leftish: It’s hard.  I know it is for me.  It’s terrifying to step up, to get over my fears…the survival instinct is strong…yet, if we cower in fear and do nothing, it will be worse. You know I’m right.

leftish:

It’s hard.  I know it is for me.  It’s terrifying to step up, to get over my fears…the survival instinct is strong…yet, if we cower in fear and do nothing, it will be worse.

You know I’m right.

(Reblogged from leftish)

The siren call of austerity

The United States government, which has a monopoly on its currency, is $15.2 trillion in debt, roughly the same as the entire output of the economy for a year.

That figure has been sung in a refrain about massive debt threatening to bring down the economy and cause inflation. Facts, however, show otherwise.

The country was much deeper in debt, relative to the size of the economy, in 1946 than it is today and yet what followed was decades of prosperity. The 1946 debt remains and, after six decades of growth, it is inconsequential.

In Japan, government debt is roughly twice annual economic output and yet the country continues to function because real interest rates are at or below zero.

To be sure, conditions can change and interest rates can rise sharply, though central banks have ways to limit that. But that is not the problem today. The problem today is shrinking incomes due to shrinking spending.

Austerity budgets, by reducing government spending, will only make incomes fall more. The only way to make incomes rise is to make spending rise, which in the short run means more borrowing by governments to enable more public sector spending.

(Source: azspot)

(Reblogged from azspot)
latimes: An exquisite Mexico beach, cursed by plastic: Sea currents act like a conveyor belt, depositing trash on a remote stretch of sand in an ecologically rich region of coral reef and mangrove forests. Locals can only pick up the pieces, bit by bit. Photo: Most of the refuse is plastic; many fragments are too small or faded to identify. Credit: Ken Ellingwood, Los Angeles Times View high resolution

latimes:

An exquisite Mexico beach, cursed by plastic: Sea currents act like a conveyor belt, depositing trash on a remote stretch of sand in an ecologically rich region of coral reef and mangrove forests. Locals can only pick up the pieces, bit by bit.

Photo: Most of the refuse is plastic; many fragments are too small or faded to identify. Credit: Ken Ellingwood, Los Angeles Times

(Source: Los Angeles Times)

(Reblogged from dendroica)

Romney’s Tax Returns Show How Laws Favor the Wealthy

kateoplis:

From the NYTimes:

Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann, made $27 million in 2010. They held millions of dollars in a Swiss bank account and millions more in partnerships in the Cayman Islands. His family’s trusts sold thousands of shares in Goldman Sachs that were offered to favored clients when the storied investment house first went public. The couple’s effective federal tax rate for the year worked out to 13.9 percent, a rate typical of households earning about $80,000 a year. Yet the hundreds of pages of tax documents released by Mr. Romney’s campaign on Tuesday morning did not readily reveal any elaborate financial legerdemain or exotic tax shelters. What Mr. Romney’s returns illustrated, instead, was the array of perfectly ordinary ways in which the United States tax code confers advantages on the rich, allowing Mr. Romney to amass wealth under rules very different from those faced by most Americans who take home a paycheck. 

(via: inothernews)

(Reblogged from kateoplis)

NBC asks Romney to remove news material from ad - Boston.com

sarahlee310:

NBC asked GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Saturday to pull a campaign advertisement made up almost entirely of a 1997 “Nightly News” report on Newt Gingrich’s ethics committee reprimand.

The “History Lesson” ad started running in Florida on the weekend, when it is harder for stations to switch ad traffic even if they want to. Broadcast days before Tuesday’s primary, the ad shows former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw saying that some of Gingrich’s House colleagues had raised questions about the then-speaker’s “future effectiveness.”

Under Brokaw’s image is a line that reads — “Paid for by Romney for President, Approved by Mitt Romney.”

The footage was used without permission and the extensive use of the broadcast “inaccurately suggests that NBC News and Mr. Brokaw have consented to the use of this material and agree with the political position espoused by the videos,” NBC’s vice president of media law, David N. Sternlicht, wrote Romney’s campaign manager, Matt Rhoades.

(Reblogged from sarahlee310)

sarahlee310:

Bill Moyers answers: How can ordinary people fight Citizens United?

(Source: billmoyers.com)

(Reblogged from sarahlee310)
nationalgeographicdaily: Gray Wolves, MinnesotaPhoto: Joel Sartore Members of the Ambassador Wolf Pack of the International Wolf Center bite and tussle in the snow. The center aims to educate the public about wolves, confident that as human appreciation of the species grows, so too will the wolf’s chance sof survival. View high resolution

nationalgeographicdaily:

Gray Wolves, Minnesota
Photo: Joel Sartore

Members of the Ambassador Wolf Pack of the International Wolf Center bite and tussle in the snow. The center aims to educate the public about wolves, confident that as human appreciation of the species grows, so too will the wolf’s chance sof survival.

(Reblogged from climateadaptation)

Alexander Ryking: What K-Thug Said

circlingtheroundabout:

Paul Krugman: America’s Unlevel Field | The New York Times

Think about it: someone who really wanted equal opportunity would be very concerned about the inequality of our current system. He would support more nutritional aid for low-income mothers-to-be and young children. He would try to improve the quality of public schools. He would support aid to low-income college students. And he would support what every other advanced country has, a universal health care system, so that nobody need worry about untreated illness or crushing medical bills.

If Mr. Romney has come out for any of these things, I’ve missed it. And the Congressional wing of his party seems determined to make upward mobility even harder. For example, Republicans have tried to slash funds for the Women, Infants and Children program, which helps provide adequate nutrition to low-income mothers and their children; they have demanded cuts in Pell grants, which are designed to help lower-income students afford college.

(Reblogged from ryking)

After 12 years of battling to stop Monsanto's genetically-engineered (GE) crops from contaminating the nation's organic farmland, the biggest retailers of "natural" and "organic" foods in the U.S., including Whole Foods Market (WFM), Organic Valley and Stonyfield Farm, have agreed to stop opposing mass commercialization of GE crops

(Source: climateadaptation)

(Reblogged from climateadaptation)

California Single Payer 2 Votes Short in Senate

sarahlee310:

Come on California!  If you live in the state, best be hitting the phones of your legislators.

The idea of a single-payer health care system in California stalled on the Senate floor yesterday, falling two votes short of passage.

Reconsideration of the bill was granted, though, so proponents of SB 810 by Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) have until Tuesday to reintroduce the bill. First they will have to come up with two big votes. The bill failed on a 19-15 vote.

[…]

All Republicans present voted against the bill. The abstention of four moderate Democrats and one Democrat’s “No” vote turned the political tide on single payer, proponents said.

The idea of universal coverage has been passed by the Legislature before. In 2007 and 2009, both houses approved the idea, only to have it vetoed by Gov. Schwarzenegger. Last year, it passed the Senate and stalled when it was not brought to the floor in the Assembly.

[…]

If the bill is reintroduced by Tuesday and it gets 21 votes on the Senate floor, it would move to the Assembly.

(Reblogged from sarahlee310)
“
Abortion was not always illegal before Roe. Into the 19th century, what a woman did with her early pregnancy was considered a purely domestic matter. Until “quickening,” when the fetus was perceived to be alive and kicking, it wasn’t even considered a pregnancy, but a “blocking” or an “imbalance,” and women regularly “restored the menses,” if they so chose, through plants and potions. Abortifacients became commercially available by the mid-1700s.

Quality control was not great, and the earliest abortion legislation, in the 1820s and ’30s, appears to have been an effort to curtail poisoning rather than abortion itself.

=======
Added by SarahLee:

“One doctor’s “awakening” is vividly described in The Worst of Times, a collection of interviews with women, cops, coroners, and practitioners from the illegal abortion era. In 1948, when this doctor was an intern in a Pittsburgh hospital, a woman was admitted with severe pelvic sepsis after a bad abortion. She was beautiful, married to someone important and wealthy, and already in renal failure. Over the next couple of days, despite heroic efforts to save her, a cascade of systemic catastrophes due to the overwhelming infection culminated with the small blood vessels bursting under her skin, bruises breaking out everywhere as if some invisible fist were punching her over and over, and she died. Being well-to-do didn’t always save you.

Her death was so horrible that it made him, he recalls, physically ill. He describes his anger, but says he didn’t quite know with whom to be angry. It took him another 20 years to understand that it was not the abortionist who killed her—it was the legal system, the lawmakers who had forced her away from the medical community, who “…killed her just as surely as if they had held the catheter or the coat hanger or whatever. I’m still angry. It was all so unnecessary.”

All so unnecessary.

In the same book, a man who assisted in autopsies in a big urban hospital, starting in the mid-1950s, describes the many deaths from botched abortions that he saw. “The deaths stopped overnight in 1973.” He never saw another in the 18 years before he retired. “That,” he says, “ought to tell people something about keeping abortion legal.”“

Eleanor Cooney, The Way It Was (via prolifehypocrisy)
(Reblogged from sarahlee310)

Just how rich is Mitt Romney? Add up the wealth of the last eight presidents, from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama. Then double that number. Now you're in Romney territory.

(Source: brooklynmutt)

(Reblogged from randomactsofchaos)