Anna Gorman, - Scientific American
Stephan: You don't want to be poor in America. There is only a pathetic social support network. Why is this? Three reasons, I think. First, because in complete contradiction to what the Founders' intended, we have become an every person for themselves culture. Second, a large part of the population, the part that isn't poor, think the poor should be punished for being poor -- "why should I support those losers". Third, because the poor are very profitable for corporate and government entities. All kinds of people depend on the poor for their own wellbeing.
Here is the real truth that few want to hear: A homeless person costs society much more than a person to whom you give decent housing, and it is not a little difference, it runs to tens sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars. Universal healthcare, instead of an illness profit system would save American society over a trillion dollars a year. Is that my conjecture? It is not, it is based on facts.
Jennifer Millar keeps trash bags and hand sanitizer near her tent, and she regularly pours water mixed with hydrogen peroxide on the sidewalk nearby. Keeping herself and the patch of concrete she calls home clean is a top priority.
But this homeless encampment off a Hollywood freeway ramp is often littered with needles and trash, and soaked in urine. Rats occasionally scamper through, and Millar fears the consequences.
“I worry about all those diseases,” said Millar, 43, who said she has been homeless most of her life.
Infectious diseases—some that ravaged populations in the Middle Ages—are resurging in California and around the country, and are hitting homeless populations especially hard.
Los Angeles recently experienced an outbreak of typhus—a disease spread by infected fleas on rats and other animals—in downtown streets. Officials briefly closed part of City Hall after reporting that rodents had invaded the building.
People in Washington state have been infected with Shigella bacteria, which is spread through feces and causes the diarrheal disease shigellosis, as well as Bartonella quintana, which spreads through body lice and causes trench fever.
Hepatitis A, also spread primarily through feces, infected more than 1,000 people in Southern California in the past two years. The disease also has erupted in […]
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Gulrez Shah Azhar, - International Business Times
Stephan: This is old news for SR readers but it is finally becoming a factor in government planning. I guess we should say, better late than never.
High water
Credit: IBT
Wildfires tearing across Southern California have forced thousands of residents to evacuate from their homes. Even more people fled ahead of the hurricanes that slammed into Texas and Florida earlier this year, jamming highways and filling hotels. A viral social media post showed a flight-radar picture of people trying to escape Florida and posed a provocative question: What if the adjoining states were countries and didn’t grant escaping migrants refuge?
By the middle of this century, experts estimate that climate change is likely to displace between 150 and 300 million people. If this group formed a country, it would be the fourth-largest in the world, with a population nearly as large as that of the United States.
Yet neither individual countries nor the global community are completely prepared to support a whole new class of “climate migrants.” As a physician and public health researcher in India, I learned the value of surveillance and early warning systems for managing infectious disease outbreaks. Based on […]
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Saturday, March 23rd, 2019
Alastair Sharp, - Reader Supported News/ National Observer (Canada)
Stephan: This story is a quintessential example of what I mean when I say a corporation is evil. I will never buy gas from Exxon-Mobil again or use any product they produce. In the future, I believe, historians are going to treat Exxon-Mobil as the perpetrator of crimes against humanity.
Exxon-Mobil Plant
In the three years since world leaders signed the Paris Agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the world’s five largest oil and gas companies have spent more than $1 billion on misleading branding and lobbying related to climate change, according to a new report.
While the oil majors — ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, BP and Total — have publicly supported carbon pricing and other efforts to mitigate climate change, they have also lobbied against effective policy, the report from London-based think tank InfluenceMap says.
“The overriding intention and net result of these efforts has been to slow down binding and increasingly crucial policy” while the companies also overplay their own green initiatives, it said in a report released late on Thursday.
In the month before last November’s U.S. midterm elections, for example, the five companies and related trade associations spent $2 million on targeted social media campaigns in five states where energy policy was in play.
Three-quarters of that spending went to Washington state, where a ballot […]
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Saturday, March 23rd, 2019
NEELA BANERJEE, Reporter - Inside Climate News
Stephan: This is why the report on the behavior of Exxon-Mobil is so vile.
Daniel Coats (C), director of National Intelligence, Gina Haspel (2nd L), director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Christopher Wray (L), director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and General Robert Ashley (R), director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, testify on Worldwide Threats during a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, January 29, 2019. Credit: SAUL LOEB / AFP/ Getty
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The nation’s intelligence community warned in its annual assessment of worldwide threats that climate change and other kinds of environmental degradation pose risks to global stability because they are “likely to fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent through 2019 and beyond.”
Released Tuesday, the Worldwide Threat Assessmentprepared by the Director of National Intelligence added to a swelling chorus of scientific and national security voices in pointing out the ways climate change fuels widespread insecurity and erodes America’s ability to respond to it.
“Climate hazards such as extreme weather, higher temperatures, droughts, floods, wildfires, storms, sea level rise, soil degradation, and […]
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Saturday, March 23rd, 2019
IGOR DERYSH, Political Writer - Salon
Stephan: It is now obvious, even to Republicans that the ill-conceived tax cut they passed has not done any of the good things for the middle class and the poor that were promised. Republicans, on the data, cannot govern to produce wellbeing, because they are owned by the uber-rich, and their policies always serve the interests of their masters. The tax cut makes the point with trumpets.
But what about YOUR pay raise?
Credit: Cherise May/NurPhoto
President Trump’s hand-picked Federal Reserve chairman and White House economic advisers admitted this week that the Republican tax cuts are failing to deliver the economic growth the president promised.
Trump repeatedly claimed that the Republicans’ $1.5 trillion tax cut primarily aimed at corporations and the rich would pay for itself with annual economic growth above 3 percent. Trump went as far as to claiming the cuts might lead to a GDP growth of 6 percent.
Trump’s White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) released an analysis in 2017 showing that slashing corporate taxes by 15 percent would lead to GDP growth of 3 to 5 percent.
On Tuesday, the CEA released a revised report showing that the economic gains will fall far short of their initial forecast.
According to the CEA, growth is projected to slow to 2.5 percent by 2022 and then decline to 2 percent by 2026. Even that estimate is rosy, according to most economists, […]
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