NAOMI KLEIN, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Here is some good news, about a shift going on in the environmental movement. It offers some hope.
The movement demanding that public interest institutions divest their holdings from fossil fuels is on a serious roll. Chapters have opened up in more than 100 US cities and states as well as on more than 300 campuses, where students are holding protests, debates and sit-ins to pressure their to rid their endowments of oil, gas and coal holdings. And under the ‘Fossil Free UK’ banner, the movement is now crossing the Atlantic, with a major push planned by People & Planet for this summer. Some schools, including University College London, have decided not to wait and already have active divestment campaigns.
Though officially launched just six months ago, the movement can already claim some provisional victories: four US colleges have announced their intention to divest their endowments from fossil fuel stocks and bonds and, in late April, 10 US cities made similar commitments, including San Francisco (Seattle came on board months ago).
There are still all kinds of details to work out to toughen up these pledges, but the speed with which this idea has spread makes it clear that there was some serious pent-up demand. To quote the mission statement of the Fossil Free movement: ‘If it is wrong to […]
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DAN CASSINO and KRISTA JENKINS, - Fairleigh Dickinson University
Stephan: More on the the growing Great Schism Trend. Much of this shift in attitude results from the growing disaffection people feel about the Federal government. There is a price to no one ever being held accountable for the financial meltdown, or the constant reminders of the government's corruption, coupled with the increasing awareness of the government's intrusion into ordinary people's lives.
Democrats and Republicans continue to be divided over the need for new gun control laws, and the most recent national survey of registered voters from Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind finds that attitudes regarding the perceived likelihood of an armed revolution to protect liberties an d the truth about the Sandy Hook shooting are helpful in explaining this partisan divide. Nearly three quarters (73%) of Democrats say that Congress needs to pass new laws to protect the public from gun violence, but the views of Republicans are almost com pletely opposite: 65 percent don’t think new laws are necessary. Overall, registered voters are divided over the need for new gun control legislation. Fifty percent agree it is needed, with 39 percent who disagree. ‘If there was a bipartisan moment after S andy Hook to pass gun control legislation, it’s past,
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Stephan: This excellent essay makes it clear that there is another issue beneath the austerity argument; and that it is an ideological, theological one, not an economic one.
The controversy continues to simmer around the Reinhart-Rogoff (RR) paper and the now famous Excel spreadsheet error that led to claim that debt-to-GDP ratios above 90 percent led to sharply lower growth rates. The University of Massachusetts paper that exposed this mistake has led many people to reconsider their earlier acceptance of the Reinhart-Rogoff 90 percent debt cliff.
While that is a positive development, the re-examination should go a step deeper and ask why anyone ever took their argument seriously in the first place. It’s not just the arithmetic on debt-to-GDP ratios that tripped up RR; it was the basic logic of their argument.
If we accept the RR thesis, something bad happens to countries when their debt-to-GDP ratio exceeds 90 percent, which causes them to experience prolonged periods of slow growth. It is difficult to see how this could possibly be the case since debt is only one side of a country’s balance sheet, countries also have assets. For there to be any actual relationship between debt and growth it would seem that it would have to be debt, net of assets, and growth.
The RR story, where they purport to find a relationship between debt and growth would be like finding […]
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DAVID EDWARDS, - The Raw Story
Stephan: The Great Schism Trend is reaching a kind of crescendo, whose outcome is unclear to me. This could pass, or it could continue to develop to crisis. I am using this South Carolina story, but I could have picked Alabama, or Kansas. All at the same time. This is an assertion of states rights over federal laws, and it must go to the Supreme Court, as will several of the others cases.
Depending on how those decisions go, and how the states respond, within three years there could be a shift of power to the regional and state level because of the general recognition that we are only in some senses, like defense and border control, one country.
The South Carolina state House on Wednesday passed a so-called ‘nullification
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DAVID PITTMAN, Washington Correspondent - MedPage Today
Stephan: This is the illness profit system in action. It is what we get because we insist upon a health care system driven by profit, not wellness. I don't think there is anything unusual about this story, it is one of dozens.
(See An Appraisal of The Illness Profit System http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2810%2900291-0/fulltext)
WASHINGTON — Swiss drug-making giant Novartis paid doctors kickbacks to boost the sales of three of its products by holding ‘educational events’ on fishing trips and at Hooters restaurants that were little more than parties, the federal government has alleged.
The Justice Department filed a lawsuit in federal court against the U.S. division of Novartis, saying the drug company violated the federal Anti-Kickback Statute from January 2001 to at least November 2011.
Specifically, the East Hanover, N.J., company paid physicians to speak about three Novartis drugs — hypertension drugs amlodipine/benazepril (Lotrel) and aliskiren/valsartan (Valturna) and diabetes drug nateglinide (Starlix) — ‘at events that were often little or nothing more than social occasions for the doctors,’ the Justice Department said in a news release Friday.
Such programs should have an educational purpose and include a slide presentation about the company’s drugs. But the events were nothing more than lavish dinners or trips — such as fishing trips off the Florida coast — with little record of product education ever occurring, the whistle-blower-initiated lawsuit stated. Some events were held at Hooters restaurants.
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