How the Toxic Trade Deal You’ve Never Heard Of Could Kill the Climate

As world leaders attempt to hammer out a global climate deal in Paris this week, trade officials are meeting in Geneva to continue negotiations on the mammoth Trade in Services Agreement (TISA)—and according to secret documentspublished Thursday, “the objectives of each could not be more diametrically opposed.” The latest publication by WikiLeaks exposes new threats from TISA, the least well-known …

Jeff Tollefson – Is the 2 °C world a fantasy?

The year is 2100 and the world looks nothing like it did when global leaders gathered for the historic climate summit in Paris at the end of 2015. Nearly 8.8 billion people now crowd the planet. Energy consumption has nearly doubled, and economic production has increased more than sevenfold. Vast disparities in wealth remain, but governments have achieved one crucial goal: …

Indivar Dutta-Gupta, Peter Edelman, LaDonna Pavetti – New Research Documents Growth of Extreme Poverty

A new book by two of our nation’s foremost poverty researchers, Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, reveals the desperate circumstances that hundreds of thousands of children and their parents increasingly face: living with virtually no cash income in an economy that requires it to meet nearly every human need. In $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, …

EUGEN VON BÖHM-BAWERK – Productivity In America Now On Par With Agrarian Slave Economy

In the first episode we showed how the US became an unsustainable service sector based economy from the 1970s onward when service sector employment diverged from manufacturing without a corresponding boost in productivity. In the second episode we laid out the consequences that transition has had on labour in terms of lower wages and benefits. In addition, we reiterated our argument that monetary policy …

Media Misrepresenting the Facts in the First “Measles Death” Since 2003 14

As far as we can tell, there was no “death from measles,” just a seemingly desperate attempt to twist the facts to support a pro-measles vaccine narrative. Last week, news reports started discussing the death of a woman in Washington. For the first time since 2003, the stories went, someone in the United States had died of measles. The woman was probably …

Central Bank of Central Banks Warns That World is Unprepared to Fight Global Crash By Mac Slavo

According to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the shadowy “central bank of central banks,” the world as it stands is incapable of combating another global financial crash – a crash that there is every reason to think is coming. That’s because the economy remains in the hands of the Federal Reserve and other central banks. The financial wizards in THIS …

IMF Report Admits IMF’s Obsession with Capitalism Is Killing Prosperity – Jon Queally

In light of how the International Monetary Fund has spent most of its existence parading around the world telling governments to make their economies more friendly for multinational corporations by suppressing wages, restricting pensions, liberalizing industries, and more or less advocating they ignore the popular will of workers and the less fortunate—all in the name of market capitalism and endless …

The best health care system in the world? Nonsense! – Wendell Potter

Americans spend more per capita on health care than people anywhere else in the world, yet outcomes in every other developed country are better on almost every measure, from infant mortality to life expectancy. A big reason for that is our collective gullibility. We continue to believe what many politicians tell us, despite evidence to the contrary: that we have the …

OECD: The U.S. and Israel have the worst inequality in the developed world

The OECD found that the gap between rich and poor is at record levels in most of its 34 member countries. But the U.S. and Israel stood out from the pack. In the U.S., the richest 10% of the population earn 16.5 times the income of the poorest 10%. In Israel, the richest 10% earn 15 times that of the …

OECD report: Global social inequality hits new record – Gabriel Black

Income inequality in many developed countries has reached an all-time high, according to a report released Thursday by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The report also notes that growth of social inequality has been accompanied by the growth of part-time and contingent labor, particularly for younger workers. The wealthiest tenth of the population in OECD member countries now earn …