Archive | August, 2011
Justice for Some – Joseph E. Stiglitz
22 AugIn America, the venality is at a higher level. It is not particular judges that are bought, but the laws themselves, through campaign contributions and lobbying, in what has come to be called “corruption, American-style.”
It was widely known that banks and mortgage companies were engaged in predatory lending practices, taking advantage of the least educated and most financially uninformed to make loans that maximized fees and imposed enormous risks on the borrowers. …
When it became clear that people could not pay back what was owed, the rules of the game changed. Bankruptcy laws were amended to introduce a system of “partial indentured servitude.” An individual with, say, debts equal to 100% of his income could be forced to hand over to the bank 25% of his gross, pre-tax income for the rest of his life, because, the bank could add on, say, 30% interest each year to what a person owed. In the end, a mortgage holder would owe far more than the bank ever received, even though the debtor had worked, in effect, one-quarter time for the bank.
via Justice for Some – Joseph E. Stiglitz – Project Syndicate.
Tar Sands and the Carbon Numbers – NYTimes Opposes Keystone Pipeline
22 AugThis page opposes the building of a 1,700-mile pipeline called the Keystone XL, which would carry diluted bitumen — an acidic crude oil — from Canada’s Alberta tar sands to the Texas Gulf Coast. We have two main concerns: the risk of oil spills along the pipeline, which would traverse highly sensitive terrain, and the fact that the extraction of petroleum from the tar sands creates far more greenhouse emissions than conventional production does.
How Much Tax Should The Rich Pay? | ThinkProgress
22 AugClose the loopholes in the tax system!
But the biggest takeaway that I’d like to see people take from this paper is that fans of progressive taxation should be fans of tax reform. As you see in the text, the optimal marginal tax rate for high income people soars if you first (or simultaneously) enact loophole-closing measures to broaden the tax base. In a tax code with many loopholes, higher rates is largely an incentive to exploit loopholes. Close the loopholes, and you can soak the rich with much more efficacy.
Soaking the rich — Crooked Timber
22 AugAs has been pointed out many times, the Great Compression in income distribution during the 1950s and 1960s, driven in part by policies designed quite explicitly to “stick it to the rich”, was also a time of full employment and steadily growing economic growth. And, while the success of those policies made it sensible to focus on other issues, such as civil rights, rather than seeking to push economic redistribution even further, the situation is exactly the opposite today.
When the top 1 per cent have 25 per cent of all income and this share is steadily growing, a government that doesn’t soak the rich can’t do much more than spread the pain a bit more evenly, whether this means cutting services to balance the budget without higher taxes on the bottom 99 per cent, or squeezing out a bit of extra revenue to preserve essential parts of the welfare state.
Corporate Interests Threaten Children’s Welfare – NYTimes.com
22 AugProtect children, but not the rights of corporations to exploit children for profit.
A clash between these two newly created legal entities — children and corporations — was, perhaps, inevitable. Century-of-the-child reformers sought to resolve conflicts in favor of children. But over the last 30 years there has been a dramatic reversal: corporate interests now prevail. Deregulation, privatization, weak enforcement of existing regulations and legal and political resistance to new regulations have eroded our ability, as a society, to protect children.
Childhood obesity mounts as junk food purveyors bombard children with advertising, even at school. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation study reports that children spend more hours engaging with various electronic media — TV, games, videos and other online entertainments — than they spend in school. Much of what children watch involves violent, sexual imagery, and yet children’s media remain largely unregulated. Attempts to curb excesses — like California’s ban on the sale or rental of violent video games to minors — have been struck down by courts as free speech violations.
Another area of concern: we medicate increasing numbers of children with potentially harmful psychotropic drugs, a trend fueled in part by questionable and under-regulated pharmaceutical industry practices.
via Corporate Interests Threaten Children’s Welfare – NYTimes.com.
Little Resistance as Rebels Enter Tripoli – NYTimes.com
21 AugWhat does this continuation of the “Arab Spring” portend for us in America? When will we get our Spring? When will we DEMAND it? When will we CREATE it?
The rebel leadership announced that insurgents had captured two of Colonel Qaddafi’s sons, including Seif al-Islam, his heir apparent. The leadership also announced that the elite presidential guard protecting the Libyan leader had surrendered.
via Little Resistance as Rebels Enter Tripoli – NYTimes.com.
NB: A personal friend of mine has worked with Seif. It’s complicated. I wish the man well. He’s faced and, I assume, will continue to face extremely difficult choices.
Surely They Can Read a Spreadsheet – NYTimes.com
21 AugCan’t read anything with your eyes closed and your brain draining out into the ether.
This is not the time for the usual demands by business for fewer regulations and lower taxes. The economy is too fragile and the deficit too high — in no small part because the George W. Bush administration spent eight years giving business and the wealthy exactly what they asked for.
Instead, business leaders should be pushing Washington for what is needed to avoid another recession: more near-term spending to stimulate the economy, more revenue to help pay for it, and a balanced approach to the long-term deficit by reducing health care costs and strengthening the tax base.
Fukushima early stage China Syndrome ‘clearly a concern’: Expert – National Human Rights | Examiner.com
21 AugSince Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear energy plant has reportedly released 20 times the radiation contamination amount of the Hiroshima bomb, and its molten core is sinking through the Earth’s crust, it appears to be in early stages of a “total China Syndrome meltdown” according to a Russia Today report Thursday during which Beyond Nuclear’s Paul Gunter answered why media is blacking out the catastrophe, as noted by numerous scientists, and he revealed the increasing threat of a nuclear explosion.
The Cause Of Riots And The Price of Food – Technology Review
21 AugBut what’s interesting about this analysis is that Lagi and co say that high food prices don’t necessarily trigger riots themselves, they simply create the conditions in which social unrest can flourish. “These observations are consistent with a hypothesis that high global food prices are a precipitating condition for social unrest,” say Lagi and co.
In other words, high food prices lead to a kind of tipping point when almost anything can trigger a riot, like a lighted match in a dry forest.
On 13 December last year, the group wrote to the US government pointing out that global food prices were about to cross the threshold they had identified. Four days later, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia in protest at government policies, an event that triggered a wave of social unrest that continues to spread throughout the middle east today.
One of two factors in the rise of food prices “is the con version of corn into ethanol, a practiced directly encouraged by subsidies.” The other factor is speculating in food prices.
via The Cause Of Riots And The Price of Food – Technology Review.
Truth and Traditions 