Category: economy

Very, very, very small particles.

You can buy socks infused with silver nanoparticles claiming to reduce bacteria and odor. “But what happens if we buy those socks and we wash them?” Professor Sadik asks. “The nanoparticles end up in our water system.”

You can buy Maternal Water especially for baby and mom in the gestation period, oh so chemical free, but sprinkled with very, very, very tiny particles of silver.

You can buy a chocolate milkshake containing ‘nanosize powder’ with a super-sized claim that very, very, very small particles – 100,000th the size of a single grain of sand – will carry nutrition into your cells.

Why stop there? We’re mass producing tiny particles. Appliances, Automotive, Electronics and Computers, Food and Beverage, Goods for Children, Health and Fitness, Home and Garden.

“We need to understand the chemical transformation of these materials in the ecosystem so we can take action to prevent unnecessary exposure,” Sadik said.

“Some are known toxins; others have properties similar to asbestos. And it’s difficult, if not downright impossible, to monitor them.”

Corporate Accountability International says Ronald McDonald is fueling childhood obesity.

Is it time to recognize our communities are not crops for corporate harvest?

Paul Krugman:

Some background: we used to have a workable system for avoiding financial crises, resting on a combination of government guarantees and regulation. On one side, bank deposits were insured, preventing a recurrence of the immense bank runs that were a central cause of the Great Depression. On the other side, banks were tightly regulated, so that they didn’t take advantage of government guarantees by running excessive risks.

From 1980 or so onward, however, that system gradually broke down, partly because of bank deregulation, but mainly because of the rise of “shadow banking”: institutions and practices — like financing long-term investments with overnight borrowing — that recreated the risks of old-fashioned banking but weren’t covered either by guarantees or by regulation. The result, by 2007, was a financial system as vulnerable to severe crisis as the system of 1930. And the crisis came.

And you should bear in mind that the biggest bailouts took place under a conservative Republican administration, which claimed to believe deeply in free markets.

Republican jingoism since Ronald Reagan. Tax holidays. Stripped government. Reduced regulation. Supply side and trickle down economics… Free markets. All this purchased with skyrocketing debt.

The Earth is truly a blue planet; 70% of its surface is covered with water.

Unfortunately 97.5% of that is salt water, unusable for humans. Fresh water accounts for the other 2.5%, however, about two thirds of that is locked up in glaciers and in the icy poles.

That leaves humans and every other living creature on land only about 1% of all the water on Earth to use.

The cubic miles of water on Earth:

— Oceans, Seas, and Bays – 321 million
— Glaciers, permanent snow – 5.8 million
— Groundwater – 5.6 million
— Lakes – 42,320
— Atmosphere – 3,095
— Swamps – 2,752
— Rivers – 509
— Biological Water – 269

David A Gabel:

When looking at these numbers, what really pops out is the enormous stores of groundwater available. 5.6 million cubic miles is a staggering sum, even when compared to the immensity of the oceans.

Ocean acidification is caused when the CO2 emitted by human activity, mainly burning fossil fuels, dissolves into the oceans.

It is happening independently of, but in combination with, global warming.

These changes are taking place at rates as much as 100 times faster than the last tens of millions of years. Ocean acidification could represent an equal – or perhaps even greater threat – to the biology of our planet than global warming… “We are seeing signs of its impact even in the deep oceans”, said Dr Eva Calvo, Marine Science Institute.

The USA is about 300 million people living on 3,794,000 square mile. That’s a population density of approximately 79 Americans per square mile.

If the population density of the United States was equal to that of Brooklyn, the entire US population would fit into New Hampshire.

If we lived as tightly as Manila, Philippines, the entire USA would be just 52 by 52 miles.

Yes, it’s human activity. Stunning population growth, sprawling megacities and fossil fuels have changed the planet

Wired’s Brandon Keim: “From diverting a third of Earth’s available fresh water to planting and grazing two-fifths of its land surface, humankind has fiddled with the knobs of the Holocene, that 10,000-year period of climate stability that birthed civilization.”

We enter a new geologic time, an age of mankind’s making.

How long did it take to build?
It took me three days. I built it on an old computer I had in my bedroom.

Then what happened?
I showed it to my friends and they criticized it; they asked why anyone would want to use it. So I went onto a few forums and asked people to try the site, and I got 20 people to try it.

How many users do you have now?
Well, after the initial 20 users the site doubled and it continued to double every day since then. Last month I saw 30 million unique visitors come to the Web site and one million new people visit each day. It continues to multiply and I just couldn’t stop it from growing.

What were you thinking while this was happening?
I woke up one morning and checked my computer and saw all of these news articles about Chatroulette. I yelled to Mom to come and look at my computer. At first she was very nervous, but she doesn’t really understand it very well and asked me why I’m not going to school.

NakedCapitalism:

Why aren’t our government “leaders” talking about slashing the military-industrial complex, which is ruining our economy with unnecessary imperial adventures?

And why aren’t any of our leaders talking about stopping the permanent bailouts for the financial giants who got us into this mess? And see this.

And why aren’t they taking away the power to create credit from the private banking giants – which is costing our economy trillions of dollars (and is leading to a decrease in loans to the little guy) – and give it back to the states?

If we did these things, we wouldn’t have to raise taxes or cut core services to the American people.

The Bush years and Republican outsourcing.

What about these contractors?

About 7.6 million people earned their paycheck through federal government contracts in 2005, a 50 percent increase since 2002.

In 2000, federal spending on all government contracts was $208 billion rising to $457 billion by 2007.

And their lobbyists?

The Washington Post reports that the number of registered lobbyists in Washington doubled between 2000 and 2005, to nearly 35,000.

Six of ten richest counties and twelve of the top 25 richest counties are around Washington DC. In one county alone, there are:

1. 183,900 worth between $2 million and $10 million;
2. 24,887 worth between ten and fifty million;
3. 7,200 ‘really rich’ between a 100 and 500 million;
4. 500 tycoons, lobbyists, lawyers, owners worth about a billion.

If Obama can enact health reform, at least it will restrict how premium dollars can be spent on profits and overhead by requiring health insurance companies to spend 80-85% of the money they take in on care. “That’s worth keeping in mind.”

1. High net worth families — those with at least $5 million — grew 17 percent last year to 980,000. The 7.8 million with a net worth of $1 million or more, excluding their primary residence, jumped 16% last year.




2. For employees, 27 percent say they have less than $1,000 in savings, up from 20 percent last year, while 54 percent of Americans now have less than $25,000, excluding their primary home.

link

Around a third of industrialized nations’ carbon emissions are exported to developing nations and then imported as products.

Mike Stathis submits:

I have discussed the financial industry on numerous occasions. My sentiment has not changed.

I can tell you that I have NEVER personally invested in banks and I don’t ever plan to because I feel they are parasites. I could go on and on how criminal this industry is, but I don’t have the time to write volumes of books.

But let’s have a look at what they’ve been up to lately.

Despite raising fees and credit card interest rates while paying out essentially nothing for deposits, these criminals have not been satisfied.

Iceland’s national referendum was the first opportunity for the people of any nation to vote directly on who pays when the financial elite fail.

Michael Collins:

Who cleans up the mess when ignorant, greedy bankers rack up massive debt then go broke? The people of Iceland made a strong statement Saturday. The sins of big bankers and government regulators shouldn’t fall on the citizens. By a 93% to 2% margin, they voted down a proposal requiring them to cover bad debt incurred by one of the nation’s oldest and largest banks.

Covering the debt would have cost Iceland’s 317,000 citizens around $17,000 each.

Enough Already: Venting Over Four Decades of Right-Wing Activism:

Today, Richard Nixon would be considered a flaming liberal. In Nixon’s day, Barack Obama would have passed as a typical conservative…

All this right-wing nonsense might be somewhat understandable if it were necessary to provide for a good life; however, the economy is becoming as dysfunctional as the ridiculous political system.

Watching people rebel politically or in the streets in Iceland and Greece, while people in the United States express their frustrations with the tea party, makes me noxious.

As counties, cities and towns linger toward default:

Now it is fair to say that municipal finance has long been an ugly nexus of incompetence, chicanery, and greed.

But even when you don’t combine venal officials to the underhanded financier, you routinely find kissing cousins, chump officials hire venal advisor in cahoots with underhanded financier.

“The basic problem is the swap adviser gets paid only if there is a transaction — an unbelievable conflict of interest,” he said. “It’s the adviser who is supposed to protect you, but the swap adviser has a vested interest in seeing something happen.”

And that is as good as it gets.

Remember, there is no penalty for screwing up in a conventional manner.

Habits:
Foreign Policy.

“The U.S. military spends $1.75 billion every day, much of it on big ships, big guns, and big battalions that are not only not needed to win the wars of the present, but are sure to be the wrong approach to waging the wars of the future.”

Switch windows on or off to radically reduce energy use.

Sage Electrochromics, Inc, a Minnesota-based inventor of an international breakthrough glass innovation – a window that can be switched on or off to reject up to 98% of the sun’s heat and light on demand – has received a financial shot in the arm from the Department of Energy for a total of $103 million to mass produce energy-saving glass.

“This investment will help cut utility bills, reduce carbon pollution, and create jobs our economy needs,” said Energy Secretary Chu in granting the loan guarantee.

Breakthrough technology. Glass switched from clear to dark at the push of a button.

How ‘free market’ was turned into profoundly destructive behavior.

It’s been a long time a-comin’, this Crisis.

Invisible hand?

Free market?

It’s really scams, rip-offs and brazen looting.

Absurd complacency and happy talk.

Worthless cheer from the glossy clueless.

Travesty speculation.

Cooked figures and oblivious economists.

The outcome of this pseudo-scientific botching is an imposing corpus of pretentious quackery that somehow elevates unregulated ‘free markets’ into the sole mechanism of economic activity.

We are supposed to believe that by some alchemical process, maximum indulgence of human greed results in maximum prosperity for all.

Our civilization is collapsing. Why shouldn’t we feel bad?

We’ve exhausted the natural resources our planet took a billion years to store up, we live in suffocating, overcrowded, polluted, horrifically stressful conditions, and we have launched the planet into the 6th global extinction.

Depression is a sane response to a crazy world.

Gary Greenberg: The diagnosis is detached from where depression might come from.

More than 14 million suffer from major depression, 3 million suffer from minor depression longer than two years. These numbers are ridiculous — not because people aren’t depressed but because, in most cases, their depression is not a mental illness.

“Well, if people are encouraged to think of external circumstances, then they may be more empowered to take action.”

Of course, as Mind Hacks points out, “One difficulty with their proposal, however, is that while they admit that social problems are one of the most common triggers for depression, they miss out the many studies that have found depressed people and, especially depressed people who ruminate, are reliably worse at social problem solving.”

In all, 47.4 million Americans lived in poverty last year, or 7 million more than official poverty reports.

The official measure, created in 1955, does not factor in rising medical care, transportation, child care, housing, utilities or geographical variations in living costs.

Duh. And that would be because…?

This is especially troubling because the economy is still such a long way from being healthy.

Lawrence Katz, the Harvard labor economist, estimates that 10.6 million jobs would need to materialize immediately to return the job market to its condition when the Great Recession began.

For it to get there four years from now, the economy would have to add 316,000 jobs a month. That pace would be faster than in any four-year stretch of the 1990s boom.

Uh-huh. That’s what I thought. That’s what most economists thought. That’s what everybody who didn’t have his head up his ass thought.

Mark Zandi – chief economist for Moody’s – has calculated which stimulus work.
One more time, Bush and Republicans behind the line. [click large]