Saturday, December 23rd, 2017
Christopher Ingraham, - The Washington Post
Stephan: I have been warning my readers for some years now about the Neo-feudalism Trend that is the result of the vast wealth inequity that now shapes America.
This trend is happening very quickly and almost without comment. It isn't just the absurd wealth disparity, it is now becoming an issue of land ownership. If it continues you possibly, and your children and grandchildren certainly, will be peasants serving an aristocracy and nobility based on wealth, and hereditary privilege. The very thing that drove immigrants to leave Europe in the 17th through 19th centuries to come to the U.S. is now being recreated in the U.S.. Here is some data.
The federal government is by far the nation’s biggest land owner, holding 640 million acres of purple mountains, fruited plains and amber waves of grain in the name of the American public.
But over the past decade, the nation’s wealthiest private landowners have been laying claim to ever-larger tracts of the countryside, according to data compiled by the Land Report, a magazine about land ownership in America.
In 2007, according to the Land Report, the nation’s 100 largest private landowners owned a combined 27 million acres of land — equivalent to the area of Maine and New Hampshire combined.
A decade later, the 100 largest landowners have holdings of 40.2 million acres, an increase of nearly 50 percent. Their holdings are equivalent in area to the entirety of New England, minus Vermont.
Those rising numbers represent “the growing appeal of land as an asset class,” said Eric O’Keefe, editor of the Land Report, in an interview.
The stock market has been on a tear in recent years, and some wealthy individuals have been looking to cash out and park their assets […]
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Saturday, December 23rd, 2017
BARBIE LATZA NADEAU, - The Daily Beast
Stephan: Over the course of my life I have known several high ranking members of the Roman Curia, as well as dozens of men and women who describe themselves as Catholics. Listening to higher ranks and listening to the average Roman Catholic lay person has taught me there is not one church but two. One is the laity, the community of believers who practice the rituals.
The other is the hierarchy of the clergy, particularly the upper levels. The village priests are the ones who commit most of the pedophilia. The higher levels of the Church have their own sex issues but, in addition, this component of the Church has been awash in dirty money and power games for centuries. Taken together it is an hermetically sealed system riven by corruption and sexual dysfunction.
I've never been quite sure how normal people deal with this, what they tell themselves, but they must say something because so many people are still affiliated.
Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast
ROME—In 2015, the Council of Europe’s financial-evaluation arm Moneyval laid down the law for the Vatican Bank, telling the rather unholy financiers who had been accused of abetting money laundering for years that it isn’t enough to just smoke out suspicious account holders and freeze assets. Instead they said the Vatican Bank, formally known as the Institute for Religious Works, or IOR, needed to start actually prosecuting criminal cases.
Two years later, thousands of accounts have been closed or frozen, but Moneyval still isn’t happy. According to its 209-page December 2017 progress report, the Vatican gets good marks for not funding terrorism and for flagging potential illegal behavior. But the holy bank fails once again to actually hold anyone accountable for what are clearly crimes such as “fraud, including serious tax evasion, misappropriation and corruption,” according to the report.
More curious still, a week before the highly anticipated report was released, the IOR Deputy Director Giulio Mattietti was fired with no advance warning and escorted […]
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Friday, December 22nd, 2017
Megan Thielking, - Scientific American
Stephan: America is becoming an increasingly unhealthy country; the evidence can be seen everywhere. And one of the major contributors to this growing unhealthfulness is the entirely manufactured and completely legal opioid epidemic which is killing 10s of thousands of Americans every year. This death rate is a demonstration that in the United States corporate profits take precedence over human life. It is that stark.
Last week 60 Minutes did one of its segments on McKesson Pharmaceutical one of the most evil corporations in an evil industry. They knowingly created the opioid crisis with the help, of course, of an endless string of drugstores, middle men, and doctors. It's America, profit first. That's the real crisis.
The result? Well, this is the result.
Credit: Jonathan Perez Unsplash
People born in the U.S. in 2016 could expect to live 78.6 years on average, down from 78.7 the year before, according to a new report released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The most common cause of death: heart disease.
The report also found death rates — calculated from the number of deaths per 100,000 people — actually rose among young adults between 2015 and 2016. And while the authors didn’t draw a direct link, another report also released Thursday by the CDC found an estimated 63,600 people died of drug overdoses in 2016. Two-thirds of those deaths were caused by opioids. Adults between the ages of 25 and 54 had the highest rate of drug overdose death.
Here’s a look at the findings:
Most common causes of death
Heart disease was the leading cause of death, followed by cancer, unintentional injuries, chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, kidney disease, and suicide.
One key point: Unintentional injuries climbed to the third leading cause […]
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Friday, December 22nd, 2017
Stephan: Everyday as I go through 100s of stories looking for those that rise to usage in SR, I am struck again and again by how the rest of the world is going in one direction while the United States under Trump and his administration are moving in another. You can see this in "big" stories like the U.N. vote today in which essentially the world called the threat made by Trump and Nikki Haley that they "were taking names" of those who voted against Trump's decision about moving the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. You can see it in the reaction to Trump's decision to withdraw America from the Paris climate change agreement.
But you can also see it in the policy decisions being made in different countries about things like internet access. The Trump zombies engineered the end of net neutrality, and the results of that policy change will become ever more dramatic in the months to come. Meanwhile there are stories like this one from the U.K..
Hot on the heels of the FCC’s net neutrality repeal, the UK Government has offered up a new regulation to classify internet access as a “legal right”
Credit: stori/Depositphotos
The UK Government has just announced that from 2020, high-speed broadband will be considered a legal right for all its citizens, meaning service providers must offer access to any person that requests it. (emphasis added) The announcement follows a proposal from BT, the UK’s largest telecommunications provider, to provide universal broadband coverage to all areas of the UK under a voluntary agreement. The Government, however, felt the importance of universal broadband access required a regulatory hand in the matter.
Called the Universal Service Obligation (USO), this regulation will be sketched out in detail over the coming months but the current announcement stipulates that everyone in the UK must have access to a broadband connection of at least 10 Mbps by 2020.
The move by the UK Government comes at an interesting time, literally days after the FCC in the United States repealed the
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Friday, December 22nd, 2017
Outside in America Research Team, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: First of all, as you read this, realize that it was printed in the Guardian in the U.K., and is now being read throughout the world. This is what America looks like now.
Second, realize that if you live in America and you are poor and homeless, dogs are treated better than you. Americans with money on the whole don't care about the poor, don't want them around, and are unwilling to spend money to help or support government policies that do.
There are exceptions of course, I know a number of groups, institutions, and individuals who help. They are wonderful isolated epi-phenomena in support of wellbeing. But the trend is the trend and one needs to learn to distinguish between an isolated program and a trend.
We have transformed America from a community based everyone pulls together to an every person for themselves culture, and no one, no government can change that. Only we ourselves. Where do you stand?
Marleen Schiessl and her daughter Tiffany Schiessl in Lehigh Acres, Florida.
Quinn Raber arrived at a San Francisco bus station lugging a canvas bag containing all of his belongings: jeans, socks, underwear, pajamas. It was 1pm on a typically overcast day in August.
An unassuming 27-year-old, Raber seemed worn down: his skin was sun-reddened, he was unshaven, and a hat was pulled over his ruffled blond hair. After showing the driver a one-way ticket purchased for him by the city of San Francisco, he climbed the steps of the Greyhound bus.
Cities have been offering homeless people free bus tickets to relocate elsewhere for at least three decades. In recent years, homeless relocation programs have become more common, sprouting up in new cities across the country and costing the public millions of dollars.
But until now there has never been a systematic, nationwide assessment of the consequences. Where are these people being moved to? What impact are these programs having on the cities that send and the cities that receive […]
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