Saturday, October 25th, 2014
Lindsay Abrams, Staff Writer - Salon
Stephan: Ask yourself: How is it possible that nine out of 10 physicians are concerned about America's food supply, particularly animal husbandry, and the Congress has no interest in the issue, and our regulatory agencies are controlled by the industry they are supposed to regulate?
Credit: ChameleonsEye/Shutterstock
Over 95 percent of physicians are concerned about antibiotic resistance, a Consumer Reports poll found. And they have good reason to. Called a global threat by the World Health Organization and “the next pandemic” by CDC director Thomas Friedan, antibiotic resistance threatens their ability to do their jobs. Imagine being a doctor and having to tell a patient with a common but serious disease, like pneumonia, a urinary tract infection or gonorrhea, that there’s nothing you can do to help them.
In fact, this is already becoming their reality: of the 500 doctors polled, 85 percent said they’d treated a patient with a confirmed or suspected antibiotic-resistant infection; 35 percent saw their patient suffer serious complications or die as a result.
There is, of course, a large role for doctors to play in helping to solve this problem: antibiotics lose their efficacy when they’re overprescribed, which doctors have been known to do when they’re uncertain about a diagnosis, when they’re pressed for time or in order to placate pushy patients. Despite growing awareness of the […]
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Saturday, October 25th, 2014
Stephan: This is such a sad story about American culture. People are so insecure about their jobs and the economy is so dodgy that they don't feel that they can even take even the modest vacation time -- the smallest amount of time off of any industrialized nation -- to which they are entitled.
Feeling buried by work, like you can’t find time for a few days off, like your entire work-life balance is out of whack?
If you’re an American worker, it just might be.
A new study has found that U.S. workers forfeited $52.4 billion in time-off benefits in 2013, and took less vacation time than at any point in the last four decades.
American workers turned their backs on a total of 169 million days of paid time off, in effect “providing free labor for their employers, at an average of $504 per employee,” according to the study.
Titled “All Work and No Pay: The Impact of Forfeited Time Off,” the study was conducted by Oxford Economics for the U.S. Travel Association’s Travel Effect Initiative, which studies the impact of forgone vacation time.
“Americans are work martyrs,” says the U.S. Travel Association (USTA). “Tied to the office, they leave more and more paid time off unused each year, forfeiting their earned benefits and, in essence, work for free.”
According to the study, in 2013 U.S. employees took an average of 16 days of vacation compared […]
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Friday, October 24th, 2014
Jeff Spross, - Think Progress
Stephan: There are going to be many unanticipated consequences arising from climate change, here is one that is just beginning to surface. Our failure to take what is happening to our planet seriously is going to come at great cost to human civilization. And this may be part of the reason the police have been militarized. Strategic Planners reach into the future as far as they can. And with 55 studies known, and an unknown number in the secret literature, the climate change violence linkage is becoming accepted wisdom. Militarizing the police is the obvious move, particularly in a country filled with guns, militias, and roaring boys.
Armed vigilantes and local hunters patrol the streets of Maiduguri, Nigeria on September 4, 2014.
Credit: AP Photo / Jossy Ola
According to a new review of 55 separate studies, there is a meaningful connection between climate change and human violence.
The
working paper, put out by researchers with the National Bureau of Economic Research, is what’s called a meta-analysis: a study of studies, in effect. After going through numerous analyses of the relationship between climate change and violence in various settings, the researchers settled on 55 of the most rigorous pieces of work. They then evaluated the picture painted by those studies, and worked to amalgamate their findings into a single statistical result.
They looked at conflicts between individuals — “domestic violence, road rage, assault, murder, and rape” — as well as conflicts between larger human groups — “riots, ethnic violence, land invasions, gang violence, civil war and other forms of political […]
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Friday, October 24th, 2014
Lynn Stuart Parramore, - Salon
Stephan: The Obama Administration's failure to hold the grifters and criminals that crashed the economy in 2007-2008 responsible, and the failure of both Obama and the Congress to draft the necessary legislation to see that it didn't happen again, I think, will be seen by history as one of the greatest examples of poor governance in American history and, as this report spells out, it has planetary consequences. More than that, it virtually guarantees it will happen again. These wheeler-dealers are still obscenely rich, and ethically degenerate. And the the transfer of wealth that was part of this process will haunt us for a least one, and perhaps two generations. The middle class is dying and no democracy can endure that does not have a vibrant middle class. They are the consumers that drive the economic engine.
Thomas Piketty
Credit: Reuters/Charles Platiau
According to a new report, the richest one percent have got their mitts on almost half the world’s assets. Think that’s the end of the story? Think again. This is only the beginning.
The “Global Annual Wealth Report,” freshly released by investment giant Credit Suisse, analyzes the shocking trend of growing wealth inequality around the world. What the researchers find is that global wealth has increased every year since 2008, and that personal wealth seems to be rising at the fastest rate ever recorded, much of it driven by strong equity markets. But the benefits of this growth have largely been channeled to those who are already affluent. While the restaurant workers in America struggled to achieve wages of $10 an hour for their labor, those invested in equities saw their wealth soar without lifting a finger. So it goes around the world.
The bottom half of the world’s people now own less than 1 percent of total wealth, and they’re struggling to hold onto even […]
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Friday, October 24th, 2014
Michael Winship, - Truthout
Stephan: The legacy of Citizens United is eating away at the health of America like a metastasized cancer in the body politic. It is the most appallingly bad Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott, indeed I think it is the worst decision in our history. Here is yet another story of what it has led to. I see more and more stories like this. And yet, nothing serious is being done in government to rectify it.
Credit: dailytrojan.com
When the Citizens United decision came down in 2010, many feared the Supreme Court had unleashed vast and unfettered campaign contributions from corporations bent on tightening their hammerlock on government and politics.
That hasn’t happened as much as anticipated – yet. Individual billionaires and millionaires have dominated the scene instead. Perhaps it’s in part because some corporations dipping their toes into new modes of campaign funding have been rebuffed by hostile consumer and stockholder reaction: witness the backlash in 2010 when Target contributed $150,000 to a 501(c)(4) supporting anti-gay rights gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer in Minnesota.
But other corporate giants seem to have no such qualms about negative public feedback. Chevron, for example. Based in California, the multinational energy company is the third largest producer of crude in the world and greedily grateful for ongoing, generous subsidies from Congress.
According to the Los Angeles Times, “In 2013, its revenue topped those of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., Apple Inc. and General Motors Co., trailing only retailer Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and rival Exxon Mobil Corp… In August, Chevron reported $57.9 […]
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