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Why We’re in a New Gilded Age by Paul Krugman

Why We’re in a New Gilded Age by Paul Krugman
Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 685 pp., $39.95 Thomas Piketty, professor at the Paris School of Economics, isn’t a household name, although that may change with the English-language publication of his magnificent, sweeping meditation on inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Yet his influence runs deep. It has become a commonplace to say that we are living in a second Gilded Age—or, as Piketty likes to put it, a second Belle Époque—defined by the incredible rise of the “one percent.” The result has been a revolution in our understanding of long-term trends in inequality. It therefore came as a revelation when Piketty and his colleagues showed that incomes of the now famous “one percent,” and of even narrower groups, are actually the big story in rising inequality. Still, today’s economic elite is very different from that of the nineteenth century, isn’t it? Why? Related:  Red-Hot

Why the Worst Get on Top -- in Economics and as CEOs FDR On American Facism(image by JoeInSouthernCA) Reprinted from neweconomicperspectives.org Libertarians are profoundly anti-democratic. The folks at Cato that I debate make no bones about their disdain for and fear of democracy. "[W]hen government uses its legal monopoly on coercion to confiscate one person's property and give it to another, it is engaging in what would normally be called theft. But von Hayek's critique of democratic government has proven to be the most monstrous blood libel of the post-World War II era -- falsely declaring that democratic government must end in tyranny and the mass murder of its own people. "The political scientist Herman Finer " denounced [The Road to Serfdom] as 'the most sinister offensive against democracy to emerge from a democratic country for many years.' Why the Worst Get on Top -- in Economics Economists claim that their work should be evaluated based on predictive success. Why von Hayek and Milton Friedman are the Patron Saints of Plutocracy

Monsanto Hides Toxicity RoundUp Results, Calls them Secret Talking about Monsanto’s latest attempt to obstruct justice, halt transparency, and prevent people from stopping their seed and herbicide businesses from spreading is starting to seem redundant, but the company just keeps acting in increasingly objectionable ways. Now, the company is refusing to release to the public lab tests conducted in St. Louis, Missouri, which gave them authority to use glyphosate in China. Just months ago, Chinese food safety volunteers tendered a request to China’s Ministry of Agriculture to release the study that justified issuing the safety certificate for the import into China of Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide RoundUp. Glyphosate was given a safety certificate in 1988 after studies submitted by Monsanto were conducted at Younger Laboratories in St. The test was meant to be an acute exposure toxicity test in which rats were given RoundUp by mouth for several days, and rabbits were exposed to RoundUp by skin.

Interne Kommunikation: Wie der BND die “Weitergabe von Rohdaten in großem Umfang” an die NSA verheimlicht Rechtsfreier Raum: Abhörstation in Bad Aibling. Als der Bundesdatenschutzbeauftragte den BND fragte, wie viele Daten er an die NSA übermittelt, war die Antwort: „580 Meldungen“ im Jahr 2012. Tatsächlich werden aber 1,3 Milliarden Metadaten übermittelt – jeden Monat. Das geht aus interner Kommunikation des Geheimdiensts hervor, die wir veröffentlichen. Letzte Woche berichtete Kai Biermann auf Zeit Online: BND-Spionageaffäre: BND liefert NSA 1,3 Milliarden Metadaten – jeden Monat. Seit dem Sommer von Snowden versuchen vielerlei Institutionen, etwas Licht ins Geheimdienst-Dunkel zu bekommen, darunter auch der/die Bundesdatenschutzbeauftragte. Aber auch schriftliche Anfragen an den BND hat die Datenschutzbehörde gestellt, so beispielsweise zwei im Juli und eine Anfang August 2013. Bundesdatenschutzbeauftragter: „Wie viele Daten an USA übermittelt? Wurde vom BND belogen: Ehemaliger Bundesdatenschutzbeauftragter Peter Schaar. BND-Abteilung Technische Aufklärung: „580 Meldungen an USA in 2012″

Rauchen ist gesund! | Internationale Politik und Gesellschaft - IPG Die Vereinigten Staaten und die Welt führen derzeit eine große Debatte über neue Handelsvereinbarungen. Derartige Verträge wurden früher als „Freihandelsabkommen“ bezeichnet; tatsächlich waren es gelenkte Handelsvereinbarungen, die auf die Interessen der Konzerne vor allem in den USA und der Europäischen Union zugeschnitten waren. Heute werden derartige Vereinbarungen häufig als „Partnerschaften“ bezeichnet – wie etwa im Falle der Trans-Pazifischen Partnerschaft (TPP). Es ist unschwer erkennbar, warum. Der vielleicht unfairste – und unehrlichste – Bestandteil derartiger Übereinkommen betrifft den Investorenschutz. Die wahre Absicht dieser Bestimmungen besteht darin, Gesundheits-, Umwelt-, Sicherheits- und sogar Finanzaufsichtsregeln auszuhebeln, die Amerikas eigene Volkswirtschaft und Bürger schützen sollen. Dies ist keine bloße theoretische Möglichkeit. Philip Morris verklagt derzeit Uruguay und Australien, weil diese Warnetiketten auf Zigarettenschachteln vorschreiben.

Sitemap for One Community :: Complete Overview of the One Community Site One Community Terms and Conditions Homepage: This is a great place to startOur Team: This is our amazing team of world-change peopleOverview Page: An overview of One Community and our goalsThe One Community Pledge: Our commitment to making a differenceFor The Highest Good of All: This is our #1 value and the foundation for all we doOpen Source Project Launch-blueprinting: This is how we are changing the worldPurpose, Mission, Vision, and Values: Our Purpose, Mission, and Vision statementsSolutions that Create Solutions: This is the point of why we are doing what we are doing4-Phase Strategy: This is the overview of how we will accomplish solutions that create solutionsMethodology: This is the details page covering how we will accomplish solutions that create solutionsWho We Are and Who We Are Looking For: This is the kind of people we are and are looking forFulfilled Living Page: This is the environment we are purposed to create and create from

Oubliez Airbnb : l’économie du partage va s’étendre bien au-delà - L'Obs Airbnb, qui a révolutionné l’hébergement, approche le million d'"hôtes" (640.000, au dernier décompte) louant leur appartement. La bête noire des taxis, l’application Uber, qui permet à tout le monde de devenir chauffeur, est valorisée 40 milliards de dollars. Les plateformes de financement participatif ("crowdfunding"), comme KissKissBank, explosent. "Pourtant, vous n’avez encore rien vu", lance Jeremiah Owyang, à l'ouverture de la conférence sur l'innovation Le Web. "2015 sera l’année de la foule." Pour ce gourou de l’économie du partage, ou plus précisément "collaborative", de nouveaux acteurs vont bouleverser d’autres secteurs, plutôt inattendus : Santé et bien-être. Et encore : Bannerman vous permet de "louer" des gardes du corps comme une voiture.Un premier rendez-vous avec un inconnu ? En 2014, le secteur de l’économie collaborative a levé 8 milliards de dollars. La présentation complète (en anglais) : Aurélien Viers - @aviers

Paper-thin printed solar cells could provide power for 1.3 billion people The cost of solar power has declined dramatically over the past few decades, from $40 per watt in 1977 to $0.74 per watt in 2013. This trend is expected to accelerate as improvements in efficiency and new technologies come online. This is good news for citizens of developed countries who want to make the switch to a cleaner and increasingly cheaper energy source. The shift to solar may be most dramatic for those living in developing countries. Thanks to inexpensive printed solar cells, 1.3 billion people currently without electricity may be able to plug in for the first time. Paper-thin solar cells require only an industrial printer to manufacture and are inexpensive to produce. Related: Maasai women are the new solar warriors of Africa However, the mass production and distribution of printed solar cells is not without its obstacles. Via SciDevNet Images via NPL

Fracking poses 'significant' risk to humans and should be temporarily banned across EU, says new report - Environment The damning report by the CHEM Trust, the British charity that investigates the harm chemicals cause humans and wildlife, highlights serious shortcomings in the UK’s regulatory regime, which the report says will only get worse as the Government makes further budget cuts. It also warns of severe risks to human health if the new Conservative government tries to fast-track fracking of shale gas across the UK. The “scale of commercial fracking” unleashed by the Government’s eagerness to exploit the technique “should not be underestimated”, it cautions. Read more: Lancashire fracking in doubt following critical reportFracking turning US into bigger oil producer than Saudi Arabia The report is due to be published tomorrow – in the week that Lancashire county council votes on two highly contentious planning applications to frack in the county by the company Cuadrilla. The charity says it will send copies of the report to the Lancashire councillors before they vote. Loading gallery 1 of 22

How Tesla Will Change The World This is Part 2 of a four-part series on Elon Musk’s companies. For an explanation of why this series is happening and how Musk is involved, start with Part 1. A Wait But Why post can be a few different things. One type of WBW post is the “let’s just take this whole topic and really actually get to the bottom of it so we can all completely get it from here forward.” The ideal topic for that kind of post is one that’s really important to our lives, and that tends to come up a lot, but that’s also hugely complex and confusing, often controversial with differing information coming out of different mouths, and that ends up leaving a lot of people feeling like they don’t totally get it as well as they “should.” For example, I kind of got the Iraq situation, but there was a lot of fog there too—so when I wrote a post about it, one fog-clearing rabbit hole took me all the way back to Muhammad in 570AD. I’ve heard people compare knowledge of a topic to a tree. Two disclaimers before we start:

The Real Story Behind the Oil Price Collapse » Page 2 of 2 Read page 1 Under Hayward’s leadership, BP largely discontinued its research into alternative forms of energy and reaffirmed its commitment to the production of oil and gas, the tougher the better. Following in the footsteps of other giant firms, BP hustled into the Arctic, the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico, and Canadian tar sands, a particularly carbon-dirty and messy-to-produce form of energy. Over the Cliff By the end of the first decade of this century, Big Oil was united in its embrace of its new production-maximizing, drill-baby-drill approach. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the U.S. That, of course, was just before oil prices took their leap off the cliff, bringing instantly into question the wisdom of continuing to pump out record levels of petroleum. Demand will continue to rise—that’s undeniable, given expected growth in world income and population—but not at the pace to which Big Oil has become accustomed. Michael T.

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