Stephan: In order to believe in profit above all one perforce has to abandon any concern for facts because, as our own history shows, the shift to unregulated profit above all produces notably inferior social outcomes. Only placing belief above facts allows one to continue to espouse such a philosophy.
These deniers are going to destroy society unless we stop them. The vote in 2014 may be the most important vote in the country's history. If the Theocratic Right continues to exercise such power in the Congress after the 2014 election we will be in very difficult straits.
A strong belief in a hands off approach to economics is tightly linked to the rejection of scientific facts such as climate change, according to research published in Psychological Science in late March.
‘The conspirator ideation that all of the world’s scientific academies have conspired together to create a hoax known as global warming has found traction in American mainstream politics,
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LES LEOPOLD, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: The figures in this report are jaw dropping, really. I read them, and then checked them, not believing they could be correct. They are. Imagine 10 people made $10.2 billion, one earned over a million dollars an hour. The financial structure of the United States has been transformed into a system that enriches the few at a level that can hardly be imagined while beggaring millions of decent hard working people. The system is corrupt, lacking in governmental oversight, and desperately out of kilter, and few are ever held accountable.
The new Rich List is out — yet another example of financial pornography. While nearly 15 million Americans still can’t find jobs due to the 2008 Wall Street-created crash, the top hedge manager, David Tepper, earned $1,057,692 an HOUR in 2012 — that’s as much as the average American family makes in 21 years!
America’s new math: 1 Wall Street hour = 21 years of hard work for the rest of us.
Together the top 10 hedge fund managers waltzed off with $10.1 billion in 2012, which is more than enough to hire 250,000 entry level teachers or 196,000 new registered nurses.
It’s not just that these financial gurus are filthy rich. It’s that they are the richest of the rich and we don’t even know what they do. Overall, hedge fund managers make 50 to 100 times more than our top athletes, movie stars, CEOs, lawyers, writers, doctors and celebrities. Yet, their activities are treated like state secrets.
So what is a hedge fund? No, it has nothing to do with the wholesale garden supply business. Nor does all that money come from hedging against unforeseen negative economic events. Rather, hedge funds are investment vehicles for the super rich — for […]
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DAVID MORGAN, - Truthout.org
Stephan: Here is a report on a new trend that I take to be good news: the rise of worker-owned cooperatives. This is a good explanation of what they are, and how they work.
Flashpoints-those unexpected events that movements gather around, when everything is accelerated, exciting, and energizing-fizzle. Whether they fail to gain traction, or splinter off to catalyze multiple new efforts, movement events serve an important function: they are shortÂlived and inspiring.
At the same time, they are moments of immense opportunity when we can make strides and pool our collective power. The cooperative movement is experiencing a string of these moments now, and is burgeoning with renewed activity. I see this firstÂhand as a coÂ-owner of the Toolbox for Education and Social Action (TESA), a workerÂ-owned cooperative that participates in many coÂop networks. We’ve facilitated hundreds of coÂop workshops around the country, and taught thousands with our resource CoÂopoly: The Game of Cooperatives.
It’s our philosophy that cooperatives enable direct democracy and local control over the economy. As participants in the coÂop movement, we help to turn flashpoints into lasting social change. Fortunately, the path to a community-Âcontrolled economy is well worn, and the adaptive responsive networks of the movement are buoying this energy. Over decades, these movement-based networks have quietly built support structures to transition us to a new economy. And with renewed demands for economic justice, they are springing to life.
The Model
As […]
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SY MUKHERJEE, - Think Progress
Stephan: Here is the naked truth about the illness profit system that masquerades as healthcare in the United States. It is about money, and nothing else.
Have you noticed the stories coming out of the Boston Marathon bombing about people struggling to deal with their medical bills, as a result of being injured? We treat this as normal; when it should be anything but. There is no other advanced Western nation where this story would appear, or even exist as a story.
By all appearances, UnitedHealth Group is having a stellar year. The mammoth company, which is the largest health insurer in America and the biggest manager of private Medicare Advantage plans, announced on Thursday that despite a 14 percent decline in earnings, it had still made a profit of $2.1 billion – and that was just in the last fiscal quarter. UnitedHealth also won a major policy victory at the beginning of this month when the Obama Administration reversed course on its plan to cut reimbursements to Medicare Advantage plan providers by two percent. In fact, the Administration went the entirely opposite direction and announce it would raise these rates by 3.3 percent – a swing of 5.3 percent in UnitedHealth’s favor. Apparently, that isn’t enough for the insurance company. UnitedHealth is now threatening to reduce its involvement in managing Medicare plans, claiming that its government reimbursements are still too low.
‘We did not expect the fastest growing, most popular and most effective Medicare benefit option serving America’s seniors to be underfunded to this extent in 2014,
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Stephan: In my view history is going to condemn the Obama Administration as one of the most destructive in the country's history for three reasons: Its disregard for personal privacy, with the resultant surveillance state we now have; its absolute attempt to stop whistle blowers from revealing the corruption and incompetence that is so rife in our government; and its complete unwillingness to hold villains accountable if they are big and rich. The combination of these three things is destroying people's faith in the American system, as poll after poll makes clear.
When Thomas Drake, then an official at the National Security Agency, realized that the agency’s decision to shut down an internal data analysis program and instead outsource the project to a private contractor provided the government with less effective analysis at much higher cost, he tried to do something about it. Drake’s decision to join three other whistleblowers in asking the agency’s inspector general to investigate ultimately made him the target of a leak investigation that tore his life apart.
In 2005, the inspector general of the Department of Defense, of which NSA is a part, confirmed the whistleblowers’ accusations of waste, fraud and security risk.
Earlier this year, former NSA Director Michael Hayden even conceded that TrailBlazer, the program for which the NSA paid over $1 billion to the Science Applications International Corporation, had failed. The agency, after killing its own program (called ThinThread) ‘outsourced how we gathered other people’s communications,
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