ANNA BERNASEK, - The New York Times
Stephan: I got three emails today from readers telling me how their lives, or the lives of people close to them, are being devastated by declining financial security. We have endless money for war and foreign adventures but the needs of the actual people of the country don't seem terribly important.
Economic inequality in the United States has been receiving a lot of attention. But it’s not merely an issue of the rich getting richer. The typical American household has been getting poorer, too.
The inflation-adjusted net worth for the typical household was $87,992 in 2003. Ten years later, it was only $56,335, or a 36 percent decline, according to a study financed by the Russell Sage Foundation. Those are the figures for a household at the median point in the wealth distribution – the level at which there are an equal number of households whose worth is higher and lower. But during the same period, the net worth of wealthy households increased substantially.
The Russell Sage study also examined net worth at the 95th percentile. (For households at that level, 94 percent of the population had less wealth and 4 percent had more.) It found that for this well-do-do slice of the population, household net worth increased 14 percent over the same 10 years. Other research, by economists like Edward Wolff at New York University, has shown even greater gains in wealth for the richest 1 percent of households.
For households at the median level of net worth, much of the damage has […]
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EMILY ATKIN, - Think Progress
Stephan: Since we are going to have an election in a few months time I have been looking closely at the candidates. The Republican Party this year particularly seems to be specializing in promoting morons. But in Red value states the Democrats are often not much better. This is what is on offer from both parties in West Virginia: two men who are both incompetent to stand for office. Yet one of them is going to represent West Virginia's 2nd District. This is a very pronounced trend and one of the symptoms telling us our democratic republic is failing. You'd do better to vote for your dog. At least your dog understands loyalty, service to others, integrity, and well-being.
There are two major-party candidates in the running for West Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District seat in the U.S. House, and both of them think the issue of climate change is best left for other countries to deal with, according to multiple news reports from a candidate forum Thursday.
At the forum, both Democrat Nick Casey and Republican Alex Mooney would not say whether they accept that humans are contributing to global warming. But either way, both candidates also said that it wasn’t for them to decide.
‘It’s not our problem,” Casey reportedly said, adding that it was an international issue. ‘These other people think we’ve got a global problem, let’s see them step up.”
According to the Associated Press, Mooney echoed Casey, saying ‘there’s no EPA in China” to ensure the country is limiting its greenhouse gas emissions. On the contrary, China has a Ministry of Environmental Protection that works to limit emissions.
Both candidates used their stance on the United States’ responsibility to fight climate change to argue that the Environmental Protection Agency should not be regulating greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. If elected, Mooney said he would ‘fight for legislation to defund and restrict the EPA.”
Casey is certainly correct that, […]
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JANIE CAMPBELL, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: Here is the latest in the corruption of the American food system. This is really quite chilling, and yet another reason not to shop at Walmart.
Click through to see the pictures, and try it yourself.
Last we checked, ice cream is supposed to melt if it isn’t kept chilled.
But Walmart’s store-brand ice cream sandwiches don’t even melt in the sun, according to a report from WCPO Cincinnati.
The discovery was made by a local mom, Christie Watson, who noticed that a Great Value ice cream sandwich her son left out on their patio table hadn’t fully melted — even though it had been sitting out for 12 hours on an 80-degree day. Watson left a second ice cream sandwich out overnight with the same results, WCPO reports.
“What am I feeding to my children?” she asked, appalled.
walmart ice cream sandwich
‘Ice cream melts based on the ingredients, including cream,” Walmart spokeswoman Danit Marquardt said in an email. “Ice cream with more cream will generally melt at a slower rate, which is the case with our Great Value ice cream sandwiches.”
But as Business Insider reports, the product also contains a number of additives:
According to Wal-Mart’s website, the ice cream sandwiches contain milk, cream, buttermilk, sugar, whey, and corn syrup.
It also contains “1 percent or less of mono-and diglycerides, vanilla extract, guar gum, calcium sulfate, carob bean gum, cellulose gum, carrageenan, artificial […]
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BRANDON BAKER, - Ecowatch/Nation of Change
Stephan: Although the Congress and the Obama Administration think Fracking is just the thing, the evidence for the wrongness of this policy just keeps piling up. One learns in school that the purpose of the government is to be responsive to its people, and provide for their safety and wellbeing. But that of course we know is just a fantasy of academics. Your house has been brought down by an earthquake? Terribly sorry, the government says, but our corporate masters' profits are too important for us to stop them.
When the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission ordered NGL Water Solutions to stop fracking wastewater injection operations a month ago, a team of University of Colorado Boulder researchers began conducting its own investigation.
NGL, formerly known as High Sierra Water Services, was given permission to resume its activities at a 10,800-foot-deep well a few weeks later, but the CU findings suggest that shouldn’t have happened. Anne Sheehan and her team found that the well is linked to more than 200 earthquakes, the geophysics professor in the CU Department of Geological Sciences told Boulder County Business Report.
She said the group found ‘quite a few” earthquakes with epicenters within two miles of the well.
Two earthquakes-with magnitudes of 3.4 and 2.6-took place within mere miles of the well. Shemin Ge and Matthew Weingarten, also of CU, also found that activity within fracking wastewater injection wells likely caused earthquakes in central Oklahoma.
NGL operates 11 of the 29 fracking wastewater injection wells in Weld County, CO. When the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission allowed NGL to resume activities, it began injecting 7,500 barrels per day at maximum pressure.
‘We’ll continue to closely monitor and accumulate all available information at this location,” Colorado Department of Natural […]
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Stephan: The once upwardly mobile essentially egalitarian United States has become an oligarchy with a privileged financial aristocracy who own the government, and are not subject to the same laws as the mass of the country. In its own way this is as destructive a trend as climate change.
A dangerous trend is growing in the United States. In it, individuals are accumulating massive amounts of wealth having done nothing to earn it beyond being born. That’s a practice that will prove to have disastrous consequences for the United States.
We talk a lot about income inequality, but what’s really dangerous is wealth inequality. Wealth inequality is often a reward for simply having been born to someone who achieved great income in their lives. And it doesn’t go away with time, people that inherit their wealth only tend to become wealthier.
This gives them an unparalleled power in the economy and, thanks to decisions like Citizens United, the loudest voices in politics.
Here are some facts that help back that premise up:
1) In the past 50 years, the top one percent have increased their wealth to own nearly 40 percent of all wealth in the United States; it’s a number that is only continuing to rise.
2) The bottom 90 percent own less than 30 percent of the wealth in the United States.
3) In addition, the top income tax rate is decreasing. It is now at 39.6 percent. In 1960, it […]
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