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According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, repairing our crumbling infrastructure will require an investment of $2.2 trillion over five years. (Source: ASCE Report Card for America's Infrastructure) For every $100 billion spent on infrastructure projects such as rebuilding our roads and bridges, public transportation, energy transmission and water systems, 1.8 million jobs would be created. (Source: Heintz, Robert, James Pollin, and Heidi Garrett-Peltier, "How Infrastructure Investments Support the U.S. Economy: Employment, Productivity and Growth." Amherst, MA: Political Economy Research Institute, January 2009) The current Congress hasn't passed a single job-creation bill. Instead of creating jobs, they've been killing them and slowing down the economic recovery with severe budget cuts. In fact, 1.8 million jobs will be lost as a result of the recent debt ceiling deal to cut government spending while failing to extend the payroll tax and emergency unemployment benefits. (Source: The Century Foundation/Economic Policy Institute) A huge share of the nation's economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top .1% of Americans, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90% of us is only $31,244. (Source: Mother Jones http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph) In 1945, the top tax rate for millionaires was 66.4%. The top tax rate for millionaires today is 32.4%. (Source: Mother Jones http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph) Between 2007 and 2010, corporate profits came roaring back to record-high levels at the same time the country lost 8.2 million jobs, or 5.9% of the job base. (Source: Economic Policy Institute) Instead of investing in America and creating jobs, businesses have stockpiled nearly $1.9 trillion in cash - a record high. (Source: Federal Reserve) Corporate taxes account for only 1.3% of the gross d

A definitive review and close reading of medical peer-review journals, and government health statistics shows that American medicine frequently causes more harm than good. The number of people having in-hospital, adverse drug reactions (ADR) to prescribed medicine is 2.2 million. (1) Dr. Richard Besser, of the CDC , in 1995, said the number of unnecessary antibiotics prescribed annually for viral infections was 20 million. Dr. Besser, in 2003, now refers to tens of millions of unnecessary antibiotics. (2, 2a) The number of unnecessary medical and surgical procedures performed annually is 7.5 million. (3) The number of people exposed to unnecessary hospitalization annually is 8.9 million. (4) The total number of iatrogenic [induced inadvertently by a physician or surgeon or by medical treatment or diagnostic procedures] deaths is 783,936. The 2001 heart disease annual death rate is 699,697; the annual cancer death rate is 553,251. (5) It is evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the United States.

I've written before about the crisis of inequality in the United States and about the quasi-religious abhorrence of "wealth redistribution" that causes many Americans to oppose tax increases, even on the ultra rich. The conviction that taxation is intrinsically evil has achieved a sadomasochistic fervor in conservative circles-producing the Tea Party, their Republican zombies, and increasingly terrifying failures of governance. Happily, not all billionaires are content to hoard their money in silence. Earlier this week, Warren Buffett published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he criticized our current approach to raising revenue. As he has lamented many times before, he is taxed at a lower rate than his secretary is. Many conservatives pretend not to find this embarrassing. Conservatives view taxation as a species of theft-and to raise taxes, on anyone for any reason, is simply to steal more. Conservatives also believe that people become rich by creating value for others. Once rich, they cannot help but create more value by investing their wealth and spawning new jobs in the process. We should not punish our best and brightest for their success, and stealing their money is a form of punishment. Of course, this is just an economic cartoon. We don't have perfectly efficient markets, and many wealthy people don't create much in the way of value for others. In fact, as our recent financial crisis has shown, it is possible for a few people to become extraordinarily rich by wrecking the global economy. Nevertheless, the basic argument often holds: Many people have amassed fortunes because they (or their parent's, parent's, parents) created value. Steve Jobs resurrected Apple Computer and has since produced one gorgeous product after another. It isn't an accident that millions of us are happy to give him our money. But even in the ideal case, where obvious value has been created, how much wealth can one person be allowed to keep? A trillion doll

Here we go again. The government and corporate media are pumping out more propaganda on vital economic statistics to mask the severity of our economic crisis. Deceptive unemployment, GDP, inflation and poverty measures are easily exposed with some research and a closer look at the data. The latest deception comes from the Census Bureau in their annual poverty report, which is now uncritically being "reported" on throughout the corporate media and echoing throughout online news outlets as well. The new Census data reveals that a stunning 46.2 million Americans, 15.1% of the population, lived in poverty in 2010. This is an increase of 2.6 million people since 2009. While these are staggering statistics that represent the highest number of American people to ever live in poverty, and a dramatic year-over-year increase, it significantly undercounts the total. The Census Bureau poverty rate is a highly flawed measurement that uses outdated methodology. The Census measures poverty based on costs of living metrics established in 1955 - 56 years ago. They ignore many key factors, such as the increased costs of medical care, child care, education, transportation, and many other basic expenses. They also don't factor geographically-based costs of living. For example, try finding a place to live in New York that costs the same as a place in Florida. A much more accurate measurement of poverty, which factors in these vital cost of living variables, comes from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Unlike the Census poverty measure, which gets significant coverage throughout the corporate media, the NAS measurement gets little, if any, mainstream media coverage.

United States v. Dougherty was a 1972 decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in which the court ruled that members of the D.C. Nine, who had broken into Dow Chemical Company, vandalized office furniture and equipment, and spilled about a bloodlike substance, were not entitled to a new trial on the basis of the judge's failing to allow a jury nullification jury instruction. The Appeals Court ruled, by a 2-1 vote: " The fact that there is widespread existence of the jury's prerogative, and approval of its existence as a "necessary counter to casehardened judges and arbitrary prosecutors," does not establish as an imperative that the jury must be informed by the judge of that power. On the contrary, it is pragmatically useful to structure instructions in such wise that the jury must feel strongly about the values involved in the case, so strongly that it must itself identify the case as establishing a call of high conscience, and must independently initiate and undertake an act in contravention of the established instructions. This requirement of independent jury conception confines the happening of the lawless jury to the occasional instance that does not violate, and viewed as an exception may even enhance, the over-all normative effect of the rule of law. An explicit instruction to a jury conveys an implied approval that runs the risk of degrading the legal structure requisite for true freedom, for an ordered liberty that protects against anarchy as well as tyranny. " Nonetheless, the defendants were given a new trial on the grounds that they had been denied their right of self-representation.[1] The Circuit Judges' assumption that jurors know about their nullification prerogative has since been brought into question by other empirical evidence.[2] According to Irwin Horowitz, "Beyond the empirical issue, lack of nullification instructions maintains a deceit. After all, juries can nullify, but they know this fact only on a so

It's important, yes, and must be addressed. But by a wide margin, it's not the nation's most pressing economic problem. That would be the widespread and persistent joblessness that has plagued the labor market since the Great Recession began in 2008. Almost 14 million people - 9.1 percent of the labor force - were officially counted as unemployed last month. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. There were almost 9 million part-time workers who wanted, but couldn't find, full-time jobs; 28 million in jobs they would have quit under normal conditions; and an additional 2.2 million who wanted work but couldn't find any and dropped out of the labor force. If the economy could generate jobs at the median wage for even half of these people, national income would grow by more than 10 times the total interest cost of the 2011 deficit (which was less than $40 billion). So anyone who says that reducing the deficit is more urgent than reducing unemployment is saying, in effect, that we should burn hundreds of billions of dollars worth of goods and services in a national bonfire. We ought to be tackling both problems at once. But in today's fractious political climate, many promising dual-purpose remedies - like infrastructure investments that would generate large and rapid returns - are called unthinkable, in the false belief that they would impoverish our grandchildren. Yet there are other ways to attack unemployment that could garner bipartisan support. Perhaps the most promising is a payroll tax holiday.

PROPOSAL: We as fellow occupiers of Oscar Grant Plaza propose that on Wednesday November 2, 2011, we liberate Oakland and shut down the 1%. We propose a city wide general strike and we propose we invite all students to walk out of school. Instead of workers going to work and students going to school, the people will converge on downtown Oakland to shut down the city. All banks and corporations should close down for the day or we will march on them. While we are calling for a general strike, we are also calling for much more. People who organize out of their neighborhoods, schools, community organizations, affinity groups, workplaces and families are encouraged to self organize in a way that allows them to participate in shutting down the city in whatever manner they are comfortable with and capable of. The whole world is watching Oakland. Let's show them what is possible.

Wall Street Isn't Winning - It's Cheating The two-tiered justice system: an illustration 9/10/2001: Rumsfeld says $2.3 TRILLION Missing from Pentagon  The due-process-free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality The Quiet Coup "the finance industry has effectively captured our government" What OWS is about + data behind the movement Data privacy is now extinct in the U.S. "The problem that confronts us is that every living system in the biosphere is in decline and the rate of decline is accelerating. There isn't one peer-reviewed scientific article that's been published in the last 20 years that contradicts that statement. Living systems are coral reefs. They're our climatic stability, forest cover, the oceans themselves, aquifers, water, the conditions of the soil, biodiversity. They go on and on as they get more specific. But the fact is, there isn't one living system that is stable or is improving. And those living systems provide the basis for all life." The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen The prison industry in the United States: big business or a new form of slavery? How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich: The inside story of how the Republicans abandoned the poor and the middle class to pursue their relentless agenda of tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent

No serious person denies that Reagan's 1981 tax cuts and military increases threw the country into a pattern of borrowing and borrowing that we have not escaped. When Reagan took office the national debt was $995 billion. When Reagan left office it was $2.87 trillion and climbing fast. No serious person denies that Bush's 2001 tax cuts and continued military increases dramatically worsened the problem. Bush's last budget year ended with a record single-year deficit of $1.4 trillion. As the country discusses what to do about the borrowing the elephant in the room is that everyone understands that restoring top tax rates to pre-Reagan levels and cutting the military budget in half would solve the problem completely. But we can't do that. We can't even discuss it. And we all know why. And we all know why. It is because the Reagan Revolution transformed the country from a democracy to a plutocracy -- a country run by and for the wealthy. Such sensible and simple ideas are considered off-limits. To even bring up the idea of restoring tax rates to pre-Reagan levels and cutting military spending invites terrible consequences. The speaker risks becoming the target of the money's noise machine: Limbaugh, Hannity, Drudge, Fox. Smears. Humiliation. Banishment. Or the noise machine cranks up a campaign of misinformation, convincing people --especially DC people -- that what they see in front of their eyes just isn't so. Repeat it enough and it becomes solid knowledge. We all know this is the way it is. So don't tell me that "we don't have the money" to keep 300,000 teachers from being laid off, or to help the long-term, mostly older unemployed workers get something to live on and keep their health care. The money is right there in front of us, but the Congress is bought and paid for. What do we do? We have to demand representatives who represent us, not make excuses for representing the wealthy. The unfortunate, poor and disadvantaged must count every bit as much as the

"LONDON, Sep. 2, 2010 (Reuters) - God did not create the universe and the "Big Bang" was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, the eminent British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking argues in a new book."

"In 2009, the scientific literature caught up with what top climate scientists have been saying privately for a few years now: * Many of the predicted impacts of human-caused climate change are occurring much faster than anybody expected - particularly ice melt, everywhere you look on the planet. * If we stay anywhere near our current emissions path, we are facing incalculable catastrophes by century's end, including rapid sea level rise, massive wildfires, widespread Dust-Bowlification, large oceanic dead zones, and 9°F warming - much of which could be all but irreversible for centuries. And that's not the worst-case scenario! * The consequences for human health and well being would be extreme. That's no surprise to anybody who has talked to leading climate scientists in recent years, read my book Hell and High Water (or a number of other books), or followed this blog. Still, it is a scientific reality that I don't think more than 2 people in 100 fully grasp, so I'm going to review here the past year in climate science. I'll focus primarily on the peer-reviewed literature, but also look at some major summary reports."

During the past 15 years, the World Wide Web has created remarkable new methods for harnessing the creativity of people in groups, and in the process has created powerful business models that are reshaping our economy. As the Web has undermined old media and software companies, it has demonstrated the enormous power of a new approach, often referred to as Web 2.0. In a nutshell: the secret to the success of bellwethers like Google, Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter is that each of these sites, in its own way, has learned to harness the power of its users to add value to-no, more than that, to co-create-its offerings.

The Transportation Security Administration is feeling public heat these days over its combination of whole-body-image scanners and heavy-handed pat-down searches, and deservedly so. There's no question that reform is needed to curtail TSA's excesses. We especially applaud the Electronic Privacy Information Center's efforts to increase public awareness about the body scanners. But will the heat now being generated produce the kind of light we really need? Consider, for instance, the all-too-common response that we need to accept the indignity and invasiveness of the body scanners and pat-down searches in order to be safer. That response assumes that body scanners actually make us safer - a dubious assumption that we explore below.

Adam Smith observed in 1776 that economies work best when governments keep their clumsy thumbs off the free market's "invisible hand." Two generations later, in 1817, the British economist David Ricardo extended Smith's insights to global trade. Just as market forces lead to the right price and quantity of products domestically, Ricardo argued, free foreign trade optimizes economic outcomes internationally. Reading Adam Smith in Copenhagen -- the center of the small, open, and highly successful Danish economy -- is a kind of out-of-body experience. On the one hand, the Danes are passionate free traders. They score well in the ratings constructed by pro-market organizations. The World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Index ranks Denmark third, just behind the United States and Switzerland. Denmark's financial markets are clean and transparent, its barriers to imports minimal, its labor markets the most flexible in Europe, its multinational corporations dynamic and largely unmolested by industrial policies, and its unemployment rate of 2.8 percent the second lowest in the OECD (the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). On the other hand, Denmark spends about 50 percent of its GDP on public outlays and has the world's second-highest tax rate, after Sweden; strong trade unions; and one of the world's most equal income distributions. For the half of GDP that they pay in taxes, the Danes get not just universal health insurance but also generous child-care and family-leave arrangements, unemployment compensation that typically covers around 95 percent of lost wages, free higher education, secure pensions in old age, and the world's most creative system of worker retraining. Does Denmark have some secret formula that combines the best of Adam Smith with the best of the welfare state? Is there something culturally unique about the open-minded Danes? Can a model like the Danish one survive as a social democratic island in a turbulent sea of globali

To know what the most important virtue of our age is we need to have at least a basic understanding of our age. Our era is becoming increasingly characterized by uncertainty. Fortunately or unfortunately, more than a cursory elucidation of our situation is beyond the scope of this essay. There are geopolitical, economic, technological and environmental trends worth mentioning. When the more philosophical portion of this  discourse arrives I will argue that the virtue of wisdom underlies the meaningfulness and efficacy of all other virtues, and this in broad strokes is primarily due to (1) the aforementioned instability in our surroundings ; (2) the relationship between the deontological and virtue; and (3) the nature of agency itself.  Whether uncertainty itself can provide an ethical foundation for us to elaborate on will be a separate question, and finally I speculate on where wisdom leads us in the context of a philosophy that is politically active and not doomed to irrelevance to and by the larger population.

This is the Official Online (Youtube) Release of "Zeitgeist: Moving Forward" by Peter Joseph. [30 subtitles ADDED!] On Jan. 15th, 2011, "Zeitgeist: Moving Forward" was released theatrically to sold out crowds in 60 countries; 31 languages; 295 cities and 341 Venues. It has been noted as the largest non-profit independent film release in history. This is a non-commercial work and is available online for free viewing and no restrictions apply to uploading/download/posting/linking - as long as no money is exchanged. A Free DVD Torrent of the full 2 hr and 42 min film in 30 languages is also made available through the main website [below], with instructions on how one can download and burn the movie to DVD themselves. His other films are also freely available in this format.

Forget about whether you're liberal or conservative, pro-union or anti. A simple question: in either the public or the private sector, would you not expect a college grad who has worked his or her job for 4 years to be paid significantly more than someone with a high school diploma who's had his or her gig for 2 years?