One useful way to break down the research and investigative reporting about Wall Street’s bilking of American cities is to establish a “before Bhatti/after Bhatti” marker. Prior to Saqib Bhatti‘s groundbreaking Dirty Deals report, many reporters and activists had been digging up and promulgating incidents of big banks and finance leading governments into risky projects, overcharging for financial services, or the plundering of pension funds. But Bhatti’s report, produced by the Roosevelt Institute, was thoroughgoing, comprehensive, and focused and specific.
Bhatti’s report came at the same time that the Chicago Tribune released a damning three-part report on Chicago Public Schools’ disastrous bonds losses. In late 2014, a picture emerges of widespread predatory dealing on the part of big private finance, with cities and counties in the cross-hairs because, with a public mandate, municipalities are more vulnerable to promises of providential yield.
The best readings, the ones I’ve gathered from a variety of subtopics, explain the mechanics of financial fees, risky investments (eg interest rate swaps), and pension issues (the latter could be a separate article and probably should be). Many […]
These are actual photos taken by the lifeblogging app used by people in the study. Participants were later shown these photos while in the fMRI and asked to recall the memories associated with the pictures.
Credit: Per Sederberg
For the first time, scientists have seen evidence of where the brain records the time and place of real-life memories.
Results showed that the similarity of the brain activation patterns when memories were recalled was an indicator of the breadth of space and time between the actual events.
Participants in the Ohio State University study wore a smartphone around their neck with an app that took random photos for a month. Later, when the participants relived memories related to those photos in an fMRI scanner, researchers found that a part of the brain’s hippocampus stores information about where […]
Short of cash and unsettled in their careers, young Americans are waiting longer than ever to buy their first homes. The delay reflects a trend that cuts to the heart of the financial challenges facing millennials: Renters are struggling to save for down payments.
Credit: AP/Michael Conroy
WASHINGTON — Home ownership, that celebrated hallmark of the American dream, is increasingly on hold for younger Americans.
Short of cash, burdened by student debt and unsettled in their careers, young adults are biding time in apartments for longer periods and buying their first homes later in life.
The typical first-timer now rents for six years before buying, up from 2.6 years in the early 1970s, according to a new analysis by the real estate data firm Zillow. The median first-time buyer […]
Credit: Shutterstock
A meat-inclusive diet often comes with a side of environmental caveats, including livestock’s contribution to global warming, its contribution to deforestation, and the stress it places on a bevy of increasingly precious resources, from water to land. Now, a group of researchers want to add another concern to the meat-eater’s plate: worldwide species extinction.
According to a recent study published in Science of the Total Environment by researchers at Florida International University in Miami, livestock production’s impact on land use is “likely the leading cause of modern species extinctions” — a problem the researchers think will only get worse as population growth increases the global demand for meat. (emphasis added)
The study is particularly interesting to scientists because research linking livestock’s relationship to biodiversity loss has been lacking, Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at Bard College who was not involved in the study, told Science.
“Now we can say, only slightly fancifully: You eat a steak, you kill a lemur in Madagascar. You eat a chicken, […]
Paul Krugman
Nobel Laureate Economist and Op-Ed Columnist
Credit: Twitter.com
Something strange is happening in the Republican primary — something strange, that is, besides the Trump phenomenon. For some reason, just about all the leading candidates other than The Donald have taken a deeply unpopular position, a known political loser, on a major domestic policy issue. And it’s interesting to ask why.
The issue in question is the future of Social Security, which turned 80 last week. The retirement program is, of course, both extremely popular and a long-term target of conservatives, who want to kill it precisely because its popularity helps legitimize government action in general. As the right-wing activist Stephen Moore (now chief economist of the Heritage Foundation) once declared, Social Security is “the soft underbelly of the welfare state”; “jab your spear through that” and you can undermine the whole thing.
But that was a decade ago, during former President George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
