Regulations on pesticides have failed to prevent poisoning of almost all habitats, international team of scientists concludes
The world’s most widely used insecticides have contaminated the environment across the planet so pervasively that global food production is at risk, according to a comprehensive scientific assessment of the chemicals’ impacts.
The researchers compare their impact with that reported in Silent Spring, the landmark 1962 book by Rachel Carson that revealed the decimation of birds and insects by the blanket use of DDT and other pesticides and led to the modern environmental movement.
Here is what I think is a correct assessment of the new global aristocracy that owns a growing percentage of the world's wealth, and wants more. We think of peasants as agricultural workers. But that is the past. In the present day it is increasingly ordinary workers — both blue and white collar. The wealth differential now is even greater than it was in the 14th century. Click through to see the very useful graphs.
Privatization is the curse laid upon society by vampire capitalism. As this article shows it only benefits the rich, and it degrades the lives of ordinary Americans.
As most experts and layman enthusiasts will tell you, there’s no one, single explanation for the past 30-plus years of growing economic inequality. Its drivers are multiple and separating one from the other is often quite complicated. Low taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations, the gutting of labor unions, the increased mobility of capital, technological gains, overly protective intellectual property law; the list goes on.
In fact, here’s another one to add to the list: privatization. According to ‘Race to the Bottom: How Outsourcing Public Services Rewards Corporations and Punishes the Middle Class,” a new study from In the Public Interest, a think tank focused on how privatization affects the economy, the routine practice of outsourcing government functions is another important reason why the middle class is shrinking as those at the very top reap more and more of the fruits of our economy. To explain how that is – and why it’s important that people committed to economic justice push back against the practice – Salon recently spoke with ITPI research and policy director Shar Habibi. Our conversation is below and has been edited for length and clarity.
Over half of Americans (52%) have had to make at least one major sacrifice in order to cover their rent or mortgage over the last three years, according to the “How Housing Matters Survey,” which was commissioned by the nonprofit John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and carried out by Hart Research Associates. These sacrifices include getting a second job, deferring saving for retirement, cutting back on health care, running up credit card debt, or even moving to a less safe neighborhood or one with worse schools.
This is a very good interview with Matt Taibbi discussing what has happened to the American justice system. One of our myths is that we have the fairest justice system in the world but, like our fantasy that we have the world's freest press, it is a delusion. As with the press we aren't e! ven in the top 25. It is very hard to maintain a healthy democracy if both the government and the people insist upon lying to themselves.
Morally, it doesn’t work anymore. You just cannot have a society where people instinctively know that certain people are above the law, because it will create total disrespect for authority among everybody else. And that’s completely corrosive. You need to have people believing in the system to some degree – even if it’s just an illusion, you need to have them believing. And that was … another thing I was trying to get to in this book, the difference between what happened in the Bush years, with the scandals with Adelphi and Enron and Tyco, and what happened now, [when] they just stopped seeing the necessity of keeping up appearances. They didn’t even make a few symbolic prosecutions, and so it leaves the entire public with this glaring statistic that there were no prosecutions and there was massive crime. How does that make anybody else feel? How does it make you feel when you pay a speeding ticket, you can’t write that off, but HSBC can write off its $1.9 b! illion fine for drug trafficking? People start to think about these things, and they start losing their faith in the system and it doesn’t work anymore. It’s funny, because when they talk about income inequality on the campaign trail and in these elections … They always talk about it in this unthreatening, antiseptic way, and it’s just so much more extreme than that. It’s much broader and more disgusting problem than the way they typically present it in our political debate. So that was another thing I was trying to do, was to try to bring out the grotesque nature of the whole thing.
If you have been reading SR for some time you know I predicted this in the late 90s. Eventually a wide range of industries are going to be opposed to the carbon energy interests. This is an important trend, and one to watch closely.
Being a big business, the insurance industry is a strong backer of free enterprise and its laissez-faire leaders. But a rift could be developing now that some major carriers are staking claims in the climate change cause while many of their congressional backers have remained skeptical of the science.
For insurers, it’s not about the political machinations but rather, it’s about the potential economic losses. If even part of the predictions hold – the ones released by the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change that ascribe temperature change to humans with 95 percent certainty – then the rate of extreme weather events will only increase and the effects would be more severe. That, in turn, would lead to greater damages and more payouts.
A full interview with Ricardo Semler by the Dutch TV-show Backlight. In our episode ‘The capital power of hapiness' we made a portrait of this Brasilian business man. Here you can watch the full interview of one hour and a half. Mostly unedited, but divided in chapters.
This man is Semco's business guru, and known for his development of leadership by omission.
Offers major insights into education as well as business — structures that focus on “managing” large groups of people, especially children, are not focusing on their core mission — creating value or teaching. A society's “constraints” and blinders begin embedding at the age of two — that is the starting point for creating a Smart Nation of free spirits instead of sheep.
