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Viewing Economics NEWS articles 151 through 225 of 414
- The already enormous gap between rich and poor in America has become a Grand Canyon. In every part of their lives, U.S. workers are having a harder time making ends meet--while the fantastic wealth of a tiny few grows even more obscene.
- Symptomatic of the underlying tendency in capitalist society toward ever greater levels of social inequality is the phenomenal growth in the remuneration paid to the chief executive officers (CEOs) of leading corporations. - A review of only a sampling of the programs included on the list indicates the human cost of the proposed cuts...they include cuts in such basic necessities as food subsidies for the elderly and poor, educational programs for low-income students, literacy programs, and arts education. They also threaten basic infrastructure and the environment.
- Forget Iran, Americans Should be Hysterical About This - Global experience teaches us that a system based upon the ownership of and access to wealth and capital of a few cannot satisfy the needs of the majority people particularly in the post-colonial world, mainly because that was the essential and dominant system in the first place through stages of slavery, indentureship and colonial capitalism that had failed miserably.
- No Escape from Scarcity
- The United States will always rely on foreign imports of oil to feed its energy needs and should stop trying to become energy independent, a top Exxon Mobil Corp...executive said on Tuesday.
- At least street crackheads just steal radar detectors out of cars - not $2,770,000,000,000 out of the next three generations' pockets.
- At least 46 million Americas are now without health insurance. And most earn too little to put much money toward a high-deductible health insurance policy. With rising inflation the working poor and middle class are lucky enough to be able to save $100 toward the cost of their health care, let alone $10,500. The president’s proposal to "strengthen health savings accounts" is nothing more than an attempt to increase tax shelters for the rich.
- "A celebration of concentrated wealth." - When you can believe the LYING media, instead.
- The Internal Revenue Service’s taxpayer advocate recently revealed that the agency froze tax refunds owed to hundreds of thousands of poor Americans, labeling them fraudulent. Refunds were withheld by the IRS without notifying taxpayers that their claims were under review, thereby eliminating any opportunity to respond to the agency. - Beyond the massive amounts of money involved, such a mind-numbing event as the Super Bowl serves to divert the population—reeling from economic blows and witness to the carryings-on of a ruling elite that has lost its head—from everyday life and all the unresolved problems in American society. The shrillness of the media hype about everything trivial increases as the list of major disasters lengthens...A bewildered population is urged to ignore all this and concentrate on the appropriate menu for three (or four!) hours of television viewing. It’s untenable and absurd.
- In the wake of George W. Bush’s State of the Union address, the White House and the Republican-led Congress have moved swiftly to implement a series of budget measures that will slash funding for health care and education while allocating vast new sums for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and tax cuts for America’s wealthy elite.
- Like earlier civilizations that got into environmental trouble, we can decide to stay with business as usual and watch our global economy decline and eventually collapse. One way or another, the decision will be made by our generation. Of that there is little doubt. But it will affect life on earth for all generations to come. - Our economic system is unsustainable by its very nature. The only response to climate chaos and peak oil is major social change.
- Pensions were once considered one of the central features of the American Dream. That was the dream, but U.S. workers are waking up to a different reality today--that pensions are fast becoming a thing of the past. - Speak out too loudly against the drug war, and you might be targeted. Peter McWilliams had AIDS and cancer and was dependent on marijuana to stay alive. But the federal government wouldn’t let McWilliams, a vocal anti-prohibition activist, have his medicine. They threatened to take his mother’s house away if he used the substance that was keeping him alive. He was found dead in his home in June 2000. The drug war killed him directly. - While big business racks up historic profits, workplace life is becoming more unbearable for the people who make the products and services.
- by Michael Parenti - A central function of the corporate capitalist state is to maintain and advance the capital accumulation process. This it does by (a) taxing the many to subsidize the few; and (b) privatizing the public wealth, specifically the land, airwaves, mineral deposits, and other natural resources that are nominally the property of the American people.
- US Plan for the "Great Middle East"
- The report maintains that insurers then used the overstated figures to justify increases in doctors' premiums and pressure legislators to enact lawsuit restrictions. - Can't pay your student loan on time? The fat cats at Sallie Mae are so glad to hear it. - New government data indicate that the concentration of corporate wealth among the highest-income Americans grew significantly in 2003, as a trend that began in 1991 accelerated in the first year that President Bush and Congress cut taxes on capital.
- Here in my state poverty is RAMPANT. There are no jobs of any decent calibur, only WalMart, McDonalds and the like. The majority of people can afford to shop only at THE DOLLAR GENERAL STORE or THE FAMILY DOLLAR STORE, living on minimum wage barely pays the bills. - This article posits two main assumptions: (i) that global “peak oil” is fast approaching its optimum level, and (ii) that the Bush administration’s jingoism is directly correlated to US efforts at dominance over strategic oil supplies.
- Be aware - we stand at the threshold of total ruin - the international bankers and war profiteers care little for our lives and families - these demons worship money and all things vile and evil - they have very much to gain from war, misery, disease, famine, chaos and death (our deaths). - For "our" Establishment press and book trade, the trick is to use free market ideology to justify America’s Rightist approach and deride those of our geopolitical competitors. The trouble is that free markets and free trade are inadequate to the realities of Peak Fossil Fuels and the gap is widening all the time.
- ...the most basic of the foundations of our assumptions of future economic wellbeing is rotten. Our society is in a state of collective denial that has no precedent in history, in terms of its scale and implications.
- Millions of Americans saw their living conditions drastically decline in 2005. For the US working class, four years of a supposed economic recovery celebrated by Wall Street have translated into rising expenses, stagnating real wages and record debt.
- ...the current path -- continually expanding our use of oil on the assumption that the Earth will yield whatever quantity we need -- is irresponsible and reckless.
- The rush of indebted consumers to file bankruptcy before a tough new law took effect pushed personal filings for 2005 to their highest annual level on record — more than 2 million, according to new data. - The economic effects of peak oil go far beyond spending more at the pump.
- ...it's never been easier to show why the tax cuts were closer to the worst thing for the economy, if it's ordinary Americans' well-being you're worried about (as opposed to shareholder comforts).
- Standing in the way of minimum justice for workers are the big corporate lobbies, their trade associations in Washington, DC and their political slush funds for the politicians. Changes have to begin with the indignation of the millions of deprived workers who have contributed to the doubling of labor productivity since 1969 but are receiving less by way of inflation-adjusted returns.
- ...fact cannot be escaped that government action needs to be taken at the nation state and, more importantly, global levels.
- It is estimated that 33 million Americans continue to live in households without an adequate supply of food. - The US pension systems for workers are now widespread disasters.
- Peak oil is most likely a term most readers have not heard before. That is about to change. The concept is slowly making its way onto the mainstream stage. It is intruding into the fringes of the public conscience and soon it may occupy the greater part. When that time comes, as it inevitably will, and probably sooner than you think, the world as we know it will end.
- The rich and privileged in our government and big banks don't have a clue how most working American families exist. - The Swedish Prime Minister, Göran Persson, has founded a non-political committee with the intent of making Sweden fossil fuel-independent by 2020. - Rather than accept cheap diesel from Venezuela, the city chose to raise commuting costs for low-income residents.
- Millionaires will receive an average tax cut of $19,000 a year when the two provisions are wiped out, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said. The center added that this comes on top of an average tax cut of $103,000 that millionaires received in 2005 because of other tax cuts adopted since 2001. - No doubt, the mainstream media often LIES. I could go over examples ad nauseum. But more often than not, they merely massage the truth.
- The American Dream is becoming the American Pipe Dream.
- The great shame is that the debate that should have happened, the debate the people of this nation so desperately need to hear, never occurred. Every major media outlet gave only cursory coverage of the transit workers’ case.
- December is the month for year-end bonuses for Wall Street’s traders, brokers and investment bankers and this year the top layers are expected to pocket some $17 billion in incentive payouts. According to Johnson Associates Inc., a compensation consulting firm, the average bonus for a managing director will be $1.2 million, with top investment bankers and prime brokers seeing checks padded by as much as 20 percent more than 2004’s bonuses. - Wages & Incomes Down, Poverty & Debt Up
- "This is the biggest cut in the history of the federal student loan program," said David Ward, president of the American Council on Education, an umbrella group for public and private colleges and universities. - Some 70% of the world's Christmas ornaments and other paraphernalia now originate in officially atheist mainland China. Tinsel, Santas, mistletoe and artificial trees of every shape and hue are churned out at a relentless pace by thousands of factory workers in Guangdong, Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces.
- The strike by transit workers is an event of international significance. Defying massive fines and even the threat of jail, the strike represents a direct challenge to a super-rich Wall Street elite that is accustomed to imposing its economic interests and its will not only on New York City, but on the world. - The fast-food giant tries to appease migrant farmworkers while doing everything possible to keep its labor costs dirt-cheap.
- The facts about oil supply, our primary energy source, have been known for some time. The body of literature on oil supply is very compelling, but seldom makes the bestseller list. What is really surprising is the silence from the mainstream media and our elected officials about this enormous issue that has been bearing down on us for decades.
- Call it the class war economy--a shocking transfer of wealth out of the pockets of working people and the poor and into the overstuffed bank accounts of the super-rich. - "The Iraqi people...will continue to move forward toward a sovereign Iraq, an Iraq where an elite few can no longer erect expensive and ornate palaces like these while the majority of the people suffer in fear and poverty." The whistling of the dud mortar overhead as he spoke--sending generals scrambling for cover--seemed a fitting catcall to this piece of hypocrisy.
- They bleat about the free market, then insist that we subsidise them.
- 51 percent of the world’s 100 hundred wealthiest bodies are corporations. - The cost of rental housing has increased faster than wages, making it increasingly difficult for low-income families to afford even modest apartments, an advocacy group said Tuesday.
- There is, simply, a national denial. It’s echoed in the daily press. So the newspapers in my city run big, colorful daily sections on food preparation. In general the media is dramatically disinterested in the poor, and dramatically interested in the rich – the same newspapers carry regular sections on real estate which show baronial homes in Bel Air.
- The now-moot ordinance, passed by the county Board of Supervisors in 2000, had required that contractors paid more than $250,000 for services agree to remain neutral when facing efforts to organize their employees. - In the stately pantheon of class-warriors, Greenspan's spectral-image looms larger than any other; the foremost proponent of hardnosed social-Darwinism and exclusionary economics. Even his carpet-bagging consort, G.W. Bush, pales in comparison.
- Genetically modified crops have failed to deliver the economic benefits promised to US farmers and could pose similar problems if adopted in Australia, a former US government bureaucrat has warned.
- When aid or debt relief are discussed, attention often focuses on corrupt leaders and governments in Africa and other parts of the developing world. But they are amateurs compared with the rich companies and individuals who use the world's tax havens and banking systems to hide sums of money that could address almost all of the continent's financial needs.
- Break out those champagne wishes and caviar dreams. The donor class is getting what it paid for. - Debt-fueled growth is qualitatively different from economic growth that results from an increase in high value-added jobs.
- "If the United States government designed and implemented the policies according to human rights standards much of the problem of poverty could be resolved..." - We must stop accepting that low-wage, low-benefit, part-time jobs are the best our children can do. We need to ensure a livable wage for all.
- ...if GM is a symbol of the American industrial golden age, its decline...is a sign of the destruction of the American social contract. No more pensions, family-supporting wages, or hardworking, blue-collar membership in the middle class. Instead, we are living in the era of Wal-Mart wages, food stamps and Medicare for the children of the working class, and a disappearing American Dream. That shift may be good for General Motors shareholders, but it is killing America.
- The average student borrower now graduates with $27,600 of debt, almost three and a half times what it was a decade ago. 84 percent of black students and 66 percent of Latino students graduate with debt. And 39 percent of all student borrowers graduate with unmanageable levels of debt... - The protesters, including three sisters who were also arrested at the mall last year and a man dressed as Santa Claus, were urging shoppers to curb their consumerist urges as part of "Buy Nothing Day" ...
- The spread between the rich and the rest has been growing for decades. Current policies will only make it worse. - We grab the easy, exploitatively derived money and run, letting the Devil take the hindmost. American commercial life consistently works at vicious cross-purposes with public welfare and the common good. - The permanent military bases and Pentagon sized American consul offices in Iraq are being built because 60% of the world's crude comes from an increasingly hostile Middle East - this percentage of the supply of the world's most valuable commodity will increase over the next decade - and because control of Iraq is the decisive high ground for control of the Middle East.. - Oxfam, the global anti-poverty organisation, has cautioned the EU against seeking rapid free trade in agriculture with Arab nations around the Mediterranean, saying it will drive people there deeper into poverty.
- See, Neoliberalism Really Works!
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