A moving video of the extraordinary recovery — and resilience — of an abandoned dog who was left to die in a trash heap is reminding us this week of the healing power of love, friendship and second chances.
On Nov. 15, when Eldad Hagar first laid eyes on Miley, an abandoned dog living among piles of trash on the outskirts of Los Angeles, his heart broke.
“When I got there, I almost couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” Hagar, the co-founder of animal rescue organization Hope For Paws, told The Huffington Post of his first encounter with the pup. “It’s almost as if this place was struck by a tsunami.”
Miley, covered in mange and infections, was so lifeless and defeated that Hagar, who recorded the dog’s rescue on camera, says she “didn’t even have the energy” to run away from him as he approached her.
Hagar says he rushed to Miley’s side after he heard about the pooch’s plight from a local resident. The tipster told him that Miley had been living in the trash heap for at least a few months. It is believed that she was abandoned by her owners.
Though he knew that Miley wouldn’t be in good shape, Hagar says he was still shocked when he finally made contact with her. Her physical deterioration was “definitely one of the worst cases” he’d ever seen, he said.
He knew he had to get Miley to a hospital right away.
Gaining the pup’s trust was no easy feat, however. Hagar says he offered her food and sat with her in the pile of trash for an hour before she was finally ready to leave with him. Then he got her into his car to be brought to the vet.
“She was very lucky we rescued her when we did, because her condition would have continued to deteriorate until she would have died a miserable and painful death,” Hagar said.
After examining Miley, veterinarian Dr. Lisa Youn discovered that the pooch wasn’t just suffering from mange and bacterial infections, but parasites and malnutrition, as well.
“She was in so much pain,” Hagar said.
Over the next two weeks, Miley got intensive medical care and was treated with antibiotics, medicine for parasites and frequent medicated baths. Slowly but surely, her spirits began to lift.
It wasn’t, however, until Miley found a best friend that her recovery took a dramatic turn for the better.
Miley met Frankie the chihuahua after he was rescued from a sewer tunnel by Hagar and a friend. The tiny dog had almost drowned, Hagar said, because of a spell of heavy rain.
“He was so scared of everything,” Hagar wrote of Frankie in the video. “Miley took Frankie under her wing and they quickly became really good friends.”
Miley and Frankie, who are wonderfully affectionate with each other, are said to be doing well.
The “worst part is behind [them],” Hagar told the HuffPost, adding that Miley should be “100 percent” in a few months.
Watch the adorable duo playing with each other in the video above. To find out more about the work that Hope For Paws does, visit the organization’s website andFacebook page.
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That first YouTube video also had the following comment:
Published on Dec 12, 2013
Please make a small donation to Hope For Paws and help us start 2014 strong with many more rescues. A $5 donation from many people would make all the difference to so many animals: HopeForPaws.org
Hope For Paws took care of Miley’s vet care, but she is now fostered by our friends from The Fuzzy Pet Foundation. Please visit their website to fill an application to adopt her: fuzzyrescue.org
Little guest star – Frankie was also rescued by Hope For Paws (with help from Lisa Chiarelli), and is now being fostered by our friends from The Forgotten Dog Foundation. If you would like to adopt him, please fill an application here: theforgottendog.org
Thanks 🙂
Eldad
The Hope For Paws website is here. Please, please make a small Christmas donation. It makes such a difference. Chapter Twenty-Three of The Book comes out in thirty minutes and, I hope, goes a long way to demonstrate the value of our relationship with dogs over thousands upon thousands of years.
I wrote down the title of today’s post a few days back. Jean and I had just watched the BBC Panorama Special regarding Amazon UK. It had been screened on the 25th November and was described:
It’s the online retailer that has transformed the way we shop, but how does Amazon treat the workers who retrieve our orders? Working conditions in the company’s giant warehouses have been condemned by unions as among the worst in Britain. Panorama goes undercover to find out what happens after we fill our online shopping basket.
Or more fully reported in a BBC News item, as this extract reveals:
A BBC investigation into a UK-based Amazon warehouse has found conditions that a stress expert said could cause “mental and physical illness”.
Prof Michael Marmot was shown secret filming of night shifts involving up to 11 miles of walking – where an undercover worker was expected to collect orders every 33 seconds.
It comes as the company employs 15,000 extra staff to cater for Christmas.
Amazon said in a statement worker safety was its “number one priority”.
Undercover reporter Adam Littler, 23, got an agency job at Amazon’s Swansea warehouse. He took a hidden camera inside for BBC Panorama to record what happened on his shifts.
He was employed as a “picker”, collecting orders from 800,000 sq ft of storage.
A handset told him what to collect and put on his trolley. It allotted him a set number of seconds to find each product and counted down. If he made a mistake the scanner beeped.
Adam Littler went undercover as a “picker” at Amazon’s Swansea warehouse
“We are machines, we are robots, we plug our scanner in, we’re holding it, but we might as well be plugging it into ourselves”, he said.
The 30-minute Panorama programme is on YouTube and is included in this post just below.
As I started to explain, the reaction to watching the Panorama programme was to feel sickened by the way these workers were being treated.
Not helped when yesterday, the UK Daily Mail newspaper added their own story of another undercover reporting operation at Amazon. Here’s an extract from the last third of the piece, reported by Carole Cadwalladr:
It is taxes, of course, that pay for the roads on which Amazon’s delivery trucks drive, and the schools in which its employees are educated.
Taxes that all its workers pay, and that, it emerged in 2012, Amazon tends not to pay.
On UK sales of £4.2 billion in 2012, it paid £3.2 million in corporation tax. In 2006, it transferred its UK business to Luxembourg and reclassified its UK operation as simply an ‘order fulfilment’ business.
The Luxembourg office employs 380 people. The UK operation employs 21,000. You do the sums.
Brad Stone tells me that tax avoidance is built into the company’s DNA. From the very beginning it has been ‘constitutionally oriented to securing every possible advantage for its customers, setting the lowest possible prices, taking advantage of every known tax loophole or creating new ones’.
In Swansea I chat to someone called Martin for a while. It’s Saturday, the sun is shining and the warehouse has gone quiet. The orders have been turned off like a tap.
‘It’s the weather,’ he says. ‘When it rains, it can suddenly go mental.’ We clear away boxes and the tax issue comes up.
‘There was a lot of anger here,’ he says. ‘People were very bitter about it. But I’d always say to them: “If someone told you that you could pay less tax, do you honestly think you would volunteer to pay more?”’
He’s right. And the people who were angry were also right. It’s an unignorable fact of modern life that, as Stuart Roper of Manchester Business School tells me, ‘some of these big brands are more powerful than governments. They’re wealthier. If they were countries, they would be pretty large economies.
‘They’re multinational and the global financial situation allows them to ship money all over the world. And the Government is so desperate for jobs that it has given away large elements of control.’
MPs like to attack Amazon and Starbucks and Google for not paying their taxes, but they’ve yet to actually create legislation compelling them to do so.
Then if that wasn’t sufficient to make me want to live on a desert island, along comes George Monbiot pointing out that even the BBC, to me the most respected and trusted news organisation on the planet, has been economical with the truth.
The BBC’s disgraceful failure to reveal who its contributors are speaking for.
By George Monbiot, published on the Guardian’s website 29th November 2013
Do the BBC’s editorial guidelines count for anything? I ask because it disregards them every day, by failing to reveal the commercial interests of its contributors.
Let me give you an example. Yesterday the Today programme covered the plain packaging of cigarettes. It interviewed Mark Littlewood, director-general of the Institute of Economic Affairs, an organisation which calls itself a thinktank.
Mishal Husain introduced Mark Littlewood as “the director of the Institute of Economic Affairs, and a smoker himself”.
It’s bad enough when the BBC interviews people about issues of great importance to corporations when it has no idea whether or not they are funded by those companies, and makes no effort to find out.
It’s even worse when those interests have already been exposed, yet the BBC still fails to mention them.
Then along came three items that pulled my back from the brink of despair and disgust.
The first came from the blog of the UK’s Transition Network, Transition Times. Rob Hopkins wrote an article on December 5th called The day I closed my Amazon account. Please read it if you feel unsettled by the Amazon situation. The last two paragraphs are:
Me, I resolve to buy less, but better. Less, but longer-lasting. Less, but local. The thought of where we will end up in 5 years time, 10 years time, 20 years time, if companies like Amazon continue as they are, really frightens me. It’s not good, it’s not right. It’s not about our needs, it’s about the needs of huge investors. I want a different world for my boys.
I can’t, on my own, do that much about it. I can’t insist that the UK government legislate so that, as in Holland, the Recommended Retail Price (RRP) is the legal minimum at which any book can be sold, although I think that is grounds for a really timely campaign. Because of that, Amazon don’t really operate in Holland. Bring back the RRP for books here, and let’s have a level playing field. As I say, I can’t do much, but I can withdraw my support. I just have withdrawn my support. It feels surprisingly unsettling, as one does after ending a relationship, but it was the right thing to do. It may be a drop in the ocean, but if enough people do it….
The second was coming across something called The Restart Project in London. I had never heard of them before. But it gets better because these London folk are part of a global movement. Which in the words of The Restart Project can be explained thus:
A spontaneous, global, grassroots repair movement
Sitting in London, we at The Restart Project have been inspired by Holland, the US, Australia, and now we realize that there are many more community repair and fixit groups than we ever knew of before… Milan, Barcelona, Finland, the list just grows.
Some groups have regular events in their own spaces and some are pop-up groups.
The most remarkable thing is that we are not just all doing similar things, we are doing them in the same way and with similar motivations
1) learning, skillsharing and community are a premium. No judgment. Openness and inclusivity, all are made to feel welcome.
2) the idea is NOT a freebie fix. The idea is that people get involved in the repair, taking responsibility for their stuff and taking back control. It’s about behaviour change, not just about waste prevention
and
3) importantly – fun!
Please help us map repair groups, to connect people to their local repair gurus and fixit friends – and who knows, inspire the creation of more.
“Just repair, don’t despair!”
Just repair, don’t despair! That shouted out at me. The more that the world we live in is consumed by the power-brokers and greed-mongers. The more that our traditional view of politics is seen to be out-dated and incorrect, then the more we have do within our own lives, within our own communities and with our friends, loved ones and families to show we can repair our world a darn site quicker than the ‘dark forces’ can break it.
My third example of hope is tomorrow in a post called The power of self.
Tried hard to avoid a grim reality post, but failed!
As last week, I thought that wall-to-wall book chapters were a bit much and that Wednesdays should be a break. Ideally, a light-hearted break. But failed! Sorry!
For a long time, I have followed George Monbiot’s writings. Like a number of other correspondents that come to mind, Mr. Monbiot writes with a clarity and intellect that takes some beating. Rather tentatively I wrote to him asking if I might republish some of his essays, including those that are published in the UK newspaper, The Guardian. To my great pleasure, George replied that so long as his essays did not appear in print then permission was given.
Before going on, it may do no harm to remind me and so many millions of others, of the opening preamble of the US Constitution:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Whatever the country, the concept of ‘by the people, of the people, for the people’ takes one hell of a lot of beating.
So to the essay. I was struck by a recent essay from George Monbiot that seemed to touch on something that more and more ordinary folk sense; that many so-called democratic political systems are not functioning in the interests of the people. Thus with no further ado, here it is.
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Why Politics Fails
November 11, 2013 Nothing will change until we confront the real sources of power.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 12th November 2013
It’s the reason for the collapse of democratic choice. It’s the source of our growing disillusionment with politics. It’s the great unmentionable. Corporate power. The media will scarcely whisper its name. It is howlingly absent from parliamentary debates. Until we name it and confront it, politics is a waste of time.
The political role of corporations is generally interpreted as that of lobbyists, seeking to influence government policy. In reality they belong on the inside. They are part of the nexus of power that creates policy. They face no significant resistance, from either government or opposition, as their interests have now been woven into the fabric of all three main parties.
Most of the scandals that leave people in despair about politics arise from this source. On Monday, for example, the Guardian revealed that the government’s subsidy system for gas-burning power stations is being designed by an executive from the company ESB, who has been seconded into the energy department(1). What does ESB do? Oh, it builds gas-burning power stations.
On the same day we learnt that a government minister, Nick Boles, has privately assured the gambling company Ladbrokes that it needn’t worry about attempts by local authorities to stop the spread of betting shops(2). His new law will prevent councils from taking action.
Last week we discovered that G4S’s contract to run immigration removal centres will be expanded, even though all further business with the state was supposed to be frozen while allegations of fraud are investigated(3). Every week we learn that systemic failures on the part of government contractors are no barrier to obtaining further work, that the promise of efficiency, improvements and value for money delivered by outsourcing and privatisation have failed to materialise(4,5,6). The monitoring which was meant to keep these companies honest is haphazard(7), the penalties almost non-existent(8), the rewards stupendous, dizzying, corrupting(9,10). Yet none of this deters the government. Since 2008, the outsourcing of public services has doubled, to £20bn. It is due to rise to £100bn by 2015(11).
This policy becomes explicable only when you recognise where power really lies. The role of the self-hating state is to deliver itself to big business. In doing so it creates a tollbooth economy: a system of corporate turnpikes, operated by companies with effective monopolies.
It’s hardly surprising that the lobbying bill – now stalled by the Lords – offered almost no checks on the power of corporate lobbyists, while hogtying the charities who criticise them. But it’s not just that ministers are not discouraged from hobnobbing with corporate executives: they are now obliged to do so.
Thanks to an initiative by Lord Green, large companies have ministerial “buddies”, who have to meet them when the companies request it. There were 698 of these meetings during the first 18 months of the scheme, called by corporations these ministers are supposed be regulating(12). Lord Green, by the way, is currently a government trade minister. Before that he was chairman of HSBC, presiding over the bank while it laundered vast amounts of money stashed by Mexican drugs barons(13). Ministers, lobbyists – can you tell them apart?
That the words corporate power seldom feature in the corporate press is not altogether surprising. It’s more disturbing to see those parts of the media that are not owned by Rupert Murdoch or Lord Rothermere acting as if they are.
For example, for five days every week the BBC’s Today programme starts with a business report in which only insiders are interviewed. They are treated with a deference otherwise reserved for God on Thought for the Day. There’s even a slot called Friday Boss, in which the programme’s usual rules of engagement are set aside and its reporters grovel before the corporate idol. Imagine the outcry if Today had a segment called Friday Trade Unionist or Friday Corporate Critic.
This, in my view, is a much graver breach of BBC guidelines than giving unchallenged airtime to one political party but not others, as the bosses are the people who possess real power: those, in other words, whom the BBC has the greatest duty to accost. Research conducted by the Cardiff school of journalism shows that business representatives now receive 11% of airtime on the BBC’s 6 o’clock news (this has risen from 7% in 2007), while trade unionists receive 0.6% (which has fallen from 1.4%)(14). Balance? Impartiality? The BBC puts a match to its principles every day.
And where, beyond the Green Party, Plaid Cymru, a few ageing Labour backbenchers, is the political resistance? After the article I wrote last week, about the grave threat the transatlantic trade and investment partnership presents to parliamentary sovereignty and democratic choice(15), several correspondents asked me what response there has been from the Labour party. It’s easy to answer: nothing.
Blair and Brown purged the party of any residue of opposition to corporations and the people who run them. That’s what New Labour was all about. Now opposition MPs stare mutely as their powers are given away to a system of offshore arbitration panels run by corporate lawyers.
Since Blair’s pogroms, parliament operates much as Congress in the United States does: the lefthand glove puppet argues with the righthand glove puppet, but neither side will turn around to face the corporate capital that controls almost all our politics. This is why the assertion that parliamentary democracy has been reduced to a self-important farce has resonated so widely over the past fortnight.
So I don’t blame people for giving up on politics. I haven’t given up yet, but I find it ever harder to explain why. When a state-corporate nexus of power has bypassed democracy and made a mockery of the voting process, when an unreformed political funding system ensures that parties can be bought and sold, when politicians of the three main parties stand and watch as public services are divvied up by a grubby cabal of privateers, what is left of this system that inspires us to participate?
Up to 100,000 people died in drug-related violence in Mexico in the last 6 years. We might think this has nothing to do with us, but in fact we are all complicit, says Yale professor Rodrigo Canales in this unflinching talk that turns conventional wisdom about drug cartels on its head. The carnage is not about faceless, ignorant goons mindlessly killing each other but is rather the result of some seriously sophisticated brand management.
Rodrigo Canales wants to understand how individuals influence organizations or systems–even those as complex as the Mexican drug cartels.
Yesterday’s post here on Learning from Dogs looked at the utter insanity, the greed, the short-sightedness of extracting oil in greater and more varied ways; as if the future for all of life on this planet just didn’t matter. I guess the truth is that for those who stand to benefit from this wealth, the future of the planet just doesn’t matter.
Revealing the obvious!
The recent interview on BBC Newsnight by Jeremy Paxman of British comedian Russell Brand has gone viral. At the time of writing this post, YouTube report 7,661,280 viewings! It’s not surprising because what Russell Brand is saying is obvious to millions of people all around the world. What Brand is expressing is as clear as a lone, lighted beacon at midnight on the darkest Winter night one could imagine.
During his Wednesday night interview with Jeremy Paxman on BBC Newsnight, comedian and actor Russell Brand said what no politician or pundit would ever dare say: that without dramatic, fundamental change, the prevailing political and economic system is broken, and hell-bent on planetary-level destruction:
With Dr Ahmed, the author of that Guardian article, concluding:
And in doing so, we might begin to realise that it is precisely the lack of a single, top-down manifesto that is our greatest strength – because, unlike the old, dying, fossil fuel dependent paradigm of endless growth for its own sake for the corporate few, the new, emerging post-carbon paradigm will be co-created by people themselves from the ground up.
That is why Brand’s answer for the way forward is so compelling:
“We shouldn’t destroy the planet. We shouldn’t create massive economic disparity. We shouldn’t ignore the needs of the people.”
If we want our children to inherit a habitable planet, rather than bashing Brand for not having a more coherent solution, we need to start being part of it.
You know what! The incredible response to that Paxman-Brand interview shows the millions of us who are already “part of it.” Yes, it really does feel that the time is now. That time that so very many of us, in a myriad of different ways, are fighting for our beautiful planet from the ground up.
Finally, if you want to read that interview between Paxman and Brand in detail, then over on Corrente there is a full transcript of the exchange between them.
Long may this run!
Passion for speaking the truth about our present times!
“The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing.” Apparently an epigram by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr in the January 1849 issue of his journal Les Guêpes (“The Wasps”). Source.
Both the heading and the sub-heading to today’s post reflect strong connections to Chris Snuggs. Chris has featured previously several times on Learning from Dogs and, I’m sure, my association with Chris has been mentioned. An association going back too many years to the time when Chris invited me to run a course on sales and marketing for the students at the French Institute ISUGA in Quimper, France. It became a regular event and Chris and I got to know each other well.
A retired teacher, I am very worried about the state and future of the world. One thing may help, a determination to communicate and state the truth as one sees it, which is what I seek to do. I try to see things objectively; my horror of being brainwashed or motivated by some dogma or partisan viewpoint is absolute.
I salute the free press which has a good record of unearthing nepotism, corruption, dishonest and lunacy. However, the nepotists, the despots, the corrupt, the dishonest and the lunatics often have a lot of power, money and therefore influence. This allied to the fact that the lumpenmass is too busy toiling away to survive and often shrugs its shoulders in hopelessness means that the aforementioned get away with it.
Anyway, enough of me waffling on! In my email in-box earlier today was an email from Chris offering me a couple of links to his posts on Nemo Insula Est. One was very funny and one was decidedly less so. The latter is being republished here today, with Chris’s permission. It is called The State of America.
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The State of America
A Blog post from the “Daily Telegraph” on October 3rd, 2013 by:
Ghislane400
I haven’t got time to verify all of these statistics, but I assume they are accurate. I have added some from Nicholas Kristoff at the end.
As far as I understand, the only reason the USA is not totally bankrupt right now is because the rest of the world keeps lending to it, believing that it is “too big to fail.” Many countries and Empires in history have believed they are too big and important to fail, France being yet another one ………. On that point, see: “The Life Cycle of a Democracy”, which is rather sobering!
After DECADES of bad decisions, America is now dangerously in debt! Obama has crippled America since he was re-elected, and his ineptitude is highlighted by the facts below:
30 years ago the US national debt stood at about one trillion dollars. Today it stands at almost 17 TRILLION DOLLARS!
About 40 years ago the TOTAL debt stood at about 2 trillion dollars, today it is more than 56 TRILLION DOLLARS!
At the same time as they have run up all of this debt, their economic infrastructure and their ability to create wealth has been completely gutted. Since 2001, America has lost more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities and millions of jobs have been moved overseas.
Their share of the global GDP declined from 31.8% in 2001 to 21.6% in 2011.
The percentage of self-employed Americans is at an all time low whilst the amount of them on benefits is at a record high.
During Obama’s first term, the federal government accumulated more debt than it did under the first 42 U.S presidents combined.
If they started to pay off the new debt accumulated under Obama at the rate of $1 per second, it would take them 184,000 years to pay it off.
Every hour of every day, the federal government steals more than 100 MILLION DOLLARS from their children and your grandchildren.
America has dropped in global economic competitiveness for the past 4 years running.
According to “The Economist”, America was the best place to be born in 1988; now they tie for 16th place.
There are fewer Americans working in manufacturing today than in 1950, despite the fact that their population has doubled since then.
In Detroit alone, there are over 70,000 abandoned buildings.
When NAFTA was pushed through American Congress in 1933, they had a trade surplus with Mexico of 1.6 billion dollars. They had a trade DEFICIT with them of 61.6 billion dollars come 2010.
Their trade deficit with China was 6 MILLION DOLLARS in 1985 for the entire year. In 2012 their trade deficit with China was 315 BILLION DOLLARS. This is the largest trade deficit between nations in the history of the world.
America also loses half a million jobs to China annually. Fewer than 65% of all men in America have jobs. 53% of American male workers make less than $30,000 a year! Only 7% of all non-farm workers in the States are self-employed. This is an all time low.
146 million Americans are either ‘poor’ or ‘low income’. 49% of them live in a home that receives benefits from the federal government, according to the U.S Census Bureau. One in every 6 Americans is on Medicaid and Obamacare will add another 16 million to the Medicaid rolls; this will be a total of 73.2 million come 2025. This will increase liabilities of 38 trillion dollars to Medicare over the next 75 years, which equates to $328,404.00 for every single household in the United States.
Of the 56 million Americans collecting Social Security benefits now, by 2035 that will soar to an astounding 91 MILLION! That is a 134 trillion dollar shortfall over the next 75 years.
Americans on Social Security Disability exceed the population of Greece, and those on food stamps exceed the population of Spain.
45% of all children in Miami now live in poverty, more than 50% of all children in Cleveland live in poverty, 60% of all children in Detroit live in poverty.
More than 1 million public school students in America are HOMELESS. This is the first time in American history this has ever happened.
Since Obama got back in, those Americans on food stamps have risen from 32 million to 47 million. That number exceeds the combined populations of Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Colombia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming!
What a spiffing good job Obama is doing of bankrupting America! Anyone would think he hates the States! Seriously, anyone who voted for him owes an apology to the children of America, for whom a terrible country full of debt has been created by the biggest clown one could imagine.
The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.
C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.
POSTSCRIPT:
The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on on-going financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that “the buck stops here.” Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.
Want to know who said that, and when? ……
Senator Barack Obama on March 20, 2006.
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Just a footnote on that level of US inequality reported by Nicholas Kristoff using an extract from a recent post on Learning from Dogs: Our broken ways:
OK, that’s enough ‘copying’ from me so please go and read more about the plight of those poor billionaires. But if the NYT and Paul Krugman will forgive me, here’s the paragraph towards the end of the Krugman essay that makes me sick [my emboldening]:
The thing is, by and large, the wealthy have gotten their wish. Wall Street was bailed out, while workers and homeowners weren’t. Our so-called recovery has done nothing much for ordinary workers, but incomes at the top have soared, with almost all the gains from 2009 to 2012 going to the top 1 percent, and almost a third going to the top 0.01 percent — that is, people with incomes over $10 million.
There will be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, who share my view that this dimming of America’s historic beacon of truth and justice is a failure not just for the United States of America but for the rest of the world.
It seems appropriate to remind all you dear readers as to why I write this Blog. Most easily encapsulated in what appears on my Welcome page:
Dogs live in the present – they just are! Dogs make the best of each moment uncluttered by the sorts of complex fears and feelings that we humans have. They don’t judge, they simply take the world around them at face value. Yet they have been part of man’s world for an unimaginable time, at least 30,000 years. That makes the domesticated dog the longest animal companion to man, by far!
As man’s companion, protector and helper, history suggests that dogs were critically important in man achieving success as a hunter-gatherer. Dogs ‘teaching’ man to be so successful a hunter enabled evolution, some 20,000 years later, to farming, thence the long journey to modern man. But in the last, say 100 years, that farming spirit has become corrupted to the point where we see the planet’s plant and mineral resources as infinite. Mankind is close to the edge of extinction, literally and spiritually.
Dogs know better, much better! Time again for man to learn from dogs!
Pharaoh, as with all dogs, is an integrous creature – man has much to learn from him, and all dogs.
Each and every one of us must fight for truth, justice, sanity and brotherhood!
How the foreclosure crisis was a boon for the super wealthy.
For some time now, must be quite a few years, I have subscribed to Yves Smith’s Naked Capitalism blog. I do so for a number of reasons.
Thus it was that a few days ago I read with a mixture of anger and disgust an article about the consequences of the foreclosure crisis on the wealthy. Within a few hours of me requesting by email permission to republish that article on Learning from Dogs came the reply from Yves granting such permission.
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It’s a welcome departure to see Adam Davidson’s weekly column in the New York Times, which usually puts a happy face on how the 1% are winning the class war in America, have a guest writer look at the other side of the story.
Catherine Rampell has a short but compelling piece on how the foreclosure crisis was wealth transfer from lower and middle income families to the rich. Her points are simple: the typical person who lost their home wasn’t a greedhead who bought too much house or refied to buy flat panel TVs and go on cruises (if you hang out with mortgage types, you’ll get a big dose of profligate consumer urban legend). The people who were like that (and there were some) for the most part were in subprime loans that reset in 2007 and 2008 and were in the early wave of foreclosures. The people who’ve lost their homes in later foreclosures were overwhelmingly people who had the bad fortune to buy late in the housing bubble (so when the bust hit, they had negative equity and couldn’t use lower rates to refi into cheaper payments) and took economic hits as a direct result of the crisis (hours cuts and job losses; other people who were hurt were in the more typical “shit happens” categories, like suffering medical problems, with their situation made much worse by their inability to sell or refinance their home).
Rampell’s contribution is to look at the phenomenon of investors, both big and small, and how they’ve bought properties at foreclosure and then flipped them. Separately, Josh Rosner recently released the astonishing statistic: that sales of owner-occupied properties showed only a 1% gain in the last 12 months. The gains that have been driving the indexes were all in investor owned properties. Some flipped to other investors. In hot markets, local investors have been doing “mini-bulks,” acquiring small portfolios to sell to private equity investors, some without renovating them, others with modest fix-ups. Others sold them to homebuyers.
Rampell uses the example of a couple who believed that renting was throwing away their money, and had the bad luck to buy a moderately-priced fixer-upper in early 2007. Each wage earner saw their income drop and unable to get a loan modification, they lost their home. Their $309,000 Seattle home went to an investor for $155,000 in the summer of 2011. That investor just sold it to a homeowner for $290,000, not far below what the hapless couple paid for it. But the new buyer paid all cash.
Rampell tells us:
Of the 87,062 foreclosures in the last five years that were bought by corporate investors and have been flipped, about a quarter were sold for at least $100,000 more than what the investor originally paid, according to [an online real estate listings site] Redfin (Although it’s impossible to know how much investors spent on upgrades or renovations.)….
The boom-bust-flip phenomenon is just one of the most obvious ways that research suggests the financial crisis has benefited the upper class while brutalizing the middle class. Rents have risen at twice the pace of the overall cost-of-living index, partly because middle-class families can’t get the credit they need to buy. That means “landlords can raise rents with impunity,” says Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin. And according to a report by David Autor, the M.I.T. economist, job losses during and after the recession were concentrated in midskilled and midwage jobs, like white-collar sales, office and administrative jobs; and blue-collar production, craft, repair and operative jobs. Employment for higher-skilled workers, on the other hand, has grown substantially.
There is a second way foreclosures have served as a wealth transfer to the capitalist classes. Foreclosures don’t necessarily result in evictions. Banks often leave properties in a “zombie” state, starting foreclosures but not completing them, leaving the owner who thought he was foreclosed on still on the hook for property taxes. Another variant which is much less damaging is to leave the homeowner in place. I recently met an investor who is acquiring homes in Atlanta. The day after he buys a house, he goes to introduce himself to the former homeowner to see if he can work out a deal to keep them in place as tenant. In the overwhelming majority of cases, he can. “They were paying $1100 on their mortgage and the bank wouldn’t give them a mod. I’ll let them rent for $700, which is way above what they’d have gotten if they wrote the principal down to the price at which I bought the house. And I tell the tenants I’d be happy to sell the home to them.” We didn’t discuss details, but it sounded as if he’d be willing to structure rent to own deals (where part of the rent would go to a down payment on the house).
He was clear that his business depended on what he saw as value destroying behavior by banks. He described how he’d recently bought a home and when he went for his usual visit to the house, a well-dressed black man met him and invited him in, saying he’d be out in 30 days and assumed it wasn’t a problem. The new owner saw the house was in impeccable shape. He chatted with the owner a bit and found out he was a bodybuilder with a high-end training business. He asked the homeowner: “You look like you take good care of yourself and the house. You’d been paying on time. What happened?”
The trainer told him that he’d bought the house at the peak of the cycle for $160,000. The house was clearly now worth way less. He tried to get the bank to modify it to a principal balance of $100,000. The bank wouldn’t consider it. “So I bought a house which is comparable to this one for $50,000 and gave this one up.”
In this case, the homeowner had enough cash to arbitrage himself. The investor told me he’d bought the foreclosed home for $40,000. Had the bank cut a deal for $100,000 (and who knows, the homeowner might have accepted a higher number), it would have come out way ahead. But that also assumes that the bank owned the mortgage. It’s pretty much a given that the bank was a servicer, and as we’ve seen again and again, servicers don’t have the incentives or the infrastructure to do mods. So investor in the mortgages lose, homeowners lose. The winners are the banks as inefficient looters (the money they skim off the servicing is chump change relative to the damage done by negligent and predatory servicing) and the investors who profit by picking up the pieces. This is isn’t a well-functioning economic system, it’s rentier capitalism. And it’s looking more and more like a doomsday machine for what remains of the middle class.
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Can’t add anything polite to this! Except, to say it’s a very long way from integrity!
Each of us, whoever you are, for the sake of your children and for all of the children in the world, embrace today the qualities, the values of Nature.
Now if the shenanigans going on over here in my home country aren’t bad enough, then a recent essay from George Monbiot about the UK’s Department of Environment (DOE) really takes the cake. The essay is called Age of Unreason, published in the UK Guardian newspaper, and for obvious copyright reasons, I can only offer limited extracts. This is how the essay opens:
The governments of Britain, Canada and Australia are trying to stamp out scientific dissent.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 1st Ooctober 2013
It’s as clear and chilling a statement of intent as you’re likely to read. Scientists should be “the voice of reason, rather than dissent, in the public arena.”(1) Vladimir Putin? Kim Jong-un? No, Professor Ian Boyd, chief scientific adviser at the UK’s department for environment.
Boyd’s doctrine is a neat distillation of government policy in Britain, Canada and Australia. These governments have suppressed or misrepresented inconvenient findings on climate change, pollution, pesticides, fisheries and wildlife. They have shut down programmes which produce unwelcome findings and sought to muzzle scientists. This is a modern version of Soviet Lysenkoism: crushing academic dissent on behalf of bad science and corporate power(2).
Mr. Monbiot offers a very convincing argument to show how Professor Ian Boyd used poor scientific data to justify the culling of British badgers and how Boyd’s boss, the UK’s Environment Secretary Owen Paterson, is playing down the dangers of global warming – even suggesting the process had its advantages. George Monbiot goes on to show how that aforementioned Department has claimed, “that its field trials of neonicotinoid pesticides on bees showed that “effects on bees do not occur under normal circumstances”! [my italics].
Oh, and that there was an attempt to cull British buzzards to enable the rich and famous to ‘enjoy’ better pheasant shoots!
To be reasonable, when a government is manipulating and misrepresenting scientific findings, is to dissent. To be reasonable, when it is helping to destroy human life and the natural world, is to dissent. As Julien Benda argued in La Trahison des Clercs, democracy and civilisation depend on intellectuals resisting conformity and power(28).
A world in which scientists speak only through their minders and in which dissent is considered the antithesis of reason is a world shorn of meaningful democratic choices. You can judge a government by its treatment of inconvenient facts and the people who expose them. This one does not emerge well.
It’s enough to make a dog very angry!
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Please do go across and read the essay in full because Mr. Monbiot is a journalist whom one can trust. In stark contrast to so many that purport to be governing on our behalf.
As an Englishman grateful to have the right to live in this fair country, it pains me to see what is happening to both my old country and my new one. When I was granted my visa, my fiancee visa, from the US Embassy in London I was given a small booklet containing the text of the US Constitution. Page One is open in front of me at this moment:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Yesterday’s long rant was the outcome of me promising ‘a debate’ with Patrice Ayme. Succinctly, I had disagreed with a comment from Patrice where he had written: “Force is the truth of man. Everything else is delusion, even the vegetarian style.” and wanted to respond within the space of a post rather than the more restrictive comment.
For my disagreement with Patrice had been essentially about his statement, ‘Force is the truth of man‘. I don’t recall a war in the last 50 years that has been a force for good.
But then it was Alex’s comment, see below, that stopped me short. For I realised that I was confusing ‘force’ with ‘war’ and that was probably a big mistake on my behalf. Of course, I’m writing this without the benefit of knowing better what Patrice meant in his comment! Blogging, as powerful a media as it is, does not provide for immediate interaction!
Nevertheless, Alex’s comment yesterday was powerfully inspirational. Because so many of us (and I include me in that ‘us’) all too often behave as though we are a species utterly divorced from Nature.
So what to do? Because I am fundamentally at odds with the sentiment expressed by Patrice Ayme; “Force is the truth of man. Everything else is delusion, even the vegetarian style.“
The answer takes us to tomorrow’s post, A return to integrity.
And, yes, it does mention dogs! Rather a lot as it happens!
Dogs are the one species that man has lived with longer than any other species. So when we refer to the qualities of the dog it is simply because we are so familiar with them. In no way does that exclude the numerous other species that bond with man and share the same wonderful qualities.
Qualities so easily seen: Love, Honesty, Loyalty, Trust, Openness, Faithfulness, Forgiveness and Affection. Together they are Integrity.
Of course dogs will kill a rabbit, for example, as readily as a cat will kill a mouse. In this respect force isthe truth of Nature.
The only way for species man to survive on this planet is for every element of man’s existence on this planet to be rethought of in terms of the natural order. Read the comment left by Alex in yesterday’s post:
Hi Paul, what you highlight are examples of disconnection between humanity with nature and each other. I have on my own blog highlighted a concept of Ubuntu – “I am because we are” – which is only possible when the self realises they are part of an inter-connected network of life. Your example of islands of fragmented forest where disconnected wildlife are dying out is how it is with disconnected humanity, we are doomed to destruction because we are cut off from the life-giving connection to nature.
All the problems you highlight are symptoms of the disease of disconnection, until there is reconnection to nature none of these symptoms can be successfully addressed.
War is an integral part of nature, when people seek to dismiss this then they add to the disconnection from nature. I was stung in the face by a drunken wasp a few days ago, this is how it is with nature, it is beautiful but also brutal. Peace and balance are illusions, life is in a becoming because of unbalance and strife. I advocate harmony, like a downhill skier we do not seek to control our surroundings, but instead act in harmony by moving around the obstacles such as rock and tree.
Disconnection can be as large as destroying whole forests by ignorant energy policies to those idiots who kicked a puffball to pieces before I could harvest it, or the new owners of my former home who have taken a chainsaw to all the trees and bushes in the garden. People who are disconnected do not consider how their actions impact nature or people contrary to the philosophy of Ubuntu.
“I am because we are!” Each and every one of us is where we are today, for good or ill, because of what we are: part of Nature. It’s so incredibly obvious – we are a natural species – yet who reading this wouldn’t admit at times to behaving “as though we are a species utterly divorced from Nature.”
Millions of us have pets and animals that we love. Yet we still miss the key truth of our pets. That we are a part of Nature, subject to Natural order, just as much as our pets are. We have so much to learn from our animals.
Take this rather sad story but, nonetheless, a formidable story of the integrity of one species for another. Watch the video.
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Take this rather happier story about the integrity of one species for another. Watch the video.
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Thus when we see the extraordinary benefits that arise from love and trust, from loyalty and faithfulness, and much more, why oh why is so much of our society fundamentally broken?
As John Hurlburt wrote in a recent email, it is because, “we are spiritual bankrupt. We spend too much of our time thinking about ourselves and what we want and too little of our time thinking about other people and what we all need.” John went on to add that this spiritual bankruptcy had preceded our moral and economical bankruptcy. He pointed out that the solution to our moral and financial problems, as well as our salvation as individuals and as a species, is spiritual. “We simply need to love the Nature of God, the earth and each other regardless of what we may believe God to be.”
Now whether you are a religious soul, or a heathen, or somewhere in the middle, it matters not. For if we continue to defy Nature and the natural laws of this planet we are going to be dust before the end of this century. Again in John’s powerful words:
Denying climate change is a death wish.
Nature always wins in the long run.
Nature is balanced. Are we?
As if to endorse the great examples that Nature offers us in terms of the benefits of love and trust, take a look at these three recent photographs from here in Oregon.
A young timid deer showing her trust of me as I sat quietly on the ground less than 30 feet away.
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A mother and her fawn trusting Jean’s love for them, and getting a good feed!
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Little Sweeny and Cleo converting trust to peace and happiness. (Not to mention Jean!)
Now these are not photographs to ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’ over, these are reminders that kindness, generosity, selflessness and trust are part of Nature. All the great virtues and values of man do not come from a vacuum, they come to us via Nature.
We have been blessed by an evolution that has allowed mankind to achieve remarkable things. Even to the point of leaving the confines of our planet and setting foot on the Moon and sending probes from out of our Solar System. There’s a sense, a distinctly tangible sense, that man has conquered all; that we have broken the link from being part of Nature; from being of Nature.
And now Mother Earth is reminding all of her species, every single one of them including species man, that everything is bound by her Natural Laws.
Does this mean that man has to revert to some form of pre-civilised stone-age era? Of course not! Progress can be as much within the Natural order than in competition with it, as it has been in recent times. In fact, Professor Pat Shipman explains our progress is benefited by being part of that Natural order. Here’s how Amazon describe her book, The Animal Connection.
The Animal Connection: A New Perspective on What Makes Us Human
A bold, illuminating new take on the love of animals that drove human evolution.
Why do humans all over the world take in and nurture other animals? This behavior might seem maladaptive—after all, every mouthful given to another species is one that you cannot eat—but in this heartening new study, acclaimed anthropologist Pat Shipman reveals that our propensity to domesticate and care for other animals is in fact among our species’ greatest strengths. For the last 2.6 million years, Shipman explains, humans who coexisted with animals enjoyed definite adaptive and cultural advantages. To illustrate this point, Shipman gives us a tour of the milestones in human civilization-from agriculture to art and even language—and describes how we reached each stage through our unique relationship with other animals. The Animal Connection reaffirms our love of animals as something both innate and distinctly human, revealing that the process of domestication not only changed animals but had a resounding impact on us as well.
It’s a powerful read and greatly recommended. Here’s an extract from the book [page 274, my emphasis]:
Clearly, part of the basis of our intimacy with tame or domesticated animals involves physical contact. People who work with animals touch them. It doesn’t matter if you are a horse breeder, a farmer raising pigs, a pet owner, a zoo keeper, or a veterinarian, we touch them, stroke them, hug them. Many of us kiss our animals and many allow them to sleep with us. We touch animals because this is a crucial aspect of the nonverbal communication that we have evolved over millennia. We touch animals because it raises our oxytocin levels – and the animal’s oxytocin levels. We touch animals because we and they enjoy it.
From the first stone tool to the origin of language and the most recent living tools, our involvement with animals has directed our course.
So to round this off. These last two posts came from my need to debate with Patrice the statement that “Force is the truth of man.” If Patrice’s meaning was that the truth of man is subject to the force of Nature, then I agree one-hundred percent.
For the time for man to recognise that the force of Nature is “the truth of man” is running out.
Each of us, whoever you are, for the sake of your children and for all of the children in the world, embrace today the qualities, the values of Nature.
Learning from Dogs 