The great era of US economic growth was the postwar generation; even during the good years of the 90s we didn’t achieve comparable growth, and overall, the post-Reagan era was marked by slower growth than the equivalent period of time pre-Reagan. And I haven’t even gotten into the income distribution thing. All of which makes… Continue reading Untitled
Chris Hedges: Why I’m Suing Barack Obama
Chris Hedges: Why I’m Suing Barack Obama
Attorneys Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran filed a complaint Friday in the Southern U.S. District Court in New York City on my behalf as a plaintiff against Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to challenge the legality of the Authorization for Use of Military Force as embedded in the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed by the president Dec. 31.
I’d like to see more challenges to the NDAA related detention provisions. Why the ACLU is dropping the ball on this is a mystery to me.
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America is both especially unequal and has especially low mobility. But he also argues that because we are even more unequal now than we were a generation ago, we should expect even less social mobility going forward. Very illuminating — and disturbing. (via The Great Gatsby Curve – NYTimes.com) Wow. This looks awful.
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as just two recent examples, both Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel have championed massive cuts to public education while sending their kids to private school. America’s dangerously removed elite – Salon.com
Zoologger: Unique life form is half plant, half animal
Zoologger: Unique life form is half plant, half animal
These hybrids play merry hell with our attempts to classify organisms into neat groups. “The division between plants and animals is collapsing completely,” Moestrup says. Instead, many microorganisms may be animal and plant at once, or switch between the two, like M. rubrum. The new M. chamaeleon breaks yet another barrier. It is halfway between a pure animal and a hybrid.
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is there anything at all in Romney’s stump speech that’s true? It’s all based on attacking Obama for apologizing for America, which he didn’t, on making deep cuts in defense, which he also didn’t, and on being a radical redistributionist who wants equality of outcomes, which he isn’t. When the issue turns to jobs, Romney… Continue reading Untitled
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what the story of Romney and the auto bailout actually shows is something we already knew from health care: he’s a smart guy who is also a moral coward. His original proposal for the auto industry, like his health reform, bore considerable resemblance to what Obama actually did. But when the deed took place, Romney… Continue reading Untitled
Maybe Fair Trade Cotton Isn’t Growth By Child Slaves After All
Maybe Fair Trade Cotton Isn’t Growth By Child Slaves After All
If you think about an agricultural economy centered around a cash crop for export—it could be cotton, coffee, or whatever else you like—then realistically locally focused food production is also going to be part of the picture. The cotton farmers need food after all. So you could easily have a situation in which a bunch of farmers are clustered in a village, partially growing vegetables for basically their own consumption and partially growing cotton. In the unfair trade paradigm, children and adults alike grow both cotton and vegetables. Then when you switch to a fair trade paradigm, what you get is labor market segmentation. Maybe children stop working in the export-oriented cotton fields, but now children are doing all the vegetable farming. The household- and village-level economies, however, are still dependent on child labor. This is all just very tricky to deal with unless the country where it’s happening has the state capacity to enact mandatory free public schooling rules and enforce them effectively as a matter of policy.
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Leaving the payroll tax intact and reducing Social Security benefits for higher-income seniors is, in effect, an increase in marginal tax rates but it was clear from the discussion at this morning’s GOP Presidential debate that few Republicans see it this way. Still, it’s true. The way Social Security works is that you pay taxes… Continue reading Untitled
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Have any Republicans been blocked from voting in the primaries because they didn’t have proper id?