By Sarah Lazare / Common Dreams
Calls for Michigan Governor Rick Snyder’s ouster—and arrest—are growing after internal emails showed that his high-level staffers were aware of lead poisoning in Flint’s public water supply six months before the administration declared a state of emergency. [Read more…]
Part three of the quartet of storms pounding San Diego this week is in full force as I sit here at my computer. The alert goes off on my phone signaling a flash flood warning. The shade cloth over my neighbor’s garden has disengaged itself from two of the poles securing it to earth and is preparing for takeoff.
Peering out the rain-whipped, sliding-glass doors that safely separate me from the deluge outside on my patio, I can’t help but wonder how the people living out on the streets are faring in this godawful storm. Even those fortunate enough to have a tent can’t be feeling protected right now.
Earlier today, local homeless advocate Lisa Kogan had given me an update on the 4’ x 7’ wood structure that she had built for Red, a homeless man she befriended. [Read more…]
By United States Senator Bernie Sanders / Common Dreams
The American people are catching on. They understand that something is profoundly wrong when, in our country today, the top one-tenth of 1 percent own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent and when the 20 richest people own more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans – half of our population. They know that the system is rigged when the average person is working longer hours for lower wages, while 58 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent.
They also know that a handful of people on Wall Street have extraordinary power over the economic and political life of our country. [Read more…]
Over the last few days we’ve heard, via the Union-Tribune and the Wall Street Journal’s free marketeers, a tale of woe arising from the ruling of a state agency holding that the city of San Diego violated state law by not negotiating with employee unions over a 2012 ballot measure that eliminated guaranteed pension benefits for most city employees.
Now we’re being told that greedy unions have circumvented the will of the voters. Talk-show host Carl DeMaio says the agency making this determination is a “kangaroo court.”
Then-Mayor Jerry Sanders worked hand-in-glove with local right-wing politicos to create and sell a “reform” program promising to save taxpayers untold millions of dollars. They lied, they cheated, and when they were called on it, said “so what?” [Read more…]
By Robert Reich
Economic forecasters exist to make astrologers look good, but I’ll hazard a guess. I expect the U.S. economy to sputter in 2016. That’s because the economy faces a deep structural problem: not enough demand for all the goods and services it’s capable of producing.
American consumers account for almost 70 percent of economic activity, but they won’t have enough purchasing power in 2016 to keep the economy going on more than two cylinders. Blame widening inequality. [Read more…]
By Sonali Kolhatkar / TruthDig
California lawmakers have been extremely busy actually getting work done—unlike their federal counterparts in Washington, D.C. The most populous state in the nation is now arguably also the most progressive. Here are 10 critical issues covered by recently passed laws, from reproductive rights and equal pay to voting rights and health care for undocumented children. [Read more…]
By Susan Grigsby / Daily Kos
It is traditional at the end of the year to look back at the year’s events and rank them according to significance or popularity. In my youth, I used to enjoy the news reports that focused on the biggest stories of the year, mostly because I was too busy living to pay much attention to them while they were happening.
Now the years pass so quickly that I find year end round-ups to be a bit of a bore. It feels like January was last month. So instead of dwelling on the news stories that did happen and that everyone else will be covering, I decided to recount the top ten stories that were NOT written (because they did not happen) but that should have been written, and in the utopia of my imagination, DID occur. Here they are, in no particular order: [Read more…]
By Kos / Daily Kos
You hear conservatives tell it, the key to a job-creating positive business environment is … drum roll … low taxes! So the conservative Tax Foundation will rank the best and worst business climate states:
California and New York are ranked way low (48 and 49, respectively), with New Jersey coming in last at 50. And on the “positive” side, you have Wyoming leading the pack, with Texas at #10.
CNBC has its own rankings, with Texas at #2, and California down at #27 and New York at #36. (These rankings, for example, favor right-to-work anti-union states.)
And how about crazy-ass ALEC?
[Read more…]
Martin Shkreli, CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, who bought the drug, Daraprim and then raised the price from $13.50 to $750. a pill was arrested on December 17 by the FBI on fraud charges having nothing to do with his price gouging with Daraprim. Shkreli seemed to back off on his 5000% increase for a life-saving drug after he received a lot of negative publicity but later said that he wished that he had raised the price of the drug even more. A silent chorus went up all over America, “He’s getting what he so richly deserves!” It does seem like Karma, doesn’t it?
Earlier this month Shkreli talked about his second thoughts at a health care conference sponsored by Forbes. “I probably would have raised the price higher. That’s probably what I would have done. I think health care prices are inelastic. I could have raised the price higher and made more profits for my shareholders which is my primary duty. And again no one wants to say it, no one’s proud of it, but this is a capitalist society, capitalist system and capitalist rules and my investors expect me to maximize profits, not minimize them or go half or go 70% but to go to 100% of the profit curve …”
So the ultimate solution for this capitalist is maximizing value for his shareholders (and for himself, by the way) and if a few people who can’t afford this life-saving drug have to die along the way that’s just the cost of dong business, collateral damage, because what’s most important is profit maximization. The Ultimate Solution becomes synonymous with Hitler’s Final Solution. [Read more…]
As I wrote back in mid-October, Project Censored recently released their list of the most underreported stories of 2015. The number one story on their list features the news that 2016 will be the year when half of the world’s wealth will be controlled by the top 1%. More specifically, they document how:
According to the Oxfam report, the proportion of global wealth owned by the 1 percent has increased from 44 percent in 2009 to 48 percent in 2014 and is projected to reach 50 percent in 2016. In October 2014, a prior Oxfam report, “Even It Up: Time to End Extreme Poverty,” revealed that the number of billionaires worldwide had more than doubled since the 2009 financial crisis, showing that, although those at the top have recovered quickly, the vast majority of the world’s population are far from reaping the benefits of any recent economic recovery.
Even more staggering, the world’s richest eighty-five people now hold the same amount of wealth as half the world’s poorest population. “Failure to tackle inequality will leave hundreds of millions trapped in poverty unnecessarily,” the report’s authors warned. [Read more…]
This was the year that growing inequality became too big a problem to ignore. A growing chorus of voices broke through the white noise of the media’s slavish subservience to the concept of ‘trickle down’ as a viable economic choice.
None-the-less, all the national contenders for the presidency continue to swear allegiance to the failed idea. They are rarely challenged in interviews, editorials or debates, even though the preponderance of data demonstrates a growing disparity between the very rich and the rest of us. Why they don’t get laughed off of any stage where this bad idea gets bandied about is a mystery to me.
Today, we’ll look at some labor advocacy from 2015, focusing on the Fight for Fifteen campaign. Modern-day political reality dictates that the struggle to increase wages will be fought on the local level. [Read more…]
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently came out with a 55-page document titled “Homeless Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing: Defining “Chronically Homeless”.
I can only imagine the thousands of dollars spent to clarify that: agencies receiving HUD funds to serve chronically homeless people cannot use those funds for persons or households if any of the periods separating the requisite “4 separate occasions in the past 3 years” where they were homeless (according to the HUD definition of homeless) were less than 7 nights.
If that sounds convoluted to you, imagine being an underpaid, intake staff person at an underfunded homeless service agency, interviewing a homeless client to determine if they can accept him or her into the program without jeopardizing their HUD funding. [Read more…]
