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Bloomberg News reports today the biggest drivers of our debt are your Republican policies.
House Speaker John Boehner often attacks the spendthrift ways of Washington.
“In Washington, more spending and more debt is business as usual,” the Republican leader from Ohio said in a televised address yesterday amid debate over the U.S. debt. “I’ve got news for Washington — those days are over.”
Yet the speaker, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell [and Oregon representative Greg Walden] all voted for major drivers of the nation’s debt during the past decade: Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts and Medicare prescription drug benefits. They also voted for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, that rescued financial institutions and the auto industry.
Together, a Bloomberg News analysis shows, these initiatives added $3.4 trillion to the nation’s accumulated debt and to its current annual budget deficit of $1.5 trillion.
Across generations, the playbook is seventy-five years old:
Mike Konczal reviewed Jeff Madrick’s latest book, Age of Greed, for The Nation.
Like a lot of recent historical work, the book puts the 1970s front and center as the decade when everything changed. The runaway inflation of the 1970s, a course set in by the expansive monetary policies of Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns and the price controls imposed by the Nixon administration to keep the economy running in high gear through Richard Nixon’s second term, forced further deregulation of the financial sector. When the financial sector approached a collapse, a collapse stopped by emergency Federal Reserve intervention, further deregulation was used to return the sector to profitability.
It’s not like we didn’t know it was happening:
Though the main story in Age of Greed is how an elite group was able to privatize the gains and socialize the losses of an out-of-control financial system, there’s another story in the background that could lead us somewhere. Most of the people we meet were thinking of the long-term when it came to changing the world to be closer to their free market image they had in mind. Many of the original architects of the demise of Roosevelt-era financial reforms were anti-New Dealers who thought of their project as a generational shift. Will the battle against the increased financialization of the economy look the same way? Will the battle require thinking in terms of decades, and have to be fought in all parts of the economy? If history is any guide, that might be the only way to get to an economy that works for all of us.
More here.
If I’m wrong, I lose something but I forget what it is. And don’t give a shit. If you’re wrong, we lose the planet and all of our grandkids die. Can you handle that bet?
How many Americans have Republican climate change deniers killed this week?
So put down the Ambien, Prosaic, Viagra and crotch-shots on RNN/Faux News Kool-Aid and turn off the television, because the melting polluted Arctic ice is allowing deadly chemicals to seep out, including the pesticides DDT, lindane and chlordane, as well as PCBs.
The chemicals seeping out as temperatures rise include the pesticides DDT, lindane and chlordane as well as the industrial chemicals PCBs and the fungicide hexachlorobenzene (HCB). All of these are know as persistent organic pollutants (Pops), and are banned under the 2004 Stockholm convention.
Pops can cause cancers and birth defects and take a long time to degrade. Over past decades, the low temperatures in the Arctic trapped volatile Pops in ice and cold water. But scientists in Canada and Norway have discovered that global warming is freeing the Pops again. They examined measurements of Pops in the air between 1993 and 2009 at the Zeppelin research station in Svalbaard and Alert weather station in northern Canada.
After allowing for the decline in global emissions of Pops, the team showed that the toxic chemicals are being remobilised by rising temperatures and the retreat of the sea ice, which exposes more water to the sun. The scientists’ work is published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Feed the Poor. Until there are no, Rich no more.
~Ten Years After: A Space in Time
End your chicken-shit little wars on Israel’s behalf.
Apparently the twitter is filled with people twitting #fuckyouwashington.
Maybe it’s good for something afterall.
Where Christians, indeed, all of the Jew/Christian/Muslim Cult of Bloodshed, Hate and Male Domination, come from: Many modern-day humans may be carrying around a fragment of Neanderthal DNA on one of their sex chromosomes, a new study finds.
The research adds a piece of corroborating evidence to the theory that Neanderthals and humans interbred sometime after humans migrated out of Africa between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago. The DNA fragment, found on the human X chromosome, is present in 9 percent of humans across the world from Asia to Europe to America — except in Africa, where it does not appear.
“It’s in the Middle East, it’s in Europe, it’s in Eurasia, it’s in America, it’s in Australia,” study researcher Damian Labuda of the University of Montreal told LiveScience. “This one event which led to this on the human X chromosome has to occur very early after modern man left Africa.”
So put down the Ambien, Prosaic, Viagra and crotch-shots on RNN/Faux News Kool-Aid because on Wednesday, 140 daily maximum temperature records were tied or broken, according to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.
Ninety one young people were gunned down on Utoya Island in Norway, where a gunman stalked the youths on the island summer camp for children of members of the governing Labor Party, and seven killed in the bombing in Oslo.
Norwegian police have a suspect in custody: Anders Behring Breivik, a right-wing extreme Christian, nationalist, and Islamophobe, and are treating the assaults as connected. More Oklahoma City than World Trade Center.
