LYNDSEY LAYTON, - The Washington Post
Stephan: The corruption and degrading of public education in every facet in the U.S. is an extraordinary saga of social self-sabotage. Our children are falling further and further behind the children of other technological societies. You would think it would be obvious that, in the long-term, this leads to a kind of social suicide. But that is only from a national perspective. From an international NGCS view, school privatization is more profitable, and the status of the children of any given nation is not that important. What matters is that the children grow up to be good consumers.
The vast majority of the 1,430 education programs that prepare the nation’s K-12 teachers are mediocre, according to a first-ever ranking that immediately touched off a firestorm.
Released Tuesday by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington-based advocacy group, the rankings are part of a $5 million project funded by major U.S. foundations. Education secretaries in 21 states have endorsed the report, but some universities and education experts quickly assailed the review as incomplete and inaccurate.
Programs at Furman, Lipscomb, Ohio State and Vanderbilt universities received the only ‘four-star
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NICOLE FLATOW, - Think Progress
Stephan: This is why the appointment of Supreme Court Justices matters so much. We now have a court which routinely favors corporations over individuals. Here is their latest decision, part of the Legalization Trend. Increasingly monopolistic practices that would previously have been illegal, are now the law of the land. We are becoming a country where corporate influence makes illegal things legal so that vassal politicians, and corporations can say, 'They/we broke no laws. Everything they/we are doing is perfectly legal.'
In case it wasn’t clear already, the U.S. Supreme Court hammered home Thursday morning that it will protect the rights of corporations to force arbitration over the individuals’ access to the court system at any expense.
In a 5-3 ruling with Justice Sonia Sotomayor recused, Justice Antonin Scalia eviscerated almost any opportunity small merchants have to challenge alleged monopolistic practices by American Express in their credit card agreements.
Sound familiar? Earlier this term, the court turned back on procedural grounds a lawsuit alleging monopolistic practices by Comcast. A week after that, they turned back the claims of workers to challenge employer practices as a class. And in 2011, they issued one of the worst blows to consumer rights in years when they held that consumers challenging $30 fees could not sue together as a class. In each of these cases, the court’s procedural rulings mean the parties may never get to argue about whether these corporations actually violated the law. And as a consequence, these corporations may never be held accountable.
With Thursday’s ruling, the court added small businesses to the list of aggrieved parties whose access to the courthouse has been foreclosed by boilerplate contracts that prohibit parties from filing their challenge […]
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ANDREW GAVIN MARSHALL, - Truthout
Stephan: This is one of the first responsible pieces I have seen that shows the interlocking nature of the new world elite. One of the effects of the world being run by Non-geographical Corporate States is that a corresponding transnational elite has arisen. A tiny group of people who control most of the world's wealth. The disparity of wealth has become so great as to be absurd. As an example: Six WalMart heirs have a wealth greater than the collective wealth of 41.5% of the rest of the population of the United States. That's just under a 131 million Americans.
Because they live globally in a way inconceivable to even normally wealthy people they have a bias for global not national interests. And like any group of people anywhere they have their clubs, and societies where they socialize, and deals are cemented. They have their interlocking boards. Their children marry. To keep it all invisible the vast corporations they control maintain the brand identify of the companies they takeover as they consolidate their wealth and power. I recently published a list of just the seed companies Monsanto owns, each apparently a different company but, in fact, a single corporate organism.
This report spells out many of the players, and how the system works.
In an article for the journal International Sociology, William K. Carroll and Jean Philippe Sapinski examined the relationship between the corporate elite and the emergence of a ‘transnational policy-planning network,
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ROBERT FRANK, - The Wall Street Journal
Stephan: One of the central arguments of conservatives, virtually an article of faith, is that higher taxes drive out the rich. They believe and say over and over that if their taxes are raised it will make rich people, and the companies they control, move out of the country. Now, let's look at some actual data. Quickly it becomes apparent this argument is specious. Indeed, it is not just without substance, it is perniciously wrong.
Note that this report was published in the leading conservative newspaper.
Today’s wealth headline out of London seems tailor-made for the anti-tax crowd.
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
According to a new study from Lloyds TSB, nearly one in five affluent Britons plan to leave the country in the next two years. That’s up from 14% a year ago. The study measured those with around $400,000 in investible assets.
Conservatives point out this sudden flight comes on the back of the 50% tax rate that was imposed on top earners during the recession. That hike was widely blamed for U.K. wealth flight and for not raising nearly as much revenue as expected.
But a closer look at the study provides a different picture. The top reason that the study group (it’s a stretch to call them ‘wealthy
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Thursday, June 20th, 2013
Stephan: Although the climate deniers blather on, people who actually have to plan and protect cities from what climate change and sea rise holds in store, are refining the data into increasingly clear scenarios. Here is the latest. If you live in the areas mentioned here, I would begin to think about how you plan to respond to what is coming.
Click through to see the very useful charts.
Before Hurricane Sandy tore through New York and New Jersey, it stopped in Florida. Huge waves covered beaches, swept over Fort Lauderdale’s concrete sea wall and spilled onto A1A, Florida’s coastal highway. A month later another series of violent storms hit south Florida, severely eroding Fort Lauderdale’s beaches and a chunk of A1A. Workers are building a new sea wall, mending the highway and adding a couple of pedestrian bridges. Beach erosion forced Fort Lauderdale to buy sand from an inland mine in central Florida; the mine’s soft, white sand stands out against the darker, grittier native variety.
Hurricanes and storms are nothing new for Florida. But as the oceans warm, hurricanes are growing more intense. To make matters worse, this is happening against a backdrop of sharply rising sea levels, turning what has been a seasonal annoyance into an existential threat.
For around 2,000 years sea levels remained relatively constant. Between 1880 and 2011, however, they rose by an average of 0.07 inches (1.8mm) a year, and between 1993 and 2011 the average was between 0.11 and 0.13 inches a year. In 2007 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast that seas could rise by as much as 23 inches […]
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