Norfolk Southern Values An East Palestinians Life At ~ $Two Piece And A Biscuit

bloomberg  |  Amid criticism of the response to a train derailment that spilled hazardous chemicals in a small Ohio town, Norfolk Southern Corp.’s chief executive officer pledged to ensure the safety of local residents, and the state’s governor asked for federal help. 

“We are here and will stay here for as long as it takes to ensure your safety and to help East Palestine recover and thrive,” CEO Alan Shaw said in a letter released Thursday. The statement came after a town hall Wednesday in East Palestine, Ohio, which the company did not attend because of concerns about “the growing physical threat to our employees,” according to a report from a local ABC News station.

Also read: Norfolk Southern will be held accountable, White House says

Crews are cleaning up the site, and the railroad implemented a testing program for the water, air and soil, Shaw said. The company created a $1 million fund as a “down payment” to help rebuild the community of about 4,800. 

On Thursday, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine said he asked three federal agencies for assistance, according to the Associated Press. The White House said that President Joe Biden had offered DeWine help.

“We’re going to hold Norfolk Southern accountable,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Thursday during a daily press briefing. 

Norfolk Southern could rack up tens of millions of dollars in costs from the derailment, according to one analyst’s estimate. The Environmental Protection Agency has urged the company to reimburse for costs related to the crash as soon as possible, citing “potential liability” in a Feb. 10 letter.

Norfolk Southern is likely to take a special charge in the first quarter to cover costs, Cowen Inc. analyst Jason Seidl wrote in a Tuesday report.

The company’s shares have declined more than 8% since the derailment on Feb. 3. Rail operations resumed last week, although delays continue.

Residents have raised concerns about whether it’s safe to return home after the 150-car train derailed, caught fire and spilled chemicals, including vinyl chloride. There were 20 chemical cars on the train. 

Three days after the accident, authorities intentionally vented and burned five tank cars containing vinyl chloride, in a safety measure designed to relieve pressure and prevent an explosion that would eject chemicals and metal shards in all directions. The dramatic cloud of black smoke and fire that resulted sparked even more concerns.  

“I know there are still a lot of questions without answers. I know you’re tired. I know you’re worried,” said Shaw, who visited the disaster site last week. “We will not let you down.”

 

Precision Scheduled Railroading: A Capitalist Disaster With Consequent Mass Niggerization

NC  |  In this post, I will not cover what has been well-covered elsewhere: The derailment itself (50 cars, 20 of which carried toxic materials, 14 of those vinyl chloride), the subsquent fire, which burned for three days, the ultimate “controlled release” of the poisonous gas, the toxicity of vinyl chloride, the effects of the poison on locals, their pets, and their streams, or the arrest of the reporter who asked questions at Governor DeWine‘s presser. On the bright side, Norfolk Southern donated $25,000 to community shelters. NS is also funding a hotline to a toxicologist at an environmental consulting firm. The EPA has a timeline.

Rather, I shall begin from the very concrete (“for want of a nail…”) and move to the very abstract: From the wheel, to the truck, the cars, the firm (Norfolk Southern), and the owners.

Steel Wheels on Steel Rails

Steel wheels on steel rails inherently produce 85-99% less friction than rubber truck tires on roads; the contact point of a wheel to the rail is about the size of a dime. Hence the inherent advantage of rail over trucks for moving goods:

Compared to truck – its main competitor – train is cheaper (in the US it’s 4 cents vs 20 cents per ton-mile), more efficient (the record-breaking train was 682 cars and 4.5 miles long carrying 82,000 metric tons of ore), and more sustainable (one ton of freight can be moved over 470 miles on just a single gallon of diesel fuel).

However, if you want that advantage to be real and not just theoretical, you’ve got to maintain all that steel in good working order; after all, when things go wrong with a train that’s 4.5 miles long, they can go very, very wrong. Norfolk Southern adopted Precision Scheduled Railroading (see NC here, and alert reader Upstater, here) in 2019 (“average train speed increasing by 10%”), achieving a record operating ratio of 60.4% in 2022[3]. In so doing, it threw away the inherent advantage of rail. Specifically, in the East Palestine disaster, it did not maintain its steel wheels.

Due to NS intimidating (or corrupting) the regulators, train 32N was not classified as a “high-hazard flammable train,” despite its obviously hazardous and flammable cargo. Such a classification would have affected both its speed and its route (possibly not through East Palestine). From Lever News:

Though the company’s 150-car train in Ohio reportedly burst into 100-foot flames upon derailing — and was transporting materials that triggered a fireball when they were released and incinerated — it was not being regulated as a “high-hazard flammable train,” federal officials told The Lever.

Documents show that when current transportation safety rules were first created, a federal agency sided with industry lobbyists and limited regulations governing the transport of hazardous compounds. The decision effectively exempted many trains hauling dangerous materials — including the one in Ohio — from the “high-hazard” classification and its more stringent safety requirements.

I don’t have a documented connection to 32N’s classification and PSR, but it seems pretty obvious. Here from 49 CFR § 174.310 – “Requirements for the operation of high-hazard flammable trains”:

(2) Speed restrictions. All trains are limited to a maximum speed of 50 mph. The train is further limited to a maximum speed of 40 mph while that train travels within the limits of high-threat urban areas (HTUAs) as defined in § 1580.3 of this title, unless all tank cars containing a Class 3 flammable liquid meet or exceed the DOT Specification 117 standards, the DOT Specification 117P performance standards, or the DOT Specification 117R retrofit standards provided in part 179, subpart D of this subchapter.

No railroad company dedicated to increasing average train speed by 10% through PSR would ever want to comply with that statute (which also imposes restrictions on the routes to be followed and allowable cars).

Railroad Owners

Here are the owners of the NS:

No doubt they are very happy with the Operating Ratio that NSR achieved through NSR. 

Eric Schmidt's Perfect AI War-Fighting Machine

wired  |  “Let's imagine we’re going to build a better war-fighting system,” Schmidt says, outlining what would amount to an enormous overhaul of the most powerful military operation on earth. “We would just create a tech company.” He goes on to sketch out a vision of the internet of things with a deadly twist. “It would build a large number of inexpensive devices that were highly mobile, that were attritable, and those devices—or drones—would have sensors or weapons, and they would be networked together.”

The problem with today’s Pentagon is hardly money, talent, or determination, in Schmidt’s opinion. He describes the US military as “great human beings inside a bad system”—one that evolved to serve a previous era dominated by large, slow, expensive projects like aircraft carriers and a bureaucratic system that prevents people from moving too quickly. Independent studies and congressional hearings have found that it can take years for the DOD to select and buy software, which may be outdated by the time it is installed. Schmidt says this is a huge problem for the US, because computerization, software, and networking are poised to revolutionize warfare.

Ukraine’s response to Russia’s invasion, Schmidt believes, offers pointers for how the Pentagon might improve. The Ukrainian military has managed to resist a much larger power in part by moving quickly and adapting technology from the private sector—hacking commercial drones into weapons, repurposing defunct battlefield connectivity systems, 3D printing spare parts, and developing useful new software for tasks like military payroll management in months, not years.

Schmidt offers another thought experiment to illustrate the bind he’s trying to get the US military out of. “Imagine you and I decide to solve the Ukrainian problem, and the DOD gives us $100 million, and we have a six-month contest,” he says. “And after six months somebody actually comes up with some new device or new tool or new method that lets the Ukrainians win.” Problem solved? Not so fast. “Everything I just said is illegal,” Schmidt says, because of procurement rules that forbid the Pentagon from handing out money without going through careful but overly lengthy review processes.

The Pentagon’s tech problem is most pressing, Schmidt says, when it comes to AI. “Every once in a while, a new weapon, a new technology comes along that changes things,” he says. “Einstein wrote a letter to Roosevelt in the 1930s saying that there is this new technology—nuclear weapons—that could change war, which it clearly did. I would argue that [AI-powered] autonomy and decentralized, distributed systems are that powerful.”

With Schmidt’s help, a similar view has taken root inside the DOD over the past decade, where leaders believe AI will revolutionize military hardware, intelligence gathering, and backend software. In the early 2010s the Pentagon began assessing technology that could help it maintain an edge over an ascendant Chinese military. The Defense Science Board, the agency’s top technical advisory body, concluded that AI-powered autonomy would shape the future of military competition and conflict.

But AI technology is mostly being invented in the private sector. The best tools that could prove critical to the military, such as algorithms capable of identifying enemy hardware or specific individuals in video, or that can learn superhuman strategies, are built at companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple or inside startups.

“The big challenge that the US military faces going forward is how to rapidly adapt commercial technologies for military use faster than competitors,” says Paul Scharre, a vice president at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank, and the author of Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, a forthcoming book about AI and geopolitics. Scharre notes in his book that the Pentagon’s share of global R&D spending has declined from 36 percent in 1960 to 4 percent today.

“We're trying to build a 21st century military with 20th century bureaucracy.”

Paul Scharre, Center for a New American Security

The US DOD primarily works with the private sector through large defense contractors specialized in building expensive hardware over years, not nimble software development. Pentagon contracts with large tech companies, including Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft, have become more common but have sometimes been controversial. Google’s work analyzing drone footage using AI under an initiative called Project Maven caused staff to protest, and the company let the contract lapse. Google has since increased its defense work, under rules that place certain projects—such as weapons systems—off limits.

Scharre says it is valuable to have people like Schmidt, with serious private sector clout, looking to bridge the gap.

 

 

Superbowl Pre-Game Featured Dancing Robotic Hunter-Killer Police Drones

newsweek  |  Viewers were left "creeped out" by Jason Derulo's robotic backup dancers during a pre-Super Bowl performance.

Derulo performed at the NFL's TikTok Tailgate event to get fans excited for Super Bowl LVII, but one aspect of his performance didn't have the desired effect.

Derulo was joined on stage by a number of human backup dancers, who in turn, were also joined by a collection of choreographed robotic dogs. Social media users shared their concern at the technological advancement, as some likened it to an episode of Black Mirror.

Oh god they’re normalizing robot dogs in the super bowl pre-show thing pic.twitter.com/BwqVJoefoK

— Read Jackson Rising by @CooperationJXN (@JoshuaPHilll) February 12, 2023

"Okay I don't know if anyone else is watching the pre-show performance from Jason Derulo but these little dancing dog robot things are kind of creeping me out," wrote South Dakota-based TV anchor Lauren Soulek. Her sentiments were echoed far and wide across Twitter by other viewers who watched Derulo perform his song "Saturday/Sunday."

"I can't be only one little creeped out by the robot dogs in [Jason Derulo's] pregame performance," wrote user @kingmeup21. "Anyone else creeped out by the robots on the pregame stage?" asked @GinQueenRunner.

TV reporter Devo Brown was also unimpressed. "Umm Jason Derulo pre game performance...ya it was ok. However, I could do without the creepy robot dogs as backup dancers."

Some Twitter users like @JakeMGrumbach likened the animals to the "Black Mirror robot attack dogs." The Season 4 episode "Metalhead" featured faceless four-legged robots hunting down humans.

One user, however, replied that their 9-year-old loved the performance. "What [...] noo they're so cute lol," wrote @CosmicBunnyBabe responding to all of the hate aimed at the robots.

The specific designers of the robots are unconfirmed, but they look similar to the Boston Dynamics robotics that often go viral for their technological advancements. The four-legged designs were similar to their product Spot, though they normally come in yellow, and Derulo's backup dancers were sporting the color gray.

There is often a debate about these humanoid robotics. Recently, social media users debated whether a robot trained to open a door was "cool or creepy."

Briahna Joy Gray, national press secretary for Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign, suggested the inclusion of the dogs were an effort to help bring the technology into the mainstream. "I see the deep state is using Jason Derulo's Super Bowl performance to normalize the Boston Dynamics dogs," she wrote with a crying laughing emoji. Not buying into the hype, Twitter user @hominigritz replied with a deadpan, "Robot assassin dogs will never feel normal to me."

Derulo refers to himself as the "King of TikTok" in a number of pre-performance videos, and while the inclusion of the robotic dogs may have "creeped out" some viewers, it ensured his performance trended and was discussed across social media.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

                                                                                                                                                                                                       

 

 

The Secret Sauce Of Neoliberal Capitalism Is Public Debt Backing Private Wealth

Fin d’siecle American imperial capitalism in a nutshell: At what point do we realize that the only function of our psychopathic elites is the creation of the debt that the banks need to back all of their  notational value? The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth. 

For decades by a concerted effort, financial capitalists have been undermining the security of this country, undermining democracy, dimming the light of freedom, capturing our politicians and perverting the constitution to the benefit of themselves, creating a free market (free for the rentiers instead of free from the rentiers). 

For example, our elites have created brittle companies while saying they were making companies more resilient. Leveraging profits into the service of debt to create ‘shareholder value’. Creating Just in Time supply chains that are also brittle and ripe for exploitation and manipulation in the cause of efficiency. Imposing an unjust tax revenue system that raised the cost of living and the cost of doing business for most people – relative to their income - and - which decreased taxes for exploitive financial rentierism. We have Bernie Sanders saying that there should be no billionaires…as if the legislation and tax favoritism that enables the extraction of these billions did not come from his own votes for legislation and tax laws.

Instead of America leading the world and promoting democracy and freedom by example, we have a ruling elite (yes, we elected most of these sell-outs via the heavily moneyed election process – even politicians who want others to not buy their elected office complain and beg for cash but never mention the corruption evident in our campaign finance laws or the necessity of raising so much bribe money) — this elite that feels the only way to defend and secure democracy is through financial coercion and brute force that, in fact makes us less secure and less a democracy.

Those who would give up essential liberty and embedding the desire for the basic human rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” the ideal that no one is to be ruled by another without their consent…to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.  

Coming Soon To A Jailhouse Near You?

levernews  |  Massachusetts Democrats have a bold new proposal for prisoners: donate your organs or bone marrow, and get as little as a couple of months off of your sentence. The legislation, which has attracted five cosponsors in the state House, raises major bioethical concerns for the 6,000-plus people currently held in the Bay State’s prisons. In essence, the bill would ask prisoners which is more important to them: their freedom, or their organs and bone marrow.

The bill appears to go significantly beyond other organ-donation policies for prisoners. The Federal Bureau of Prisons says that prisoners may donate their organs while incarcerated, but only to immediate family members. In 2013, the state of Utah allowed organ donation from prisoners who died while being incarcerated. Most other states do not allow organ donations from prisoners at all.

The Ethics Committee of the United Network for Organ Sharing, the nonprofit that administers organ transplants in the United States, has panned proposals like the Massachusetts bill. “Any law or proposal that allows a person to trade an organ for a reduction in sentence… raises numerous issues,” the committee says in a position statement on their website.

The legislation, HD 3822, states, “The Bone Marrow and Organ Donation Program shall allow eligible incarcerated individuals to gain not less than 60 and not more than 365 day reduction in the length of their committed sentence in [prison], on the condition that the incarcerated individual has donated bone marrow or organ(s).”

A five-member “Bone Marrow and Organ Donation Committee,” only one of whom is designated to be a prisoners’ rights advocate, would decide how much time off prisoners would receive from donating organs.

There is a long history in the medical field of doctors experimenting on and abusing prisoners, including in Massachusetts. While current rules prohibit the state Department of Corrections from “the use of an inmate(s) for medical, pharmaceutical, or cosmetic experiments,” in 1942, a professor at Harvard Medical School injected 64 Massachusetts prisoners with cow’s blood as part of World War II military research, killing one of the subjects.

The current bill might not even be legal. According to a 2007 ABC News report on a similar proposal in South Carolina, “It's probably going to be considered a violation of federal law. Congress passed the National Organ Transplant Act in 1984 that makes it a federal crime "to knowingly acquire, receive, or otherwise transfer any human organ for valuable consideration for use in human transplantation. It is likely 180 days off a sentence could constitute ‘valuable consideration.’”

The ABC News story noted another potential problem with the idea: Prisoners have “a much higher incidence of HIV, AIDS, Hepatitis, and even tuberculosis than the general population,” so it might not be safe to use their organs in transplant procedures.

The Massachusetts bill’s two sponsors, Democratic State Reps. Carlos Gonzalez of Springfield and Judith Garcia of Chelsea, did not respond to requests for comment. Gonzalez is the co-chair of the Joint Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security, which has oversight over corrections in the state.

 

A Struggle Ensued...., Copaganda Is Built Into The Fabric Of Police-Media Relations

kansascitydefender  |   It is easy to see how police are the dominant authority in these murders. Another news story, released by KSHB Kansas City two days after Malcolm Johnson’s murder, works to legitimate the narrative by exclusively using police and FBI perspectives. In the story, Public Information Officer Sgt. Jacob Becchina says, “We train tirelessly from day one to give officers every tool both physically, mentally and tactically to work through those situations so that they have the best chance to make the best decisions that they can,” suggesting again that this outcome was the best possible and truly could not have gone any other way.

The article also quotes a retired FBI agent and former cop, completely uninvolved in the case, who adds legitimacy through admitted ignorance: “Unless there are circumstances that we don’t know about, I think this will be found to be a justifiable use of force.” The article follows this with information about Johnson’s backstory that does not pertain to the actual incident in the convenience store.

Becchina is one of KCPD’s three Public Information Officers, a euphemism for marketing and PR cops who push information out to journalists and are functionally in-house propaganda machines. PIOs write press releases and often, as the primary spokespeople for all incidents, prevent the media from talking to the cops involved. In a 2016 study conducted by the Society of Professional Journalists, 196 survey respondents at a variety of news outlets shared that over half of them regularly experienced PIOs blocking their interview attempts with police.

A third of these respondents said that it was the department’s policy to prohibit interviews with anyone other than the PIO, Chief, or other executive cops. Every reporter I asked about PIOs had a similar story of being blocked from access to crucial information. “The police would rarely speak to me; I had to go through the city manager and rely on insufficient press releases,” a reporter for a small city’s only newspaper told me. Others spoke of problems with purposeful misinformation or information withholding, discrimination based on news outlet, and exhausting runarounds.

As paid members of the police force who report directly to the Chief, Public Information Officers create the narratives that most breaking news stories reproduce. In a vlog called “What I’ve Learned Being a Public Information Police Officer” (posted 11/23/19), a YouTuber called officer401 talks about the process of getting information to the public:

“Something major happens…you go back to your office, you type up this long press release, and you send it out to the public and all the news agencies. Within minutes you have reporters from all over the country calling you. I’ve had people from the New York Times call me, I’ve had people from People Magazine call me. And they all want further information about your story….there’s something strangely satisfying that when you put out that press release, hours later you’re watching the news and every station that’s talking about your story is literally reading your press release word for word.”

Because reports are sealed due to “pending investigations,” crime scenes are closed, and involved cops are not available for comment or questions, the rapidfire media cycle forces reporters to rely on PIO press releases for all initial reporting. Having a dedicated PR staff means police committing these acts of violence have someone at the ready to handle any incidents with necessary time, energy, and media connections, something completely foreign to the average person, not to mention someone who has been incapacitated or killed by police.

A lack of transparency and public understanding makes it so that the average person knows nothing of the way PIOs impact news stories. Further adding to the confusion, television reporters often head to the scene of the crime to do their reporting, which–again–is frequently taken verbatim from the PIO’s press release. Visually, the presence of a reporter at the scene suggests they have a kind of eyewitness authority–that they themselves have gathered information from the crime scene, possibly talking to cops and witnesses. This seeming objectivity gives the police narrative even more power.

Copaganda And "Ongoing Investigation" Shield Police Murders And Murderers

kansascity |  Authorities on Friday identified a 31-year-old Kansas City man who was fatally shot by a police officer the day before in an incident that also left a police officer shot in the leg.

Malcolm D. Johnson was killed during a confrontation at a gas station near East 63rd Street and Prospect Ave., according to the Missouri State Highway Patrol.

Kansas City police officers had identified a suspect in an aggravated assault investigation around 6 p.m. Thursday, Sgt. Andy Bell, a spokesman for the highway patrol, said Thursday.

Two officers went inside the gas station and tried to arrest him when “a fight, a struggle ensued,” Bell said.

The man drew a handgun and shot one of the other officers in the leg as an additional two officers arrived on the scene to help with the arrest. The officer who was shot returned fire, fatally shooting the man, Bell said.

“The officer in self-defense returned fire,” Bell said.

Johnson was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital. The officer was being treated for his injuries and was in stable condition Friday.

The highway patrol has been the lead investigative agency for police shootings in Kansas City since June 2020. Up until then, the Kansas City Police Department investigated its own officers, a practice that was criticized by the community.

 

What Was So Threatening About A Double Amputee With A Knife That Necessitated Shooting Him?

LATimes |  As they do every week during football season, the Lowe family gathered Sunday morning to watch the NFL games on two big flat screens in the South Los Angeles home of the family matriarch.

But as the San Francisco 49ers prepared to face off against the Philadelphia Eagles, there was one fewer family member watching. Anthony Lowe, 36, had been shot and killed by Huntington Park police officers Thursday afternoon.

Instead of talking football, the family spoke in hushed tones of the grainy cellphone video they’d seen the night before: Lowe, a double amputee, trying to run from Huntington Park police officers on what was left of his legs while holding a long-bladed knife.

Lowe’s lower legs had been amputated last year. In the video, he appears to have just dismounted from a nearby wheelchair. As he scrambled down the sidewalk away from the uniformed officers, two police sport utility vehicles drove into the frame and parked, blocking the camera’s view.

The video, which was posted on Twitter on Saturday, then abruptly ends; no footage of the ensuing gunfire has been released.

Yatoya Toy, Lowe’s older sister, identified the man running from police as her brother. She said that his legs had been amputated after an altercation with law enforcement in Texas, and that the family also has questions about that incident.

“This is the first [Sunday] where he ain’t watching the game with us. It’s what he loves to do,” Toy said. She still uses present tense when referring to her brother, who has two teenage children. “He’s the life of the family. He brings happiness, joy; he loves to dance. He’s very respectable, he loves his mother. He’s the favorite uncle. The kids all love him.”

Lowe’s death is a devastating loss for the close-knit Lowe family, Toy said. And it comes at a time of increased scrutiny of police brutality and violence after a string of high-profile incidents, including the beating death of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols by Memphis Police this month.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s homicide unit is investigating Lowe’s shooting, as it typically does for all shootings involving Huntington Park Police Department officers, according to the unit’s Lt. Hugo Reynaga.

A detective with the homicide unit stopped by the home of Dorothy Lowe, the dead man’s 53-year-old mother, Saturday to interview family. They responded, Toy said, by peppering the detective with questions about Anthony’s death.

The answers the detective provided were vague and unpersuasive, said Tatiana Jackson, another sister of Lowe. Their biggest question: What was so threatening about a disabled double amputee with a knife that it necessitated shooting him?

Cops Be Out'chere Getting Away With Shooting Wheelchair Bound Senior Citizens

azcentral  |  A Pima County grand jury found that there was insufficient evidence to charge a Tucson police officer who shot and killed a man in a wheelchair in 2021.

After former police officer, Ryan Remington, fatally shot a man in a motorized wheelchair in Nov. 2021, it was announced that he would be charged with manslaughter in Aug. 2022 by Pima County Attorney Laura Conover.

The case went to the Grand Jury and found there was not enough evidence to pursue, however, the state could still decide to charge.

According to Tucson police, Remington fatally shot the man, identified by police as Richard Lee Richards, at a Lowe's parking lot near Valencia and Midvale Park roads at about 6 p.m. on Nov. 29, 2021. Remington was working off-duty as a security guard when he responded to a shoplifting call at a nearby Walmart.

The Tucson Police Department fired Remington on Nov. 30, 2021, the day after the shooting occurred.

Police said an employee informed them when they confronted the shoplifting suspect, Richards, to show a receipt for the toolbox he was suspected of taking, he pulled out a knife and told the employee, “Here’s your receipt.” 

Police said Richards then traveled to a Lowe’s store across the parking lot in his motorized wheelchair. Tucson police released bodycam footage showing Remington following Richards across the parking lot as he called for backup, saying Richards “pulled a knife on me.” 

Officer Stephanie Taylor also responded to the scene. After both officers told Richards not to enter the Lowe’s, Remington fired his gun nine times into Richards' back and side, causing Richards to immediately fall from his chair. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

 

Canada Moving Ahead Briskly With The Final Solution

ncregister  |  Canadian food bank clients and disabled retirees facing financial insecurity are now considering doctor-assisted suicide to avoid living in poverty, several sources have reported.

“Based on the definitions in the Canadian law, nearly anyone with a chronic medical condition, such as people with disabilities, can be approved for euthanasia,” Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, told CNA Dec. 12.

“Therefore people with disabilities are requesting euthanasia based on poverty, homelessness, or an inability to receive needed medical treatment, but they are approved for euthanasia based on their disability,” he added.

Meghan Nicholls, CEO of the Mississauga Food Bank in Mississauga, an Ontario city west of Toronto, said demand has increased by 60% since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her food bank network now serves 30,000 people per year, she reported in a Nov. 30 commentary for the Canadian news magazine Maclean’s.

For the first time, according to Nicholls, beneficiaries are reporting that the cost of food has put them into financial insolvency.

“We’re at the point where clients on these programs are telling us they’re considering medically assisted death or suicide because they can’t live in grinding poverty anymore,” she said in the Maclean’s report. “A client in our Food Bank 2 Home delivery program told one of our staff that they’re considering suicide because they’re so tired of suffering through poverty. Another client asked if we knew how to apply for MAID (medical assistance in dying) for the same reasons.”

“We can’t underestimate the effect that poverty has on someone’s mental health. Our clients live with constant worry and cut corners on needed items like medication, fresh food, or warm clothes — constantly living under that stress takes its toll mentally, emotionally, and physically,” Nicholls said.

“When people start telling us they’re going to end their life because they can’t live in poverty anymore, it’s clear that we’ve failed them,” she added.

Nicholls told Canada’s The Catholic Register that leaders of other food banks in Canada have not heard clients speak of plans to take their own lives.

“I don’t know if that’s a bit of an anomaly or if it’s just because we operate this home delivery program. We do have a chance to connect with clients directly, and that kind of relationship might open us up for people to share a little bit more vulnerably than perhaps some other food banks.”

Schadenberg said assisted suicide has become very easy to access in Canada.

“We need to understand that many people with disabilities live in poverty and find themselves having difficulty receiving necessary medical treatment and yet according to the law they have no difficulty being approved for death by euthanasia,” he told CNA. “Clearly this has led to an epidemic of death, of despair, in Canada. Deaths based on cultural abandonment but sold to the population under the false guise of freedom.”

In 2021, over 10,000 Canadians died by euthanasia, also called medical aid in dying or doctor-assisted suicide. This is 10 times the number who died by euthanasia in 2016, when the procedure was first legalized.

If You Are Poor - Please Don't Make A Mistake Of Any Kind...,

welcometohellworld  |  Autumn Harris' lungs were so filled with fluid they weighed four times what a normal person's lungs should weigh during her autopsy. The thirty four year old died in an Alabama prison in 2018 after going untreated for pneumonia by medical staff for weeks according to a malpractice lawsuit filed by her father in 2020 that will finally get a hearing next year. Six years of waiting for the possibility that maybe someone will be held responsible for his daughter's death.

Harris had been arrested because she missed a misdemeanor court hearing over an alleged theft of $40 Alabama.com reported.

State investigators interviewed women Harris was being held with and one said she got so sick toward the end that she started to hallucinate and was calling one of them momma.

If you are poor please do not make a mistake of any kind. Please do not fuck up in such and such a way leading you to need $40 very badly or to miss a court date. Do not fuck up even once despite the entire world being littered with boobytraps just waiting for you to make a false step. The floor is lava but not in the way that usually means. If you are poor almost every fuck up you might make carries with it a potential death sentence in this country.

It sounds facile and obvious to say that kind of shit doesn't it? It's almost like what's the point? You know it and I know it and people walking through the obstacle course on hard mode know it better than anyone.

I guess we have to keep saying it anyway.

We're all of us walking through the obstacle course to be clear it's just at varying degrees of difficulty. Unless some of you reading this happen to be rich in which case can I have $50,000?

Why Are American Jails Dangerous Hellholes Too?

themarshallproject |  In California, lawyers accused staff at the Los Angeles County jail of chaining mentally ill detainees to chairs for days at a time. In West Virginia, people held in the Southern Regional Jail sued the state, saying they found urine and semen in their food. In Missouri, detainees in the St. Louis jail staged multiple uprisings last year, while in Texas, a guard at Houston’s overcrowded Harris County Jail said she and her coworkers had started carrying knives to work for fear that they wouldn’t have backup if violence broke out.

This article was published in partnership with The Associated Press.

And while the infamous Rikers Island jail complex in New York City has been the focus of media coverage for its surging number of deaths, rural and urban lockups from Tennessee to Washington to Georgia are not faring much better.

In other words, America’s jails are a mess.

“It’s hard to believe, but it seems jails are even more wretched than usual these last few months,” said David Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project. “Having worked in this field for 30 years, I don’t remember any other time when there seem to be so many large jails in a state of complete meltdown.”

Several lockups denied claims about deteriorating conditions or did not respond to requests for comment. A few, including Rikers, acknowledged problems such as infrastructure issues, detainee deaths and high staff attrition.

“We are working hard to stem the rippling effect of years of mismanagement and neglect within our city’s jails,” a spokesperson for the New York City Department of Correction, which runs Rikers, said in a statement. “Turning our jails around requires a collaborative effort, transparency and time.”

Unlike prisons, most jails are funded and managed locally, so the problems they face can vary widely from one county to the next. While there’s crumbling infrastructure in Atlanta’s Fulton County Jail, there’s been murky brown drinking water in Seattle’s King County Jail and overcrowding in Houston because of a backlog in the court system.

But more than a dozen employees, detainees and experts who spoke with The Marshall Project and The Associated Press highlighted two problems they’ve seen at jails across the country: too many people incarcerated, and not enough guards.

“Our jail facilities are at capacity,” said David Cuevas, president of the Harris County Sheriff’s Office deputies’ union. “It is truly not safe.”

The twin issues of overcrowding and understaffing have plagued jails across the country for years, and even before the pandemic many facilities were in disarray. Yet in the months after COVID-19 hit, the number of people in local lockups plummeted. People stayed home and committed fewer crimes. Police did not make as many arrests. Courts reduced bail. And jails let more people go home early. Nationally, the number of people in jail decreased by about 25% by the summer of 2020, according to data compiled by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.

But as concern about the virus faded, so did many of the measures designed to combat it — and soon jail populations began to rise. By the summer of 2022, many lockups held more people than they had in years, or became so overcrowded that detainees were forced to sleep on floors, in underground tunnels or in common areas without toilets.

 

Economics Of The American Prison System

smartasset  |  The American prison system is massive. So massive that its estimated turnover of $74 billion eclipses the GDP of 133 nations. What is perhaps most unsettling about this fun fact is that it is the American taxpayer who foots the bill and is increasingly padding the pockets of publicly traded corporations like Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group. Combined both companies generated over $2.53 billion in revenue in 2012, and represent more than half of the private prison business. So what exactly makes the business of incarcerating Americans so lucrative?

Most of it has to do with the way the American legal system works and how it has changed over the last 40 years. In the 1970’s, lawmakers were dealing with a nationwide rash of drug-use and crime. By declaring a nation-wide war on drugs in 1971, President Richard Nixon set a precedent for hard-line policies towards drug-related crime.

New York governor Nelson Rockefeller followed suit declaring “For drug pushing, life sentence, no parole, no probation.”  His policies once put into action promised 15 years to life in prison for drug users and dealers. His policies catalyzed the growth of a colossal corrections system that currently houses an estimated 2.2 million inmates.

The runaway growth of US corrections did not come overnight, and did not come from the government alone. Since the 1970’s federal and state correction agencies have consistently struggled to meet the increased demands brought on by the US Department of Justice and strict drug laws.

In 1982, three Texas businessmen, Tom Beasley, John Ferguson, and Don Hutto saw an opportunity in the shortcomings of the Texas corrections system’s inability to deal with this influx of incarcerations. They devised and executed a plan to secure the first government contract to design, build, and operate a corrections facility from the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Texas Department of Justice.

Contract in hand, the trio was given 90 days to open a detention center for undocumented aliens. As their January 28 deadline neared, Hutto, Ferguson, and Beasley had no facility, no staff and their experiment seemed doomed to fail.

On New Year’s Eve, 1983, Beasley decided to get crafty, “Well, we’ll just go to Houston and find a place,” he reportedly told Ferguson. Incredulous, Ferguson replied, “Tom, you’re crazy. There’s no possible way. This is New Year’s Day. There is no possible way we can find a place today.” Beasley simply responded, “We have to.”

The three men immediately got on a plane and began their search. After a litany of rejections they came upon the Olympic Motel at 1am on New Year’s Day and immediately began negotiations that lasted for three days.

After hiring the motel owner’s family and promising to return the motel to its original condition, the group was in business. They then converted all of the motel rooms to secure cells, procured secure transportation and opened shop on January 28, 1983 when 87 inmates were brought in. Hutto, Ferguson and Beasley formed Corrections Corporation of America, the largest prison private prison network in the United States.

With the precedent it set with the first private detention center, CCA changed the face of US corrections for good. The private sector came to be seen as a quick-fix to the problem of overcrowded, understaffed public prisons. Today, privatized prisons make up over 10% of the corrections market—turning over $7.4 billion per year.

 

What Is Captagon?

Newsweek |  In the past three months, investigators across Europe have intercepted thousands of Captagon pills, an amphetamine-based drug popular with the Islamic State militant group. Nicknamed "the jihadists' drug," Captagon keeps users awake for long periods of time, dulls pain and creates a sense of euphoria. According to one former militant who spoke to CNN in 2014, ISIS "gave us drugs, hallucinogenic pills that would make you go to battle not caring if you live or die." Given similar testimony from other fighters, experts say it seems likely that the hallucinogenic pills the militant took were Captagon.

Invented in Germany in the 1960s to treat attention and sleep disorders, and highly addictive, Captagon was banned throughout most of the world in the 1980s.

On May 10, Dutch investigators said they had discovered a drug lab the previous month that was churning out Captagon pills, and they were looking for two suspects associated with the lab. In March, Greek police confiscated more than 600,000 Captagon pills in a raid and arrested four people for allegedly manufacturing the drug.

Greek and Dutch police haven't said the Captagon stashes they found were destined for ISIS fighters.

Captagon is one of the brand names for the drug fenethylline, a combination of amphetamine and theophylline that relaxes the muscle around the lungs and is used to treat breathing problems. A German company first synthesized fenethylline in 1961, and when it discovered the drug improved alertness, doctors began prescribing it to treat narcolepsy and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Though generally without side effects, says Dr. Raj Persaud, a fellow at the London-based Royal College of Psychiatrists, overuse can cause extreme depression, tiredness, insomnia, heart palpitations and, in rare cases, blindness and heart attacks. In the 1980s, when the drug's addictiveness became clear, the United States and the World Health Organization listed it as a controlled substance, and it is now illegal to buy and sell throughout most of the world.

Nevertheless, fenethylline remains popular in the Middle East, particularly in Saudi Arabia, where more Captagon is consumed than in any other country in the world. Though Islamic law forbids the consumption of alcohol and other drugs, many users there see Captagon as a medicinal substance. In October 2015, Lebanese authorities arrested a Saudi prince at the Beirut airport after two tons of cocaine and Captagon pills, which sell for roughly $20 per pill in Saudi Arabia, were found on a private plane.

Once manufactured in Eastern Europe, Turkey and Lebanon, according to Columbia University's Journal of International Affairs, Captagon is now predominantly made in Syria. The Syrian conflict has allowed for illicit activities to flourish, and many fighters there know the benefits of using the drug.

The use of drugs in war has a long history. The ancient Greeks, the Vikings, U.S. Civil War soldiers and the Nazis all relied on drugs—wine, mushrooms, morphine and methamphetamines, respectively—to get them through the horror of battle. "The holy grail that armies around the world have been looking for is a drug that gives people courage," says Persaud, and Captagon comes close. "It doesn't give you distilled courage, but it gives you a tendency to want to keep going and impaired judgment, so you don't consider whether you're scared or not," he says. "You feel euphoria. You don't feel pain. You could say it's courage without the judgment." For a fighter in a war so brutally waged, the benefits of that are clear.

 

This High Potency Gubmint-Sanctioned Weed Is Mind-Killing Poison

MSDNC  |  The high potency cannabis that is now widely available may raise the risk of both psychosis and addiction, a report published Monday in The Lancet Psychiatry finds.

The potency of cannabis — measured by how much THC is found in the product — has been rising for nearly half a century, increasing by approximately 0.29% each year from 1970 to 2017, according to earlier research. THC is the chemical in cannabis responsible for its psychoactive effects.

That change could have important implications for public health, experts say.

“With the increasing strength of cannabis available in the U.S. and around the globe, it’s important to understand the long-term health outcomes that might be associated with using these types of products as compared to what has traditionally been available,” said Ziva Cooper, director of the UCLA Center for Cannabis and Cannabinoids.

Marijuana is legal for recreational use in 19 states plus Washington, D.C., according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Vermont is the only state that has a potency cap for cannabis products, though other states are looking into adding limits.

The finding that high potency cannabis is associated with a greater risk of psychosis and addiction “definitely should give people pause,” Cooper, who was not involved with the new research, said.

In Monday’s study, researchers analyzed data from 20 studies that included a total of nearly 120,000 cannabis users. They found that people with a first episode of cannabis-related psychosis were much more likely to have been using a product with high levels of THC than a product with low levels of the intoxicating chemical. Those using high potency weed were also much more likely to become addicted, compared to those who used low potency cannabis.

 

It's Not Just Fauci: Power-Sunstein An AssClown Two-Fer That Doesn't Bode Well....,(REDUX from 3/8/21)

WaPo |  Almost all conversations about roadblocks Trump faces or opposition to his initiatives centered on what was perceived as the media’s biased portrayal of him and his administration, rather than on anything the Democrats were doing.

Republicans and conservatives have grumbled about unfair coverage from the “mainstream media” for decades. But the Trump era has brought us to a new plateau, one where the media has moved from adversarial to oppositional. Many observers, on both right and left, have come to see the media as the leader of the resistance.

If you care about journalism, it’s a disturbing trend. Many in the media would undoubtedly lay much of the blame on Trump’s “fake news” attacks. But peruse the pages or websites of most of our nation’s leading news providers, and it’s easy to understand why such a perception has taken hold, apart from Trump’s claims. 

Former Democratic president Jimmy Carter’s widely reported comments in Maureen Dowd’s recent New York Times column about the media’s coverage of Trump were a welcome acknowledgment of the obvious from someone other than a Trump loyalist. 

“I think the media have been harder on Trump than any other president certainly that I’ve known about,” Carter said. “I think they feel free to claim that Trump is mentally deranged and everything else without hesitation.” 

Out of curiosity, I checked the Democratic National Committee’s website this week. Some of the headlines were: “Trump abuses role as commander-in-chief in latest lie.” “Tom Perez on Trump’s executive order to sabotage Americans’ health care.” “Trump’s lapdog Pence must return wasted taxpayer dollars.” 

That’s what you would expect from the opposition party. The problem is, headlines accusing Trump of “sabotage,” “lies” and more are not uncommon from our major media outlets. That’s why I was curious whether the DNC was still bothering to employ a press staff when it has been made so redundant.

How Can The U.S. Maintain Prosperity If It's Lost Its Capacity For Wealth Creation?

globalresearch |  GR: I think that resolving Ukraine is sort of like a short-term deal, but the longer term is going to be in fact shaking Europe away from NATO and the United States degree of influence.

MH: United States is thoroughly in control of European politicians. The only opposition to NATO and the US in Europe is the right wing. The nationalist wing. The left wing is fully behind the United States and has been ever since, really the National Endowment for Democracy and other US Agencies really took control of the left-wing parties throughout Europe. They’ve Tony Blairized the European left, the Social Democratic parties in Germany and the rest of Europe, the labour parties in England, these are not labour and not socialist, they’re basically pro-American neoliberal parties.

GR: I know that Russia is very rich in mineral deposits, its rich in oil and gas as well. Russia and Ukraine form part of the breadbasket of the world. And as they control the important minerals like lithium and palladium and so forth, so they’re dealing with Ukraine, part of that plan, as a result you’re going to see, as I mentioned, a lot of impacts worldwide including food, and we’re probably going to start to see even food shortages pretty soon.

MH: That is the intention, You have to realize that this was anticipated. Without gas, already German fertilizer companies are going out of business because fertilizer is made out of gas, and if they can’t get their Russian gas, they can’t make the fertilizer, and if you don’t have the fertilizer, the crops are not going to be as prevalent and abundant as they were before. So all of this, you have to assume that, it’s so obvious, they knew this would happen, and they expect the United States to benefit from the cost squeeze that it’s imposing on food importers to the US benefit.

GR: I just want to get a sense of what the United States has to fight back with. I mean, they had the prestige of the dollar in their ability to make up things, but they also have control, through using, confiscating, for example, the gold and the deposits of the Russian government, the Russian Central Bank. Are these efforts going to be, is that the sort of thing that they have, I mean we could also talk later on about the actual military, but could you talk about those sorts of tools that the United States has to fight back against Russia?

MH: Well, the obvious tool is that’s used for the last 75 years has been bribery. European politicians especially are very easy to bribe. And most countries, just simply paying them money, and backing their political campaigns, meddling in other countries by huge financial support of pro-US politicians is the obvious way. Targeted assassination ever since World War II when the British and Americans moved into Greece and began shooting all of the anti-Nazis because they were largely socialists, and England and America wanted to restore the Greek monarchy. You have Operation Gladio in Italy, you have the targeted assassinations from Chile all the way through the rest of Latin America and its wake. So, if you can’t buy them, kill them.

Then there are various military forces. And the main tool that the US has tried to use is sanctions. If they can’t get their oil, or finance it in gas or food from Russia, then America can simply turn off their food supply. And turn off critical raw materials and interrupt their economic processes because there are so many different components that you need for almost any kind of economic activity…

The United States was looking for pressure points. And it is going to try to work on the pressure points, sabotage certainly, is another tool that’s being used, as you see in Ukraine. So the question is whether this attempt on pressure points is going to force other countries to, certainly it’s going to cause suffering. In the short term for these countries.

Over the longer-term, they’re going to see, we’re going to have to become self-sufficient in the main pressure points. We’re going to have to produce our own food. Not import our wheat. We’re going to have to shift away from growing export plantation crops and have our own grain, maybe return to family size farming to do all this. We’re going to have to produce our own arms, we’re going to have to have our own fuel sources, and that would include solar energy and renewable energy to become independent of the American-dominated oil and gas and coal trade. So the longer-term, even medium-term effect of all of this is going to make other countries self-sufficient and independent.

There will be a lot of interruptions, even starvation, a lot of property transfers and disruption, but over the long term, the United States will, is destroying the idea of a single interconnected globalized order because it’s separated Europe and North America from the whole rest of the world.

GR: How is… When it comes to dealing with the oligarchs in Russia, and what they’re facing with these sanctions, do they want the sanctions to be ended so they can get involved with the United States, or are they taking to Putin and a “let’s do it on our own approach?”

MH: In the past, the oligarchs were very western oriented because when they transferred Russia’s oil and gas and nickel and real estate into their own hands, how did they cash out? There wasn’t any money in Russia because it was all destroyed in the, after 1991 in the shock therapy. The only way they could cash out was by selling some of their stocks to the west. And that’s what Khodorkovsky wanted to do when he wanted to sell Yukos to, I think, the Standard Oil Group. And now that they realize that the United States can simply grab their yachts, grab their British real estate, grab their sports teams, grab the assets they hold in the west, they’re realizing their only safety is to hold it within Russia and its allied economies, not US-based economies where whatever they have in the west can be grabbed.

So yes today, or yesterday, Chubais left Russia for good and went to the west, and you’re having the oligarchs choose. Either they remain in Russia and look at their wealth by creating Russian means of production or they leave Russia, they take their money and they run and hope that the west will let them keep some of what they stole.

GR: Among the countries that are not going to be supporting the sanctions against Russia or China, India, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kurdistan, I mean all those countries in the Central Asian region. And that seems to be benefiting the Belt and Road Initiative, I think.

MH: You’d think so. The big question mark is India. Because it’s so large. And India has already positioned itself to be the intermediary for a lot of financial trade financing with Russia. India is also prone to be pro-American. And Modi in the past politically has been very pro-American. But the fact is if you’re looking at India’s implicit national economic interests, its economic interests lies with the region it’s in. With Eurasia, not with the United States.

So the question is, I think within the Pentagon and the state department, their big worry is, how do we keep control of India in the US hands? That’s going to be the big crisis areas for the next few years.

GR: Maybe I’ll, maybe get you to put on your glasses to sort of looking ahead into the future. Maybe a couple of years from now. Given the prevailing trends, how is this going to play out? Is this, is it going to have one side advanced more than the other or is it going to be a nuclear husk? What is your thinking?

MH: I don’t think it’ll be nuclear, although it could, given the crazy neocons with their Christian fundamentalists in Washington, people like Pompeo thinking that Jesus will come if you blow up the world. I mean, these people are literally crazy.

I worked with National Security people 50 years ago at the Hudson Institute, and I couldn’t believe that human brains were as twisted as they were, wanting to blow up much of the world for religious reasons. And for ethnic reasons, and for personal psychology reasons. And these are the people that have somehow risen to a policy-making position in the United States, and they’re threatening not only the rest of the world, but of course the US economy as well.

But I don’t think atomic war is likely. I think that the United States is going to try to convince other countries that neoliberalism is the way that they can get rich. And of course, it’s not.

Neoliberalism impoverishes. Neoliberalism is a class war against labour by finance, primarily, and a class war against industry. A class war against governments. It’s the financial class really against the whole rest of society seeking to use debt leverage to control companies, countries, families and individuals by debt. And the question is, are they really going to be able to convince people that the way to get rich is to go into debt. Or are other countries going to say, this is a blind alley. And it’s been a blind alley really since Rome that bequeathed all the pro creditor debt laws to western civilization that were utterly different from those of the near east, that, where civilizations take off.

GR: And just maybe a final thought, I mean, I’m based in Canada, and it seems when I’m hearing about de-dollarization at the sinking of the US economy and how things are going to go for ordinary individuals, and I’m wondering if Canada can somehow escape that trajectory next to me or are we kind of manacles at the wrists, where the United States goes, we’re going there too?

MH: Canada is completely controlled by the banking sector. I wrote an article for the government’s think-tank, Canada and the New Monetary Order, in 1978, detailing how Canada was dependant. It’s very debt-financed, financially controlled, and its government is utterly corrupt. The neoliberal party, the liberal party there is fairly corrupt, and so are most of the other parties, and they look at the United States as protecting the corruption and economic gangsterism that enables them to control Canada.

GR: Well, Michael Hudson, I guess we’ve got to go now, but thanks for that very large and interesting discussion on our survival, how we survive this war, and what the consequences will be. Thank you very much for being my guest on Global Research.

MH: It’s good to be here.