JIM CLIFTON, Chairman and CEO at Gallup - The Gallup Organization
Stephan: Here is data in support of what I have been saying about a coming downturn in our economy. The United States is falling so far behind the other developed nations of the world that it may take a generation to reverse this, largely because the failures are not just about moving money around, they are about the nation's collapsing infrastructure. It takes time and great draughts of money to rebuild roads, buildings, airports, shipyards, bridges and energy systems when they have not been maintained properly for decades. We have been coasting on the genius and work of the post World War II generation for years, and now the bill is coming due. Our children and their children are going to curse us.
On a visit to the Princeton campus recently, I asked a famous economics professor a simple question, “Are we in a recovery?”
He gave me a simple, emotionless answer, “No.”
I then asked him how many of the economists in the building would agree. He said, “Every one of them.” I asked him why the media reports indicate that we are in a recovery. His exact words, “I don’t know.”
I’m concerned there’s a mistaken understanding of U.S. economic dynamism. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Fox, MSNBC, all the networks — the Federal Reserve, too — all say the same thing: The job market is strong and the economy is growing. We’re in a recovery.
That’s only partly true.
As optimistic Americans, we really want to believe this narrative. I want to. But it is hard to square this with the fact that half of Americans are making less than they were 35 years ago in real terms. They have not received a raise in 35 years. Making things worse, the cost of housing, healthcare and education are exploding while […]
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, - EcoWatch/Center for Biological Diversity
Stephan: Yet more corruption on the part of the Republicans and the Trump administration. I wish people would wake up and realize that this administration and this party don't give a damn about you or your kids, or ordinary citizens in general. It is a party that only serves the interests of the rich, and has no sense of morality or ethics. In the process of serving the people that own that party they are doing damage so profound we may never recover. Here is the latest on the bees.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported last week that in 2018 it issued so-called “emergency” approvals to spray sulfoxaflor—an insecticide the agency considers “very highly toxic” to bees—on more than 16 million acres of crops known to attract bees.
Of the 18 states where the approvals were granted for sorghum and cotton crops, 12 have been given the approvals for at least four consecutive years for the same “emergency.”
Last year the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General released a report finding that the agency’s practice of routinely granting “emergency” approval for pesticides across millions of acres does not effectively measure risks to human health or the environment.
“Spraying 16 million acres of bee-attractive crops with a bee-killing pesticide in a time of global insect decline is beyond the pale, even for the Trump administration,” said Nathan Donley, a senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity. “The EPA is routinely misusing the ’emergency’ process to get sulfoxaflor approved because it’s too toxic to make it through normal pesticide reviews.”
Under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, the EPA has the authority to approve temporary emergency uses of pesticides, even those not officially approved, if the […]
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Marc Lipsitch and Tom Inglesby, - The Washington Post
Stephan: I don't know how many readers remember books like the Hot Zone, or are familiar with the Geneva Conventions of 1929, and 1949 against chemical weapons. As I read those agreements Trump and the Republicans are now in violation of those agreements and have restarted research of so dangerous that the human race is literally at risk. This reads like the outline for anyone of several apocalypse movies. The stupidty described in this article is breath-taking.
Write your Repressentative and your Senators and tell them what you think about what is going on.
Credit: iStock
Marc Lipsitch is a professor of epidemiology and director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Tom Inglesby is director of the Center for Health Security and an environmental health and engineering professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
In 2014, U.S. officials imposed a moratorium on experiments to enhance some of the world’s most lethal viruses by making them transmissible by air, responding to widespread concerns that a lab accident could spark a global pandemic. Most infectious-disease studies pose modest safety risks, but given that these proposed experiments intended to create a highly contagious flu virus that could spread among humans, the government concluded the work should not go on until it could be approved through a specially created, rigorous review process that considered the dangers.
Apparently, the government has decided the research should now move ahead. In the past year, the U.S. government quietly greenlighted funding for two groups of researchers, one in the United States and […]
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Stephan: Just another bit of corruption under Trump and the Republicans that will trash your life. There are so many of these things it would take a separate version of SR just to list them. The corruption and degradation of American regulatory agencies is going to be one of the most lasting cancers from this era in our history.
Credit: Department of Energy
The Trump administration plans to roll back efficiency standards for light bulbs in a move that is projected to pump millions of tons of pollution into the atmosphere while costing American families billions.
The Department of Energy said in that it plans to undo two rules that were put in place in the final days of the Obama administration, which expanded the types of light bulbs subject to stricter efficiency standards under a George W. Bush-era law. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 required manufacturers to increase efficiency of home lighting by 27 percent within seven years, Reutersreported. The Obama administration expanded the law to apply the standards to other types of lighting.
The proposal would remove three-way bulbs, candle-shaped bulbs used in chandeliers, reflector bulbs used in recessed lighting, and others from having to comply with the new efficiency standards, which were set to go into effect next year.
“DOE has since determined that the legal basis underlying those revisions misconstrued existing law,” the agency
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