EFTA00851562.pdf

From: Gregory Brown To: undisclosed-recipients:; Bcc: jeevacation@gmail.com Subject: Greg Brown's Weekend Reading and Other Things.. 07/12/20158 Date: Sun, 12 Jul 2015 09:13:50 +0000 Attachments: Bank_of_the_Underworld_Jake_Halpem_The_Atlantic_May_2015.docx; MELTDOWN_— Paying_the_Pricen PART_3_Weekly_Readings_July_12,_2015.docx; the_Future_ofMusic_MakingShemo_Jobatey_Huff_Post_Apr._27,_2015.docx; What is the most_nutritious vegetable_you_can_buy_Joanna_Fantozzi_The_Daily_Meal_ Janurry:26,:2015locx; Trac—y_Chapman bio.docx; Fossil_fuels_subsidized_by_a_'shocking':$10m_a_minutejay_IMF_experts_Kashmira_Ga nder_The_Independent_May_19,_2015.docx; How_Large_Are_Global_Energy_Subsidies_IMF_May_2015.pdf; Poverty_Rates_The_Economist_May_21st_2015.docx; DISTRAUGHT_PEOPLE,_DEADLY_RESULTS_Wesley_Lowery,_Kimberly_Kindy,yeit h_L_Alexander_TWP_June_30,2015.docx Inline-Images: image.png; image(1).png; image(2).png; image(3).png; image(4).png; image(5).png; image(6).png; image(7).png; image(8).png; image(9).png; image(10).png; image(11).png; image(12).png; image(13).png; image(I4).png; image(15).png; image(16).png; image(17).png; image(18).png; image(19).png; image(20).png; image(21).png; image(22).png; image(23).png; image(24).png; image(25).png; image(26).png; image(27).png; image(28).png; image(29).png; image(30).png; image(31).png; image(32).png; image(33).png DEAR FRIEND These wars don't work As one war on drugs ends, another is starting. It will be afailure, too EFTA00851562  Inline image 2 IN 1971 Richard Nixon fired the first shot in what became known as the "war on drugs"by declaring them "iublic enemy number one". In America and the other rich countries that fought by its side, the campaign meant strict laws and harsh sentences for small-time dealers and addicts. In the poor, chaotic countries that supplied their cocaine and heroin, it meant uprooting and spraying coca and poppy crops, and arming and training security forces. Billions of wasted dollars and many destroyed lives later, illegal drugs are still available, and the anti-drug warriors are wearying. In America and Western Europe addiction is increasingly seen as an illness. Marijuana has been legalized in a few places. Several countries may follow Portugal, which no longer treats drug use as a crime. But even as one drug war begins to wind down, another is cranking up across Asia, Russia and the Middle East (see article). Echoing Nixon, China's president has called for "forceful measures to wipe [drugs] out"; his Indonesian counterpart has declared drugs a "national emergency", and in January sent six traffickers to a firing squad. This week Indonesia executed eight more, despite international pleas for clemency. Iran is executing five times as many drug-smugglers as it did a few years ago. Russia is arguing for the spraying of opium-poppy fields in Afghanistan, and is trying to get its neighbors to follow it in banning methadone, an opioid used to wean heroin addicts off their fix. Earlier this year China lobbied the UN's drug-control body to place tighter restrictions on ketamine, an anesthetic, though it failed—for now, at least. Prohibition suits criminal gangs, which enjoy exclusive control of a global market worth roughly $300 billion annually. It is also convenient for corrupt politicians and officials, who can extract rents for turning a blind eye. Several of those whom Indonesia executed this week claimed that judges offered them clemency in exchange for huge bribes. In the main, though, what drives the new drug warriors is the same conviction that animated the old ones: the sincere, if mistaken, belief that cracking down on traffickers and users will make addiction go away. The lesson of the first war is that it will not. When Peru drove away its coca growers, they moved to Colombia. When Colombia kicked them out, they went back to Peru. After the Caribbean cocaine-trafficking route was sealed, new, bloodier ones sprang open in Mexico, and then in Central America. A shortage of one drug caused by a big seizure seldom lasted long; in the meantime addicts turned to alternatives, sometimes more dangerous ones. When clean needles were hard to get hold of, they used dirty ones. The drug war turned Latin American "cartels" into bands of sadistic, well-financed killers whose reach extended into governments, security forces, judiciaries and jails. Those preparing to prosecute the next drug war need only look west to see what lies ahead of them: more violence and corruption; more HIV/AIDS; fuller jails—and still the same, unending supply of drugs. EFTA00851563 Meanwhile, rules meant to stop opioids leaking to the black market have left the innocent to die in avoidable pain. Multiple-sclerosis sufferers and cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy have been denied the relief that cannabis can bring. Some researchers think that LSD (acid), MDMA (Ecstasy) or psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) might help treat depression. But nobody knows, because drug laws have made trials close to impossible. The row over ketamine is an unwelcome reprise. A safe, orally administered anesthetic, it can be used outside hospitals, even for caesarean sections and amputations. If China succeeds in tightening restrictions on the drug, poor people in countries with weak health systems will suffer and even die unnecessarily. In the West few politicians have been ready to admit the drug war's failure—even as they quietly moderate their policy. They need to be honest with their own voters about the misery it has caused. Only then can they make a good case to the rest of the world that drug addicts need treatment, not prison, and that supply should be managed, not suppressed. A UN meeting next year to take a fresh look at the international conventions that shape national drug laws would be an excellent place to start. The first drug war caused devastation enough. For history to repeat itself would be a tragedy. The Economist — May 2, 2015 ****** Big Brother's omnipresent government surveillance and public manipulation Inline image 1 I would like to start with the transcript of the opening statement by an official at a Brazilian Senate hearing on NSA spying because it crystalizes the dangers of the U.S. Government's massive covert- surveillance programs that was exposed to the public first by Wildleaks and later in more detail by former Booz Allen Hamilton system administrator counterintelligence analyst and whistle-blower EFTA00851564 Edward Snowden, who in 2013 leaked documents that revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many of them run by the NSA and the Five Eyes with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments. Brazilian Senate Hearing on NSA Spying — opening comments First of all Americans justification for everything since the September 11 attacks is terrorism, everything is in the name of national security, to protect its population. In reality, it's the opposite. A lot of the documents have nothing to do with terrorism or national security, but with competition between countries, and with companies' industrial financial and economic issues. Secondly, there's XKeyscore. When we first started publishing articles, the U.S. government's defense was that it was not invading the content of communications, just taking the metadata. That means the names of the people talking, who is calling whom, call durations. But if I know all of the people you are communicating with, and everyone they are communicating with, where you are when you are communicating, the call duration and the location, then I can learn a lot about your personality, your activity, and your life. This is a major invasion of privacy. In reality, the defense is totally false. The U.S. government has the ability to get not only metadata, but the actual content of your emails or what you say on the phone, the words you type into Google searches, the websites you visit, the documents you sent to colleagues. This system train track nearly everything that every individual is doing online. So if you're a journalist investigating the American government, if you work for a company with American competitors, or if you work in Human Rights involving the American government or any other field, they can very easily intercept your communication. If you're an American living in the U.S., they have to seek permission from a court but they always get it. But if you're not American, they don't need anything, no special permission at all. The consequences of eliminating privacy are difficult to predict, but we must understand that this will have an enormous impact. The population's ability to have demonstrations or to organize is greatly reduced when people don't have privacy. CITZENFOUR Trailer web site: http youtu.be/XiGwAvd5mvM If you haven't seen the Academy Award winning CITIZENFOUR documentary film directed by Laura Poitras concerning Edward Snowden and the NSA spying scandal, I strongly suggest that you do. Shot in the cinema verite style, the film had its U.S. premiere on October 10, 2014 at the New York Film Festival and its UK premiere on October 17, 2014 at the BFI London Film Festival. The film features Glenn Greenwald and was co-produced by Poitras, Mathilde Bonnefoy, and Dirk Wilutzky, with Steven Soderbergh and others serving as executive producers. In January 2013, Laura Poitras received an encrypted e-mail from a stranger who called himself "Citizen Four". In it, he offered her inside information about illegal wiretapping practices of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and other intelligence agencies. Poitras had already been working for EFTA00851565 several years on a film about monitoring programs in the US that were the result of the September 11 attacks. In June 2013, accompanied by investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian intelligence reporter Ewen MacA.skill, she went to Hong Kong with her camera for the first meeting with the stranger, who identified himself as Edward Snowden. Several other meetings followed. The recordings gained from the meetings form the basis of the film. CITIZENFOUR is a real life thriller, unfolding by the minute, giving audiences unprecedented access to filmmaker Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald's encounters with Edward Snowden in Hong Kong, as he hands over classified documents providing evidence of mass indiscriminate and illegal invasions of privacy by the National Security Agency (NSA). Poitras had already been working on a film about surveillance for two years when Snowden contacted her, using the name "CITIZENFOUR," in January 2013. He reached out to her because he knew she had long been a target of government surveillance, stopped at airports numerous times, and had refused to be intimidated. When Snowden revealed he was a high-level analyst driven to expose the massive surveillance of Americans by the NSA, Poitras persuaded him to let her film. CITIZENFOUR places you in the room with Poitras, Greenwald, and Snowden as they attempt to manage the media storm raging outside, forced to make quick decisions that will impact their lives and all of those around them. CITIZENFOUR not only shows you the dangers of governmental surveillance — it makes you feel them.  After seeing the film, you will never think the same way about your phone, email, credit card, web browser, or profile, ever again. r00% real-life espionage story unfolding minute by minute before our eyes. CITIZENFOUR is a major work on multiple levels, and a deeply unsettling experience. We are living in the age of Big Brother and in a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and public manipulation by a super-state willing to cross any border, tap any phone and manipulate any content by employing Astroturf that attacks any issue by controversializing and attacking the people, personalities and organizations surrounding it rather than addressing the facts. In a world where people have no real privacy and newspeak allows the term of WMD enables a super- state to attack another country for no other reason other than it can the invasion of privacy and ubiquitous surveillance leads one to conclude that George Orwell's vision of 1984 with its official deception, secret surveillance and manipulation of recorded history by a totalitarian or authoritarian state of Oceania is here. Thank you Edward Snowden for your courage and thank you Laura Poitras for this amazing look at what it takes for a real journalist to pursue a dangerous story which the U.S. Government has labeled "Treason" which is just one of the crimes Snowden has been charged with — the government also wants to prosecute him under the Espionage Act, which as Amy Davidson wrote in The New Yorker — why CITIZENFOUR deserved to win the 2015 Oscar `Best Documentary Feature' film of the year — if not for the decade. And as Davidson concluded — What the country still has to work out is whether the Snowden documents were simply revealing or actually transformative. That's the question about a good movie, too, though one shouldn't underestimate the value of revelation, or truth, alone." In the age of Hillary Clinton's inspired "Chipotle Week" New York Times and the never ending ICardashian stories, it is great to see that there are people like Edward Snowden EFTA00851566 who are willing to sacrifice everything, journalist like Greenwald and filmmakers like Poitias who are intent to find the truth and get it out to the public. Fossil fuels subsidized by a 'shocking' $iom a minute, say IMF experts Inline image I We are often told by supporters of the fossil fuels industry that they are a much cheaper alternative to renewables and other energy sources, except that a new study by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is about to dispel this myth saying that fossil fuels firms benefit from $5.3 trillion or as Kashmira Gander wrote in The Independent - a `shocking' $10 million a minute. Gander points out that this is more than the annual total worldwide governments spend on health care, according to World Health Organization (WHO) statistics. Researchers defined energy subsidies as the difference between what consumers pay for energy and its "true costs", as firms do not pay the costs levied against governments by burning fossil fuels. This sum factors in supply costs and the damage that energy consumption inflicts on people's health and the environment, two senior IMF officials wrote in a blog post, entitled "Act Local, Save Global", launching the study on Monday. China will spend the most this year, and was responsible for over 4o per cent of the total amount as it relies heavily on coal, followed by the US at 13 per cent, while the EU will account for 6 per cent. "These estimates are shocking," experts Benedict Clements and Vitor Gaspar wrote in the post. "Energy subsidies are both large and widespread. They are pervasive across advanced and developing countries: the added. EFTA00851567 This study provides a comprehensive, updated picture of energy subsidies at the global and regional levels. The first attempt at this was Clements and others (2013), which provided estimates of global and regional pre- and post-tax subsidies for 2011, but was based on the very limited country-level data available at the time on the environmental damage caused by energy consumption. A key finding of the study was that global post-tax subsidies at $2 trillion were substantially bigger than pre-tax subsidies of $492 billion and mainly reflected undercharging for the environmental damage associated with energy consumption. Another was that subsidies were spread across both advanced and developing countries. Parry and others (2014) developed more refined estimates of the environmental costs by energy product for more than 150 countries. This paper uses these to provide updated estimates of post-tax subsidies for 2013 and projections for 2015. The study also estimates the fiscal, environmental, and net welfare gains from eliminating these energy subsidies. The key findings of the study are the following: • Post-tax energy subsidies are dramatically higher than previously estimated — $4.9 trillion (6.5 percent of global GDP) in 2013, and projected to reach $5.3 trillion (6.5 percent of global GDP) in 2015. • Post-tax subsidies are large and pervasive in both advanced and developing economies and among oil-producing and non-oil-producing countries alike. But these subsidies are especially large (about 13-18 percent) relative to GDP in Emerging and Developing Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and Pakistan (MENAP), and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). • Among different energy products, coal accounts for the biggest subsidies, given its high environmental damage and because (unlike for road fuels) no country imposes meaningful excises on its consumption. • Most energy subsidies arise from the failure to adequately charge for the cost of domestic environmental damage—only about one-quarter of the total is from climate change — so unilateral reform of energy subsidies is mostly in countries' own interests, although global coordination could strengthen such efforts. • The fiscal, environmental, and welfare impacts of energy subsidy reform are potentially enormous. Eliminating post-tax subsidies in 2015 could raise government revenue by $2.9 trillion (3.6 percent of global GDP), cut global CO2 emissions by more than 20 percent, and cut pre-mature air pollution deaths by more than half. After allowing for the higher energy costs faced by consumers, this action would raise global economic welfare by $1.8 trillion (2.2 percent of global GDP). The study urges world leaders to take action, and predicts that reforms of energy taxation and subsidies could have "enormous" impacts on fiscal, environmental, and welfare of countries by raising government revenue by $2.9trillion (£2 trillion), or 3.6 per cent of global GDP. It added that changes would also have the potential to cut carbon emissions by 20 per cent, and halve pre-mature air pollutions deaths by more than half. "The resources freed from subsidy reform could be used to meet critical public spending needs or reduce taxes that are choking economic growth," Messrs Clements and Gaspar wrote. Nicholas Stern, a climate economist at the London School of Economics, told The Guardian: "This very important analysis shatters the myth thatfossilfuels are cheap by showing just how huge their real costs are. There is no justification for these enormous subsidiesforfossilfuels, which distort markets EFTA00851568 and damages economies, particularly in poorer countries." Attached, for further reading please find the IMF Study - How Large Are Global Energy Subsidies? - as well as The Independent article by Kashmira Gander - Fossilfuels subsidized by a 'shocking' *tom a minute, say IMF experts. Is Bitcoin the future of Money? Or just another Ponzi or Pyramid Scheme Inline image 1 Last month in The Washington Post journalist Matt O'Brien wrote an interesting article — Bitcoin isn't thefuture of money — it's either a Ponzi scheme or a pyramid scheme.... Wow.... O'Brien's assertion is that Bitcoin is a tech stock and not currency as each Bitcoin is really a share in a system that supposed to make it cheaper to transfer things online — money, stocks, bonds, even the deed to your house — by cutting out the middleman. But does it really? O'Brien says that it doesn't remove the middleman so much as replace him with middlemen who don't make you pay much, but make society as a whole do so instead. And as O'Brien ask, is this progress? O'Brien: It's supposed to be. Ever since the early days of the Internet, people have been trying to figure out how to transfer money online without having to go through the financial system. The problem, though, is if I send you money, how do you know I haven't already spent it or sent it to somebody else? You don't. So the only solution has been to have a trusted third-party, like a bank, sit in between us. I send the money to the bank, it verifies that I actually have this money to send, and then it sends it on to you, all for a 2 percent fee, of course. Bitcoin's breakthrough is to have a decentralized network of "miners" sit in between us instead. Now, remember, these miners are trying to win new Bitcoins by solving computationally-taxing math EFTA00851569 problems. The clever part, though, is that in the process of doing so, they also create a public ledger of every single Bitcoin transaction, what's called the blockchain. That includes every Bitcoin that's ever been won, every Bitcoin that's ever been used, and every Bitcoin that's ever been transferred. So now we don't need a bank to know that I have the money I'm sending to you, and that I'm only sending it to you. The miners confirm all this. And the best part is that instead of having to pay the bank myself to do this, the system pays the miners in new Bitcoins. The question, though, is how you get people to mine Bitcoin to begin with. Sure, you can tell them that Bitcoin is digital money they can use to buy things online, but they already have money they can already use to buy things online. And while merchants would be more than happy to save the 2.5 percent they pay in credit card transaction fees, customers are a lot more blasé since they don't pay them directly. The answer, then, was to do what makes anything popular: make it exclusive. Specifically, Bitcoin limits the total number of coins that will ever be created to 21 million. Now, for Bitcoin's first year and a half, as Nathaniel Popper documents in his page-turning history Digital Gold, there were still only a handful of people, if that, mining it. But that began to change when libertarians, who were convinced, just convinced, that the Federal Reserve's money-printing would mean the doom of the dollar, discovered Bitcoin and its non-inflatable money supply. A boom was born. But what made people mine Bitcoins is what has kept from spending Bitcoins. Think about it like this. Bitcoin's finite supply means that its price should go up, and keep going up. So if you have dollars that are losing a little value to inflation every year and Bitcoins that are gaining it, which one are you going to use to buy things with? The question answers itself, and it raises another. Why would this ever change? Unless you can't buy something online with dollars — like drugs — you'd always want to use your dollars instead. Buying things with Bitcoin would be like cashing out your Apple stock in 1978 to go grocery shopping even though you have plenty of actual cash lying around. The catch-22 is people buy Bitcoins because they think the price will go to infinity and beyond once everybody uses them, but they don't spend their own Bitcoins because they think the price will go to infinity and beyond once everybody else uses them. And so nobody uses them. But if nobody uses them, then the price will stay stuck at something a lot less than infinity let alone beyond. So the Bitcoin faithful have tried to not only convert people, but also convince them to martyr themselves, financially- speaking, for the crypto cause. It goes something like this. Hey, do you want to hear about the future? It's a digital currency called Bitcoin that lets you spend or move your money online without paying any fees. Sounds great. How does it do that? Well, Bitcoin saves you money by making transactions irreversible. So ... if I get scammed, I got scammed? There's nothing I can do about it? Yes. Okay, but is it at least easy to use? The thing is, I don't actually use it. I just hoard it. I'm waiting for some greater fools to push up the price by using theirs. Oh. Yeah. So you should buy some Bitcoins and use yours. I'll get back to you on that. But Bitcoin is good for something other than redistributing wealth from one libertarian to another. That's transferring money, or anything else for that matter, online. "The design supports a tremendous variety of possible transaction types," Bitcoin's shadowy inventor Satoshi Nakamoto wrote back in 2010, including "escrow transactions, bonded contracts, third party arbitration, multi-party signature, etc." So anytime you need to send any kind of financial asset or agreement to somebody else, you can send it along with a Bitcoin and, through the beauty of the blockchain, avoid having to pay a lot of fees. That's why Wall Street banks are looking into whether they can build their own blockchains to cut costs before their competitors do. And while sending money is cheap within the U.S., it's not across international borders — the average transfer fee, according to the World Bank, is 7.5 percent. It's not hard to imagine, in other words, that Bitcoin could claim a big chunk of the $500 EFTA00851570 billion remittance market, although the difficulty of actually getting the physical cash to people in developing countries is still a significant hurdle. Wait a minute, though. How does the blockchain cut costs again? Remember, instead of you paying the bank a fee to process a transaction, the Bitcoin system pays miners new coins to do so. Then these transactions get added to the list of all others in the public ledger, the blockchain. But anytime it seems like you're getting something for nothing the costs are probably just being hidden. What are those costs? Well, Bitcoin mining is a pretty expensive business. Even the most specialized computers, which mine Bitcoins and only mine Bitcoins, require a lot of energy. So much so that Bitcoin miners have set up shop in far-flung places like Iceland where geothermal energy is cheap and Arctic air is cheaper still — free — for them to run and cool off their machines at the lowest possible price. Okay, but why should we care that Bitcoin miners have big energy bills? They're the ones paying them, after all. Well, for the most part. The problem is the price you pay for energy doesn't include the cost we all pay for pollution. So energy-intensive businesses that are paying less than they "should" for it can generate environmental spillovers on everyone else, or what economists call negative externalities. Once you take this into account, it's not clear how much Bitcoin is really cutting cost so much as shifting them. Specifically, it turns your transaction costs into our pollution costs. Now, Bitcoin might still lower costs overall, but the calculus isn't as simple as it appears if you only add up the benefits. It's not clear what Bitcoin is or what it will be, but it is clear what it's not. It's not a currency. People don't set prices in Bitcoin and, for the most part, don't buy things with it either. The only function of money it comes close to performing is as a store of value, but it doesn't even do that well. Even though it seems like Bitcoin prices should go up and up and up, it hasn't for a year and a half now. In fact, Bitcoin's $225-a-coin price is 8o percent less than its December 2013 peak. That said, Bitcoin might be a better way to send things online — or at least its technology, the blockchain, might — but, again, that depends on how much energy it takes to run the network. In the meantime, though, Bitcoin is still a little bit of a Ponzi — or is it a pyramid? — scheme that its libertarian early adopters are trying to cash in on. The future might not belong to Bitcoin, but it should to its technology. Back to my assessment. I got sort of lost on the environmental tangent in O'Brien's article and my tech savvy knowledgeable friends in Silicon Valley continue to tell me that Bitcoin is the future. But the fact that Bitcoin lost 8o percent of its December 2013 peak price I truly question its value as a currency as oppose to a cheaper convenience and could suffer a similar fate to traveler's cheques, which were made obsolete by the arrival and mass use of credits and debit cards. And yes in absolute terms it is a Ponzi scheme, but so is Wall Street and most financial markets. There are a number of new age financial exchanges that are trying to challenge FOREX (which has an average daily trading volume of US$4 trillion) and today Bitcoin is just one of them. Remember What You Vote For EFTA00851571  Inline image Good evening. I'm Chris Matthews in San Francisco. Tonight, we live in the land of the chicken hawk, always with a love of war but not an actual appetite. He speaks and writes a tough game, but flies away at the prospect of actual combat. For example, you can hear the cries of the chicken hawk growing loud for a quick air strike on Iran but not a peep for the grim struggle on the ground in Iraq and Syria against ISIS. Forty-seven Republican senators wrote a letter to the ayatollah trying to derail the negotiations over nuclear weapons in Iran, but you can't find one Republican senator ready to pass a war resolution against ISIS. What gives here? Does the right like to blow the bugle, only to scramble when they have to send in troops? David Corn is the Washington bureau chief for "Mother Jones" and Flashpoint Global Partners Evan Kohlmann is an NBC News terrorism analyst. Let's start -- first of all, Republican leaders and their right-wing allies love blowing the bugle for war. They love the notion of war. Let's watch. *** MATTHEWS: Let me finish tonight with this whole idea of voting for the person, not the party. Well, the problem is you don 't just get the person, you do get the party. If you voted for George W. back in 2000, you got Dick Cheney and the whole gang of neocons in his office and in the Defense Department. You got a war in Iraq for your vote. EFTA00851572 Expect the same problem the next time around. You vote for what seems to be a reasonable Republican candidate and you get the party apparatus with him, you get a hawkish foreign policy and a whole bunch of neocons jumping into administration jobs, the NSC, Defense, State, anywhere you'll look, you'll find hawks edging toward their favorite war, their most desirable regime change. Believe me, we've been there. I've been there. Why? Because even now they sit antsy and festering over there at the American Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, or all those front group sounding places like the Committee for the Present Danger or emergency committee on whatever, all packed with senior fellows who busy themselves writing op-ed columns pushing for the next regime change. But when it comes to putting their personal or political boots on the ground, watch them scatter. Try to find a Republican out there right now pushing for a war resolution against ISIS. Just try and find one. Lots of bugles on Iran and how the United States should shut the bargaining and just bomb the place. Why? Because that's the stuff the armchair generals love, the notion of a bite-size military operation, a single bombing raid, you know, a cake walk, like the one they promised in Iraq. This is how they get us in every time, it's the only way to go, then promise it will be quick and easy them. Call any one who opposes them an appeaser. How's all that working for you? And that's HARDBALL for now. Thanks for being with us. Hardball with Chris Matthews — April 17, 2015 ****** This Can't Be True There have been 500 people shot and killed by police in the U.S. so far in 2015 EFTA00851573  Inline image 3 Officer Involved: Police shootings of the mentally unstable in America In March alone, in people died during police encounters — 36 more than the previous month. As in the past, numerous incidents were spurred by violent threats from suspects, and two officers were shot in Ferguson during a peaceful protest. However, the deaths follow a national pattern: suspects were mostly people of color, mentally ill, or both. As a result conversations about police procedurals and officer misconduct are increasingly surfacing, due in large part to the Department of Justice's damning report of racial discrimination and unlawful activity in Ferguson's police department. As of this week police officers in the United States have shot and killed at least Soo people so far in 2015, according to a Washington Post analysis. The Booth gun death at the hands of police officers came Thursday night in Boulder Creek, Calif., after officers were dispatched to a home on reports of a family fight. Police officials told local media that when they arrived, they encountered a man with two firearms whom they shot and killed. It was one of four fatal police shootings that occurred on Thursday — the others were in Chicago, Phoenix and Parowan, Utah. The 5ooth fatal police shooting comes amid a particularly deadly stretch — at least two people have been shot and killed by police every single day so far this month. At least 31 people were shot and killed by police officers during the first week of July, making it the deadliest such week of the year so far. On Tuesday, officers across the country shot and killed eight people, the most police shootings that have occurred on any single day in 2015. The number of people shot and killed so far this year easily exceeds the figures reported by the FBI for any single year since 1976. The federal data, which officials acknowledge is incomplete, relies on voluntary reporting from just a sliver of the nation's more than 13,000 state and local police departments. While the FBI has never recorded more than 46o fatal police shootings in an entire year, while The Washington Post identified 463 such shootings in just the first six months of 2015. DISTRAUGHT PEOPLE, DEADLY RESULTS - 2Inline image 4 EFTA00851574 Officers often lack the training to approach the mentally unstable, experts say. How else can one explain why so many American cops believe that shooting a schizophrenic man dead for failing to drop a screwdriver is an acceptable outcome? The family of a mentally-ill man shot by Dallas Police officers when he walked to his front door carrying a screwdriver last year released video Monday of the deadly incident. Jason Harrison, 38, can be seen in the police body-camera video walking to the front door after his mother opens it for the officers and walks outside past them. She called police asking for help with Harrison, who suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Family members told reporters from local news station WFAA they've had to call the police on Harrison before. Harrison then came to the door fiddling with a screwdriver. Dallas PD said the officers then yelled for him to drop the tool and when he lunged at them with it, officers shot him, WFAA reported. "When you're dealing with somebody that's mentally ill, you're not supposed to agitate, you're not supposed to movefast, you're not supposed to inflame," said Geoff Henley, the Harrison family attorney who has been retained in the wrongful death lawsuit against the Dallas Police Department. The video shows officers carrying tasers, but the non-lethal weapons were never mentioned or used, WFAA reported. "They didn't acknowledge him, they just acknowledged the screwdriver,"said David Harrison, the victim's brother. "Immediately after [my mother]got out of the way ... it wentfrom zero to a hundred." The Dallas Police Department said the two officers who fired were justified in the shooting and they remain on active duty, WFAA reported. RAW BODY CAM: Dallas Police officers shoot mentally-ill Jason Harrison holding screwdriver Inline image 6 Web Link: https://youtu.be/QMfupZ64TiM EFTA00851575 Let's look at the story of Gary Page, a 6o year-old disabled handyman had a long history of schizophrenia and depression and, since his wife died in February, he had been struggling to hold his life together who on a bright Saturday morning in March snapped. Page slit his wrists, grabbed a gun and climbed the stairs to his stepdaughter's place in the Pines Apartments in Harmony, Ind. He said he wanted to die. And then he called 911. Nationwide, police have shot and killed 124 people this year who, like Page, were in the throes of mental or emotional crisis, according to a Washington Post analysis. The dead account for a quarter of the 462 people shot to death by police in the first six months of 2015. The vast majority were armed, but in most cases, the police officers who shot them were not responding to reports of a crime. More often, the police officers were called by relatives, neighbors or other bystanders worried that a mentally fragile person was behaving erratically, reports show. More than 5o people were explicitly suicidal. "I want to shoot the cops," Page slurred to the dispatcher, prodding his stepdaughter to confirm that, yes, he had a gun. "I want them to shoot me." Minutes later, Page's death wish was granted. Two Clay County sheriffs deputies arrived to find that he had taken a neighbor hostage. They opened fire, striking him five times in the torso and once in the head. Page's gun later turned out to be a starter pistol, loaded only with blanks. His threats of violence turned out to be equally empty, the product of emotional instability and agonizing despair. More than half the killings involved police agencies that have not provided their officers with state-of-the-art training to deal with the mentally ill. And in many cases, officers responded with tactics that quickly made a volatile situation even more dangerous. A Washington Post recent analysis provides for the first time a national, real-time tally of the shooting deaths of mentally distraught individuals at the hands of law enforcement. Criminal-justice experts say that police are often ill equipped to respond to such individuals — and that the encounters too often end in needless violence. "This a national crisis," said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, an independent research organization devoted to improving policing. "We have to get American police to rethink how they handle encounters with the mentally ill. Training has to change." As a debate rages over the use of deadly force by police, particularly against minorities, The Post is tracking every fatal shooting by a police officer acting in the line of duty in 2015. Reporters are culling news reports, public records and other open sources on the Internet to log more than a dozen factors about each case, including the age and race of the victim, whether the victim was armed and the circumstances that led to the fatal encounter. The FBI also logs fatal police shootings, but officials acknowledge that their data is far from complete. In the past four decades, the FBI has never recorded more than 46o fatal shootings in a single year. The Post hit that number in less than six months. At least 125 people with signs of mental illness have died in police encounters in the U.S. so far this year, according to the latest accounting from The Washington Post. The Post viewed these killings in which the mental health of the victim appeared to play a role, either because the person expressed suicidal intentions or because police or family members confirmed a history of mental illness. This approach likely understates the scope of the problem, experts said. EFTA00851576 Last week The Washington Post published a database with information on every fatal shooting by a police officer in the line of duty in the U.S. They took the extra step of identifying — when they could — details about the mental health of the deceased. In evaluating the role that mental or emotional crisis played in police fatalities, investigative reporter Kimberly Kindy says that the Post attempted to be cautious as the paper compiled this data. "Unless thefamilies identified the deceased as somebody who was mentally ill or the police department identified them as mentally ill, we did not — even if it may on the surface of things (have] appeared as if they might be," she tells NPR's Eric Westervelt. "So it's a conservative number — but even with it being conservative, it was a quarter of the killings." As of this week st least 71 people have been shot and killed by police across the United States within the past 3o days, according to Washington Post data. Please see via the web link below The Washington Post article: 500 People Shot Dead By Police This Year Web Link: One of the Big Uglies in America is the way we treat (ignore) the mental ill. It is estimated that we incarcerate more mentally ill then we treat in hospital. Therefore if the prison has become the psychiatric hospital, the police officer has become the psychiatric nurse. The problem with this is that police officers are not trained to deal with the mentally ill. Furthermore, traditional tactics that a police officer is trained to use [are] the very opposite of what they should be doing. It doesn't work very well with somebody who's in a mental health crisis, or who has a serious mental illness, for you to get in their face, yell for them to throw down a weapon. Most police officer-involved shootings happen within 90 seconds to two minutes of arrival of officers at the scene. Much of the time — as one experts said — there's a lot of white noise in their head, so [police officers] need to not move in and take control of the situation like you would with a criminal. They need to give a lot of space, slow things down, speak calmly and not try to immediately control the situation. That tends to escalate things and create a volatile situation instead of de-escalating things so you can safely bring a mentally ill person into custody or, you know, take them to the hospital, which is many times [why] family or friends are calling and asking for that kind of assistance — transportation to a mental health facility. The United States continues to have one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with 5 percent of the world population, but nearly 25 percent of the world's prisoners. Inmates are spending more time behind bars as states adopt "truth in sentencing laws," which requires inmates to serve 85 percent of their sentence behind bars. In 2012, about 1 in every 35 adults in the United States, or 2.9 percent of adult residents, was on probation or parole or incarcerated in prison or jail, the same rate observed in 1997. If recent incarceration rates remain unchanged, an estimated 1 out of every 20 persons will spend time behind bars during their lifetime; and many of those caught in the net that is cast to catch the criminal offender will be suffering with mental illness. It also appears that the individuals being incarcerated have more severe types of mental illness, including psychotic disorders and major mood disorders than in the past. In fact, according to the American Psychiatric Association, on any given day, between 2.3 and 3.9 percent of inmates in state prisons are estimated to have schizophrenia or other psychotic disorder; between 13.1 and 18.6 percent EFTA00851577 have major depression; and between 2.1 and 4.3 percent suffer from bipolar disorder. Across the nation, individuals with severe mental illness are three times more likely to be in a jail or prison than in a mental health facility and 40 percent of individuals with a severe mental illness will have spent some time in their lives in either jail, prison, or community corrections. I think we can safely say there is no doubt that our jails and prisons have become America's major mental health facilities, a purpose for which they were never intended. Today's police training centers on taking control. It really requires a complete shift in culture, in the way they view policing, and so it's a learning curve. And what tends to happen is that police departments start to do this type of training, like you're seeing in the LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department], when they've had a number of high-profile cases that have gone wildly wrong and there's been some community protests. In Los Angeles where I live there are so... so many of these stories; one in particular, though, is Lavall Hall, a schizophrenic young man. His mother called for help because he went outside in the really chilly, cold air. He was out there in his underwear swinging a broomstick. The police show up, and within minutes, he's gunned down. And the mother said, 'I wish I would've never called them.' It's just heartbreaking because, case after case, you're talking about family members and friends who call for help, and the person ends up dead. ... What's also heartbreaking is I think the police officers — their lives are changed forever when they take the life of somebody like this. They deserve a chance at knowing how to handle these situations and many of them are not given that chance by being given the proper training. 2. Inline image 7 One of the big obstacles today is that police are increasingly seeing themselves separate from the public — us and them... They are often more concerned about defending a shoot then they are about trying to identify what went wrong so that procedures will be change and these types of situations don't end up with a death. This cycle has to stop. Consider this; in just the month of March 2015, American police officers killed 111 people, which is more than the entire UK police have killed since 1900. Obviously the methods that American police are using today, especially with the mentally ill are madness and this needs to change. The most dangerous thing that anyone in the public can do is to remain indifferent and this is my rant of the week... EFTA00851578  WEEK's READINGS The Greek Debt Crisis (As of this week) By now like me even if you are trying to keep up with the debt crisis in Greece you find yourself confused as it seems that the Greek Parliament just approved a settlement/deal similar to the austerity measures demanded by its European creditors a week ago which was overwhelmingly rejected by Greek voters last Sunday in a special referendum. But by Friday, the euphoria had faded with Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras's who vowed to stand up to Europe, caved to the harsh realization that the birthplace of democracy stood just 48 hours away from financial ruin — and Greeks were poised to swallow what amounted to the same dose of austerity they had refused in a vote just a week ago. First of all the size of Greece's debt is daunting. At 317 billion euros at the end of 2014, or nearly $354 billion, it is the second highest national debt in the world, when measured as a proportion of gross domestic product: 177 percent. Only Japan's, at 245 percent, is higher. But as anyone who owes money knows, the burden is not so much the size of the loan but the te