Friday, August 19th, 2011
Stephan: Much of the wealth of the middle class has moved to the upper one per cent. As a result people have little money to spend and less confidence in the future -- a recipe for disaster throughout the course of history.
With an unprecedented sum of wealth, tens of trillions of dollars, held within the top one-tenth of one percent of the US population, we now have the most severe inequality of wealth in US history. Not even the robber barons of the Gilded Age were as greedy as the modern-day economic elite.
As American philosopher John Dewey said, ‘There is no such thing as the liberty or effective power of an individual, group, or class, except in relation to the liberties, the effective powers, of other individuals, groups or classes.
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Friday, August 19th, 2011
DAVID EDWARDS, - The Raw Story
Stephan: The growth of the trend of willful ignorance should be a matter of concern to everyone still interested in facts. The Right has a contempt for science believing its research constitutes just another political argument. Part of the process used by deniers is the false equivalency argument which the corporate media likes because it creates sensoids and conflict. We are better than this, and I ask you to contact one least one of your local media outlets and demand they stop using false equivalent debates.
Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry suggested Wednesday that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by scientists who are motivated by cash.
‘There are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects,
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Friday, August 19th, 2011
MICHAEL HILTZIK, - Los Angeles Times
Stephan: This is a pretty good recapitulation of where the housing crisis stands. But I think there is a ringer. We teeter on the edge of a second recession, indeed, if Europe really collapses as some think will happen it could be a global recession, little different than a depression. And we are following exactly the wrong path in my view. What we need is massive stimulus in the form infrastructure construction and reconstruction, which would create millions of jobs. Sadly, so far as I can see it is unlikely to happen.
We are now in the fifth year of a housing crisis in which more than 3 million Americans have lost their homes to foreclosure, with millions more still at risk.
Every initiative – government or private – to stem the tide of misery has fallen leagues short in the face of continued economic gloom and the intransigence of lenders.
So it’s an odd moment to be identifying glimmers of optimism that solutions to the crisis might finally be emerging. Yet that may be the case.
Over the next few weeks, several initiatives aimed at reforming the foreclosure process, holding mortgage lenders and services accountable for their past abuses, and creating more effective mortgage workouts are coming to a head.
They’re moving sometimes along parallel lines and sometimes at cross-purposes, but they’re moving.
First, some context. The complexity of the foreclosure crisis stems from the process of bundling hundreds of thousands of mortgage loans into securities and selling them to investors.
Typically, banks and other lenders retained almost no financial interest in the mortgages they originated, other than the duty to service them – collect payments and pursue delinquent borrowers, say – for which they received a fee.
Several drawbacks to that system emerged when the housing economy […]
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Thursday, August 18th, 2011
, - ArcaMax Health & Fitness
Stephan: Considering this in the context of the crazy illness profit system we have in the U.S. this looks like good news.
Washington, DC, United States (KaiserHealth) – You probably haven’t heard of either Express Scripts or Medco Health Services, but their plans to merge in a $29 billion deal, announced last month, may have an impact on your pocketbook.
The two companies are giants in the health care industry. They’re what’s called pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs: They manage the prescription drug coverage that health insurance companies offer to large organizations like corporations and unions. The companies say the merger will help them control health care costs for consumers. But will bigger really be better for consumers?
The PBM model can result in cost savings for customers, says Lisa Jackson, an administrative assistant with the Granite City, Ill., chapter of United Steel Workers who helps thousands of union retirees navigate the world of health insurance.
The people she works with – former employees of the old National Steel plant in Granite City – get prescription drug coverage through their union, and the benefit is handled by Express Scripts. Jackson says some of her retirees are saving as much as $150 each time they fill a prescription over what they would pay if they were getting the same prescription through the federal Medicare drug benefit.
‘These […]
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Thursday, August 18th, 2011
Stephan: It is one of histories great ironies that the states whose populations have the lowest belief in the reality of human mediated climate change are the ones that are going to be hit hardest by the changes.
MIAMI — The United States has already tied its yearly record for billion-dollar weather disasters and the cumulative tab from floods, tornadoes and heat waves has hit $35 billion, the National Weather Service said on Wednesday.
And it’s only August, with the bulk of the hurricane season still ahead.
‘I don’t think it takes a wizard to predict 2011 is likely to go down as one of the more extreme years for weather in history,’ National Weather Service Director Jack Hayes told journalists on a conference call.
The agency’s parent organization, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA, launched a campaign on Wednesday to better prepare Americans for violent weather.
There have so far been nine separate disasters this year that caused an economic loss of $1 billion or more in the United States, tying the record set in 2008, NOAA said. The most recent was the summer flooding along the Missouri and Souris rivers in the upper Midwest.
The ‘new reality’ is that both the frequency and the cost of extreme weather are rising, making the nation more economically vulnerable and putting more lives and livelihoods at risk, Hayes said.
The number of U.S. natural disasters has tripled in the last 20 years and […]
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