Sunday, September 15th, 2013
ANTHONY GUCCIARDI, - Nation of Change
Stephan: Here we see government corruption at its most flagrant. American exceptionalism: We are exceptional only in the corruption of our government amongst industrialize nations, our poverty, child abuse, prison population, and a host of other similar first place positions. There is little to be proud of.
The Monsanto Protection Act that protects the biotech juggernaut from any legal action, even when it comes to federal courts, has been resurrected once again. In fact, this time even more corrupt politicians are trying to go ahead and extend the act in order to help shield Monsanto from the courts.
I first reported on the original March Monsanto Protection Act before it hit the mainstream news, and thankfully we were successful in pushing it as a major talking point internationally. Unfortunately, the act was passed through being slipped in as a rider on an emergency Senate spending bill. Senators were ‘forced’ to pass the bill with the Monsanto Protection Act included, granting Monsanto the immunity that they were seeking. Now, we are seeing the exact same scenario.
Monsanto has once again managed to weasel its way into legislation by using politicians (who have utterly failed to represent the public in any capacity) to push through a renewal of the immunity. According to the Huffington Post:
‘House Republicans will include an extension of the so-called Monsanto Protection Act in the spending bill designed to avert a government shutdown, according to text of the legislation released Wednesday by House Appropriations […]
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Saturday, September 14th, 2013
TYLER DURDEN, - Zero Hedge
Stephan: This report is pretty opaquely written, but the point it is making is definitely worthy of note. The American real estate market gives us important information on the status of the middle class. It tells us this is only a recovery for a few.
Our economic inequality is beginning to change the zeitgeist; we are entering a very dangerous period.
Remember when housing was the primary aspirational asset for a still existent US middle class, to be purchased with some equity down by your average 30 year-old hoping to start a family in his or her brand new home, and, as the name implies, aspire to reach the American dream? Those days are long gone. Back in those days the interest rate on the 10 Year bond mattered as it determined the prevailing marginal affordability of leveraged real estate. That is no longer the case, at least not for about 90% of Americans, because as Goldman shows, while before the great crisis only 20% of home purchases were ‘all cash’, since then the number has soared threefold, and currently the estimated percentage of cash transactions (by count and amount) has hit a record 60%. In other words, less than half of all home purchases are debt-funded, and thus less than half of all home purchases are actually representative of what middle-class America is doing.
Goldman’s take:
Exhibit 4 shows the estimated cash transactions as percent of total home sales both by transaction count and by transaction dollar amount. Relative to the pre-crisis years, percent cash transactions has risen […]
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Saturday, September 14th, 2013
DAVID EDWARDS, - The Raw Story
Stephan: We need to acknowledge that there is a large segment of the Theocratic Right, whether Christian, Muslim, or Jewish that, as a foundation of their world view, believe women are lesser and subordinate beings that men have the right to control. It is explicit in the entire womens' rights struggle, and even more so here.
As I read this I thought of the Evangelical Protestant Quiverfull movement (do a Google). And in both cases I find it unspeakably bizarre. Like a piece of the Middle Ages popped into being in the second decade of the 21st century. This is all part of the Great Schism Trend.
Click through to see the video of the actual presentation.
A Catholic website this week encouraged its readers not to allow their daughters to go to college because any young woman would be near sin and would ‘not learn to be a wife and mother.
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Saturday, September 14th, 2013
JOSH RICHMAN and MIKE ROSENBERG, - San Jose Mercury News
Stephan: I consider this excellent news for California, but also further evidence of the Great Schism trend. The Federal minimum wage, as you probably know, is $7.25 an hour. A vast majority of these jobs are not 40 hour and come with no benefits. Thirty hours a week, a standard ploy by corporations who exploit labor to get around a full-time workweek, which leads to benefits, is $217.50 a week. Could you live on that? Blue value states are beginning to recognize this. Here in Washington minimum wage is $9.19. In Oregon it is $8.95. Still paltry, but better. Now, California, the nation's largest labor market is taking the next step, as this report describes. That is good news.
SACRAMENTO — California’s lowest-paid workers are in store for a 25 percent raise after lawmakers late Thursday boosted the Golden State’s minimum wage to the highest of any state in the country.
In the final hours of its 2013 regular session, the Legislature voted to hike the minimum wage from $8 an hour to $9 next July and $10 by January 2016 — a move Democrats praised as a boon to struggling workers and Republicans lambasted as a ‘job killer.’
Gov. Jerry Brown has already promised to sign the bill, making California a leader in a growing movement to increase wages for the working poor spurred by protesting fast-food workers across the country.
‘The minimum wage has not kept pace with rising costs,’
Brown said Wednesday. ‘This legislation is overdue and will help families that are struggling in this harsh economy.’
The state Senate voted 26-11 on Thursday to pass Assembly Bill 10 by Assemblyman Luis Alejo, D-Salinas, and the Assembly followed suit by agreeing 51-25 to Senate amendments, sending the bill to Brown. The Assembly had passed an earlier version of the bill in May.
But Republican lawmakers and business groups excoriated the Democrats, saying they were placing California’s slow economic recovery at risk.
Noting that […]
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Saturday, September 14th, 2013
DANIEL J. WEISS, Senior Fellow and Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress - Think Progress
Stephan: This report, more than anything I have read recently starkly presents the difference between fact based reality, and ideological and theological fantasy.
Click through to see the chart and map which makes it all very clear.
The federal government spent nearly $62 billion for disaster relief in fiscal years 2011 and 2012, according to a new report from the Center for American Progress. And these federal funds only cover a portion of the price tag exacted by extreme weather; private insurance and individuals harmed by the events also spent billions of dollars.
In these two years alone, there were 25 severe storms, floods, droughts, heat waves, and wildfires that each caused more than $1 billion in economic damages, with a total price tag of $188 billion.
There is new evidence that climate change played a role in the extreme weather events of 2012. A recently released analysis from the American Meteorological Society, for example, determined that:
Approximately half the analyses found some evidence that anthropogenically caused climate change was a contributing factor to the extreme event examined, though the effects of natural fluctuations of weather and climate on the evolution of many of the extreme events played key roles as well.
Interestingly, many of the states that received the most federal recovery aid to cope with climate-linked extreme weather have federal legislators who are climate-science deniers. The ten states that received the most federal recovery aid […]
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