, - The Raw Story/Agence France-Presse (France)
Stephan: The easy conclusion is that natural gas extraction in yet another country is causing earthquakes. The deeper insight I think is that this is part of the the great geopolitical shift in which virtual corporate states treat national governments as vassals and that the corporate drive for profits trumps all other considerations.
Farmers living atop Europe’s largest gas field in the isolated northern Netherlands are angry at increasingly frequent earthquakes caused by extraction.
Freezing winds and a glimmer of cold light pass through the three-foot by two-inch (one metre by five centimetre) crack in Martha and Jan Bos’s stable in Middelstum, a few miles (kilometres) from the Netherlands’ most northern point.
Their farmhouse, built in the early 20th century, has around 15 large cracks and part of the floor inside the entrance has dropped around three inches.
‘We’ve been living here for 25 years and for the last five years we’ve had regular earthquakes,
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STACY TEICHER KHADAROO, Staff Writer - The Christian Science Monitor
Stephan: Here is the latest on the New American Slavery trend, which is blending with the privatization of schools to create a pipeline of prisoners. We have no jobs for these young people of color, but they are useful to corporations as valves to tap the public treasury in the form of a payment from government, read tax payer, funds to maintain them as prisoners. It is all very profitable for the few, and a source of misery for the many. Once again a demonstration that in the U.S. we have been taken over by vampire capitalism
Two students set off fire alarms in the same school district. One of them, an African-American kindergartner, is suspended for five days; the other, a white ninth-grader, is suspended for one day.
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DANIEL GROSS, - The Daily Beast
Stephan: This interview when read as an accompaniment to the lead story in today's edition provides additional insight that helps understanding of Stockman's premises.
Taken together they suggest that very difficult times are coming.
Most 742-page jeremiads aren’t much fun to read. But The Great Deformation, David Stockman’s revisionist history of the past 100 years of capitalism American-style, is a spirited, occasionally gleeful, skewering of many of our most widely held assumptions and most lionized figures. A former divinity student, Stockman chronicles what he views as the moral rot in the American financial system-one fueled by easy money, profligate debt, and needless government intervention. To a degree, this book is autobiographical. As a congressman, Reagan-era budget official, and private equity executive, Stockman has lived through the booms and busts of the past half-century. He knows the world of which he writes from the inside out. And in The Great Deformation, few escape his opprobrium-current and past policymakers, Roosevelt and Reagan, Democrats and Republicans, leveraged buyout titans, and corporate CEOs. ‘Sundown now comes to America because sound money, free markets, and fiscal rectitude have no champion in the political arena,
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DAVID A. STOCKMAN, - The New York Times
Stephan: While I do not entirely agree with this assessment, for instance, Norway with a Keynesian economy has done very well through the last decade, on the whole I think it is an accurate and scary report on our current situation, particularly his comments on the vampire capitalism that is destroying our country in favor of the uber-rich.
David A. Stockman is a former Republican congressman from Michigan, President Ronald Reagan's budget director from 1981 to 1985 and the author, most recently, of 'The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America.
GREENWICH, CONNECTICUT — The Dow Jones and Standard & Poor’s 500 indexes reached record highs on Thursday, having completely erased the losses since the stock market’s last peak, in 2007. But instead of cheering, we should be very afraid.
Over the last 13 years, the stock market has twice crashed and touched off a recession: American households lost $5 trillion in the 2000 dot-com bust and more than $7 trillion in the 2007 housing crash. Sooner or later – within a few years, I predict – this latest Wall Street bubble, inflated by an egregious flood of phony money from the Federal Reserve rather than real economic gains, will explode, too.
Since the S.&P. 500 first reached its current level, in March 2000, the mad money printers at the Federal Reserve have expanded their balance sheet sixfold (to $3.2 trillion from $500 billion). Yet during that stretch, economic output has grown by an average of 1.7 percent a year (the slowest since the Civil War); real business investment has crawled forward at only 0.8 percent per year; and the payroll job count has crept up at a negligible 0.1 percent annually. Real median family income growth has dropped 8 percent, and the […]
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IAN SAMPLE, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Here is a story that confirms the point I made about geo-engineering in Saturday's edition.
Controversial geoengineering projects that may be used to cool the planet must be approved by world governments to reduce the danger of catastrophic accidents, British scientists said.
Met Office researchers have called for global oversight of the radical schemes after studies showed they could have huge and unintended impacts on some of the world’s most vulnerable people.
The dangers arose in projects that cooled the planet unevenly. In some cases these caused devastating droughts across Africa; in others they increased rainfall in the region but left huge areas of Brazil parched.
‘The massive complexities associated with geoengineering, and the potential for winners and losers, means that some form of global governance is essential,’ said Jim Haywood at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre in Exeter.
The warning builds on work by scientists and engineers to agree a regulatory framework that would ban full-scale geoengineering projects, at least temporarily, but allow smaller research projects to go ahead.
Geoengineering comes in many flavours, but among the more plausible are ‘solar radiation management’ (SRM) schemes that would spray huge amounts of sun-reflecting particles high into the atmosphere to simulate the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions.
Volcanoes can blast millions of tonnes of sulphate particles into the stratosphere, where they stay […]
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