SEN. BERNIE SANDERS and RYAN ALEXANDER, - AlterNet
Stephan: It is a measure of the control of old energy over the Congress and the White House that nuclear power is considered and subsidized like this. Later this year as the Fukushima fall out -- deliberate choice of words -- impacts the West Coast perhaps we can finally generate enough citizen resistance to end this nonsense.
The US is facing a $15 trillion national debt, and there is no shortage of opinions about how to move toward deficit reduction in the federal budget. One topic you will not hear discussed very often on Capitol Hill is the idea of ending one of the oldest American welfare programmes – the extraordinary amount of corporate welfare going to the nuclear energy industry.
Many in Congress talk of getting ‘big government off the back of private industry’. Here’s an industry we’d like to get off the backs of the taxpayers.
As, respectively, a senator who is the longest-serving independent in Congress and the president of an independent and non-partisan budget watchdog organisation, we do not necessarily agree on everything when it comes to energy and budget policy in the US. But one thing we strongly agree on is the need to end wasteful subsidies that prop up the nuclear industry. After 60 years, this industry should not require continued and massive corporate welfare. It is time for the nuclear power industry to stand on its own two feet.
Nuclear welfare started with research and development. According to the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, since 1948 the federal government has spent more than […]
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, - Agence France-Presse (France)
Stephan: This is the latest in the Homo Superiorus trend.
PARIS — An international team of scientists said Sunday the largest brain study of its kind had found a gene linked to intelligence, a small piece in the puzzle as to why some people are smarter than others.
A variant of this gene ‘can tilt the scales in favour of a higher intelligence
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MICHELANGELO SIGNORILE, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: Obama is disappointing in so many ways, but still remains the only adult running for the Presidency. I read this as a further example of how strongly the theocratic right influences the electorate, and how much everyone in politics is afraid of them.
Does it strike you as strange, as it does me, that at a time when the country faces so many crises that all we seem to talk about in our political conversation are issues around sexuality? As a country we seem unable to really face reality or to tell ourselves the truth.
In separate interviews, two prominent LGBT activists slammed President Obama for refusing to sign an Executive Order ‘at this time’ barring federal contractors from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Tico Almeida, president of Freedom to Work, was among the LGBT activists in a White House meeting with senior advisor Valerie Jarrett earlier in the week who were told the order would not be signed. He said the White House rationale was ‘weak,
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ALAN BARBER, Center for Economic and Policy Research - Nation of Change
Stephan: Here is the critical analysis of what I think is a very bad plan. Once again it all seems to be about savaging the elderly in a way that, in the end, does nothing good financially. So all we are left with is a kind of nasty mean spiritedness.
Social Security remains the most important source of income for most Americans in their retirement. Nonetheless, there are many proposals for cutting benefits that get serious consideration, including increasing the normal retirement age. A new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research examines the impact of raising the Social Security retirement age and its effect on the distribution of wealth from loss of future Social Security benefits.
‘The full retirement age for Social Security is already scheduled to increase to 67 over the next 10 years,
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DAVID EDWARDS, - Raw story
Stephan: The Theocratic Right's profound sexual dysfunctionality issues -- which is why so much of the Right's political focus centers on sexual issues -- has become so extreme that scientists are beginning to study it. Here is a report on one of the insights emerging.
People who have negative feelings toward homosexuality often have secret attractions to the same sex - and are more likely to have grown up in households that forbid homosexual feelings, according to a recent study.
A research team from the University of Rochester, the University of Essex, England, and the University of California in Santa Barbara found that ‘[h]omophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires.
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