongering (Iran is taking over Iraq "and they're taking it over bigly"), and self-promotion ("I beat China all the time"). All the talking points were present in unvarnished form—Obamacare bad, immigrants bad, other countries bad, economy bad, politicians bad (wonderful people who want Trump's support, but also apparently morons who won't speak the truth). Also present, major tangents about things like how President Obama would be welcome to play golf on a Trump-owned golf course. Finally, he got down to it. "Our country needs a truly great leader and we need a truly great leader now. We need a leader that wrote the art of the deal." (Or The Art of the Deal.) And yes, that means that "Ladies and gentlemen, I am officially running for president of the United States and we are going to make our country great again." Pray for us now: Pray that Donald Trump will be in at least one Republican primary debate, because wow. This speech was a promise of mirth and hilarity to come. Donald Trump is not now and almost certainly never will be a credible candidate for the presidency. His polling numbers are among the worst I have ever seen; his unfavorable rating outpaces his favorable score by 42 points among Republicans. A candidate with numbers like that is not the sort of candidate who commands live coverage on all the major cable networks when he announces for president. And yet, that's exactly what Trump got this week. He's irresistible because he will say anything no matter how ridiculous or outlandish. Facts or truth don't matter with Donald Trump as his act is entertaining to a certain segment of the public and the media. See attached assessment of the speech by Fact Checker -- Donald Trump Tramples Facts In 2016 Campaign Kickoff Speech. Donald Trump's attention doesn't equally credibility. Entertainment value doesn't equal electability. Being famous isn't the same thing as being respected. Sideshows are fun until they want to be the main EFTA00853944 attraction. Donald Trump will never be president. He knows that. We know that. But his candidacy ensures that for the next several months (at least), he will suck the attention and oxygen away from the men and women who might be. That's great entertainment. But it's terrible for politics. Again Donald Trump as President.... What a joke... Again No Outrage More wrongdoing at banks, more huge fines, still no prosecutions Inline image 2 On May 20, 2015 regulators in the U.S. and U.K. announced what for years had seemed inexplicably unattainable: guilty pleas from the parent corporations of some of the world's largest banks. Barclays Plc, Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc pled guilty to manipulating foreign exchange markets and UBS Group AG to manipulating a key financial benchmark, in what the Justice Department trumpeted as "parent-level guilty pleas." But the pleas by Citi and RBS didn't come from the banks' parent companies. Neither did the UBS plea. Instead, they came from subsidiaries: Citicorp, RBS Plc, and UBS AG. The settlement was the culmination of a long investigation into the actions of perhaps 20 employees of the six banks, who referred to themselves as the "carter. Between 2007 and 2013 they used coded communication in an online chat room to help one another make money, especially by rigging the two daily "fixes" of the exchange rate between the dollar and the euro, violating rules on market manipulation and collusion. As one of them wrote in a chat session, "If you ain't [sic] cheating, you ain't trying." After years of criticism for its lackluster approach to holding big banks accountable for their mortgage- related misdeeds, the DOJ presented May's settlements as a tougher line that forced banks' top-level parent companies to admit guilt. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the crimes were committed by "traders who were very senior, who were acting on behalf of the senior banks, whose behavior profited the parent-level banks." That is inarguably correct, and means parent companies Citigroup, RBS Group Plc and UBS AG profited from the wrongdoing, along with their subsidiaries who pled guilty. EFTA00853945 Previous settlements between big banks and U.S. authorities had been made with small, frequently foreign subsidiaries. This allowed the impact of the agreements to be isolated and provided ammunition for banks to argue publicly that wrongdoing within their organizations was not widespread. A Justice Department spokesman told The Huffington Post that "Citicorp is the parent of the top banking entity, Citibank NA. Royal Bank of Scotland plc is the top RBS banking entity," adding that "eachfinancial institution agreed to a parent-level plea. When they conspired to manipulate the exchange rate, the traders in question were acting on behalf of, andfor the benefit of, the banks that pleaded guilty." While this statement is true, it leaves out the significant fact that both "parents" are themselves subsidiaries of Citigroup and RBS Group Plc, respectively. While the guilty pleas were extracted from a parent company of the offending banks, in the cases of Citi, RBS and UBS the parent was itself another subsidiary of the top organizational entity. It is not clear why these pleas were structured in this manner. The Justice Department did not directly respond when asked why the guilty pleas for Citi, RBS and UBS were structured differently than those for Barclays and JP Morgan. While Citigroup, RBS Group Plc and UBS Group AG did not themselves plead guilty, the terms of the agreement, including cooperation with the DOJ going forward, do apply to them. The scene of regulators in the U.S. and U.K announcing huge penalties to the major international banks, based on gross misconduct with no individuals charged with any crimes and some confusion as to what exactly the banks were admitting to and what effect that would have seems so familiar that it is reminiscent of baseball's Yankee great Yogi Berra, "It's like deja-vu, all over again." Admitting to criminal behavior in America was once a guarantee of bankruptcy. That, at any rate, was the fate of big names such as Drexel Burnham Lambert, an investment bank, and Arthur Andersen, an accountancy firm, which had to shut up shop after losing both operating licenses and clients that were restricted from doing business with felons. Yet the Department of Justice and other regulators seem to have magicked this consequence away. Credit Suisse, another multinational bank, admitted to criminal charges related to its clients' tax evasion last year, but received waivers from the SEC, among others, that allowed it to stay in business. Loretta Lynch, the attorney general, claimed it was up to other regulators to decide whether to do the same this time. "It is thought that the required waivers have been obtained but this is not certain," wrote Richard Bove of Rafferty Capital, an investment bank, reflecting the confusion. Although private lawsuits are sure to follow, as a group of investors have already announced a $394 million deal with Citigroup — for these big international banks who are the "masters of the universe" in the financial sector where the foreign-exchange generates $500 billion in daily trades affecting tens of millions of people in just the dollar-euro market enabling these criminal enterprises to make tens of billions of dollars a year — these backroom deals will continue as long as no one goes to jail or companies bared from the industry because fines are just the cost of doing business.... and this is my rant of the week... EFTA00853946  WEEK's READINGS Why don't Americans call mass shootings 'terrorism'? Racism The refrain of denial — the urge to define white people's terrorist acts as anything but — is an effort to protect the idea that you can be a racist and not kill people Inline image 2 When tragedies happen, it's natural for people to come together in the spirit of protecting each other. So after the massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, people responded in an effort to make sense of seemingly nonsensical violence — to provide comfort in the midst of confusion. But for some people, their attempt to make sense of violence was more about rejecting the blatantly obvious - that the shooter was a racist intent on perpetrating an act of terrorism - than it was to comfort a community in pain. Despite the fact that Charleston Police Chief Greg Mullen said early on that "this is a hate crime" and that a witness reported that suspect Dylann Roof said to the black people he killed, "you rape our women and are taking over our country", conservative columnist Al Delgado maintained that the "odds wouldfavor [the crime] NOT being racial", Republican presidential candidate Lindsey Graham called him a "whacked-out kid"and suggested he was lookingfor Christians to kill them, and USA Today referred to him as a lone wolf'. The Daily Beast described the killer — a man who reportedly sat with a bible study group for an hour before he started to kill people — as "quiet and soft spoken", averring that he had black friends on Facebook, even as his nine victims remained unnamed and uncelebrated. EFTA00853947 The excuses to call a white, male mass-killer anything but "a terrorist" are familiar — they're part of a refrain repeated over and over again when a horrific crime intended to terrify a group of people is committed by a white man. It's a refrain of denial. (The same denial happened when Elliot Rodger penned a misogynist manifesto before his killing spree: He's not sexist, he's just crazy!) But the question, especially for white people who engage in the excuse-making, is: why are you so intent on defining situations like those in Charleston as not-terrorism? Why are you so invested in the idea that the crime was not one of hatred? A white man apparently planned and allegedly carried out a terrorist act against a historic black church and its members. He used racist language while doing so, and has been pictured wearing a jacket covered in racist, white supremacist patches. We all know what these things mean; we know what the motivation for this massacre was. So how could anyone with sense see all of these things and still maintain that race wasn't necessarily a factor, and terror wasn't the intent? It's difficult to imagine anything else but that you are protecting the idea that you can be racist and not kill people. While it may be true that not all virulent racists are mass murderers, defending the public image of racists in the wake of a massacre devalues the lives taken. And when you bend over backwards to make sure that white men who commit racist violence can maintain their humanity at the expense of the full measure of justice for their victims, we send a clear message about who is worth protecting and who isn't. Even though right wing domestic terror is as big a threat to the nation as terror from abroad, we'll likely continue to widely hear Roof described as "crazy" or a "lone wolf'. What we won't hear as broadly is how violence against people of color — especially, as my colleague Rebecca Carroll so brilliantly wrote, violence in the protection of white womanhood — is part of the United States' historical legacy, that it is systematic, that it is organized, and that is has yet to end. Violence against people of color is only as "crazy" as America is and has been. The Daily Show - Charleston Church Shooting EFTA00853948  ;.] Inline image 1 Web Link: li t t im://voutu.be/m jzryRKv6Ks For the past i6 years, a major part of Jon Stewart's job has been to write and deliver jokes during his opening monologue at "The Daily Show." But the murder of nine people at a black church by a white man in Charleston, S.C., rendered the comedian unable to find material on Thursday. "I didn't do my job today," Mr. Stewart, who will leave his post in August, told the audience, adding, "And maybe if I wasn't nearing the end of the run or this wasn't such a common occurrence maybe I could've pulled out of the spiral, but I didn't." Instead of jokes, he used his monologue to address the political and news media response to the shootings, racial tension in America and the reluctance of some to call the mass murder a terrorist attack. (Watch the video on the above web link.) If America had considered this Islamic terrorism, he said, "we'll torture people." He continued: " 'We've got to do whatever we can to keep Americans safe.' Nine people shot in a church, what about that? 'Hey, what are you gonna do, crazy is as crazy is, right?' That's the part that I cannot for the life of me wrap my head around." Mr. Stewart also addressed the Confederate flag, which continued to fly at full staff on the grounds of South Carolina's Statehouse hours after the shooting. "The Confederate flag flies over South Carolina, and the roads are named for Confederate generals," Mr. Stewart continued, "and the white guy is the one who feels like his country is being taken away from him." To add insult to injury, Charleston County Magistrate James B. Gosnell began Friday's bond hearing for mass-murderer Dylann Roof by declaring that the killer's family members were victims as well. I can't imagine an American judge saying that the family of a Islamic family be considered victims. But then this is the same judge that advised a black defendant in a November 6, 2003 bond reduction hearing, "There are four kinds of people in this world—black people, white people, red necks, and n-- rs." EFTA00853949 This month, the headlines were about a Muslim man in Boston who was accused of threatening police officers with a knife. Last month, two Muslims attacked an anti-Islamic conference in Garland, Tex. The month before, a Muslim man was charged with plotting to drive a truck bomb onto a military installation in Kansas. If you keep up with the news, you know that a small but steady stream of American Muslims, radicalized by overseas extremists, are engaging in violence here in the United States. But headlines can mislead. The main terrorist threat in the United States is not from violent Muslim extremists, but from right-wing extremists. Just ask the police. In a survey we conducted with the Police Executive Research Forum last year of 382 law enforcement agencies, 74 percent reported anti-government extremism as one of the top three terrorist threats in their jurisdiction; 39 percent listed extremism connected with Al Qaeda or like-minded terrorist organizations. And only 3 percent identified the threat from Muslim extremists as severe, compared with 7 percent for anti-government and other forms of extremism." Read more here: Muslims per year have been involved in an average of six terrorismrelated plots against targets in the United States. Most were disrupted, but the 20 plots that were carried out accounted for 5o fatalities over the past 13 and a half years. In contrast, rightwing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year in the decade after 9/11, causing a total of 254 fatalities, according to a study by Arie Perliger, a professor at the United States Military Academy's Combating Terrorism Center. The toll has increased since the study was released in 2012. Other data sets, using different definitions of political violence, tell comparable stories. The Global Terrorism Database maintained by the Start Center at the University of Maryland includes 65 attacks in the United States associated with rightwing ideologies and 24 by Muslim extremists since 9/11. The International Security Program at the New America Foundation identifies 39 fatalities from "non- jihadist" homegrown extremists and 26 fatalities from "jihadise" extremists. Meanwhile, terrorism of all forms has accounted for a tiny proportion of violence in America. There have been more than 215,000 murders in the United States since 9/11. For every person killed by Muslim extremists, there have been 4,30o homicides from other threats. Public debates on terrorism focus intensely on Muslims. But this focus does not square with the low number of plots in the United States by Muslims, and it does a disservice to a minority group that suffers from increasingly hostile public opinion. As state and local police agencies remind us, right wing, antigovernment extremism is the leading source of ideological violence in America. So why don't Americans call mass shootings 'terrorism'? RACISM The most dangerous terrorist for America are not Islamic terrorist six thousand miles away fighting for their souls of their countrymen against oppressive authoritarian regimes who have enriched themselves, families and friends. Think home-grown underachievers who for the last half century have been told by partisan leaders and cable television pundits that their meager lot in life is due to Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, Arabs, Africans, Chinese and anyone but their own kind. No wonder why they go on crazy rampages.... And remember that since 2002, Right-wing White Terrorists have Killed More EFTA00853950 Americans Than Muslim Extremists. For additional evidence attached please find the attached Raw Story article by Alex Henderson -- Here are 10 of the worst domestic terror attacks by extreme Christians and right-wing men. ****** The Changing Face of the Heartland. Inline image 1 I nline image 2 Like many places in America Minnesota and the surrounding states of the upper Midwest are experiencing a demographic revolution. That fact and its significance are just beginning to sink in, which is why many residents of the greater Minneapolis-St. Paul area, whatever their own ethnicity, still refer to their community matter-of-factly as "lily white." And while it's true that with a 78 percent Caucasian population the Twin Cities are still far less ethnically diverse than other parts of the United States — among them the far West and Southeast as well as gateway cities and multicultural hubs like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, and Miami — it's also becoming less true with every passing year. One big reason: immigration. "Our diversity is more diverse." Insofar as we associate Minnesota with immigration at all, it's because of the influx of Scandinavians and Germans during the 19th century (think of all those Norwegian bachelor farmers in Lake Wobegon). But Minnesotans now come from a surprisingly wide array of countries and communities, and these more recent immigrants tend to be people of color rather than whites. As former Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak says, "Our diversity is more diverse"than many other places because the state in general, and Minneapolis-St. Paul in particular, have been hubs of refugee resettlement for decades. The region has twice the share of immigrants from Southeast Asia as the United States as a whole (21 percent versus 10 percent of the immigrant population), and five times the share of immigrants from Africa as the nation as a whole (21 percent versus 4 percent). EFTA00853951 Minnesota is home to Mexicans, Hmong, Indians, Vietnamese, Somalis, Liberians, and Ethiopians. Its people of color also include American-born Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and African- Americans. According to the State Demographic Center, the Asian, black, and Hispanic populations in the state tripled between 1990 and 2010, while the white population grew by less than ro percent. This trend will continue: From 2010 to 2030, the number of people of color is expected to grow twice as quickly as the number of whites. As Minnesota and the region go, so goes the nation, which is also becoming ever more diversified, with an overall decline in the percentage of whites, and increase in people of color. At the same time that its overall ethnic and racial makeup is changing, Minneapolis and St. Paul are feeling the effects of another shift, vividly described by William Frey in his new book, Diversity Explosion, and again one that is occurring throughout the nation: the aging of the generation of Americans born after World War II, who were predominantly white. These two demographic shifts have huge implications for how both the private and public sectors in Minnesota — and elsewhere — allocate their resources and make decisions about education, training, and hiring. The challenge will be to make sure that as the baby boomers retire and their jobs open up to a more diverse workforce, the young people in that workforce are ready to fill those jobs. With most of the future growth in the labor force coming from people of color, it's alarming to have to acknowledge how profoundly the existing education and training systems have failed them. Statewide, 85 percent of whites graduated from high school on time in 2013, compared to 58 percent of Hispanics, 57 percent of blacks (including both U.S.-born African-Americans and African immigrants), and fewer than half (49 percent) of American Indians. The gaps are slightly larger at the metropolitan level, and wrenching for the largest city, Minneapolis, where just 51 percent of Africans, 41 percent of Hispanics, 4o percent of African-Americans, and 34 percent of American Indians graduate from public schools on time. The employment gap is appalling, too. Seventy-nine percent of working-age whites in the Twin Cities are employed compared to 65 percent of working-age people of color — the largest such gap in the country. Unless it can shake these dubious distinctions, the region and the state as a whole will not have a sufficiently skilled workforce to maintain, much less grow, its economy. That could have potentially disastrous results. The region is home to 18 Fortune 500 companies, including 3M, Medtronic, General Mills, and Pillsbury.* If the local workforce cannot meet the needs of these and other companies in the next five to ten years, which is when the state demographic office foresees labor shortages beginning to take effect, they may decide to move to regions that have a bigger pool of qualified workers. This looming crisis should come as no surprise. Reports dating back as far as the 199os and early 2000s have repeatedly warned that the education and employment gaps would become a drag on workforce growth and, as a result, on economic growth unless something was done to reverse these trends. Yet little was done, and the gaps persisted. The lag between awareness and action is partly attributable to complacency. The state has long taken pride in its progressive politics, its iconic-brand companies, and what has, for decades, been the state's distinctive advantage — a highly skilled workforce. Minnesotans were further lulled by the effects of the Great Recession of 2007-09, when the problem was a scarcity of jobs, not of workers. With a recovery underway, however, Minnesotans have begun to understand that the existing labor pool will EFTA00853952 soon be insufficient. And this recognition has helped reframe the conversation about race-based education and achievement gaps in Minneapolis-St. Paul — turning what had been a moral (and insufficiently effective) commitment to its underserved communities into an economic necessity. Leading figures from the worlds of government, business, and academia, and public and private groups throughout the region, are now trying to figure out how to undo the effects of decades of neglect, tackling the problem from many perspectives and with an ever greater sense of urgency. David Hough, the county administrator of Hennepin County, the most populous county in the Twin Cities region, confronts the changing composition of the workforce and the education gap every day. Hough is a baby boomer, as are many other Hennepin County workers. A few years ago, his human resources department ran some numbers to determine how many employees — at what levels and in what departments — were nearing retirement. The results were sobering: somewhere between 2,50o and 3,000 employees "are going to walk out the door" in the next five years, he says, and "we need to make sure we have the next workforce up and ready to go." Hough acknowledges that the impending workforce shortage never seemed urgent before. "We've always adapted [to the education and employment gaps] without necessarily taking the problem head on." While he realizes that he doesn't have to replace the thousands of retirement-eligible baby boomers — more than a third of his workforce — all at once, he knows that the time to begin preparing the next generation of workers is now. "We start with 20 people and 3o people and 4o people," he says, "hoping that we're proactive enough so that by 2020 we've got some feeder mechanisms [to get people into the jobs pipeline]." So in 2013 Hough and his colleagues developed a new approach to hiring, finding, and training entry- level workers in about 20 job categories that don't necessarily require a bachelor's degree. The county is offering customized training programs for these potential employees at local community colleges and non-profit training organizations, and giving them extensive preparation and support — not just before hiring them but during an internship phase and after they're on the job. In the pilot program, which started in March 2014, people were trained to be the human services representatives who determine eligibility for social services in Hennepin County. The job is challenging, but the pay is about $18 an hour plus benefits and it can put people on a career ladder in county government. Hough believes the return on investment will be substantial because once these new workers have jobs that pay well, they will no longer need the county public assistance services many of them currently receive. In effect, the program is moving people from one side of the desk to another. Primary working-age population in the United States will experience a net loss of 15 million whites between 2010 and 2030. EFTA00853953  Inline image 3 In terms of sheer numbers, Minnesota may still lag in diversity compared to much of the rest of the county, yet it is a microcosm of the kind of changes taking place all across the nation. As William Frey's Diversity Explosion comprehensively documents, as the baby boom generation ages out of the workforce, the primary working-age population in the United States will experience a net loss of 15 million whites between 2010 and 2030. Meanwhile, the share of people of color that are of labor-force age will steadily grow, especially the youngest segments of the working population. And as immigrants spread out beyond traditional immigrant gateways, and native-born people of color also move to new areas in search of new jobs or a different way of life, more and more communities will face a future that is markedly more ethnically and racially diverse than their past. Between 1990 and 2010, the share of the U.S. population made up of people of color went from 24 percent to 36 percent, and that share is expected to leap to 44.5 percent by 2030. The good news is: The growth of working-age populations of color will enable the United States labor force to grow, albeit modestly, in the 2020s, in contrast to the shrinking workforce populations of much of the developed world, including Japan and many European nations. Of course that's only good news if, as Minnesota's business, civic, and community leaders have recognized, that workforce has been educated and trained to take on the challenges of the 21st century. Minnesota, despite being at the back of the pack because of the huge educational and employment gap