Sunday, September 13th, 2015
David Sirota , - Alternet
Stephan: This is what oligarchy looks like. It's hallmark is a lack of accountability for the oligarchs.
Just a few years after the financial crisis, a new report tells an important story: Federal prosecution of white-collar crime has hit a 20-year low.
The analysis by Syracuse University shows a more than 36 percent decline in such prosecutions since the middle of the Clinton administration, when the decline began. Landing amid calls from Democratic presidential candidates for more Wall Street prosecutions, the report notes that the projected number of prosecutions this year is 12 percent less than last year and 29 percent less than five years ago.
“The decline in federal white-collar crime prosecutions does not necessarily indicate there has been a decline in white-collar crime,” Syracuse researchers note. “Rather, it may reflect shifting enforcement policies by each of the administrations and the various agencies.”
Underscoring that assertion is a recent study by researchers at George Mason University tracking the increased use of special Justice Department agreements that allow corporations — and often their executives — to avoid being prosecuted. Before 2003, researchers found, the Justice Department offered almost no such deals. The researchers report that from 2007 to […]
2 Comments
Sunday, September 13th, 2015
Sean Nevins, - Mint Press News
Stephan: Here is an article speaking truth to power. ISIS and the collapse of the Middle East is a direct result of the actions of George Bush, Dick Cheney and their Neocon minions. The article lays the case out very accurately in my opinion. Millions have died or had their lives destroyed because of these self-righteous ignorant men. They should have been tried for war crimes. The fact that the media gives coverage to Cheney without describing the blood dripping from his hands is national shame.
WASHINGTON — ISIS is not a guerrilla organization that popped up out of nowhere, figured out how to hold onto territory, and take on the Iraqi and Syrian armies all by themselves, says Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive multi-issue think tank in Washington.
ISIS is powerful, she argues, because the group enjoys political and military support from the Sunni communities in Iraq that were left defenseless against the Shiite-dominated government the United States put into power following its occupation of Iraq in 2003.
“The Sunni, who are a large minority, around 20 to 25 percent, have been kind of isolated from any kind of access not only to major power but to any part of [Iraqi] society,” Bennis said in July at Busboys and Poets, a restaurant and community organizing spot in Washington.
“So there’s a great deal of antagonism towards the government, and for a lot of people there’s a sense of, ‘Look I don’t like these guys, but maybe they can be the one force that can fight back,’” she said during a discussion of […]
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Sunday, September 13th, 2015
Ryan Koronowski, - Think Progress
Stephan: California under Governor Jerry Brown is leading the way once again, this time to a carbon free energy future. While the Golden State makes life-affirming choices states like Wisconsin. Louisiana, Mississippi, and Kansas run by Theocratic Rightist Republican trolls are dooming their citizens to untold suffering in the future.
SunEdison and TerraForm Power’s Regulus solar facility in Kern County, California, operational and generating clean energy.
Credit: Ap/PRNewsFoto/SunEdison, Inc.
Late Friday night, the California State Assembly voted 51-26 to pass SB 350, a landmark bill that would boost renewable energy and make buildings twice as efficient as before.
The legislature sent the bill to California Gov. Jerry Brown for his signature, and he is expected to sign it later this month, as the legislation makes real the goals Brown set down earlier this year in his inaugural address.
The state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) currently requires utilities to provide 33 percent of their electricity generation from renewable sources, such as solar, wind, and geothermal power, by 2020. The new bill, The Clean Energy and Reduction Act, would increase that target to 50 percent by 2030. It would also require a 50 percent increase in energy efficiency in buildings by that year.
Brown […]
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Saturday, September 12th, 2015
Lizzie Wade, - Mother Jones
Stephan: With astonishing rapidity a picture of the future of the Earth is emerging and it becomes clearer with each study that humanity has created a kind of nightmare that we cannot seem to acknowledge.
A few years ago in a lab in Panama, Klaus Winter tried to conjure the future. A plant physiologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, he planted seedlings of 10 tropical tree species in small, geodesic greenhouses. Some he allowed to grow in the kind of environment they were used to out in the forest, around 79 degrees Fahrenheit. Others, he subjected to uncomfortably high temperatures. Still others, unbearably high temperatures—up to a daily average temperature of 95 F and a peak of 102 F. That’s about as hot as Earth has ever been.
It’s also the kind of environment tropical trees have a good chance of living in by the end of this century, thanks to climate change. Winter wanted to see how they would do.
The answer came as a surprise to those accustomed to dire warnings that climate change will turn the Amazon into a desert. The vast majority of Winter’s seedlings didn’t die. In fact, most thrived at significantly warmer temperatures than they experience today, growing faster and larger. Just two species succumbed to the heat, […]
3 Comments
Saturday, September 12th, 2015
Paul DeRienzo, Nation of Change - Nation of Change
Stephan: Radioactive waste is going to haunt us for decades, maybe centuries. It is one of those issues that will have enormous consequences but no one is willing to talk about it. When was the last time you heard a Presidential candidate talk about what he/she will do about radioactive waste pollution? Never you say. That's right, nobody will touch it.
Radioactive spoils of nuclear power plants from 36 states have been dumped in a designated hole in Texas on a regular basis. Are we currently living through a radioactive version of the gold rush, funded by taxpayers?
In a remote place in the desert of West Texas, outside the small town of Andrews, something dirty has been going on which threatens the water supply of nearly a third of America’s farmland (and perhaps the millions of people who eat the food grown using that water).
The highly radioactive spoils of nuclear power plants from 36 states — as well as other seriously toxic or carcinogenic substances, such as PCBs dredged from the Hudson River — are being dumped there on a regular basis, and this will continue until the designated hole in the ground is filled.
That […]
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Just a few years after the financial crisis, a new report tells an important story: Federal prosecution of white-collar crime has hit a 20-year low.
