Joe Firestone: What Social Security/Medicare Solvency Problem?
Joe Firestone reviews the state of play on the Social Security/Medicare “reform” debate.
Read more...Category Archives: Social policy
Lynn Parramore: Obama Nominates America’s Biggest Walmart Cheerleader as His Chief Economic Adviser
Apparently, the most important criterion for getting an important post in the Obama Administration is telling Big Lies, better yet with data. Jason Furman claims Walmart is a “progressive success story.”
Read more...Lynn Parramore: Class of 2013 – All Dressed Up and No Place to Work
A weak job market, killer student loans and a crappy economy mean continued struggle for America’s college grads.
Read more...Lynn Parramore: Half Lives – Why the Part-time Economy Is Bad for Everyone
Why is a whole job getting harder to find every day in America?
Read more...Why Isn’t Elizabeth Warren Attacking the Student Debt Problem Head On?
It’s puzzling to see Elizabeth Warren pull her punches on a pressing issue for middle class families, that of student debt.
Read more...Joe Firestone: Sorry Folks, Austerity’s Not Dead Yet!
By Joe Firestone, Ph.D., Managing Director, CEO of the Knowledge Management Consortium International (KMCI), and Director of KMCI’s CKIM Certificate program. He has taught political science as the graduate and undergraduate level and blogs regularly at Corrente, Firedoglake and Daily Kos as letsgetitdone. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
Read more...More Market State In Action: Consumers Treated Differently Under the Law Than Businesses
You thought corporate personhood was a bad thing? Think twice. You should be so lucky as to be a corporate person. They don’t just get treated like you and me, they are increasingly being treated better than you and me.
Read more...Barbara Parramore Speaks About Her Arrest in “Moral Monday Protests” Against Republican Railroading of Extreme Right-Wing Agenda in North Carolina
Yves here. NC intern Jessica Ferrer interviewed 80 year old Barbara Parramore, who was one of 57 arrested in North Carolina on May 20 as part of what has become weekly protests at the state General Assembly called “Moral Mondays”.
Read more...Nathan Tankus: New York City Public Libraries Attack Alert – Privatizing Prized Locations and Cutting Budget by 35%
By Nathan Tankus, a student and research assistant at the University of Ottawa. You can follow him on Twitter at @NathanTankus
Now that pubic libraries have “done their jobs” (in FIRE sector terms) they can do one more thing for finance and real estate: be killed for private sector fun and profit.
Read more...Your Humble Blogger Appears on RT’s Truthseeker
We discuss how outsourcing and offshoring are more about transferring income from low-level workers to middle and senior level managers than cost savings.
Read more...Coming Corporate Control of Medicine Will Throw Patients Under the Bus
In the US, business freedom means the God-given right to exploit the vulnerability of the public. The example slouching into view is more corporate control over the practice of medicine. And based on the previews, it will make the horrors falsely attributed to socialized medicine look pale.
Read more...Cathy O’Neil: The Rise of Big Data, Big Brother
By Cathy O’Neil, a data scientist and a member of the Occupy Wall Street Alternative Banking Group. Cross posted from mathbabe
I recently read and article off the newsstand called The Rise of Big Data, It was written by Kenneth Neil Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger and it was published in the May/June 2013 edition of Foreign Affairs, which is published by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). I mention this because CFR is an influential think tank, filled with powerful insiders, including people like Robert Rubin himself, and for that reason I want to take this view on big data very seriously: it might reflect the policy view before long.
I’m glad it’s not all rainbows and sunshine when it comes to big data in this article. Unfortunately, whether because they’re tied to successful business interests, or because they just haven’t thought too deeply about the dark side, their concerns seem almost token, and their examples bizarre.
Read more...You Are a Guinea Pig: Americans Exposed to Biohazards in Great Uncontrolled Experiment
By David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, the co-authors and co-editors of seven books and 85 articles on a variety of industrial and occupational hazards, including Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution and, most recently, Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children. Rosner is a professor of history at Columbia University and co-director of the Center for the History of Public Health at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. Markowitz is a professor of history at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Cross posted from TomDispatch
A hidden epidemic is poisoning America. The toxins are in the air we breathe and the water we drink, in the walls of our homes and the furniture within them. We can’t escape it in our cars. It’s in cities and suburbs. It afflicts rich and poor, young and old. And there’s a reason why you’ve never read about it in the newspaper or seen a report on the nightly news: it has no name — and no antidote.
Read more...Medical Journal Editorial Blasts Obamacare for Increasing Underinsurance
During the protracted Congressional fight over the Affordable Care Act, its supporters kept stressing the importance of extending coverage to tens of millions of uninsured. But some observers, including your humble blogger, warned that having overpriced insurance that didn’t cover much was a headfake, not real progress.
Physicians for a National Health Care Program has gotten access to an editorial approved for publication next week in the Journal of General Internal Medicine titled Life or Debt. It which takes aim at the lousy job Obamacare does for the group it was billed as benefitting, the un- and underinsured.
Read more...Inequality, Technical Change and the “Hunger for Surplus Value”
By Alejandro Nadal, Professor at the Centre for Economic Studies of El Colegio de Mexico. Cross posted from Triple Crisis
There is (almost) no quarrel about the fact that inequality has increased during the past three or four decades. One of the consequences of this is the growth of unsustainable indebtedness of households in order to maintain aggregate demand, a problem intimately related to the global financial crisis and the so-called Great Recession.
So it is critically important to understand the causes of this rising inequality.
Read more...