Here's Why You Should Turn Your Business Vegan In 2018

from Forbes.com

No longer relegated to the fringes of society where for so long it was mocked for being ‘weird’ or ‘extreme’, veganism is going mainstream. Finally recognized for its positive impact on sustainability and animal welfare without the need to sacrifice taste or style, vegan living is starting to become the norm.

The continued proliferation of vegan and plant-based business stories and developments that have occurred during the past year demonstrate that this movement is just getting started in making its mark – and entrepreneurs are leading the way.

Here are some of the key reasons you should consider veganizing your business in 2018:

The numbers speak for themselves

Sales of plant-based food in the US went up by 8.1% during the past year, topping $3.1 billion, according to research carried out by Nielsen for the Plant Based Foods Association (PBFA) and the Good Food Institute.

Plant-based dairy alternatives are expected to represent 40% of the combined total of dairy and dairy alternative beverages within three years, up from just 25% in 2016, according to research firm Packaged Facts. The company predicts new types of dairy-free milks to find wider audiences in 2018, including barley, hemp, pea, flax and quinoa.

Vegan cheese has taken off in a big way, with the global market estimated to be worth just under $4 billion by 2024, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 7.6% from 2016 to 2024, according to a report by research firm Bharat Book.

The humble pea is revolutionizing the plant-based sector as global revenues of pea protein are estimated to be worth $104 million by 2026, according to Future Market Insights.

While plant-based milk sales grew 3.1%, cow’s milk sales declined 5% and are projected to drop another 11% through 2020, according to Mintel. Market Watch reports that Dean Foods, the largest supplier of dairy milk in the US, recently posted a third-quarter net income of just $1.4 million, down from $14.5 million in the same period a year ago. This downward trend is not confined only to the US: Australia’s largest supplier of dairy products, Murray Goulburn, announced a 22% drop in milk sales in the past financial year. Meanwhile Elmhurst, one of the longest-running dairies on the US east coast, decided in 2017, after 92 years, to cut its losses and switch to producing solely plant-based milks.

The egg industry is starting to feel the pinch too. Shares in Cal-Maine Foods, an egg producer since 1969 in Jackson, Mississippi in the US, saw its shares drop 7% in July this year, after the company reported its first annual loss in more than 10 years. CEO Adolphus Baker blamed the growth in popularity of egg alternatives.

Finally, the global meat substitutes market is expected to garner a revenue of $5.2 billion by 2020, registering a compound annual growth rate of 8.4% during the forecast period 2015-2020, according to Allied Market Research.

These key developments and players are signs that this market will continue to grow

Competition is heating up in the race to produce plant-based burgers that look, feel and taste like their animal-based counterparts, even to the point of ‘bleeding’ red juice. American startups Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat continue to lead the way. The Impossible Burger is currently served at more than 150 eateries in the US, while the Beyond Burger, whose investors include Bill Gates, Leonardo DeCaprio, Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams, and meat company Tyson Foods, is available in more than 5,000 grocery stores across the US as well as on menus at selected restaurants such as the Veggie Grill Chain. In December 2017, Beyond Meat released its Beyond Sausage which it claims mimics the taste and texture of pork, but with less fat and sodium and higher protein than traditional sausages. On the other side of the pond, three companies in the UK, two of which are backed by Gates, are working on bringing their vegan burgers to market. British startup Moving Mountains claims it will be the first to get its B12 Burger into stores there.

Hampton Creek continues to innovate with its plant-based versions of egg products, including mayonnaise and its newest release Just Scramble, a vegan egg made from mung beans which the company says saves at least 65% more fresh water than conventional egg products and emits 24% fewer greenhouse gases.

Vegan cheese brand Kite Hill secured $18 million investment from General Mills and is on a mission to have its products sold in the dairy cases in more supermarkets across the US

Miyoko’s Kitchen has rebranded to simply Miyoko’s, named after its founder, vegan cheese pioneer Miyoko Schinner. The company recently opened its new, larger premises in Petaluma, California after receiving $6 million from JMK Consumer Growth Partners, and will be ramping up its production in 2018.

According to CB Insights, at least seven of the 15 most well-funded food and beverage startups are plant-based.

‘Vegan butcher’ was named a top new job trend for 2017 by Time Money.

Plant-based fast food is on the increase. As well as McDonald’s rolling out a vegan burger in its stores in Sweden and Finland, vegan chains Veggie Grill, Plant Power Fast Food and by Chloe. opened more locations throughout 2017 and are set to do the same in 2018.

The ‘grab and go’ market in the UK saw café chain Pret a Manger make its pop-up, plant-based Veggie Pret store in central London permanent, open a second location in east London and announce a third one for 2018. British department store chain Marks & Spencer introduced two vegan sandwiches, and iconic US plant-based meat brand Tofurky launched its range of four vegan sandwiches in the UK.

Daily Harvest, a New York-based subscription service specializing in frozen, plant-based, one-step-prep foods, secured $43 million investment from Lightspeed Venture Partners and VMG Partners who join existing celebrity investors Gwyneth Paltrow and Serena Williams.

Plant-based was noted by Organic Authority as the biggest trend at trade show Natural Products Expo West in Anaheim, California this year, while the UK held its first ever vegan trade show VegFestUK Trade at Olympia in London

Even animal agriculture industries are taking notice

Plant-based meat substitutes is one of the “six greatest ag challenges for 2018,” according to Chuck Jolley, the president of the Meat Industry Hall of Fame.

Germany’s agricultural minister Christian Schmidt called for a ban this year on the labeling of plant-based proteins as vegan ‘meat’. Schmidt has a problem with products with names such as ‘vegetarian schnitzel’ and ‘curry sausage’, arguing that they are “completely misleading and unsettle consumers”.

In the US the Dairy Pride Act, a bill introduced by Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Congressman Peter Welch of Vermont earlier this year, calls on the FDA to stop plant-based dairy alternatives from being labeled as ‘milk’.

Rather than resist the inevitable, smart animal agriculture businesses are getting in on the plant-based revolution by buying or investing in plant-based brands. Tyson Foods, the top US meat producer, increased its investment in Beyond Meat this year, after initially having taken a 5% stake. Canada’s largest meat distributor Maple Leaf Foods bought popular plant-based brands Field Roast and Lightlife Foods. Nestle acquired Sweet Earth Foods (which was founded by a former Burger King board chairman). Dean Foods struck an investment and distribution deal with plant-based milk and yoghurt startup Good Karma. Japanese pharmaceutical company Otsuka bought plant-based cheese brand Daiya. Danone, a multinational food company with a focus on dairy, completed its purchase of plant-based pioneer WhiteWave (becoming DanoneWave), and Saputo, Canada’s largest dairy processor, is on the lookout for an opportunity to buy a plant-based milk company.

In Denmark Naturli Foods created a plant-based minced meat which has been taken on by the country’s largest retailer Dansk Supermarked Group. The product, which translates as ‘Minced Veggie’, will be sold in the supermarket chain’s 600 stores in the new year. Meanwhile, Dutch meat company Zwanenberg Food Group, which has been in business since 1929, is shifting half its focus on to plant-based proteins with the aim of 50% of its turnover to come from non-meat products such as vegetarian snacks, soups and sauces.

International finance group Rabobank said that recent growth in plant-based and clean meat should serve as a “wake-up call to the animal protein sector” and encouraged the meat industry to invest in alternative proteins. Rabobank also estimates that within five years alternative protein could represent a third of protein demand in the EU.

Campbell Soup Company left the Grocery Manufacturers Association and joined the Plant-Based Foods Association and Walmart encouraged its suppliers to create more plant-based products.

Responding to these developments, Bruce Friedrich, executive director at the Good Food Institute, said: “The growth of the plant-based sector in 2017 exceeded even my optimistic projections. The news from the meat industry itself was especially encouraging and 2018 is sure to continue the accelerating growth of plant-based meat.”

But wait, it’s not just all about food

While the plant-based food sector is experiencing tremendous growth, interest in animal-free products is being piqued in other sectors too. Vegan fashion is cited as a major trend for 2018 in The Future 100 Report by global research firm J. Walter Thompson Intelligence. We’ve seen the creation of alternatives to leather made from pineapple waste, apple peels, mushrooms, kombucha and wine as well as the first biofabricated leather brand and vegan silk.

Luxury car manufacturers are responding to the demand for cruelty-free materials, with Tesla reported to have removed animal-based leather as an option for its seats and Bentley exploring alternative materials to leather to cater for high-wealth ethical consumers.

Joshua Katcher, instructor of fashion at Parsons The New School and founder of men’s fashionwear store Brave Gentleman in New York, is most excited about biofabrication. “This coming year 2018 will definitely be about celebrating visionary solutions to some of the fashion industry’s most calamitous impacts: animal skins and hairs,” he said. “I also think we’ll see a lot of innovation around mycelium (fungus) textiles from companies like Mycoworks and entirely new ways of making synthetics from recycled and biodegradable materials like 10XBeta’s recycled C02 polyurethane-leather and Mango Materials’ biopolyester made from bacteria.”

Beauty brands are removing animal products from their formulations and even condom makers are recognizing this growing market and making their products vegan. The Green Condom Club in Switzerland, Hanx, a luxury brand created by a female gynecologist in the UK, and Australian brand Hero Condoms, all launched this year

Next-level high-tech products include 3D printed vegan cheese, candies and pizza crusts.

It’s a brave new business world, one in which growing numbers of consumers will continue to demand sustainable and ethical products. If you’re about to start a business, it’s worth making your products vegan-friendly from the start. If you already have a business, consider veganizing it by removing any animal-based ingredients or components (this includes bee products, wool and silk). Going a step further by gaining certified vegan status from the Vegan Society (UK) or Vegan Action (US) will help to set your brand apart from those that merely pay lip service to ethics.

The plant-based revolution is here to stay. Make sure you don’t get left behind.

Katrina Fox is the founder of VeganBusinessMedia.com, author of Vegan Ventures: Start and Grow an Ethical Business and host of the Vegan Business Talk podcast.

We’re witnessing the wholesale looting of America

from VOX

Unchecked by norms or political prudence, it’s smash-and-grab time for the GOP.
By Matthew Yglesias

Over the course of 2017, both in Congress and in the executive branch, we have watched the task of government devolve into the full-scale looting of America.

Politicians are making decisions to enrich their donors — and at times themselves personally — with a reckless disregard for any kind of objective policy analysis or consideration of public opinion.

A businessman president who promised — repeatedly — that he would not personally benefit from his own tax proposals is poised to sign into law a bill that’s full of provisions that benefit him and his family. Congressional Republicans who spent years insisting that “dynamic scoring” would capture the deficit-reducing power of tax cuts are now plowing ahead with a bill so fast that they don’t have time to get one done, because it turns out they can’t be bothered to meet their own targets.

Meanwhile, in the background an incredible flurry of regulatory activity is happening out of public view — much of it contrary to free market principles but all of it lucrative for big business and Trump cronies.

Throughout the 2016 campaign, the political class talked a lot about “norms” and how Donald Trump was violating them all. He brushed off fact-checkers, assailed the media, went on Twitter tirades against his critics, and dabbled in racism. Since taking office, his norm busting has spread. Members of Congress who under other circumstances might be constrained by shame, custom, or the will of their constituents have learned from Trump’s election that you can get away with more than we used to think.

Norm erosion is real, and it matters. Economists Daron Acemoglu and Matthew Jackson of MIT and Stanford have written about how rules are only effective when they are backed up by social norms “because detection relies, at least in part, on whistle-blowing.” Their Spanish colleague Patricia Funk emphasizes that in a variety of contexts, “the strength of the social norm of ‘not committing a crime’ is shaped by social interactions.”

These scholars are all considering deep, long-lasting differences in cultural norms, but we also know from experience that norms can sometimes shift dramatically in unusual circumstances. Sometimes a blackout or other disaster prompts a few people who would ordinarily be too cautious to break store windows in broad daylight to become more brazen. And the normal course of ordinary life flips into reverse, as those with some inclination toward bad acts recognize a moment of impunity and grab what they can, while those who would ordinarily be invested in upholding order are afraid and stay inside. The sheer quantity of bad acts makes it impossible for anyone to hold anyone accountable. Soon, a whole neighborhood can be in ruins.

Or a whole country.

Republicans love bank bailouts now
The tax bill pending in Congress this week is, naturally, front of mind and unquestionably represents the linchpin of the 2017 looting agenda. But in some ways, the clearest example of the difference between a regime of corporate looting and one of free market ideology came on the lower-profile topic of financial regulatory policy, where the Trump administration quietly signaled a major shift last month.

Back in 2009-’10, of course, the Obama administration responded to the financial crisis and the chaotic Bush-era bailouts by passing the Dodd-Frank law to overhaul America’s financial regulations. The goals of the law were twofold, on the one hand hoping to tighten the regulatory screws to make future bailouts less likely and on the other hand trying to bring some order to the question of what to do with large banks that do go bust in a way that risks a crisis.

Republicans opposed this approach, arguing that heavy-handed regulation was stifling the economy. But they said that they, too, deplored bailouts and that the real solution to the problem of banking crises was a need to tie the government’s hands to prevent any possibility of future bailouts.

The Trump administration has taken up the deregulatory baton with gusto, appointing Wall Street lawyers to run key agencies and turning what was intended to be an interagency working group on identifying financial risk into a forum for advancing deregulation.

But the free market fix for financial crisis has gone missing in action. In late November, the Trump Treasury Department quietly announced that it wants to keep the Dodd-Frank Orderly Liquidation Authority fund around after all. That’s an obscure little corner of the government, but it’s conceptually crucial — that’s the thing Republicans used to call a “permanent bailout fund.” They used to argue that eliminating it was the key to establishing a sound financial regulatory framework in which no bailouts would happen, and bankers would be disciplined by markets rather than bureaucrats.

Under Trump, the reality is that neither markets nor bureaucrats are going to be doing any disciplining.

In the short term, of course, lax banking regulation will almost certainly pay off in the form of higher bank profits and stock valuations. The problem is when the crisis hits down the road. But that’s exactly the triumph of short-term thinking that pervades everything Trump does, from debt-financed tax cuts for the rich to disinvestment in education, rollback of environment regulations, and approaches to the telecom sector that prioritize the profitability of today’s incumbent businesses over tomorrow’s regulators.

Across the board, it’s about letting whoever’s powerful now squeeze as much out as they can without worrying too much about the consequences — like enormous, deficit-financed tax cuts passed with no regard for budgetary or economic effects.

The strange death of tax reform
The tax bill is another case in point. It’s poised to pass Congress this week, and the swamp is overflowing with perks.

Somewhere in its murky origins, “tax reform,” as conceived by is Republican authors, was supposed to be a policy-driven bill aimed at creating a simpler and fairer tax code that would generate broadly superior economic outcomes for most people — a normal governing objective even if it was always the case that substantial disagreement would exist over the merits of marginal corporate tax rate cuts as a growth-boosting policy.

But along the way, virtually all of the high-minded aspirations were dropped and all of the normal aspects of congressional process broken — to the point where the bill’s leading architects won’t even mention the policy changes that are at the heart of the bill. In the end, instead of taking on the special interests as promised, it gives away the store to almost every lobby shop in town — with last-minute additions that personally enrich the Trump family and a decent chunk of the members of Congress voting for it.

Once upon a time, Republicans had a set of clear promises about what they called “tax reform.” The idea was to produce a simpler tax code, with fewer brackets and fewer deductions so that a typical individual could fill it out on a postcard.

The goal was to cut tax rates without reducing government revenue because loopholes would be closed. From the beginning, they were counting in part on economic growth to make up the difference, but they said they would rely on serious, third-party analysis of the impacts.

“Not economic growth judged by us,” Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX), the Chair of the House’s tax-writing committee, told Vox in March, “but by the independent Joint Committee on Taxation.”

And of course it wasn’t going to be a bonanza for the rich. Trump went so far as to promise that the rich wouldn’t benefit “at all” from his plan, and he certainly swore repeatedly that he would not personally benefit.

Neither the House nor the Senate came within a trillion dollars of hitting Brady’s deficit target, so the conference committee charged with reconciling the bills didn’t bother to wait for a dynamic score at all, and both houses are expected to pass the bill before the JCT can finish its analysis. The House bill slashed the top tax rate a little and the Senate bill slashed it a little more, so the conference committee compromised on a bigger rate cut than either had proposed.

Meanwhile, after all the months of work, Republicans ultimately settled on not actually eliminating any significant deductions or loopholes after all.

Why? Well it certainly seems to have had something to do with the orgy of lobbying that, according to the New York Times, led more than half of the city’s 11,000 registered lobbyists to report having worked on the tax bill. The swamp is running wild.

The committee also created a big new tax cut for owners of real estate LLCs — i.e., for Donald Trump’s family. Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) also stands to personally benefit from this provision, leading to early speculation that it’s the reason he flip-flopped and decided to back a bill whose deficit impact he’d earlier deplored. Corker denies this, offering the absurd defense that the new provision can’t possibly have driven the change since he hasn’t even read the bill he’s now decided to support.

Members swapping votes to secure special deals for their constituents is nothing new in the political process, but getting special deals for themselves personally is quite the innovation. And the ultra-rushed process means we have almost no time to kick the tires on how many new loopholes have been created and who stands to gain from them.

The new political dishonesty
Politicians have never been renowned for their honesty and have always liked to spin their policies in the most positive light possible. But not only does Trump lie a lot more than his predecessors — a New York Times analysis found six times as many lies in Trump’s first 10 months in office as across Obama’s eight years — but the Trump-era GOP has grown terrifyingly comfortable with a kind of large-scale misrepresentation of what their legislation says that’s totally unprecedented.

Speaker Paul Ryan’s official list of five policy highlights in the tax bill, for example, includes one point that is merely preserving the status quo on mortgage interest, and totally neglects to mention the corporate tax cut that is its centerpiece.

Republicans’ Obamacare repeal bills ultimately didn’t pass, but they also had this characteristic.

Reasonable people can disagree, for example, on whether it’s a good idea to cut Medicaid spending. But the GOP wrote a series of bills that entailed large cuts in Medicaid spending and then sent the secretary of health and human services out on television to say they weren’t proposing to cut Medicaid spending.

Not every member of the party was as brazen as that. But Trump and Ryan have completely dissolved the norm against dishonesty to the point where there are no longer any whistleblowers in the Republican caucus or the world of conservative media. You just say whatever you want, and dole out favors to your friends — moving at such a rapid pace that the country’s ability to process what’s happening gets overwhelmed.

There’s so much happening that we don’t notice
Back in April, Megan Wilson reported that there were 1,500 new lobbying registrations and a huge surge in lobbying revenue as firms moved to snatch up new staff with connections to Trump and key congressional Republicans in order to take advantage of a new bonanza of opportunities.

And it’s paid off enormously. While Americans are fascinated by major legislative drama, endless sexual abuse scandals, endless Trump-Russia scandals, and countless inappropriate presidential Twitter outbursts, key regulators — almost uniformly drawn from the ranks of corporate America — are doling out favors at a pace that boggles the mind.

Most people know about the Federal Communications Commission rescinding network neutrality rules, for example. But they’re also rescinding rules on overconcentration in the broadcast television industry, while Congress has moved to let ISPs sell their users’ private browsing data.

Trump’s Labor Department has been working overtime by making it easier for employers to steal servers’ tips but harder for workers to organize against chain restaurants. They’ve made it easier for employers to get away with not paying overtime, and while stories like Trump’s effort to destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or his unprecedented shrinkage of protected national monuments at least garnered a couple of days of coverage, most of this labor stuff has passed in the night.

Some of this is dictated by free market ideology, of course. But the coal industry bailout Rick Perry is pushing doesn’t fit that bill, nor does the Transportation Department’s drive to reduce transparency in airline fees.

And while it’s unlikely that the famously detail-averse president is actually paying attention to the nuts and bolts of DOT rulemaking, he is absolutely setting the tone from the top.

The looter-in-chief
It takes a lot more than Donald Trump to orchestrate the kind of feeding frenzy that’s currently playing out in Washington. Nothing about this would work if not for the fact that hundreds of Republican Party members of Congress wake up each morning and decide anew that they are indifferent to the myriad financial conflicts of interest in which Trump and his family are enmeshed. Moral and political responsibility for the looting ultimately rests on the shoulders of the GOP members of Congress who decided that the appropriate reaction to Trump’s inauguration was to start smashing and grabbing as much as possible for themselves and their donors rather than uphold their constitutional obligations.

But it really is true that in this case, the fish rots from the head.

Trump has always operated in businesses in legal and ethical gray areas — during the transition, he had to pay out a $20 million fraud settlement arising from a fake university he used to operate, and the fraudulent part wasn’t even that the university was fake. His all-purpose excuse for shady, greedy behavior was, to quote the man himself, “that makes me smart.”

Yet in his business career he did once undertake solemn obligations to people other than himself, as the chief executive officer of a publicly traded company, Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts.

Trump never turned THCR into a profitable business. But he did profit mightily from running it, bilking shareholders by transferring his personal debts onto the corporate balance sheet, having the public company pay extravagant sums to buy Trump-branded goods from separate companies that he owned personally, and of course paying himself a lavish salary for his troubles.

This is looting on the corporate level, tunneling financial assets out of the company the shareholders control into entities controlled by the CEO. Like many things Trump did over the years, it’s probably illegal, but enforcement of white-collar criminal law is spotty. Trump was fined by the Federal Trade Commission and separately by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and then separately again by the Treasury Department’s financial crimes division, but not in ways that were serious enough to put him out of business.

And in truth, we have no clear picture of the full extent of Trump’s personal corruption, since in violation of decades’ worth of tradition he’s refused to give us a clear sense of his income streams or financial interests. It would be trivially easy for congressional Republicans to force Trump to disclose his tax returns, but instead of holding his feet to the fire, they are taking their cues from him — even though many of them spent the 2016 campaign openly recognizing that he was unfit for office.


Trump’s victory, rather than inspiring a bipartisan movement to check the new president’s worst impulses, caused the party to snap, with as many factions as possible reaching to toss a rock and grab what they can as long as the party lasts.

The country is left only to hope that it doesn’t last too long.

Skateboarding is Awesome: Check out Nora Vasconcellos

In celebration of the first female Pro rider to join the global adidas Skateboarding team, we are proud to present "Nora", a digital short documenting the birth of skate icon, Nora Vasconcellos. Earning the respect of her peers, both on and off the board, Nora shares the experiences that have shaped her life.

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Christmas is... Christmas In Hollis

My photo above, corny fun video below...



peacE.

Snoop Dogg feat. Nate Dogg - 'Twas the Night Before Christmas

Run The Jewels - A Christmas F*cking Miracle

BONUS:

Santa Claus Goes Straight To The Ghetto

Holy Shit: Cheech & Chong - Santa Claus and his Old Lady

I grew up on Cheech and Chong...

Why Run-DMC didn’t want to make ‘Christmas in Hollis’

from the New York Post:



By Hardeep Phull

Shopping for the holidays is stressful enough to send anyone reaching for the eggnog, but for Darryl McDaniels, a k a DMC of Run-DMC, it’s especially taxing.

“At this time of year, I can’t walk five steps at the mall without someone shouting the lyrics to ‘Christmas in Hollis’ at me,” he tells The Post. “Just yesterday, I was at the grocery store, and a lady said, ‘Guess what’s on my playlist right now?’ I said, ‘Christmas in Hollis.’ She said, ‘How did you know?!’ It’s a beautiful thing, but I got to expect that for the rest of my life!”

That didn’t seem likely when the song was first released 30 years ago. In 1987, Run-DMC was invited to contribute a holiday song to “A Very Special Christmas,” a charity compilation benefiting the Special Olympics. Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, Whitney Houston and other artists recorded covers, but the New York rap trio went the extra mile and came up with the fun and funky “Christmas in Hollis.”

The song didn’t chart at the time, but over the years, it’s developed a cultural cachet as one of the few holiday songs that isn’t sappy. It’s also been featured in movies such as “Die Hard” (1988) and Seth Rogen’s 2015 comedy “The Night Before.” DMC’s just given it a 30th anniversary revamp to help promote the IFC network’s “Christmas in the ’80s” movie marathon over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

“We’re down with Christmas forever because of that record,” says the 53-year-old DMC, who recently released a four-track vinyl-only EP “Back From the Dead — The Legend Lives.”

“We’re part of the holidays, and I get paid a lot of money to do that song at parties this time of year.”

But the coolest Christmas song of all time almost didn’t happen. Kurtis Blow released the holiday track “Christmas Rappin’ ” in 1979, and the group worried about looking like copycats by releasing another. “In hip-hop culture, you can’t duplicate what’s already been done, so we weren’t sure about doing it,” says DMC.

But publicist Bill Adler convinced them otherwise. An avowed enthusiast and collector of lesser-heard Christmas music, Adler bought the group’s DJ Jam Master Jay (a k a Jason Mizell) a crate of festive records, hoping there would be something they could use to build a song. Eventually, Jay came across Clarence Carter’s 1968 R&B track “Back Door Santa,” and it immediately caught his ear.

“Run and DMC were in the next room and came in, as if they’d been drawn to the scent of a big Christmas pie or something,” Adler tells The Post. “They nodded at Jay, and everybody knew that was going to be the sample.”

Lyrically, the song followed Run-DMC’s established trope: writing about their native Queens. Joseph “Run” Simmons’ verse centers on spotting Santa Claus in Hollis, while DMC captures his own childhood Christmases, with his mom “cooking chicken and collard greens” at home.

“I ate that meal for 48 years before my mother passed away [in 2013], and I got tired of it,” says the rapper, who’s since left Queens for New Jersey.

“Now, I go out with my family on Christmas, because when you go to the city on Christmas, the whole city’s yours. You can get reservations in places you never would. The next Christmas song I do is gonna be about going out on Christmas to eat!”

Interview with Al Jaffee at 95 years old Podcast from WE EAT ART

As a kid of the 60's and 70's Mad magazine was a huge influence to me as well as entertainment.
Al Jaffee was one of it's masterminds, I found this interview really enjoyable and you probably will too.

In fact I just did an interview with these guys at WE EAT ART based on their dedication to the art they love. Give them a listen, and look out for my interview coming in the near future.

Al Jaffee has quite literaly been making cartoons longer than any artist in history. Unfortunately for everyone involved, he works at Mad Magazine.

School of Life Monday: What Is the Sunday Evening Feeling?

Sunday evenings have a particular atmosphere, where nostalgia mixes with dread. A lot of the emotion is at heart about a background sense that we haven’t found the meaning of our lives – and that time is running out for us.

Sunday Sermon: The Feminist Case For Single Payer

BY
NATALIE SHURE
It's time to take health care away from the power of bosses and spouses.

In the spring of 1969, a dozen feminists gathered at a women’s conference in Boston and came to a sober conclusion: their encounters with the United States health-care system had been overwhelmingly negative. They felt unsettled by doctors, alienated from their bodies, grifted by fees, and altogether powerless to navigate an industry they believed objectified them just as popular culture did.

The conference launched a years-long project, with each participant delving into some aspect of anatomy, sexuality, or society related to women’s health. The result was a self-published volume of essays called Women and their Bodies, which the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective used to provide women with a resource produced from their own perspectives and experiences.

Within a few years, the landmark feminist booklet was re-dubbed Our Bodies, Ourselves, released by Simon and Schuester, and sold millions of copies. In 2012, the Library of Congress named it one of the most significant works in American history. In recent years, it has inspired Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, which similarly seeks to be a health-care guide “by and for” the transgender community.

While Our Bodies, Ourselves is remembered for its role in the history of women’s health and culture, less attention is paid to its political context. In the 1970s, the small collective became one of the first feminist organizations to demand a single-payer health-care system: “Suffice it to say that capitalism is incapable of providing good health care, both curative and preventive, for all people,” one entry read. “Cost-benefit analysis trades off the benefit to the people of collective public health in favor of the cost to the people of private, patch-up medical care. The capitalist medical care system can be no more dedicated to improving the people’s health than can General Motors become dedicated to improving the people’s public transportation.” In a subsequent edition, they expounded: “We believe that health care is a human right and that a society should provide free health care for itself . . . Health care cannot be adequate as long as it is conceived of as insurance.”

If the book’s then-radical content has so permeated mainstream culture that it would strike readers as obvious today, the same is not the case for its authors’ critique of American health care. In fact, nearly fifty years after the collective articulated its vision for a universal system, “feminist” arguments against single-payer pepper politics and the media.

In June, Planned Parenthood of California refused to endorse a bill for a statewide single-payer system, contending that it was critical to focus on defending the Affordable Care Act (ACA) against GOP attacks instead. Vice cast it as a job-crusher for the mostly women of color who work in healthcare administration. In 2016, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton — whose campaign foregrounded her feminist credentials — famously declared single-payer would “never, ever come to pass.” More recently, Senator Bernie Sanders’s release of an expansive Medicare for All bill has been met with skepticism by media personalities who backed Clinton for her feminist credentials. At the very least, it seems clear that single-payer health care is rarely framed as a feminist issue.

Some mainstream feminists knock single payer as a distraction from the fight to defend the ACA. But while the Affordable Care Act undeniably improved some women’s lives, it could not dismantle gendered barriers to care.

Of all systems, single-payer is capable of going furthest to eliminate them. That’s the vision that Our Bodies, Ourselves adopted nearly half a century ago, and it must be taken up again today.

The Double Bind

One of the pervasive ways women are disadvantaged under the ACA is its reliance on employer-based coverage. In the United States, World War II–era wage freezes helped entrench a system of employer-provided health insurance, a perk meant to attract workers in a squeezed labor market.

Eventually, Medicare and Medicaid were devised as a safety net for those shut out of private plans, and the ACA expanded that safety net. Still, job-based plans remain the bedrock on which our insurance system is built.

Under this system, it’s harder for women to get health insurance in the first place. The strains of childrearing and elder care make women more likely to seek more flexible employment, like part-time, remote, or freelance work. These forms of employment tend not only to pay less, but are less likely to include health insurance benefits.

Divorce leaves some 65,000 women uninsured each year, with men being far more likely to maintain coverage after their marriages dissolve.

Those that do provide inferior ones: companies with majority-female workforces tend to offer less generous health-care coverage than those that are majority male. And less than one-third of low-income workers receive any health insurance through work. Jobs paying at or around the minimum wage are most often occupied by women, the majority of whom are women of color. Trans women face even higher levels of poverty than cis women, and are frequently saddled with impossibly high out of pocket costs.

Then there are the 25 percent of non-elderly adult women insured as dependents of a working spouse, which weakens their control over both their insurance coverage and their relationship. Health insurance has been found to be a common reason for getting married — and for staying married when one would rather not — especially among low-income people. Upon the loss of a spouse’s coverage, it’s difficult and expensive to continue receiving the same care. COBRA coverage — a program that allows people who lose employer-based insurance to remain on it, so long as they pony up the amount formerly contributed by employers — is often the only way to maintain provider networks, but it’s wildly expensive and eventually expires. Ultimately, divorce leaves some sixty-five thousand women uninsured each year, with men being far more likely to maintain coverage after their marriages dissolve.

Women’s unpaid domestic work puts further pressure on the contradictory demands of home, work, and the need to access coverage. Women disproportionately shoulder the responsibility of caring for others, putting them in an impossible situation when it comes to child and elder care: in order to maintain health insurance, they can’t take too much time off work. As a result, they’re forced to spend a significant portion of their wages on private care for the hours they’re on the job. For low-income women who don’t qualify for insurance through employers, the problem can be severe, made worse still by right-wing efforts to impose higher copays and out-of-home work requirements on Medicaid recipients, or to defund programs like CHIP that help parents pay for their children’s health insurance.

During particularly urgent health episodes, like childbirth or a relative’s protracted illness, women opt to take unpaid time off instead of risking their jobs. Notoriously, the United States is one of only a handful of countries that doesn’t guarantee paid maternity leave, exacerbating the financial stress of an already pricey phase of life. The Labor Department has found that nearly one-third of women who take unpaid time off for their own or dependents’ health issues fall into serious credit card debt.

Our Health, Our Selves

None of this is to say that the Affordable Care Act was a total wash for women. The ACA’s Medicaid expansion provided public health insurance to anyone with income below 137 percent of the federal poverty line, and federal subsidies (however inadequate) to anyone making below 400 percent. Because of the gendered wage gap, the effect was to extend insurance to more women than men. The law also took on health discrimination, by mandating that men and women pay equal premiums, ending gatekeeping based on preexisting conditions or the ability to become pregnant, and requiring that plans sold on state exchanges cover maternity care and birth control.

The ACA’s overhaul of the individual insurance market has helped somewhat to delink insurance from employment. Before the ACA, reproductive-age women faced considerable difficulties getting coverage on the individual market, since insurers were free to charge sky-high premiums to hedge against the possibility of having to shell out for maternity care. But even if premiums are more highly regulated, increased cost-sharing still means that patients pay stiff prices simply for getting the care they need: reproductive-aged women still spend over 60 percent more than men do in out-of-pocket health-care costs.

At the same time, while state ACA exchanges offer an alternative to employer-provided plans, the exchange plans remain inferior. Both tiers of insurance are plagued by narrowing provider networks, and ever-rising out of pocket costs – leading millions to forego insurance because it’s too unaffordable, or find themselves stuck with plans they can’t even afford to use. And that’s with the ACA.

In short, the dynamics that make the American health-care system so hostile to women remain largely unscathed after the ACA: the pervasive commodification of healthcare and dependent care in the United States, coupled with employment-based gatekeeping, engineers an impossible bind for women: they face more challenges accessing the health-care system and pay more for their care when they do, out of lower incomes that are further squeezed by child and elder care costs.

By removing power over health care from employers and spouses, and replacing unequal tiers with one unified insurance pool, we could fund our health-care system with progressive taxes. That way, we could guarantee everyone the care they need, and make it free at the point of service. Ability to pay, pre-existing conditions, employment status, and gender would cease to be barriers. Building Medicare for All — with robust guarantees for tougher-to-access services like abortion and gender affirming care — would force American society as a whole to address the care disparities women face.

peaking Bad Brains the BLACK DOTS session

Jay Adams 1977 early back yard ramp skating on my instagram

The Original One and Only JAY ADAMS on a somewhat primitive but well built back yard ramp circa 1977. This was just a one hit ramp, at the end of an L shaped drive way, you had maybe 60feet to push with a little down slope half way through then had to veer right hard and you had maybe 10 feet before you'd hit the ramp, it was awkward but it was rare and relatively smooth transition, the first ramp many of us had ever seen with a perfectly round cut transition in the base support structure, no one even built half pipes yet, and here's fuckin Jay Boy totally going off in more ways than one, just going for it, because that's just what he did. The ramp belonged to a friend of mine from school, Brett Adams (no relation to Jay). The ramp was up in Brentwood, just in between Paul Revere and Kenter. As you can see from this picture the ramp is actually leaning up against the roof of the house (note broomstick coping and no deck on top, oldschool kids!), a few weeks later they built its own free standing support and put the ramp at the straight end of the driveway, i made a bunch of great photos there with Alva, in particular, and several others, including one of Brett that made it into my Fuck You Too book and MY RULES the book. The frontside airs of Alva are classics, a backside tail-tap of T.A. ( @thetonyalva1957 ) made it onto the contents page in SkateBoarder Magazine. This photo appears in my co-authored (w/Stecyk) "DogTown - The Legend of The Z-Boys" still available at your local bookstore or Amazon... #jayadams #jayboy #jayboyadams #ZBOYS #Zflex #TrackerTrucks #backyardramp #1977 #DogTown #WLA #quarterpipe #inspiration #integrity #BadAss #Venice #OG #100% #100percentskateboarder #innovator #skateboarding #skating #knowYourHistory #rampskating #quarterpipe #getRadical #GNARLY #RAD #politicallyIncorrect #MyRules #surfculture #GetTheNewBook

A post shared by glen E. friedman Ⓥ (@glenefriedman) on Dec 13, 2017 at 11:37am PST

Former Facebook exec says network is 'destroying how society works'

from Mashable:

"You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies."

That was the tagline for The Social Network, the film about creating Facebook, and it's only become more relevant as the social network has grown to more than 2 billion people. Those "few enemies" are former Facebook executives, people who helped build the tech giant.

“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works," said Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007 and served as its vice president for user growth. He was referring to the iconic "like" button and other reactions we have while browsing News Feed.

The video, first surfaced by The Verge on Monday, is of Palihapitiya speaking at Stanford Graduate School of Business on Nov. 13. Four days prior, Facebook's founding president Sean Parker echoed similar concerns about Facebook "exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology."

Facebook has received a lot of attention for helping manipulate the 2016 presidential election via Russian trolls and propaganda, but Palihapitiya noted other bad events that have transpired over Facebook's networks. He described how a lynching in India occurred via hoax messages sent over WhatsApp.

"Imagine taking that to the extreme, where bad actors can now manipulate large swathes of people to do anything you want," Palihapitiya said.

Of course, it's not all bad. Facebook “overwhelmingly does good in the world," he said.

And, of course, Facebook helped make people like Palihapitiya rich. His net worth was rumored to be close to $1 billion, according to Business Insider in 2015. He spent some of his wealth on owning a part of Silicon Valley's favorite basketball team, the Golden State Warriors.

Since leaving Facebook, Palihapitiya entered the venture capital industry in 2011. He runs his own VC firm called Social Capital that focuses on investing in technology, healthcare, and education. Social Capital is also an investor in Slack, a platform that causes anxiety like Facebook.

Palihapitiya critiqued not only Facebook and social networks but also the state of venture capital in Silicon Valley.

“Everybody’s bullshitting,” he said of the venture capital community. "Over time you get one of the 20 [successful investments] and you look like a genius."

-----------------

He's an interesting guy, but can't say I agree with all of his philosophies and tactics discussed in the interview below... but some interesting stuff...

MUST WATCH: If Milk Commercials Were Honest If you still drink Cows Milk or have a good sense of humor

Milk, dairy, cheese and lactose commercials are great and all but no one's ever actually looked into how much our consumption of mammal udder juice contributes to growing up big and strong, but we just roll with it anyway.

School of Life Monday: Are Intelligent People More Lonely?

It sounds like a hugely arrogant and self-serving suggestion to imply that cleverness might lead you to loneliness. But if you define cleverness in a selective (and modest) way, there may truly be an aspect whereby it can lead to a certain isolation.

Sunday X-Mas advice:(Virtually) No one should ever own an Echo or any other "voice assistant" product

from Boing Boing:

If you buy one of those intrinsically insecure, always-on "smart speakers" from Google, Amazon, Apple or other players, you're installing a constantly listening presence in your home that by design listens to every word you say, and which is very likely to suffer at least one catastrophic breach that allows hackers (possibly low-level dum-dums like the ransomware creeps who took whole hospitals hostage this year, then asked for a mere $300 to give them back because they were such penny-ante grifters) to gain access to millions of these gadgets, along with machine-learning-trained models that will help them pluck blackmail material, credit card numbers, and humiliating disclosures out of the stream of speech they're capturing.

I don't own one of these and I've turned off the "voice assistant" on my mobile devices.

Writing in Gizmodo, Adam Clark Estes explains what a fantastically dumb fad these gadgets represent, and how they normalize surveillance.

One use-case I've heard of sounds like it justifies all these risks: helping people with dementia by serving as an infinitely patient interlocutor who can answer questions like "what day is it?" and "where am I" over and over again without losing its temper.

Which brings us back to security and surveillance. I’m not here to be Tin Foil Hat Man and convince you that companies like Amazon are spying on your every move and compiling data sets based on your activity so that they can more effectively serve you ads or sell you products. I am here to say that smart speakers like the Echo do contain microphones that are always on, and every time you say something to the speaker, it sends data back to the server farm. (By the way: If you enabled an always-listening assistant on your smartphone, now’s a good time to consider the implications.) For now, the companies that sell smart speakers say that those microphones only send recordings to the servers when you use the wake word. The same companies are less explicit about what they’re doing with all that data. They’re also vague about whether they might share voice recordings with developers in the future. Amazon, at least, seems open to the idea.

We do know that Amazon will hand over your Echo data if the gadget becomes involved in a homicide investigation. That very thing happened earlier this year, and while Amazon had previously refused to hand over customer data, the company didn’t argue with a subpoena in a murder case. It remains unclear how government agencies like the FBI, CIA, and NSA are treating smart speakers, too. The FBI, for one, would neither confirm nor deny wiretapping Amazon Echo devices when Gizmodo asked the agency about it last year.

Sinister ambitions of governments and multinational corporations aside, you should also worry about the threat of bugs and hackers going after smart speakers. Anything that’s connected to the internet is potentially vulnerable to intrusions, but as a new category of devices, smart speakers are simply untested in the security arena. We haven’t yet experienced a major hack of smart speakers, although there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that they’re hardly bulletproof. Not long after its launch, the Google Home Mini experienced a bug that led to the device recording everything happening in a technology reporter’s house for dozens of hours. You can chalk that up to a very bad screw up on Google’s part, but it’s a tear in the fabric of trust that should encase these kinds of gadgets.

Don't Buy Anyone an Echo [Adam Clark Estes/Gizmodo]

It's Mueller Time! Dump Administration Season Ending

for your friday:Lust for life - Iggy Pop documentary 1987

Documentary directed by Bram van Splunteren for VPRO TV. Doc contains footage of Iggy Pop live in Vredenburg Utrecht, The Netherlands (november 1986), Iggy being interviewed in New York City ('87), and the late great Ron Asheton, guitarist of Iggy & the Stooges, filmed in his hometown Ann Arbor in 1987, playing old Stooges riffs in his mother's basement, the place where the band did their first rehearsals.

Thanks to Alex at Flaming Pablum

How Socialism Can Replace Mass Death as a Tool for Leveling Inequality

By Eve Ottenberg, Truthout | News Analysis

The world is run by an oligarchy of billionaires, as Bernie Sanders recently observed. To take power away from that oligarchy, it is necessary to take some of their wealth, through means like progressive taxation, a maximum income for all citizens, a guaranteed basic income for everyone, stronger unions, slashing the military budget and strengthening the welfare state, meaning free higher education, student debt forgiveness, Medicare for all and other measures. Would these approaches mitigate inequality? They could help, suggest Canadian professors and contributors to Socialist Register 2017 Leo Panitch and Bryan Palmer. Peter Edelman, a former adviser to Robert Kennedy and Bill Clinton, also indicates the potential of some social welfare policies to eradicate inequality in his book, So Rich, So Poor. However, Stanford professor Walter Scheidel, in his recent book The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality, expresses much less optimism about the potential of social programs to end inequities. Scheidel argues that over thousands of years of human history, the only thing that has ever succeeded at truly equalizing wealth, or that has even led to the large-scale adoption of social welfare policies, is mass death. In particular, he points to the Black Death in the late Middle Ages, history's various violently failed states, Stalin's terror, purges and gulags, the violence of Mao's revolution and two world wars. Scheidel argues that the "only" cure for inequality -- mass death -- is worse than the disease.

But the disease is pretty awful, and there are those who think that socialism, not mass death, might cure it. Scheidel notes that in the early 21st century, the 62 richest people on Earth own as much wealth as the poorer half of humanity, more than 3.5 billion people. And a lot of that poorer half is outright destitute. Scheidel speculates that the creation of predatory, wealth-stealing elites might be hard-wired into our species. So, like Thomas Piketty does in his writings on inequality in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Scheidel notes that the world wars countered inequality, but he takes the observation much further, into a pessimism that implicitly concludes that since only mass death can effectively create equality, we have to give up on equality. (Incidentally, Scheidel argues that many wars only serve to increase inequality. Not all death equalizes -- only, he says, mass death in certain very specific circumstances.)

However, as Trent University professor Bryan Palmer pointed out in a recent interview with Truthout, the idea that inequality has only ever effectively been lessened "by mass death is indeed pessimistic and highly worrying -- not to mention contentious."

Indeed, so far, the most likely next producer of mass death -- climate change -- will probably be a powerful driver of inequality, with the world's poorer populations being hardest hit. The world is already facing the horrors of pestilence (think cholera in Yemen) and climate-induced calamity, and these conditions will only intensify. "A strong case can be made that inequality will be enhanced by catastrophes of various kinds," Palmer said, "since the truly rich ... can insulate themselves somewhat."

According to Scheidel, after the Black Death wiped out much of the population of medieval Europe, a labor scarcity enabled workers to demand and receive higher wages. State collapse, the modern version of which we have seen in Somalia, has also had equalizing effects, according to Scheidel. In the 20th century, two new violent ways of equalizing elite wealth emerged -- "total war," namely World War I and II, and communist revolutions, particularly in Stalin's Russia and Mao's China, though much of what occurred in both places could better be termed counterrevolution. "Key mechanisms of equalization, such as unionization," Scheidel writes, "public intervention in private wage setting and highly progressive taxation of income and wealth, all first rose to prominence in the context of global war..." and in the context of a communist threat.

However, trade unionism had been growing for decades before global war descended in 1914, and so had socialism. They may have gained ground with the unique conditions of two world wars and a major depression, but they preexisted them, too. "You have to look at the previous activity of socialists, trade unionists and mass suffrage," said York University professor Leo Panitch in a recent interview with Truthout. "You had to mobilize wealth -- in the context of class struggle, and you can't leave that out.... After World War II, you see the accommodation of social democratic governments and the Democratic Party, making the welfare state fit with capital accumulation -- and that couldn't be maintained. If the social democrats had gone further to control capital's escape of wealth taxation -- socialists want to take capital away from capitalists to take away their power -- they might have succeeded."

As for capitalism today, Panitch paraphrases German philosopher Max Horkheimer, to the effect that anyone who speaks of capitalism and not fascism should remain silent. In other words, the one entails the other. For instance, domestic repression and refugee policies are two ferociously brutal features of contemporary capitalist regimes, from Duterte's Philippines to Sheriff Joe Arpaio's "concentration camps" for immigrants in Arizona, to name but two examples. Given capitalism's tilt toward total control and readiness to resort to fascistic, police state methods, Panitch sees "a very bloody future, a Blade Runner future."

Scheidel's mass death thesis is bolstered by massive research into tax and other records spanning millennia. His conclusion, that we're in for growing inequality over the long haul and there's little to be done about it, is, however, undercut by some of his own observations. Even by the author's estimation, inequality is not inevitable. Scheidel allows that three peaceful mechanisms of controlling inequality have been somewhat effective: land reform, debt forgiveness and powerful unions. He also notes the "anomaly" in Latin America in the early 2000s of inequality being significantly and peacefully reduced. This development looks less anomalous when correlated with the region's left-tide-inspired social welfare gains.

Also contradicting this pessimism is the existence of Kerala State in India, home to 35 million people, who have been voting a communist government into power regularly since 1957. Literacy there, according to a recent Washington Post article, is over 95 percent. Communism has peacefully done away with the caste system and, in Kerala, a street sweeper can have major surgery practically for free. With free education and health care, Marxist Kerala has been producing excellent doctors, engineers and scientists for decades. Many immigrate to the Persian Gulf states for higher wages, but many of those migrants eventually return to Kerala. This is only one example, but it and countries that have peacefully attained socialist features, like Bolivia and Ecuador, would seem to undercut the defeatist conclusion that we have to accept inequality and abandon economic freedom because the only alternative is mass death.

Closer to home, we have 103 million poor and near poor people in the US -- including 6 million with no income other than food stamps, as Peter Edelman reported in So Rich, So Poor a few years ago. Meanwhile, billionaires and corporations are now poised to reap tax break bonanzas from a dreadful tax bill put forth by a reactionary, Republican-controlled and donor-owned Congress. Inequality is rampant in the US. Benefits of a modest welfare state are in tatters, and unions have been ravaged. Only truly radical measures -- like a cap on income and wealth and a basic guaranteed income, as has been adopted in Finland, Ontario, Canada, and many European cities -- can wrench around our backward drift. As Edelman's book observed, currently welfare has 4 million participants. Before President Clinton slashed it (whereupon Edelman quit the Clinton administration), it had 14 million.

Given the violent and determined nature of elite predation, how realistic is socialism as a peaceful force for equality? "We should be very modest about the likelihood of achieving socialism," Panitch said. However, he qualified this: "Socialism may be unrealistic, but history is contingent. Wars and revolutions are not chosen, they brew out of decades ... Bolshevik demands in 1917 were not socialism, but bread, land and peace. They weren't proposing to bring down the then liberal government at first."

For Palmer, "socialism is the only alternative." He argues that Scheidel's recognition that progressive reforms were often implemented in contexts of crisis, especially war, and to stave off the threat of communism, only establishes that creating socialism with its insistence on overcoming inequality might actually be easier and less traumatic than in circumstances of constraint. According to Palmer, globalization and advancing conditions in the developing world, as well as technological innovation mean that the possibilities for socialism are now greater than at any time previously. He argues that more and more of the global economy is open to rational, planned development. He observes that, of course, elites will resist. "Yet the [Russian Revolution] was relatively peaceful, and it was a popular, mass supported revolution," which Palmer clearly distinguishes from "the terror of a new ruling caste" under Stalin.

In Latin America, Panitch noted, "reaction is undermining the left tide." But additionally, none of Latin America's current or recent left governments were truly socialist. "Even Chavez made no moves outside of the oil industry to take capital away from the Venezuelan ruling class," Panitch said. "He did nothing to build a more balanced, internally oriented economy. The state was never reformed and remained corrupt. What happened in Bolivia and Ecuador was not a break with capitalism."

Meanwhile inequality in China has soared. "The billionaire class is all the Communist Party members," Panitch observed, adding that even if they want to return to socialism, they're billionaires, and they can't be the force for undoing their own wealth. But Panitch asks whether there are left-wing elements in China who would want real socialism. He observes that the Chinese working class engages in a phenomenal number of strikes, 100,000 ever year, and wonders if it could become a left-wing Solidarność movement. Panitch notes that what is missing from Piketty's book is the issue of inequality of power on the job. Who gives orders and takes them? "Socialism was all about democratizing the workplace, increasing workers' power," he noted. "If we got more equality in World War II, it was because of those working-class, socialist and communist subcultures, not just the war."

If socialism is a real alternative to mass death and to the inequality of mass dispossession, what would it look like? Could the three peaceful programs Scheidel sees as having mitigated inequality in the past function as three legs for socialism to stand on -- land reform, debt forgiveness and powerful trade unionism?

"No, not enough," Panitch said. "Socialism would have to stand on turning finance into a public utility.... A viable socialism would need the building of mass socialist organizations again."

Palmer agrees that simply instating the three "peaceful programs" would not be sufficient, since it would not actually transform capitalism. He noted that, "The problem with [authors] like Piketty and Scheidel, is that they approach inequality as an island unto itself," without recognizing that inequality "is situated within capitalism." Palmer also says that land reform in the Global South will never suffice as a solvent of poverty and destitution. To secure debt forgiveness, he thinks we need a revolutionary challenge to the current global political economy. Regarding trade unions, he says that what is needed is a class struggle unionism, against dispossession across borders. Palmer observes that trade unionism is under assault everywhere in the world. But it is now strongest where wages are lowest, conditions at their worst, and the politics of opposition most acute -- in the Global South. He sums up with the point that socialism requires new organizations. For Palmer, ending capitalism now "is imperative. We're faced with socialism or barbarism ... as Marx once said, commenting on India, human progress must 'cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.'"

Panitch agrees: "Given how ugly and chaotic capitalism is in the world, there will be socialist movements and revolutions in the coming decades."

It will be up to those movements and revolutions to prevent the other types of mass death, those we could be staring in the face any day -- the ones associated with climate change, fascism and nuclear war.

The full BLACK FLAG Target video

I own a copy of this half hour on 3/4" tape somewhere... The Dez clips are incredible... as are the live Henry clips, but he was still kinda new at the time, not 100% settled in yet. Gotta love this live stuff . . .



Yeah that's me in the embarrassing "TV Party" video that Dukowski and I wrote the story line to on the way up to SF.

it get's better after that clip...

WISHFUL THINKING:Oddsmakers in the UK say Trump has a 50/50 shot of being impeached in the next 12 months

from Boing Boing:

In light of the recent news about Michael Flynn becoming a stool pigeon, UK bookmakers are adjusting the odds on the likelihood that Trump will be impeached.

“In the wake of the bombshell news that Michael Flynn is pleading guilty to making false statements to the FBI during their Russia investigations, President Trump has hit his shortest price yet to leave office before the end of his term," Naomi Totten, spokeswoman for Betfair, told The Independent.

“Trading at a low of 1.7 or 4/6, which equates to a 59 per cent implied chance, punters are increasingly confident that this is one mess Trump will not be able to tweet his way out of.”

"Paddy Power now bet 4/7 that Donald Trump will be impeached. That’s an implied probability of 63 per cent," said Joe Lee, Paddy Power's Head of Trump Betting.

"Those odds sat at 11/10 yesterday which would have been a 47 per cent probability," he continued. "Our punters are also very interested in the year of impeachment with 2018 now sitting at even money - making it a 50/50 shot it happens in the next 12 months."

School of Life Monday: How to Start a Business

We’re often encouraged to think that the secret to starting is a business is to have a bold and entirely original idea. But the suggestion here is that all we really need is to LOVE something a little more than most other people do: that will be enough to help us stand out from the competition.

One of My All Time Favorite Photographs - BLACK FLAG on my InstaGram

BLACK FLAG - 1981 at the infamous Cuckoo’s Nest in Costa Mesa (near Huntington Beach). This is one of Henry's first shows as Black Flag's official vocalist (#4). This is one of my favorite pictures I've ever made. My favorite band of the era by far. The DAMAGED album is an absolute peak for them, it was being recorded around this time. The intensity is captured perfectly in this photograph, without sparing any composition or character, which sweats and bleeds out of the frame. #punkrock #MyRules #BlackFlag #PUNK #AF #inspiration #Integrity #PracticePracticePractice #Sweat #RiseAbove #hardcore #HeavyBeyondWords #HenryRollins #DezCadena #ChuckDukowski #GregGinn #ROBO - #KeepItReal #OldSchool #cuckoosNest #HB #goofy #CostaMesa #goingOff #GetTheNewBook #MyRules ... did i forget to mention this photo is 11.5" tall in MY RULES (after it first appeared in FUCK YOU HEROES) get it from any bookstore or Amazon if you must. #FILM #35mm #FullFrame #DMAx

A post shared by glen E. friedman Ⓥ (@glenefriedman) on Dec 2, 2017 at 6:08pm PST

Democrats Don’t Need "Dump" Supporters to Win Elections

from The Nation:

The 2017 elections made clear that the Obama coalition is the majority.

The evidence is in from the 2017 elections, and the verdict is clear—the constituencies that twice voted to put a black man in the White House remain the majority in this country. Democrats spent a year wailing and navel gazing as they tried to figure out how to woo Trump supporters, but it turns out that the way to win is to mobilize the New American Majority—people of color and progressive whites.

In the elections on November 7, Democrats carried the day in contests across the country. From Virginia and New Jersey to Montana to California—and myriad races in between—Democratic candidates swept to victory. What was the secret to all this success? Inspiring and mobilizing those people who are with us rather than trying to persuade those who support Trump that they made a mistake. In Virginia, 91 percent of those who approve of Trump’s performance voted Republican, but Ralph Northam nonetheless trounced his Republican opponent, Ed Gillespie. In New Jersey, 87 percent of Trump supporters stuck with the Republicans, but Democrat Phil Murphy cruised to a landslide victory.

In Virginia and New Jersey, it was the “Obama coalition” of people of color and progressive whites—what I call the New American Majority—that propelled Democrats to victory. In both of those states, the Democratic candidates for governor lost the white vote but won the election because 80 percent of people of color supported them, providing the same kind of cornerstone that Obama enjoyed.

Despite 12 months of worried think pieces, high-profile initiatives, and expensive, poll-driven campaigns designed to appeal to the white working class, the levels of support for Democrats from that constituency barely budged. In Virginia, Northam received 26 percent of the white working-class vote, as compared to the 24 percent Hillary Clinton received in 2016. It is worth noting that Northam and Murphy both received a higher percentage of the white college-educated vote than Clinton did last year, but that could just be a statistical quirk reflecting a higher number of white Democrats turning out to vote than white Republicans. If that uptick is real, it was nonetheless among college-educated whites; in other words, not from the constituency that Democrats have obsessively focused on. The ceiling with the white working class is what it is.

The ability to win without picking up significant additional support from Trump supporters lays bare the fundamental fallacy underlying most Democratic and progressive strategy—the notion that Trump won and enjoys majority support. He didn’t, and he doesn’t. What happened in 2016 was not a mass defection of Democratic voters to Trump. What happened was a dramatic decline in black voter turnout (because of voter suppression, grossly insufficient investment, and overall lack of inspiration from the all-white Democratic ticket), combined with a splintering of the Obama coalition that saw statistically significant numbers of Democratic voters defect to the third- and fourth-party candidacies of Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. Not only did Trump lose the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes; he also failed to garner a majority of the vote in the states that tipped the Electoral College vote—Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

What does all of this mean for 2018? It means that by inspiring and investing in the core components of the Obama coalition, namely people of color and progressive whites, Democrats can capture control of the House of Representatives and replace Republican governors in key states such as Georgia, Florida, Arizona, Maryland, Illinois, Ohio, and Massachusetts.

In order to prevail, however, Democrats must celebrate and embrace the diversity of the progressive coalition in all its multicultural, multiracial splendor. It is time to reject the conventional wisdom that electoral success requires muting our identities for fear of further alienating those who are already so afraid of the country’s changing population that they put a hate-mongerer like Trump in the Oval Office. A proud turban-wearing Sikh man, Ravi Bhalla, was elected mayor of Hoboken, New Jersey. Two out transgender candidates—Danica Roem in Virginia and Andrea Jenkins in Minneapolis, Minnesota—won their races for state legislature and city council, respectively. The voters of Seattle elected out lesbian Jenny Durkan as mayor. Vi Lyles and LaToya Cantrell became the first African-American female mayors of Charlotte, North Carolina, and New Orleans, Louisiana, this year. And despite the relentless demonization of immigrants of color over the past two years, Wilmot Collings, an African refugee, was elected as mayor of Helena, Montana (yes, Montana).

Celebrating the fullness of our nation’s radiant rainbow inspires people to participate and leads to the kinds of wins we saw on November 7. Apologizing for “identity politics” precipitates an electoral death spiral, because it doesn’t work to woo Trump voters, who will always opt for the real racist, and it also depresses the enthusiasm of the very voters we need to win.

Inspiring and investing in progressive Democratic turnout is the winning strategy, even in the 10 Senate races where Democrats are running for reelection in 2018 in states that Trump won. In seven of those states, more people voted for Clinton in 2016 than voted for the Republican nominee for the Senate in the last mid-term election. That means that focusing on getting out the Democratic vote is a far more promising course of action than striking a moderate pose. And in the other three—Missouri, North Dakota, and West Virginia—the Democratic incumbents enjoyed solid support long before Trump entered the political arena.

Especially in the states Trump won handily, the decision to vote for Clinton was a statement. Offering voters a vehicle to make that statement again is what’s required.

Lastly, winning elections isn’t just about inspirational words and impressive candidates. It’s also about the basic, expensive, and labor-intensive blocking and tackling involved in helping busy people overcome the many barriers to participation in the political process. Ample empirical evidence has proven that the best way to increase voter turnout is to work with trusted messengers to engage their friends and neighbors. That means putting money into organizations with credibility in communities of color and a track record of conducting effective electoral work.

One of the unsung heroes of the Virginia election is New Virginia Majority. Its co-director Tram Nguyen spent years coordinating a coalition of community-based organizations, and that work paid off decisively as people of color turned out to vote in record numbers this year. In 2018, millions of dollars should be showered on groups like New Virginia Majority—groups like One Arizona, which registered 150,000 Latino voters in 2016 in a state that represents one of the few Democratic senatorial pickup opportunities; New Georgia Project, which recorded the largest black voter-registration numbers in the history of the state; and New Florida Majority, which has organizers across the state communicating with hundreds of thousands of voters. There are similar over-performing but underfunded leaders in key states across the country (my organization, Democracy in Color, listed several such organizations, which we call Frontline Freedom Fighter groups, earlier this year in our report, “Return of the Majority”).

Perhaps the single most important takeaway from the 2017 elections is that we must carry ourselves with the confidence that we are the majority of people in this country. We should spent less time going hat in hand to try to understand the motivations of people who want to expel and ban Mexicans and Muslims from this country, incarcerate African Americans, restrict fundamental rights for women, and discriminate against the LGBTQIA community. As Democrats and progressives, we can govern in the interests of those people (that is, those who voted for Trump) by preserving affordable health care, access to higher education, and raising the minimum wage, but seeking their votes is a waste of time and energy, time and energy that’s required to get our voters—our majority—to the polls.

We must have less apology and more outrage. This monster in the White House and his enablers in Congress are destroying the country and the world. The appropriate response is outrage, anger, and, most important, action. Action to move our friends and neighbors to the polls so that we can take our country back. We’ve made a good start in 2017, and the results confirm the soundness of the strategy. Now is the time to redouble those efforts.

Steve PhillipsTWITTERSteve Phillips is a national political leader, civil-rights lawyer, author, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and the founder and editor in chief of Democracy in Color, a multimedia platform on race and politics. He is the author of the New York Times best seller, Brown Is the New White: How a Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority (New Press). He is a regular contributor to The Nation.

Cards Against Humanity purchases border territory to stop Trump's wall, gets legal advice and builds trebuchet, to make it stick

from Boing Boing:

This year's Cards Against Humanity secret Xmas surprise has begun, and on day one, they've delighted buyers (I'm one!) by sending us a share certificate for an infinitesimal fraction of a stretch of US/Mexican borderlands, along with details of their plans to keep the land secure from Trump's attempts to seize it and build a stupid wall on it.

The first line of defense is a pack of rabid attack lawyers from the firm of Graves, Dougherty, Hearon, & Moody, who've penned a letter vowing to fight any eminent domain seizure with everything they have, running out the clock on the Trump administration before any wall can be built.

The second line of defense is much more direct: Cards Against Humanity have built a 30' trebuchet, a medieval siege engine used to knock down walls since the 12th century, as an object lesson in just how far behind the times Donald Trump's mentality is. The have paid 300 gold to increase its attack damage, so it’s very powerful.

Today's package also included an awesome Dungeons and Dragons style map of the USA and Mexico, a cover letter and some Trumpwall-themed expansion cards for CAH. I can't wait for day two!

CARDS AGAINST HUMANITY STOPS THE WALL