BARBARA EHRENREICH, - truthdig.com
Stephan: This is too polemic, but it is also too true. And it is this perceived sense of unfairness that is rotting the country from the inside.
Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene. But as Business Week helpfully pointed out in 2007, the poor in aggregate provide a juicy target for anyone depraved enough to make a business of stealing from them.
The trick is to rob them in ways that are systematic, impersonal, and almost impossible to trace to individual perpetrators. Employers, for example, can simply program their computers to shave a few dollars off each paycheck, or they can require workers to show up 30 minutes or more before the time clock starts ticking.
Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest. When supplemented with late fees (themselves subject to interest), the resulting effective interest rate can be as high as 600% a year, which is perfectly legal in many states.
It’s not just the private sector that’s preying on the poor. Local governments are discovering that they can […]
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BARBIE LATZA NADEAU, - The Daily Beast
Stephan: This is a measure of how truly weird, I would even say perverse, the institutional Catholic church has become.
The Catholic Church is not investigating the Girl Scouts for their sinfully delicious cookies, but rather for the organization’s ties to nonprofits such as Médicins Sans Frontières and other groups that teach safe-sex education. Barbie Latza Nadeau on how one U.S. official’s claim that the GSA has links to Planned Parenthood has snowballed.
Should there be any doubt left about how the Vatican views women after clamping down on American nuns late last month, the leaders of the billion-strong Catholic Church have now set their sights on the devilish Girl Scouts. No, it’s not about the sinful cookies, but a claim that the Girl Scouts are associating with ‘questionable
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PAUL KRUGMAN, Nobel Laureate - Op-Ed Columnist - The New York Times
Stephan: The Euro crisis is hard to track and understand. Here is a good and, I believe, accurate primer on this issue, one that could and may have a huge impact on the American economy. There is a kind of morbid fascination to watching austerity politics -- the darling policy of the Right -- play out to disaster.
Suddenly, it has become easy to see how the euro – that grand, flawed experiment in monetary union without political union – could come apart at the seams. We’re not talking about a distant prospect, either. Things could fall apart with stunning speed, in a matter of months, not years. And the costs – both economic and, arguably even more important, political – could be huge.
This doesn’t have to happen; the euro (or at least most of it) could still be saved. But this will require that European leaders, especially in Germany and at the European Central Bank, start acting very differently from the way they’ve acted these past few years. They need to stop moralizing and deal with reality; they need to stop temporizing and, for once, get ahead of the curve.
I wish I could say that I was optimistic.
The story so far: When the euro came into existence, there was a great wave of optimism in Europe – and that, it turned out, was the worst thing that could have happened. Money poured into Spain and other nations, which were now seen as safe investments; this flood of capital fueled huge housing bubbles and huge trade deficits. […]
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MARTHA ROSENBERG, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: The psychiatric drug industry represents the illness profit system at its greediest and most depraved.
The following is an excerpt from Born with a Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks, and Hacks Pimp the Public Health (Prometheus Books, 2012). Click here to order a copy of the book.
In his book Psychiatryland, psychiatrist Phillip Sinaikin recounts reading a scientific article in which it was debated whether a three-year-old girl who ran out into traffic had oppositional-defiant disorder or bipolar disorder, the latter marked by ‘grandiose delusions
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ED PILKINGTON, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: We are becoming a majority non-White society, and this is the source of much of the racism we see coming from the Theocratic Right.
US census figures show Hispanic families driving demographic change as white babies now account for 49.6% of total births
America has crossed a landmark in its demographic make-up, presaging a monumental shift in the country’s culture, politics and economics, with minority groups for the first time in US history accounting for more than half of all births.
New figures released by the US census bureau underline the changing face of the world’s only superpower. They show that most children born between July 2010 and July 2011 belonged to ethnic or racial minorities, with Hispanic families driving the demographic growth.
Within that year, 1.98 million non-Hispanic white babies were born – just below half of the 4m total of births. The proportion of white births – 49.6% in that period – has never before fallen below the halfway mark since the advent of large-scale European immigration to the US.
The milestone has been a long time coming, with key demographic trends leading up to it for at least two decades. But the bare fact that American children under the age of one are now more likely numerically to be Hispanic, black or Asian than they are to be white still constitutes a moment of enormous […]
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