DAVID OUTTEN and TED BAEHR, Production Editor and Publisher - Movieguide
Stephan: The ignorance of the population is also what makes the disinformation machine of the Theocratic Right so successful. Here is a representative argument purveyed by that machine, in this case the leading Theocratic Right movie review site.
Reports have come out that a 2010 Pentagon directive details how United States military forces can be deployed against United States citizens in the case of emergencies – as authorized by the President.
This scenario is in many movies, including the top two movies so far this year, THE LEGO MOVIE and CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER. It’s only logical that some of the horrible disasters presented in Science Fiction and Fantasy movies (the two most popular movie genres today) would require every possible form of military, police and superhero involvement to restore a civil society. The interventions are not always against some alien invader. Viruses and domestic superthugs have been used as reasons for intervention.
Conservatives mad that such a Pentagon directive exists aren’t being realistic. Nearly $18 trillion of federal debt and 151 million Americans receiving some form of government assistance is a recipe for financial collapse of epic proportions.
American lifestyles are sustained by the free enterprise system. Make the dollar worthless or end all government payments, and it’s predictable that families will have to do bizarre things to survive – even for just one week. The possibility of chaos is very real. If local police are unable to […]
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Stephan: As SR has been predicting for years it is the insurance companies -- not issues like human wellness, or protecting the planet -- that are going to force governments to deal with climate change. Here is the latest in this trend.
o insurance companies, there’s no doubt that climate change is here: They are beginning to file lawsuits against small towns and cities who they say haven’t prepared for the floods and storms that will cost the companies billions in payments.
Earlier this week, the U.S. arm of a major global insurance company backed away from an unprecedented lawsuit against Chicago and its suburbs for failing to prepare for heavy rains and associated flooding it claimed were fueled by global warming. While legal experts said the case was a longshot, its withdrawal didn’t alter the message it contained for governments: prepare now for climate change or pay the price.
After several days of ground-saturating rain last April, an early-morning train of intense storm cells passed over the greater Chicago area and overwhelmed the region’s stormwater and sewage systems. Water gushed out of sewer inlets and backed up into basements.
“There was just nowhere for this water to go,” Marilyn Sucoe, the stormwater administrator for the Village of Lisle, a ring suburb west of Chicago that was affected by the flooding, told NBC News.
What’s causing our weather extremes?
TODAY
The village was among about 200 municipalities named in the nine class-action lawsuits filed in March by […]
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Stephan: Privatization is the curse laid upon society by vampire capitalism. As this article shows it only benefits the rich, and it degrades the lives of ordinary Americans.
As most experts and layman enthusiasts will tell you, there’s no one, single explanation for the past 30-plus years of growing economic inequality. Its drivers are multiple and separating one from the other is often quite complicated. Low taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations, the gutting of labor unions, the increased mobility of capital, technological gains, overly protective intellectual property law; the list goes on.
In fact, here’s another one to add to the list: privatization. According to ‘Race to the Bottom: How Outsourcing Public Services Rewards Corporations and Punishes the Middle Class,” a new study from In the Public Interest, a think tank focused on how privatization affects the economy, the routine practice of outsourcing government functions is another important reason why the middle class is shrinking as those at the very top reap more and more of the fruits of our economy. To explain how that is – and why it’s important that people committed to economic justice push back against the practice – Salon recently spoke with ITPI research and policy director Shar Habibi. Our conversation is below and has been edited for length and clarity.
I think the general perception is that privatization/government outsourcing really kicked off under […]
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ELEANOR GOLDBERG, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: The average middle class family donates six per cent of its income to charity. The Walmart heirs... not so much -- try 0.04%. This is really an amazing tale of greed and hoarding, and it made me about think about philanthropy by the uber rich in general. This afternoon I realized that large scale philanthropy has become the modern equivalent of the aristocracy's medieval patronage. Rather than having a society that makes wellness a collective priority, with all the social institutions that entails, we have an aristocracy idiosyncratically supporting peasants.
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The heirs to the Walmart fortune, worth an estimated $140 billion, are one of the richest families in America, but a new report says they’ve given just 0.04 percent of their personal wealth to their charitable foundation.
Our Walmart, a group that fights for fair wages and other rights for Walmart workers, released a damning report on Tuesday of the Waltons’ giving tendencies. After analyzing 23 tax returns filed by the Walton Family Foundation, the group found that the company’s four heirs — Rob, Jim, Alice and Christy Walton — have given a total of $58.49 million to the family foundation, which comes to 0.04 percent of their net worth.
According to the report, the organization — which has just under $2 billion in assets — is 99 percent funded by charitable lead annuity trusts (CLATs), which offer the Waltons a sizable perk.
The money put into these trusts is designated for charity, but if the assets appreciate significantly, the money can be passed on — tax-free — to the heirs, according to Bloomberg.
A donor secures assets in the trusts for a set period of time and gives away a set amount each year. Whatever funds are leftover at the end of the […]
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Stephan: This story stopped me dead, and I have been thinking about it all day. People so rich they could buy entire cities, and I don't mean little villages or towns. As this report shows, it could be Boston or Philadelphia, or Seattle. Think about that. We have 17 million children suffering food insecurity and hunger. We have 1.6 million minor children who are homeless. And we have a handful of the uber rich so wealthy they could buy whole cities, and four of them, the Walmart heirs, have wealth equal to everything owned by 138 million of their fellow Americans. They could buy a couple of cities.
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Larry Page may have no plans to retire in Boca Raton, Florida. But if he wanted to, he could afford any house in town-in fact, every house in town.
A new analysis from Redfin, a real-estate brokerage and search site, looked at the towns or cities that certain billionaires could buy. They paired the fortunes of each billionaire with the cost of all of the homes in various cities and towns.
Read MoreWho pays the top property taxes in the NY area?
The Walton family, with a combined fortune of $111.5 billion, could buy all 241,450 homes in the city of Seattle. That calculation doesn’t include surrounding towns and suburbs, so they wouldn’t get Bill Gates’ house in suburban Medina.
But Gates could buy Boston. His $76.6 billion fortune could buy all 114,212 homes in Beantown. His pal Warren Buffett could no doubt buy a couple of Omahas, but he could also buy Charlotte, North Carolina, with its 280,214 homes valued at $56 billion.
Read MoreHelicopter to your beach house? Check out this app
“The two things everybody talks about are rich people and real estate,” said Nela Richardson, Redfin’s chief economist. “So we thought it would be interesting to pair them.”
She said the study reveals […]
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