Fukushima, it CAN happen here.
Now, multiple news outlets are reporting possible incidents at nuclear power plants across the east coast following the surprising earthquake this afternoon.
via East Coast Earthquake Knocks Power Out At Virginia Nuke Plant, Others On Alert | ThinkProgress.
Do we want more of this for our children?
Mawani’s film brings to the screen what numerous long-term studies have shown: that a lack of autonomy over one’s daily tasks leads to boredom (at best), utter despair and even increased mortality rates. Yet, time and again, proposed solutions ignore these deeper issues and focus instead (see last month’s column) on the furniture.
via Rethinking the Office Workspace, Part Two – NYTimes.com.
The townspeople of Andes, New York, said “Frack, no!”
As different as they were, the message was the same and it was eloquently proclaimed: “What we have here is unique and beautiful.” “We have to take action to keep the town we love.” “We must take our destiny into our own hands.” “Andes could become the model for the country.” One of the speakers was a local and a folksinger. She made up a song on the spot and taught it to everyone. The refrain was “If we work together / Then we can make it better.”
What’s the political equivalent of running barefoot?
We also went to Africa and went to people who’d never worn shoes. What we discovered was that people who run barefoot tend to run differently than people who wear modern shoes; they run in a much lighter and gentler way because it would hurt to run the way people do in shoes.
In 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.
This 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.
Close 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.
As 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.
Truth and Traditions 