I’ve become tired about writing about a flotilla to Israel that might or might not happen, since I’ve been writing about it since March. It’s like banging my head against a wall every few days, and the wall isn’t budging. So what’s up with the flotilla? The only ship to make it out of Greek harbors – nice political maneuvering, Israel – was stopped, and boarded, in international waters by Israel today.
Despite all my contemplations, and writings, about the matter, I cannot easily judge who was right in their actions. Much like last year. Israel stopped a ship in international waters (against international law), but the ship’s destination was clear. The expectation of this has been building for months, and Israel worked well with Greece (not usually an Israeli friend) to use every means to prevent the arrival of several hundred people – many of them Jewish – making a statement about policy in Israel. Perhaps the activists (which the media uses as a dirty word, though it is anything but) succeeded in their cause. Did you notice that there was a flotilla trying to sail to Gaza? It’s much more likely that you noticed, because all of months of expectation – the ‘flotilla’ ( now a single ship) that set sail was supposed to sail six weeks ago – led to more news coverage.
Why do I object to Israel’s policy? It’s not because I’m anti-Israel; it’s because I’m pro-peace. I don’t believe you create peace by perpetrating violence. Were the activists, whom I have supported, perpetrating violence? I think they were bringing attention to the oppression of Gaza – and oppression is a form of violence. Does Israel believe the activists were violent? Probably. Does Israel believe it is creating peace through oppression and prevention of statement? Probably.
However, Peace, like war, must be waged. Although I support Israel – to paraphrase Shakespeare, I love Israel so much I would not part with a single inch of it – my conception of Israel is different from how Israel (the government) envisions itself, and is also different from your conception of Israel. I think, and some retired commanders of the Israeli Defense Forces agree with me, that Israel legitimately exists, and the in 1948, 1956, and 1967 Israel had legitimacy. There has not been a war since in which Israel has had legitimacy,which comes from the international community (not just the United States) and that includes the daily oppression and occasional bombing of Gaza.
Land, and the borders of countries which rest on land, are not immutable. History works in such a way that one nation conquers another, and claims land, a claim which, over time, is sometimes validated and sometimes invalidated. While Wales, and the requisite Gaelic, are returning as a culture, it is part of Great Britain. Which, in turn, was founded because of marriage, not conquest of land. In the United States, there are the Jamestown Indians, of Washington State, which were never an oppressed tribe (or a tribe at all), and are quite prosperous. Then there are the Chumash Indians, or California, who were servants to the Spaniards and the white men, but now make a killing running a casino. When South Sudan became the world’s newest country last week, were you disappointed, and thinking that continued oppression on the basis of religion was the right thing between the Sudanese? Or did you feel joy for the South Sudanese, who felt hope? It is reasonable on the basis of history to expect that land in Israel will not remain unaltered.
When we call for peace in the Middle East, which stems from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, it is not a call for the end of Israel. It is a call for peace, and the Germans were right that peace requires ‘living space;’ it’s equally clear that the Germans went the wrong way about that claim. The creation of war does not bring about peace. When activists, those dreaded people who use action to advocate peace, bring to our attention that the Palestinians, too, need ‘living space’ it is not without merit. Room to live give us successful examples such as the Chumash and Jamestown Indians, peace in Ireland, and the hope the Republic of South Sudan is experiencing.
The Economy, Stupid is a great text-based game that simulates four years of a mythical medium-sized country, with you in control. Perhaps more non-mythical elected representatives should play the game, because you get to discover what happens to the economy when the global economy is good and bad, what happens when you raise taxes and lower taxes, what happens when you raise and lower benefits to the unemployed and retired, and what happens when you fund or defund the public sector.
The Economy, Stupid, is a simulation, true, but certain realistic things happen. Guess what happens when you reach a maximum debt level, and are forced to balance the budget (as opposed to slowly decreasing the level of debt and lowering debt under the maximum level)? You guessed right: unemployment increases drastically, approval ratings drop drastically, less money enters the economy because you have been forced to balance the budget by cutting funding and raising taxes at the same time to create a positive budget.
Does this future world sound familiar to you? The United States reached it’s debt level at $14.29 trillion on May 16, but the US Treasury is using “extraordinary measures” to prevent default until August 2. Congress has been debating how to fix the debt since June, with the Republicans suggesting drastic changes to Medicare and Social Security – big changes that the Democrats signaled “they would allow for some changes to the retirement insurance program, provided they be on the delivery-side as opposed to the beneficiary side,” which nonetheless would have little impact on improving the debt. Democrats are asking for an end to subsidies to large companies, while ” House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has said the lower chamber will not approve” any measure involving tax increases.
No wonder Obama is frustrated. He doesn’t get mad often, and like all calm people, when he gets mad it is a spectacular sight. On Wednesday he told the Republicans “’It cannot all be on us,’” arguing that Republicans need to give on the revenue side of things as Democrats are willing to do so on spending cuts.” Which, of course, they are loathe to do. Obama said in the meeting, to his credit “‘I have reached the point where I say enough,'” according to Reuters. ‘Would Ronald Reagan be sitting here? I’ve reached my limit. This may bring my presidency down, but I will not yield on this.'”
Nate Silver, who created a name for himself with extremely accurate predictions of the 2008 elections, and other things since (such as the Emmy’s, and sports players), has quite a bit to say on Republicans in federal office, and Republicans generally.
However, all but 7 Republicans in the House of Representatives, or 97 percent of them, have signed the pledge of Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform stating that any net tax increases are unacceptable. One might have believed this to be simply a negotiating position. But the proposal that Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell floated yesterday, which would give up on striking a deal and instead rely on some procedural gymnastics to burden Mr. Obama with having to raise the debt ceiling, suggests otherwise. Republicans in the House really may be of the view that a deal with a 3:1 or 4:1 or 5:1 ratio of spending cuts to tax increases is worse than none at all.
If we do take the Republicans’ no-new-taxes position literally, it isn’t surprising that the negotiations have broken down. Consider that, according to the Gallup poll, Republican voters want the deal to consist of 26 percent tax increases, and Democratic voters 46 percent — a gap of 20 percentage points. If Republicans in the House insist upon zero tax increases, there is a larger ideological gap between House Republicans and Republican voters than there is between Republican voters and Democratic ones.
There is also a large gap between the GOP establishment and the Tea Partyers who crashed the party party last November and quickly found they had to be part of the establishment. Steve Bell, Steve Bell is former Staff Director of the Senate Budget Committee, and now Senior Director on Economic Policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center – writes about the debt negotiations. “Chairman [of the House Financial Services Committee, Spencer] Bacchus hardly qualifies as a RINO nor is he considered a renegade Republican. His remarks, therefore, may well hint that the many senior members of the House Republican caucus are beginning both to tire of the ideological rigidity of some of their “Tea Party” members and to believe that it is time to stop playing games with the debt limit negotiations.”
NPR continues the discussion about the split within the Republican Party.
The split between Obama and Republicans is nothing compared to the gap between GOP leaders and their Tea Party fueled rank and file. Top congressional leaders appear to have essentially painted themselves into a corner between Obama on one side and the just-say-no bloc of House Republicans on the other.
That the warnings [of Republican leaders that it’s time to compromise] seem to be going unheeded is leaving many people with a sinking feeling.
For those with a good memory, including the Republicans, NPR is good enough to remind us that Mitch McConnell, Republican minority leader in the Senate, knows well that the government shutdown in 1995 produced bad results for Republicans in the following election. History has a tendency to repeat itself. Senator Lindsey Graham also knows just how dangerous political tactics are.
“Our problem is we made a big deal about this for three months. How many Republicans have been on TV saying, ‘I’m not going to raise the debt limit.’ You know, Mitch [McConnell] says, ‘I’m not going to raise the debt limit unless we talk about Medicare.’ And I’ve said I’m not going to raise the debt limit until we do something about spending and entitlements.’ So we’ve got nobody to blame but ourselves,” Graham told reporters after a GOP caucus lunch.
“We shouldn’t have said that if we didn’t mean it.”
Part of the confusion, according to a Reuters article, is that Republicans don’t know who’s in charge. They are all Chiefs with no Indians, thinking that they each know best and represent the party leadership; at the same time they are all Indians and no Chiefs, not quite sure of who the leader is or whether they are being represented to the negotiations. It all makes for a lot of clamoring. Representative Pete Sessions thinks there will be no deal until August(!); Speaker of the House Boehner is being advised by other representatives that a default won’t be a bad thing. Eight Republican presidential candidates – not all of whom hold office – said they won’t back any increase in the debt ceiling.
Democrats and Republicans, the Department of the Treasury, and the IMF, all have their own interests in mind. Some are more willing to compromise than others. Tim Geithner, Treasury Secretary, doesn’t have a lot of room to compromise. He does his job, and he wants to keep his job; he has his own interests in mind. He joins a long list of people who understand the economy, or at least know how it can be manipulated, in saying that “consequences would be catastrophic” if the US defaults. Much as in The Economy, Stupid, “interest rates [would spike] on U.S. debt and the government [would have] to decide who it won’t pay, from senior citizens to the unemployed, to government contractors and whole branches of government. Many economists fear it would spark a new recession.”
Senator Bernie Sanders, the only Independent in the Senate, has a penchant for giving powerful speeches. This time he didn’t give an eight-hour filibuster speech – a fascinating story, but he managed to say important things in ten minutes.
Our right-wing friends in the House of Representatives have given us an option. What they have said is end Medicare as we know it and force elderly people, many of whom don’t have the money, to pay substantially more for their health care. So when you’re 70 under their plan and you get sick and you don’t have a whole lot of income, we don’t know what happens to you. They forget to tell us that if their plan was passed you’re going to have to pay a heck of a lot more for the prescription drugs you’re getting today. They we’re going to throw millions of kids off health insurance. If your mom or dad is in a nursing home and that nursing home bill is paid significantly by Medicaid and Medicaid isn’t paying anymore, they forgot to tell us what happens to your mom or dad in that nursing home. What happens?
And what happens today if you are unemployed and you’re not able to get unemployment extension? What happens if you are a middle-class family desperately trying to send their kids to college and you make savage cuts to Pell grants and you can’t go to college? What does it mean for the nation if we are not bringing forth young people that have the education that they need? They forgot to tell us that. And if you are one of the growing number of senior citizens in this country who are going hungry, they want to cut nutrition programs. And on and on it goes. Every program that has any significance to working families, the sick, the elderly, the children, the poor, they are going to cut in the midst of a recession when real unemployment is already at 15 percent and the middle class is disappearing and poverty is increasing. That’s their idea.
Shouldn’t the wealthiest Americans and the most profitable corporations contribute to deficit reduction rather than just the elderly and the sick and working families? They say no. They’re going to defend the richest people in this country — millionaires and billionaires — and make sure they don’t pay a nickel more in taxes. We’re going to make sure there is no tax reform so we can continue to lose $100 billion every single year because wealthy people and corporations stash their money in tax havens in the Cayman Islands or Bermuda, and that’s just fine. We’ll protect those tax breaks while we savage programs for working families.
No one is to blame, yet. There are a little more than five days to July 22, when a deal needs be reached “to get it through Congress in time.” However, several polls have already been conducted about who people would blame, if the US defaults.
In a poll conducted by Quinnipiac University from July 5-11, when asked to whom they would assign responsibility should the limit not be raised, 48 percent of respondents chose the congressional Republicans; 34 percent said they would blame the Obama administration.
These results echo a Pew Research Center poll conducted from June 16-19 which asked the same question as the Quinnipiac poll. According to that survey, 42 percent of respondents said they would blame Republicans in Congress if the debt ceiling were not raised; 33 percent chose the Obama Administration.
The findings highlight the political repercussions that the GOP could confront should default occur.
We’ve been told before that post-apocalyptic economies are coming our way soon (and while it’s true that our economy sucks, we’re not quite post-apocalyptic yet). I imagine we heard that in 1995. And we sort of heard that in 2000, with the dreaded Y2K. We heard it when the tech bubble collapsed. When the housing market collapsed completed its collapse in 2008, we got close. We’ll never know what happened, because after the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 777 points congress agreed to past the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which it had failed to pass days earlier. And so, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi has suggested that maybe Republicans need to see the market fail again before they try to fix it, with the commonplace act of raising the debt ceiling.
The polls suggest that people will blame the Republicans, and that’s likely, because at the moment people are likely to blame whoever they voted into office for not fixing things. But Republicans aren’t always the ones that are blamed. In 2010 it was the Democrats; in 2008, and previously in 2006, it was the Republicans. TARP passed, but it seems to have made people understandably, but unjustifiably, mad.
Wall Street is too abstract and the financial games that brought on the Great Recession almost impossible for most Americans to grasp. But the government bailout of the Street was a specific act almost everyone could instinctively understand — and to most Americans it seemed perversely wrong.
That’s what Robert Reich, professor at UC Berkeley and former adviser to Bill Clinton says about the economy.
A recent paper by Cornell political scientist Suzanne Mettler surveyed how many recipients of government benefits don’t really believe they have received any benefits. She found that over 44 percent of Social Security recipients say they “have not used a government social program.” More than half of families receiving government-backed student loans said the same thing, as did 60 percent of those who get the home mortgage interest deduction, 43 percent of unemployment insurance beneficiaries, and almost 30 percent of recipients of Social Security Disability.
Government is such an everyday part of life that people don’t recognize it. We need it. We can work in positive integers and have a government too.
I hope that you agree that I have some sense of politics, such as either-or, all-me, give-and-take, and the purpose and lack of purpose of some of our institutions. However, while I think I have political sense, I never thought I had any business sense. Business never made sense to me, because I cannot fathom a world where the primary goal is profit, and short-term interests reign supreme. Not everyone is lacking in business sense, though, and not all businesses are boring places for their customers. From my friend Felicia, writing about cupcakeries,
that is what this bakery is really about- while its business objective may be to sell a lot of cupcakes, it really needs to sell the idea of fun. Some customers may dash in just to grab a treat and go, but there needs to be an environment that welcomes customers with more time on their hands to sit around and stay a while. This particular bakery has board games all over the place, a good way to encourage customers to see the shop as a hangout spot rather than a version of a fast food joint. Keeping a customer in a store longer is generally good idea given the chance for add-on purchases, unless that extra time is spent waiting in line for a ridiculous amount of time (in which case the customer will be antsy. Very antsy). But in this case it also increases the likelihood of positive association with the bakery’s brand. Remembering a bakery for its yummy treats is one thing, but remembering a bakery for its treats PLUS the experience you had while there is a whole other trick.
I’ve been in businesses like this, where the pleasant atmosphere is part of what you pay for, even though you don’t pay extra, and you can sit there and pay for nothing at all. It is a welcoming sort of world, where I’ve played games of chess and scrabble and listened to music and done nothing at all. Business as usual can be about atmosphere, not profit, and still prosper all the while, because it makes people happy.
News of the World no longer exists, but Rupert Murdoch still knows how to make money.
Over the past four years Murdoch’s U.S.-based News Corp. has made money on income taxes. Having earned $10.4 billion in profits, News Corp. would have been expected to pay $3.6 billion at the 35 percent corporate tax rate. Instead, it actually collected $4.8 billion in income tax refunds, all or nearly all from the U.S. government.
That is from Reuters, a generally reliable source when it comes to facts. The article describes how Murdoch profits off the tax system.
One [way] is the aggressive use of intra-company transactions that globally allocate costs to locations that impose taxes — and profits to areas where profits can be earned tax-free.
For that Murdoch can thank laws and treaties that treat multinational corporations much more generously than working stiffs, such as those who make up the audience for his New York Post and for his British tabloids with bare-breasted women. Working stiffs have their taxes taken out of their pay before they get it, while Murdoch gets to profit now and pay taxes by-and-by.
News Corp. has 152 subsidiaries in tax havens, including 62 in the British Virgin Islands and 33 in the Caymans. Among the hundred largest U.S. companies, only Citigroup and Morgan Stanley have more tax haven subsidiaries than News Corp., a 2009 U.S. Government Accountability Office study found.
News Corp. had nearly $7 billion permanently invested offshore in 2009, money on which it does not have to pay taxes unless it brings the money back to the United States. Meanwhile, it can use that money as collateral for loans in the United States, where interest paid is a tax-deductible expense.
Smart people who have morals dream of doing what Murdoch actually does, which is make money off himself. You also might have heard recently that the US is approaching default on its debt, which is not usually a big deal and the magical debt ceiling is raised again. This time, people who think like Murdoch does have a plan; it’s the same plan that caused zero job growth over the last decade. Rational people who were not in a daze over the last decade point out that
this notion that eliminating tax loopholes and peeling back the overly generous tax breaks for wealthiest 2% will hurt job creation is nothing but a fantasy. There has never been a shred of evidence that links the kind of tax revenue increases being proposed to the creation, or lack thereof, of jobs. In fact, the result of the Bush tax breaks was some of the lowest job creation in our nation’s history, along with an explosion of our national debt that we are still trying to climb out from under. Yet John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor and the rest of the GOP brain trust that so happily endorsed the Bush policies that created much of this mess, are now trying to suggest that these same policies are our only way to salvation and jobs? Really, you can’t make this stuff up!
Three months ago I wrote an article titled, “On Funding,” about my lack of confidence that the federal government could sign an appropriations bill by the deadline which was fast approaching. I hope that if I say now as I did then that I don’t have confidence the government can reach a compromise that they will reach a compromise….
To borrow a great phrase, ‘now we are engaged in another battle, testing whether this nation, or any nation so conceived, can long endure. We are met on another battlefield of that war…’ which is a war over what the government will fund; this time, about limits on the national debt due to default August 2nd. I have gotten into the habit of quoting myself, and I apologize, but I must quote part of what I wrote in April, because it applies so well now.
There have been past government shutdowns and with the trend in current political climate it stands to reason there will be others in the future….
This is a conflict between a mindset: one mindset says that politics in a representative democracy should be done for political gain, and if shutting down the government may gain political points, it is the thing to do. The other mindset says that in representative democracy, the government must represent many views, and the government must always maintain the ability to function. The first mindset says politics is a game of 50%+1. The second mindset wants the best society for the most people….
Do wecut the $30,000,000,000 of non-security spending for political gain, default on our debt or should we do it because it represents our interests?
That is the question.
People like Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, say there will be “real nasty consequences” if the US defaults, which makes some funny part of me want to see what would happen. But beyond that funny part of us that wants to see human catastrophe, I don’t really want to see us default on our debt. There’s no financially or rationally sound reason why we should. And what would happen? “The president warned that failure to reach agreement could create another recession and throw millions of Americans out of work, painting a picture of catastrophe if a partisan stalemate is not broken and Congress fails to act. He criticized politicians who say the debt ceiling doesn’t need to be raised.”
A google search informs us that during between 2000 and 2008 the debt increased by more than $4 trillion dollars, and as of September 29, 2008, the debt limit had been raised seven times without comment by the people who now want catastrophe; alternately, the same search says the debt may have been raised five times or nineteen times.
A majority of swing-state voters, those magical states that political scientists pay attention to because of the electoral college, would raise taxes on the rich to begin to fix the deficit. Not so the federal Republicans, to which Obama responded in today’s press conference “‘I don’t see a path to a deal if they don’t budge. Period,'” accusing Republicans of having a ‘my way or the highway’ posture on taxes.” As if to prove his point, “even before Obama was finished speaking, Republicans were disagreeing with his insistence that a deficit-trimming deal include cutbacks in tax breaks for the wealthy and some big corporations. While the news conference was under way, Boehner’s office sent two emails to his news list saying tax hikes never should have been in the discussion.”
In April I wrote about the possible political consequences of American fear of hell.
In current American Christian terms, Christians believe in heaven but much less in hell. This has to do with globalization, on an international level and on a communal level. If you’re Christian and your good neighbor is Hindu/Jewish/Buddhist, you begin to think that person should not be damned for eternity. On a personal level, this means that you don’t believe in hell anymore, so your own actions won’t get you damned for eternity if you do something wrong. What incentive is left to be good if hell isn’t there waiting for you?
In political terms, this has some meaning. Church and state are much less separate than we like to think, for we political animals are surrounded by religion, and both are part of our being. If you don’t believe in hell – I don’t; it has never been part of my religion – why do things well, as opposed to not well? It means you have to have empathy; it means you have to be part of the here-and-now and not only the afterlife. What’s this going to do to American politics? We’ll have to wait and see.
Now there is more research, involving several European nations.
Daniel Treisman, a political scientist at UCLA, has come up with a way to measure how fearful nations are. What Treisman found is that is that if an individual admit to being worried about one threat, they are also highly likely to say they are worried about the others.
Now, the interesting thing is that fear is often not all that closely linked to real danger. There was no relationship between fear of BSE and actual number of cases, and only a weak relationship between fear of medical errors and the number of medical errors, and between terrorism and number of terrorist attacks. Fear of bird flu was actually highest in the countries with the fewest cases!
Fear was influenced by all sorts of weird effects. People are less scared if you quiz them in the evenings – Treisman speculates they may have partaken of a few bevvies already!
To me, this looks like good evidence that putting the fear of god into people actually makes them more fearful of everything else – and that, of course, has a number of interesting political and social ramifications!
An absolutely fascinating article, by Kai Nagata, titled Why I quit my job
Until Thursday, I was CTV’s Quebec City Bureau Chief, based at the National Assembly, mostly covering politics….
It was what I would qualify as a “great job,” especially for a 24-year old. Many of you told me how proud you were of my quick climb. But there was a growing gap between the reporter I played on TV, and the person I really am and want to become….
As a reporter, I feel like I’ve been holding my breath. Every question I asked, every tweet I posted, and even what I said to other journalists and friends had to go through a filter, where my own opinions and values were carefully strained out. Even then I’m not sure I was always successful, but I always knew at the CBC and subsequently at CTV that there were serious consequences for editorial. Within the terms of my employment at CTV, there was a clause in which the corporation (now Bellmedia) literally took ownership of my intellectual property output. If I invented a better mouse trap, they owned the patent. If I wrote a novel, they got a cut. Rhymes on the back of a napkin? Bellmedia is hip to the jive, yo.
…
Meanwhile, the people who are supposed to be holding decision makers to account are instead broadcasting useless tripe, or worse, stories that actively distract from the massive projects we need to be tackling instead of watching TV.
I thought if I paid my dues and worked my way up through the ranks, I could maybe reach a position of enough influence and credibility that I could say what I truly feel. I’ve realized there’s no time to wait.
If storytelling turns out to be my true passion and the best use of my skills, then I’ll continue down that path. If elder care, academia, agriculture, activism, art, education, Budo, or as-yet unforeseen pursuits turn out to make the flame burn brighter, I’ll make the switch, or do them all. I’m willing to work with anyone of any religion or political stripe, if they’re sincere about doing what it takes.
I’m broke, and yet I know I’m rich in love. I’m unemployed and homeless, but I’ve never been more free.
Everything is possible.
I hope you find time to read the whole thing.
If you can’t find a job, you’re not alone. ” Carl E. Van Horn, a professor of public policy at Rutgers University recently looked at what happened to college graduates who finished school between 2006 and 2010. Of these, only half found full-time jobs.” Twenty-five year olds with masters degrees are overqualified for government service, and one works as a nanny. Another college graduate found that ‘success’ had to be redefined to working at Walgreens. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics “unemployment rate for college graduates between the ages of 20 to 24-year-olds soared five percentage points in the past month — from 7.1 percent in May to 12.1 percent in June.” Van Horn says that “‘The continued weak recovery will mean more graduates finding themselves in part-time jobs and contingency jobs and jobs that are far below their level of education.'”
According to the Huffington Post,
House Democrats are circulating a resolution accusing House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) of having a conflict of interest in the debt ceiling debate.
The resolution goes after Cantor’s investment in ProShares Trust Ultrashort 20+ Year Treasury EFT, a fund that “takes a short position in long-dated government bonds.”
The fund is essentially a bet against U.S. government bonds. If the debt ceiling is not raised and the United States defaults on its debts, the value of Cantor’s fund would likely increase.
The article continues,
Cantor spokesman Brad Dayspring said Democrats have it backwards: The Majority Leader stands to lose much more money if Congress does not reach a deal on the debt ceiling and the U.S. defaults.
According to Dayspring, Cantor owns $3,327 in the ProShares trust. His congressional pension in the Thrift Savings Plan, on the other hand, is invested in the G Fund of government bonds and is valued at over $263,000. The value of his investment in the ProShares fund is highly variable and could change significantly if the government defaults.
The resolution is unlikely to be ruled valid by the House parliamentarian, but it could certainly create an uncomfortable bit of political theater when it’s read.
The Dole Blog 