Friday, September 16th, 2011
DANIEL STONE, - The Daily Beast
Stephan: One of the big lies of the Randian Right is that government cannot create jobs or foster innovation. It has been repeated so many times that like all big lies repeated often enough, it is now believed by a large percentage of the population. That belief does not make it any less of a lie, as the public statements of these mega CEOs and other business leaders make clear.
As Washington debates the country’s economic future, America’s top CEOs say the government needs to get serious about finding the next big idea in energy-by providing money for long-term research.
Bill Gates and several of his closest friends-CEOs and top executives from Bank of America, Lockheed Martin, and Kleiner Perkins-are in Washington discussing their latest uphill battle.
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Friday, September 16th, 2011
CURTIS BRAINARD, - Columbia Journalism Review
Stephan: The cancer of secrecy creeps across the consciousness of our culture, invading every nook and cranny. Years ago Herman Kahn, founder of the Hudson Institute, told me over dinner one night that the American obsession with secrecy, which in science really took hold with the Manhattan Project, would eventually cripple the country. Putting a secret stamp on something just tells your enemies which file cabinets to look in. In contrast, he said, look at lasers -- then one of the most cutting edge areas of applied science -- 'It was all done in the open literature. The developments came so quickly, and were so numerous, they had to publish the submission date. There might already be more advanced and newer information. The Soviets could not keep up, and it was hard for them to know what was truly substantive.'
In July 2009, just months after President Obama took office promising to revolutionize government transparency, leaders of the Society of Environmental Journalists participated in an hour-long conference call with public-affairs staffers working for Lisa Jackson, the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Jackson’s office wanted to hear what the reporters’ gripes were when it came to access, and Christy George, then the society’s president, and her colleagues obliged, outlining their most persistent problems: the requirement to seek permission for interviews with agency scientists and experts, and difficulty arranging those interviews; the requirement to have press officers, or ‘minders,
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Friday, September 16th, 2011
ALEX VEIGA, Real Estate Writer - The Associated Press
Stephan: The basis of middle class wealth is owning one's home. That dream continues to slip away. It's not in the news everyday as it once was, but the riptide of foreclosure is still washing across the land. Neither the Bush nor Obama administrations has effectively addressed the foreclosure trend.
LOS ANGELES — Banks have stepped up their actions against homeowners who have fallen behind on their mortgage payments, setting the stage for a fresh wave of foreclosures.
The number of U.S. homes that received an initial default notice — the first step in the foreclosure process — jumped 33 percent in August from July, foreclosure listing firm RealtyTrac Inc. said Thursday.
The increase represents a nine-month high and the biggest monthly gain in four years. The spike signals banks are starting to take swifter action against homeowners, nearly a year after processing issues led to a sharp slowdown in foreclosures.
‘This is really the first time we’ve seen a significant increase in the number of new foreclosure actions,’ said Rick Sharga, a senior vice president at RealtyTrac. ‘It’s still possible this is a blip, but I think it’s much more likely we’re seeing the beginning of a trend here.’
Foreclosure activity began to slow last fall after problems surfaced with the way many lenders were handling foreclosure paperwork, namely shoddy mortgage paperwork comprising several shortcuts known collectively as robo-signing.
Many of the nation’s largest banks reacted by temporarily ceasing all foreclosures, re-filing previously filed foreclosure cases and revisiting pending cases to prevent errors.
Other […]
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Thursday, September 15th, 2011
ED CROOKS, - Financial Times (U.K.)
Stephan: This is one of those stories illustrating a trend as much as a single event. They are momentarily huge but then drift off the media radar. I don't think they should because then one doesn't really know what happened. It takes time to sort through the evidence. Here is the emerging truth of Deepwater Horizon.
NEW YORK — Decisions made by BP to save time and money on its Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico were contributing causes of the Deepwater Horizon disaster on April 20 last year, an official US government inquiry has concluded.
The final report from the joint investigation of the US Coast Guard and the offshore oil regulator, published on Wednesday, accused BP of ‘multiple decisions
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Thursday, September 15th, 2011
JOHN RONDY, DAVID BAILEY and CYNTHIA JOHNSTON, - Reuters/Raw Story
Stephan: This arises because of the collapse of the family farm economy, migration out of rural areas by the young, the general destruction of the middle class, and the failure of the illness profit system to provide real healthcare. Rural poverty in some areas of the country is beginning to look like the Depression era.
MILWAUKEE — Conventional wisdom might suggest living in the country would be healthier than the city, but that is not necessarily so, according to a study comparing relative health across cities, suburbs and rural areas.
‘Some of these rural areas are quite depressed, impoverished, with poor social and economic factors, and they have bad health outcomes,’ Patrick Remington of the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute said on Thursday.
Remington, who expanded the institute’s annual statewide study to a national study in 2010, said that some of the least healthy places in Wisconsin were small rural areas.
The County Health Rankings takes a snapshot of an area’s health using rates of premature death, low birth weight, disease and risk factors such as smoking, obesity, drinking and crime along with education and employment rates.
One of the main goals of the rankings is to raise community awareness. This year’s study concluded that 48 percent of the healthiest counties were urban or suburban, while 84 percent of the unhealthiest counties were rural.
Suburban counties tended to have the best health outcomes, Remington said.
‘Some cities have better health outcomes than what you would expect,’ Remington added, pointing to some densely populated boroughs of New York as ranking well.
Not […]
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