We’re All In This Together There’s No Doubt, Vote Out Trump I am deeply uncertain about our world. Our larger one, as in the entire planet – and our smaller one, the United States of America. Every day I read the papers and online news, and the news is unbearable. There is no longer any reasonable doubt that human beings are responsible for climate change. Ice caps and glaciers melt, fires ravage the parched West, and record numbers of hurricanes…
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We're All In This Together
WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER Praising Justice Ginsburg …With One Reservation We mourn Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second female justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Born in Brooklyn in 1933, she taught at both Rutgers and Columbia, and became Columbia’s first tenured female professor. She was director of the Women’s Rights Project of the ACLU during the 1970s, and argued six important cases on gender equality before the Supreme Court, winning five of them. President Jimmy Carter appointed her to…
WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER Non-Violence Worked For Revered Trio Does anyone remember how Mahatma Gandhi changed the world? How a slight Indian man, a lawyer who never carried a weapon, defeated the strongest empire in the world and rewrote the future of billions of people? Does anyone remember how Martin Luther King changed the world? How a Black Southern Baptist preacher, a man who never carried a weapon, changed two centuries of oppression of Black Americans and opened new…
WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER The Question Of Out-Of-Towners By LARRY BENNETT • Special to www.AllOTSEGO.com FOR: First is the idea that all have the right to remove their family from a place of apparent danger to a place seen to be safer. Second is the economic idea that second-home owners have the absolute right to relocate to those homes, which they own and pay taxes on. Presumably that is also true if a city resident can afford to rent…
We’re all In This Together Otsego County’s Allocation Of COVID-19 Testing Kits? 3. Reports about the coronavirus offer hugely differing opinions. That the facts are in dispute isn’t surprising, since this is a novel virus that health systems around the world are fighting for the first time. Still, some facts are agreed on. As of March 1, the World Health Organization reported 87,000 confirmed cases, 2,989 deaths, and cases in 60 countries. 80,000 cases are confirmed in China with the…
COLUMN WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER Acquittal Emboldens Trump, For Now No, Chicken Little, the sky is not falling. Donald J. Trump has dodged the impeachment bullet just as he dodged the Mueller Report. He may feel emboldened to continue to ask others to dig up on his opponents; to continue to look the other way as Russian trolls do dirty work for him; to continue to require Republican politicians to swear fealty and kiss his pinkie ring. He will…
WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER President Loudest Climate Denier The definition of ignorance is “a lack of knowledge, education, or awareness.” Climate change deniers can’t hide behind a lack of knowledge, so they claim the knowledge is false and the facts are fake. They could also claim the earth is flat, yet a satellite would still persist in orbiting it. Facts seem to work that way. The most important issue humanity faces is already changing the futures of all living…
We’re All In This Together On Arms, Will Enough Ever Be Enough? The 2020 proposed U.S. military budget is $737 billion. When is enough, enough? This is 37 percent of the $1.7 trillion military spending for all the world. It is more than the next 13 nations combined (numbers in billions): China ($224), Saudi Arabia ($70), India ($55), Germany ($49), UK ($49), Japan ($47), Russia ($44), France ($40), South Korea ($38), Brazil ($29), Italy ($29), Australia ($26) and Canada ($21).…
COLUMN WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER Disunity Is As American As Cherry Vs. Apple Pie By LARRY BENNETT • Special to www.AllOTSEGO.com The press says we live in an era of unprecedented political division. The amplification of every tweet may make it seem so, but there is a different view of the severity of our polarization. The American Revolution saw Loyalists interested in compromises to prevent war, but colonists seeking independence who were not. Anyone trying to effect compromise or…
WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER In Land Of Plenty, Many Are Needy By LARRY BENNETT • Special to www.AllOTSEGO.com This column is titled, “We are all in this together,” but it doesn’t always appear to be so. The U.S. economy is the world’s largest – our GDP will exceed $21 trillion in 2019. Our GDP represents 20 percent of total global output, is larger than China’s GDP, and is projected to grow 2.5 percent in 2019. Our GDP per person…