Author: John Hanno

Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. Bogan High School. Worked in Alaska after the earthquake. Joined U.S. Army at 17. Sergeant, B Battery, 3rd Battalion, 84th Artillery, 7th Army. Member of 12 different unions, including 4 different locals of the I.B.E.W. Worked for fortune 50, 100 and 200 companies as an industrial electrician, electrical/electronic technician.

Bernie Sanders Talks Democratic Socialism with John Nichols.

The Nation

Bernie Sanders: ‘We Have to Talk About Democratic Socialism as an Alternative to Unfettered Capitalism’

In an exclusive interview with The Nation, Sanders explains that economic rights must be understood as human rights.

By John Nichols      June 12, 2019

 

Bernie Sanders has been talking about democratic socialism for decades, as a mayor, a member of the US House, and a member of the US Senate. But now that he is a serious contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, and now that more and more elected officials and activists are identifying as democratic socialists, President Trump and his Republican allies are attacking socialism as a threat to “liberty and independence.” On Wednesday, with a major address at George Washington University, Sanders is pushing back. He’ll explain that his vision of democratic socialism extends from the themes outlined in the 1944 State of the Union address, where Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared: “We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” Arguing that the United States must finally recognize that “economic rights are human rights,” Sanders plans to outline a vision of democratic socialism as an alternative to a system that is organized to benefit a handful of oligarchs—including Donald Trump—rather than the great mass of Americans.

Sanders explained why it is important to discuss democratic socialism as the 2020 race fires up, in a conversation with The Nation’s John Nichols, who has written about the senator and democratic socialism is a number of books, including The S Word: A Short History of an American Tradition… Socialism (Verso).

Bernie Sanders: Let’s talk about democratic socialism.

John Nichols: Where do you want to start?

Sanders: OK, look, the bottom line is that, in 1944, in a not-much-remembered State of the Union speech, what Franklin Roosevelt talked about essentially is that we have a Bill of Rights in our Constitution that protects our political rights: our freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, etc. All of that is enormously important if we are going to protect freedom in America from tyranny. But what Roosevelt also said in that speech, which was very significant and very profound, was this: We’ve got political rights, but we don’t have economic rights.

Now I’m paraphrasing a little bit—and this is a point that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made very often as well—but the point Roosevelt was making was that it’s great that you have political rights, but what does that matter if you can’t afford to go to the doctor when you’re sick? What does it matter if you’re earning a starvation wage? What does it matter if you’re sleeping out on the street? What does it matter if you are 85 years of age and you can’t afford the prescription drugs that you need to ease your pain?

So what we are talking about, and what the definition of democratic socialism is to me, is making certain that economic rights have to be seen as human rights—not just political rights are human rights, which we believe strongly in; but economic rights are human rights, as well.

Nichols: What sort of economic rights are you talking about?

Sanders: When we talk about that, we’re talking about the right to a decent job, a job that pays you at least a living wage. We’re talking about the right to quality health care for every man, woman, and child. Health care is a right, not a privilege. We’re talking about affordable housing. That means everybody in America should be able to live in decent, safe housing that is affordable—that is not consuming 40, 50, 60 percent of their limited income.

We’re talking about education as a human right. That means quality pre-K and childcare. It means free public colleges and universities. It means doing away with much of the student debt that graduates or those who left school are now forced to assume.

We are talking about a decent retirement for our parents. Right now in America, you’ve got 20 percent of seniors trying to live on incomes of $13,500 a year, which is insane. And you’ve got millions and millions of seniors who can’t afford the prescription drugs that they need. People who have worked their whole lives, who have raised their kids, deserve to have a secure and decent retirement.

And last, but certainly not least, we’re talking about the right to a clean environment.… [All] over this country, you’ve got people who are turning on their water faucets today and the water that’s coming out is not drinkable. It’s toxic. You’ve got kids in the Bronx and many parts of this country, in urban areas, coming down with absolutely outrageous levels of asthma and other environmentally induced illnesses.

So the point here is that, in the year 2019 in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, we have got to conclude that economic rights are human rights. And that’s what democratic socialism means to me.

I should also add just one other thing: that, obviously, when we see the power of government in action… what we have seen in recent years is not that it works for working people. You have seen attempts to make massive cuts to health care and education and environmental protections. But you have also seen massive federal aid to Wall Street with the biggest bailout in American history in 2008; and massive help to the fossil-fuel industry, to the pharmaceutical industry, and so forth and so on.

So, as people like Martin Luther King Jr. talked about, we do have socialism: We have socialism for the rich and large corporations, and we have unfettered free enterprise for working families.

We have to change that.

Nichols: When Roosevelt talked about economic rights as human rights, one of the arguments he made, that his supporters made, was that to fully engage in the democratic process, you needed an element of security. There was this suggestion that it is simply easier for people to be active citizens if they have at least some of the basics of life taken care of. So FDR linked economic and political rights by saying that, of course, the wealthy have the time and flexibility to always practice politics; but that, for working-class and low-income folks, it’s a struggle.

Sanders: Well, that’s right. It’s right in two senses.

First, the point that you made. It is no secret that poor people vote at a lower rate than wealthy people do. Wealthy people have the and the time to sit around and deal with politics. They have the money to actually, you know, donate large amounts of money. And, as you know, one of the scandals that we are working [to address] is [the US Supreme Court’s] Citizens United ruling—and the ability of billionaires to buy elections. The fact is that, when you have somebody that is making $7.25 or $9 an hour now, working 50–60 hours a week, I’m not so sure [that person has] the time to be reflecting about politics or to get involved in the political process to the extent that they would like to be involved…

The second point that I think Roosevelt was talking about, which is equally important, is that if government does not respond to the urgent economic needs of working families, they are going to give up on the political process. That’s above and beyond the issue of time.

If [working people] think that nobody gives a damn that they’re out there trying to raise a family on $9 an hour, why are they going to vote? If they can’t afford to go to a doctor, why are they going to vote? If they’re paying 25 percent interest rates on credit cards, or even 100 or 200 percent to a payday lender, and nobody is talking to their needs, why are they going to vote?

I think what Roosevelt talked about—and of course this was in the 1930s, when you’re dealing with the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy, and all over the world—[was this idea that] we have got to talk to the needs of working families and make them understand that government does hear their pain and is going to respond to their economic challenges.

Nichols: That was something Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, and others talked about in the 1940s, as World War II wound down. They said that there would always be demands from the right and the left on people. And that if progressives, if the Democratic Party, did not step up and deliver on economic rights, that there was the threat of authoritarians stepping up.

Sanders: Exactly. That’s exactly the point that I’m making. And it’s relevant today. I mean, I think it’s relevant all over the world. If you don’t give working people and young people a reason to participate in the political process, they won’t. And if working people and young people are not fully engaged, then bad things happen.

Nichols: You have talked about democratic socialism for a long time, throughout your career. But it seems that in this campaign you have talked about it more frequently and with more force. Is there something about this time in our history that you think creates an opening, a necessity, for this discussion?

Sanders: Absolutely.

Nichols: What’s going on?

Sanders: I think a couple of things:

Number one, I think it is very clear that young people, who by and large are progressive—the younger people are the most progressive generation in the history of this country; they are the most idealistic, and furthermore they are the first generation in the modern history of this country that is likely, unless we turn it around, to see a lower standard of living than their parents. They are saying, “The system is not working for us.” And they’re asking: “Why is the system not working?”

We have to talk about democratic socialism as an alternative to unfettered capitalism, where the rich get richer and almost everybody else is getting poorer. I think that’s a message that young people are receptive to, and I think it’s a message that working people are receptive to.

Right now, the average worker in America is making, in inflation-accounted-for dollars, and despite a huge increase in technology and worker productivity, exactly the same amount of money that he or she made 43 years ago. That’s incomprehensible.

There has been a massive transfer of wealth from the working class of this country to the top 1 percent. And at the end of the day, John—and the media doesn’t talk about it, the corporate media does not talk about it—nobody can defend three families in this country owning more wealth than the bottom half of the American people. Or that 49 percent of all new income today goes to the top 1 percent. That is indefensible. That is outrageous. That is immoral. And I think the American people understand that has got to change.

Nichols: President Trump has been making a big deal about socialism, attacking it explicitly in his State of the Union address and in his other speeches. Am I right that you are trying to show—with the reference to Roosevelt, but also with the broader discussion—a way to respond to the president?

Sanders: You are exactly right. Let me give you an example of what I mean. Donald Trump himself, of course, is a major beneficiary of the massive amounts of corporate welfare. If you are the Trump family, you receive $885,000,000 worth of tax breaks and subsidies for your family’s housing empire that, among other things, was built on racial discrimination.… What Trump is about is socialism for the very rich. We are about socialism for working families. That’s the difference.

John Nichols is The Nation’s national-affairs correspondent. He is the author of Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse: A Field Guide to the Most Dangerous People in America, from Nation Books, and co-author, with Robert W. McChesney, of People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy.

Unions Did Great Things for the Working Class

Bloomberg – Opinion

Unions Did Great Things for the Working Class

Strengthening them could blunt inequality and wage stagnation.

By Noah Smith 
Noah Smith is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.
On the right side.On the right side. Photographer: Stephen F. Somerstein/Archive Photos/Getty Images

Politically and economically, unions are sort of an odd duck. They aren’t part of the apparatus of the state, yet they depend crucially on state protections in order to wield their power. They’re stakeholders in corporations, but often have adversarial relationships with management. Historically, unions are a big reason that the working class won many of the protections and rights it now enjoys, but they often leave the working class fragmented and divided — between different companies, between union and non-union workers, and even between different ethnic groups.

Economists, too, have long puzzled about how to think about unions. They don’t fit easily into the standard paradigm of modern economic theory in which atomistic individuals and companies abide by rules overseen by an all-powerful government. Some economists see unions as a cartel, protecting insiders at the expense of outsiders. According to this theory, unions raise wages but also drive up unemployment. This is the interpretation of unions taught in many introductory courses and textbooks.

If this were really what unions did, it might be worth it to simply let them slip into oblivion, as private-sector unions have been doing in the U.S.:

It’s Been a While Since the Union Made Us Strong

But there are many reasons to think that this theory of unions isn’t right — or, at least, is woefully incomplete.

First, even back in the 1970’s, some economists realized that unions do a lot more than just push up wages. In a 1979 paper entitled “The Two Faces of Unionism,” economists Richard Freeman and James Medoff argued that “by providing workers with a voice both at the workplace and in the political arena, unions can and do affect positively the functioning of the economic and social systems.”

Freeman and Medoff cite data showing that unions reduced turnover, which lowers costs associated with constantly finding and training new workers. They also show that unions engaged in political activity that benefited the working class more broadly, rather than just union members. And they showed that contrary to popular belief, unions actually decreased racial wage disparities. Finally, Freeman and Medoff argue that by defining standard wage rates within industries, unions actually reduced wage inequality overall, despite the cartel-like effect emphasized in econ textbooks.

But the world didn’t listen to Freeman and Medoff, and private-sectors unions declined into near-insignificance. Now, four decades later, economists are again starting to suspect that unions were a better deal than the textbooks made them out to be. A recent paper by economists Henry Farber, Daniel Herbst, Ilyana Kuziemko and Suresh Naidu concludes that unions were an important force reducing inequality in the U.S.
QuicktakeIncomeInequality

Since past data tends to be patchy, Farber et al. combine a huge number of different data sources to get a detailed picture of unionization rates going all the way back to 1936, the year after Congress passed a law letting private-sector employees form unions. The authors find that as unionization rises, inequality tends to fall, and vice versa. Nor is this effect driven by greater skills and education on the part of union workers; during the era from 1940 through 1970, when unionization rose and inequality fell, union workers tended to be less educated than others. In other words, unions lifted the workers at the bottom of the distribution. Black workers, and other nonwhite workers, tended to benefit the most from the union boost.

Now, however, private-sector unions are mostly a faded memory and their power to raise wages has waned — Farber et al. find that although there’s still a union wage premium, it’s now much more due to the fact that higher-skilled workers tended to be the ones who stayed unionized. A 2004 paper by economists John DiNardo and David Lee found that by 1984-1999, unions had lost much of their ability to force wages higher.

Given the contrast between the golden age of 1940-1970 and the current age of spiraling inequality, wouldn’t it make sense to bring unions back? Perhaps. The key question is why private-sector unions mostly died out. Policy changes — right-to-work laws, and the appointment of anti-union regulators, probably played a key role in reducing unionization. But globalization may have also played a big part. Competition from companies in countries like Germany — where unions often bargain to hold down wages in order to increase their companies’ competitiveness — might have made the old American model of unionization unsustainable. Now, with even stiffer competition from China, the challenge of re-unionizing the U.S. might be an insurmountable one.

But it might be worth it to try. Other than massive government redistribution of income and wealth, there’s really no other obvious way to address the country’s rising inequality. Also, there’s the chance that unions might be an effective remedy for the problem of increasing corporate market power — evidence suggests that when unionization rates are high, industry concentration is less effective at suppressing wages. Repealing right-to-work laws and appointing more pro-union regulators could be just the medicine the economy needs.

So supporters of free markets should rethink their antipathy to unions. As socialism gains support among the young, both economists and free-market thinkers should consider the possibility that unions — that odd hybrid of free-market bargaining and government intervention — were the vaccine that allowed the U.S. and other rich nations to largely escape the disasters of communism in the 20th century.

It looks like it’s time for a booster shot.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Why some CEOs figure ‘Medicare for All’ is good for business

USA Today

Why some CEOs figure ‘Medicare for All’ is good for business

Phil Galewitz, Kaiser Health News              June 11, 2019 

EASTON, Pa. – Walk into a big-box retailer such as Walmart or Michaels and you’re likely to see MCS Industries’ picture frames, decorative mirrors or kitschy wall décor.

Adjacent to a dairy farm a few miles west of downtown Easton, MCS is the nation’s largest maker of such household products. But MCS doesn’t actually make anything here anymore.

It has moved its manufacturing operations to Mexico and China, with the last manufacturing jobs departing this city along the Delaware River in 2005. MCS now has about 175 U.S. employees and 600 people overseas.

“We were going to lose the business because we were no longer competitive,” CEO Richard Master explained. And one of the biggest impediments to keeping labor costs in line, he said, has been the increasing expense of health coverage in the United States.

Today, he’s at the vanguard of a small but growing group of business executives who are lining up to support a “Medicare for All” national health program. He argues not that health care is a human right, but that covering everyone with a government plan and decoupling health care coverage from the workplace would benefit entrepreneurship.

In February, Master stood with Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) outside the Capitol after she introduced her Medicare for All bill.

“This bill removes an albatross from the neck of American business, puts more money in consumer products and will boost our economy,” he said.

As health costs continue to grow, straining employer budgets and slowing wage growth, others in the business community are beginning to take the option more seriously.

While the influential U.S Chamber of Commerce and other large business lobbying groups strongly oppose increased government involvement in health care, the resolve of many in the business community – especially among smaller firms – may be shifting.

“There is growing momentum among employers supporting single-payer,” said Dan Geiger, co-director of the Business Alliance for a Healthy California, which has sought to generate business support for a universal health care program in California. About 300 mostly small employers have signed on.

“Businesses are really angry about the system, and there is a lot of frustration with its rising costs and dysfunction,” he said.

Geiger acknowledged the effort still lacks support from any Fortune 500 company CEOs. He said large businesses are hesitant to get involved in this political debate and many don’t want to lose the ability to attract workers with generous health benefits. “There is also a lingering distrust of the government, and they think they can offer coverage better than the government,” he said.

In addition, some in the business community are hesitant to sign on to Medicare for All with many details missing, such as how much it would increase taxes, said Ellen Kelsay, chief strategy officer for the National Business Group on Health, a leading business group focused on health benefits.

Democrats propel the debate

For decades, a government-run health plan was considered too radical an idea for serious consideration. But Medicare for All has been garnering more political support in recent months, especially after a progressive wave helped Democrats take control of the House this year.

Several 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, strongly back it.

The labor unions and consumer groups that have long endorsed a single-payer health system hope that the embrace of it by employers such as Master marks another turning point for the movement.

Supporters of the concept say the health system overall would see savings from a coordinated effort to bring down prices and the elimination of many administrative costs or insurance company profits.

“It’s critical for our success to engage employers, particularly because our current system is hurting employers almost as much as it is patients,” said Melinda St. Louis, campaign director of Medicare for All at Public Citizen, a consumer-rights group based in Washington.

Master, a former Washington lawyer, worked on Democratic Sen. George McGovern’s presidential campaign before returning to Pennsylvania in 1973 to take over his father’s company, which made rigid paper boxes. In 1980, he founded MCS, which pioneered the popular front-loading picture frame and steamless fog-free mirrors for bathrooms. The company has grown into a $250 million corporation.

Master frequently travels to Washington and around the country to talk to business leaders as he seeks to build political support for a single-payer health system.

In the past four years, he has produced several documentary videos on the topic. In 2018, he formed the Business Initiative for Health Policy, a nonprofit group of business leaders, economists and health policy experts trying to explain the financial benefits of a single-payer system.

Dan Wolf, CEO of Cape Air, a Hyannis, Mass.-based regional airline that employs 800 people calls himself “a free market guy.” But he also supports Medicare for All. He said Master helps turn the political argument over single-payer into a practical one.

“It’s about good business sense and about caring for his employees and their well-being,” he said, adding that employers should no longer be straddled with the cost and complexity of health care.

“It makes no more sense for an airline to understand health policy for the bulk of its workers than for a health facility to have to supply all the air transportation for its employees,” he said.

Employers are also an important voice in the debate because 156 million Americans get employer-paid health care, making it by far the single-largest form of coverage.

Master said his company has tried various methods to control costs with little success, including high deductibles, narrow networks of providers and wellness plans that emphasize preventive medicine.

Insurers who are supposed to negotiate lower rates from hospitals and doctors have failed, he added, and too many premium dollars go to covering administrative costs. Only by having the federal government set rates can the United States control costs of drugs, hospitals and other health services, he said.

“Insurance companies are not watching the store and don’t have incentives to hold down costs in the current system,” he said.

Glad the boss is trying to make a difference

What’s left of MCS in Pennsylvania is a spacious corporate office building housing administrative staff, designers and a giant distribution center piled high with carton boxes from floor to ceiling.

MCS pays an average of $1,260 per month for each employee’s health care, up from $716 in 2009, the company said. In recent years, the company has reduced out-of-pocket costs for employees by covering most of their deductibles.

Medicare for All would require several new taxes to raise money, but Master said such a plan would mean savings for his company and employees.

MCS employees largely support Master’s attempt to fix the health system even if they are not all on board with a Medicare for All approach, according to interviews with several workers in Easton.

“I think it’s a good idea,” said Faith Wildrick, a shipper at MCS who has worked for the company 26 years. “If the other countries are doing it and it is working for them, why can’t it work for us?”

Wildrick said that even with insurance her family struggles with health costs as her husband, Bill, a former MCS employee, deals with liver disease and needs many diagnostic tests and prescription medications. Their annual deductible has swung from $4,000 several years ago to $500 this year as the company has worked to lower employees’ out-of-pocket costs.

“I’m really glad someone is fighting for this and trying to make a difference,” said Wildrick.

Jessica Ehrhardt, the human resources manager at MCS, said the effort to reduce employees’ out-of-pocket health costs means the company must pay higher health costs. That results in less money for salary increases and other benefits, she added.

Asked about Medicare for All, Ehrhardt said, “It’s a drastic solution, but something needs to happen.”

For too long, Master said, the push for a single-payer health system has been about ideology.

“The movement has been about making health care a human right and that we have a right to universal health care,” he said. “What I am saying is this is prudent for our economy and am trying to make the business and economic case.”

Kaiser Health News is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

I don’t Believe It! New York Times Cuts All Political Cartoons?

Drawing Fire. America’s Best Political Cartoonists.

June 11, 2019

No photo description available.
Kevin KallaugherFollow

The newest edition of Counterpoint is out which includes a special cartoon I created to answer the cartoon killers at the New York Times.

Near Record ‘Dead Zone’ Predicted for Gulf of Mexico

EcoWatch

Near Record ‘Dead Zone’ Predicted for Gulf of Mexico

Jordan Davidson           June 11, 2019 

This map shows how pollution from cities and farms flows down into the Gulf of Mexico. NOAA

 

Every year the Gulf of Mexico hosts a human caused “dead zone.” This year, it will approach record levels scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — or NOAA — estimate, in a statement released Monday.

The researchers predict the hypoxic zone — an area with little to no oxygen that can kill marine life — to be nearly 8,000 square miles or roughly the size of Massachusetts.

NOAA wasn’t the only organization to estimate a near record dead zone this summer. Researchers from Louisiana State University (LSU) released a statement on Monday predicting this year’s dead zone to be 8,717 square miles, making it the second largest on record.

“We think this will be the second-largest, but it could very well go over that,” said Nancy Rabalais, a marine ecologist who studies dead zones co-authored the LSU report, as CNN reported.

The Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone is a result of nutrient pollution, including nitrogen and phosphorus from urban environments and farms, traveling through the Mississippi River watershed and into the gulf, according to NOAA’s press release.

NOAA pointed to the overwhelming spring rains along the Mississippi River, which led to record high river flows and flooding, as a major contributing factor to this year’s sizeable dead zone.

The record flooding brought a substantial amount of pollutants into the water. “This past May, discharge in the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers was about 67 percent above the long-term average between 1980 and 2018. USGS estimates that this larger-than average river discharge carried 156,000 metric tons of nitrate and 25,300 metric tons of phosphorus into the Gulf of Mexico in May alone. These nitrate loads were about 18 percent above the long-term average, and phosphorus loads were about 49 percent above the long-term average,” NOAA said in its press release.

What happens is the nitrogen and phosphorus stimulate the growth of phytoplankton, which fall to the bottom of the water and decompose with the bacteria that uses up the oxygen, creating an area with not enough oxygen to sustain life.

“The low oxygen conditions in the gulf’s most productive waters stresses organisms and may even cause their death, threatening living resources, including fish, shrimp and crabs caught there,” LSU said in a statement. “Low oxygen conditions started to appear 50 years ago when agricultural practices intensified in the Midwest.”

To prevent the problem in the future, a task force of federal, state and tribal agencies from 12 of the 31 states that comprise the Mississippi River watershed set a goal of reducing the dead zone from an average of about 5,800 square miles to an average of 1,900 square miles, but that number is far from today’s reality, according to NBC Dallas-Fort Worth.

“While this year’s zone will be larger than usual because of the flooding, the long-term trend is still not changing,” said Don Scavia, an aquatic ecologist at the University of Michigan who contributed to the NOAA report, in a University of Michigan statement. “The bottom line is that we will never reach the dead zone reduction target of 1,900 square miles until more serious actions are taken to reduce the loss of Midwest fertilizers into the Mississippi River system.”

In the meantime, farmers along the Mississippi can build embankments to stop runoff, diversifying their crops and using sustainable perennials like wheat grass, which will hold more nitrogen and soil in the ground since it has a longer root than corn and soybeans, according to CNN.

Plant Extinction Is Happening 500x Faster Than Before the Industrial Revolution

EcoWatch

Plant Extinction Is Happening 500x Faster Than Before the Industrial Revolution

By Jordan Davidson       June 11, 2019

Cyanea superba, endemic to the island of Oahu and now extinct in the wild. David Eickoff/ CC BY 2.0.

 

Researchers have found that nearly 600 plant extinctions have taken place over the last two and a half centuries, according to a new paper published in Nature Ecology and Evolution.

The 571 proven plant extinctions lost since 1753 is twice the number of animal species lost in the same time frame and nearly four times as many plants lost as botanists recently estimated. The researchers with the Royal Botanic Gardens in the UK and Stockholm University also noted that many plant species disappeared without anyone ever knowing about them, pushing the true number of extinctions much higher.

The extinction rate — 500 times greater now than before the Industrial Revolution — is also quite alarming, according to The Guardian. This number, too, is likely an underestimate.

“This study is the first time we have an overview of what plants have already become extinct, where they have disappeared from and how quickly this is happening,” said Aelys Humphreys, Ph.D., of Stockholm University, the BBC reported.

The paper documented all known plant extinctions in the world, finding that most lost plants were in the tropics and on islands. The researchers created a map that showed South Africa, Australia, Brazil, India, Madagascar and Hawaii as particular hotspots for plant extinction, according to The Guardian.

So what’s causing the rapid rate of plant extinction? The main culprit is human activity like clear cutting forests for timber and converting land into fields for agriculture.

The researchers note that their paper also shows what lessons can be learned to stop future extinctions.

“Plants underpin all life on Earth,” said Eimear Nic Lughadha, Ph.D., at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, who was part of the research team, as The Guardian reported. “They provide the oxygen we breathe and the food we eat, as well as making up the backbone of the world’s ecosystems – so plant extinction is bad news for all species.”

Life on Earth relies on plants for oxygen and food. And, the extinction of one plant can lead to cascading effects that threaten to harm other species that rely on the plant for food or for a place to lay eggs, the BBC reports.

“Millions of other species depend on plants for their survival, humans included, so knowing which plants we are losing and from where, will feed back into conservation programs targeting other organisms as well,” Nic Lughadha said, as the BBC reported.

The researchers highlighted steps to slow down plant extinctions including, recording all plants in the world, preserving specimens, funding botanists and educating children to recognize local plants, according to the BBC.

The research comes on the heels of other grim reports that have highlighted the destruction humans have caused. Last month, a UN report said that one million of Earth’s eight million plant and animal species are threatened with extinction.

Andre Rieu – You raise me up

Andre Rieu – You raise me up
“You raise me up, so I can stand on mountains
You raise me up to walk on stormy seas
I am strong when I am on your shoulders
You raise me up to more than I can be” ❤

You raise me up

"You raise me up, so I can stand on mountainsYou raise me up to walk on stormy seasI am strong when I am on your shouldersYou raise me up to more than I can be" ❤

Posted by André Rieu on Thursday, May 9, 2019

Jon Stewart’s powerful, emotional speech slamming Congress for its inaction supporting 9/11 victims and first responders.

CNN

June 11, 2019

Watch Jon Stewart’s powerful, emotional speech slamming Congress for its inaction supporting 9/11 victims and first responders.

“What an incredible metaphor this room is for the entire process that getting health care and benefits for 9/11 first responders has come to. Behind me, a filled room of 9/11 first responders, and in front of me, a nearly empty Congress.” https://cnn.it/2I8ZYTJ

Jon Stewart chokes up during angry speech to Congress

Watch Jon Stewart's powerful, emotional speech slamming Congress for its inaction supporting 9/11 victims and first responders. "What an incredible metaphor this room is for the entire process that getting health care and benefits for 9/11 first responders has come to. Behind me, a filled room of 9/11 first responders, and in front of me, a nearly empty Congress." https://cnn.it/2I8ZYTJ

Posted by CNN on Tuesday, June 11, 2019

U.S. Floods Snarl Trucks, Trains, Barges

Bloomberg