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When I began Schwartzreport my purpose was to produce an entirely fact-based daily publication in favor of the earth, the inter-connectedness and interdependence of all life, democracy, equality for all, liberty, and things that are life-affirming. Also, to warn my readers about actions, events, and trends that threaten those values. Our country now stands at a crossroads, indeed, the world stands at a crossroads where those values are very much at risk and it is up to each of us who care about wellbeing to do what we can to defend those principles. I want to thank all of you who have contributed to SR, particularly those of you who have scheduled an ongoing monthly contribution. It makes a big difference and is much appreciated. It is one thing to put in the hours each day and to do the work for free, but another to have to cover the rising out-of-pocket costs. For those of you who haven’t done so, but read SR regularly, I ask that you consider supporting it.
Stephan: Tens of thousands of people in the West are having to evacuate, hundreds of thousands of acres are already destroyed. Yet the media coverage has been very small. Massive forest fires at a scale never before seen have become a regular part of Western weather. This is going to have a massive impact on where people live, and that is going to significantly alter the economies of Western states, and it is all part of the climate change trend.
California wildfire Credit: CNN
Major wildfires are burning in California and other Western states. More than 20 major fires are burning in the Golden State, fueled by high temperatures. But states from the Northwest into the Rockies are also experiencing devastating wildfires.
California
The 660,000 acres burned in California so far is about the same area of land as Rhode Island.
Active fires from August alone have burned more than double the total acreage burned in California in 2019 (about 260,000 acres).
The LNU Lightning Complex fire is already the 10th largest in California history, at 219,000 acres.
Having burned 219,000 acres in 96 hours since it started Monday morning, the LNU fire has burned the equivalent of one football field every 2 seconds since Monday morning.
According to Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), Wednesday set a one-day record for the amount of wildfire smoke emissions coming from California fires. The fires put an estimated 3 million tons of carbon […]
Stephan: Everything in Trump world is a grift; there is always some crooked financial angle, in which your tax dollars are used to enrich Trump, his family, or one of his orcs. Here's the latest on the Steve Bannon Build the Wall grift.
Bannon and Trump fellow grifters
President Donald Trump was caught in a precarious position when one of his top former aides and former campaign CEO was indicted for fraud after running a fake effort to build the wall on the southern American border.
Over a year ago, the Pentagon inspector general began looking into a suspicious $400 million contract given from the Department of Homeland Security to the construction company linked to Bannon’s group. The funds came at Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) and Trump’s urging
“On Dec. 2, the Pentagon announced a contract worth up to $400 million to Fisher Sand and Gravel for the construction of 31 miles of new border barriers along the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in southern Arizona,” said the Washington Post.Defend democracy. Click to invest in courageous progressive journalism today.
CEO Tommy Fisher launched an aggressive effort to try and score a contract, making several appearances on Fox News and paying at least $100,000 in lobbying. Fisher also personally lobbied the president, gave hefty donations to Cramer’s Senate campaign, […]
Stephan: New Zealand, which I think is the most interesting country in the world, because they now have a government that explicitly has made fostering wellbeing its first priority has announced a potentially game-changing wireless technology for power transmission. Here is the best explanation of what this breakthrough is about that I could find. As just a historical note, this is the approach to power transmission Nikola Tesla had in mind.
New Zealand wireless transmission Credit: Emrod
Yesterday we covered the news that New Zealand’s second-largest electricity distributor has signed a deal with startup Emrod to trial long-range wireless power transmission. Today we follow up with an interview with Emrod’s founder, Greg Kushnir, to talk about the deal, the technology, safety and redundancy concerns, the efficiency of the system and whether it can be used to transmit power back to Earth from a space-based solar array.
What follows is an edited transcript.
New Atlas: Congrats on this deal you’ve signed with Powerco. It sounds pretty significant.
Greg Kushnir: Any market traction with a new technology is significant. I think it’s been a huge leap of faith on behalf of Powerco.
So Microwave energy transmission has been possible for some time. What are the advances you guys have made?
You’re absolutely right. Transferring energy with microwaves has been around for decades. In the 70s, NASA showed it could support a helicopter drone in the air, charging it with microwaves from the ground. It’s been around for a while.
Stephan: Wealth inequality in the U.S. has become the central social crisis. You cannot have a healthy wellbeing oriented society when a tiny group of people are so rich that they live in a different world from the overwhelming remainder of the population. The top 1% have an average income of $718,766.
In my opinion, it is not so much that the uber-rich have bad intentions for everyone else, it is that they literally cannot imagine and empathize with the daily lives of the non-rich. When you can have anything you want, the way you want it from that perspective a monopolistic corporate structure is the way to go. Then you and people in your circle can efficiently get what you want. Works for the rich but not for anyone else. We should go back to the tax structure of the 1950s when. as the Tax Foundation has it, "The top federal income tax rate was 91 percent in 1950 and 1951, and between 1954 and 1959. In 1952 and 1953, the top federal income tax rate was 92 percent." You simply live in a different world when your hourly income, exceeds the yearly income for most individuals, and families, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Alice Walton all have incomes of a $1 million an hour.
Biden will bring in social progressives because he believes in facts, and the people around him are also fact-based. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are competent. Talk to anyone in Burlington, Vermont, and they will tell you would a good mayor he was. Warren's record is completely oriented to fostering wellbeing, and her programs work. It is becoming clear to a growing number of people that the only way we are going to get through climate change is by making wellbeing the first priority at every level. We have to get rid of Trump, and the circus of orcs around him, and put some in prison.
The concentration of market power in a handful of companies lies behind several disturbing trends in the U.S. economy, like the deepening of inequality and financial instability, two Federal Reserve Board economists say in a new paper.
Isabel Cairo and Jae Sim identify a decline in competition, with large firms controlling more of their markets, as a common cause in a series of important shifts over the last four decades.
Those include a fall in labor share, or the chunk of output that goes to workers, even as corporate profits increased; and a surge in wealth and income inequality, as the net worth of the top 5% of households almost tripled between 1983 and 2016. This fueled financial risks and higher leverage, the economists say, as poorer households borrowed to make ends meet while richer ones shoveled their wealth into bonds — feeding the demand for debt instruments.
“The rise of market power of the firms may have been the driving force” in all of these trends, Cairo and Sim write in the paper. Published this month by the […]
Stephan: The ideal salary differential is CEOs make 11 times the average salaries of the typical worker at their company. That has gone completely awry as this report lays out.
New research published Tuesday by the Economic Policy Institute shows that the top executives at the largest corporations in the United States now make 320 times more than what their typical employees earn in wages and benefits.
“CEO pay can be curbed to reduce the growing gap between the highest earners and everyone else with little, if any, impact on the output of the economy or firm performance.” —Jori Kandra, Economic Policy Institute
EPI’s latest annual analysis of executive compensation finds that the CEOs of the top 350 firms in the U.S. raked in an average of $21.3 million in 2019, a 14% increase from 2018. The 320-1 ratio of CEO-to-worker pay in 2019 is more than five times higher than the 61-1 ratio reported in 1989.
The think tank’s research comes amid a global pandemic that is likely to exacerbate the decades-long trend of surging income and wealth inequality in the U.S.—a trend that, according to EPI, won’t be reversed by CEOs opting to take salary cuts during a public health crisis that has left tens of millions of Americans jobless.
Stephan: When you have the kind of wealth inequality that vampire capitalism produces you get this.
Credit: Brian Stauffer for Rolling Stone
On June 29th, 2020, while America remained transfixed by anti-police protests, the chairman and CEO of the pharmaceutical company Gilead issued a much-anticipated announcement. In a breezy open letter, Daniel O’Day explained how much his company planned on charging for a course of remdesivir, one of many possible treatments for Covid-19. “In the weeks since we learned of remdesivir’s potential against Covid-19, one topic has attracted more speculation than any other: what price we might set for the medicine,” O’Day wrote, before plunging into a masterpiece of corporate doublespeak.
The CEO noted a study by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a division of the National Institutes of Health, showing that Covid-19 patients taking remdesivir recovered after 11 days, compared with 15 days for placebo takers. In the U.S., he wrote, “earlier hospital discharge would result in hospital savings of approximately $12,000 per patient.”
The hilarious implication seemed to be that by shortening hospital stays by four days on average, remdesivir was worth $48,000 a dose. That O’Day might come […]
Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate Economist and Columnist - The New York Times
Stephan: As usual Paul Krugman sees through the miasma, and explains it very well.
Housing activists outside a home in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. Credit: Scott Heins/Getty
On Tuesday, the S&P 500 stock index hit a record high. The next day, Apple became the first U.S. company in history to be valued at more than $2 trillion. Donald Trump is, of course, touting the stock market as proof that the economy has recovered from the coronavirus; too bad about those 173,000 dead Americans, but as he says, “It is what it is.”
But the economy probably doesn’t feel so great to the millions of workers who still haven’t gotten their jobs back and who have just seen their unemployment benefits slashed. The $600 a week supplemental benefit enacted in March has expired, and Trump’s purported replacement is basically a sick joke.
Even before the aid cutoff, the number of parents reporting that they were having trouble giving their children enough to eat was rising rapidly. That number will surely soar in the next few weeks. And we’re also about to see a huge wave of evictions, both because […]
A meta-analysis of 63 studies showed a significant negative association between intelligence and religiosity. The association was stronger for college students and the general population than for participants younger than college age; it was also stronger for religious beliefs than religious behavior. For college students and the general population, means of weighted and unweighted correlations between intelligence and the strength of religious beliefs ranged from −.20 to −.25 (mean r −.24). Three possible interpretations were discussed. First, intelligent people are less likely to conform and, thus, are more likely to resist religious dogma. Second, intelligent people tend to adopt an analytic (as opposed to intuitive) thinking style, which has been shown to undermine religious beliefs. Third, several functions of religiosity, including compensatory control, self-regulation, self-enhancement, and secure attachment, are also conferred by intelligence. Intelligent people may therefore have less need for religious beliefs and practices.
Conclusion
The present work comprises two parts. The first part was a meta-analysis of the relation between intelligence and religiosity. The second part examined possible explanations for the relation that was observed. Results of […]
