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Food expiration dates don’t have much science behind them—a food safety researcher explains another way to know what’s too old to eat
Florida’s outbreak of listeria has so far led to at least one death, 22 hospitalizations and an ice cream recall since January. Humans get sick with listeria infections, or listeriosis, from eating soil-contaminated food, undercooked meat or dairy products that are raw, or unpasteurized. Listeria can cause convulsions, coma, miscarriage and birth defects. And it’s the third leading cause of food poisoning deaths in the U.S. Continue reading
Is universal basic income part of a just transition?
When you give everyone a chunk of change, does it really change their lives and their communities?
In the remote rural village of Dauphin, in the Canadian province of Manitoba, economists tried out an unusual experiment. In the 1970s, they persuaded the provincial government to give cash payments to poorer families to see if a guaranteed basic income could improve their outcomes. During the years of this “Mincome” experiment, families received a basic income of 16,000 Canadian dollars (or a top up to that amount). With 10,000 inhabitants, Dauphin was just big enough to be a good data set but not too big as to bankrupt the government. Continue reading
Why the U.S. Postal Service offers a great model for other government services
Progressives, take note: a newly passed bipartisan reform bill strengthens the U.S. Postal Service—a federal agency that serves as a hopeful model for government-run services in other arenas.
In case you missed it—because it got so little news attention—there’s a bit of good news regarding the United States Postal Service (USPS). In what was a very rare moment of bipartisan unity on a domestic issue, the U.S. Senate on March 8 passed the Postal Service Reform Act with a robust vote of 79 to 19. The House of Representatives passed the same bill in February with similarly high levels of support from both parties in a 342-92 vote. President Joe Biden is expected to sign the bill into law. Continue reading
How a guaranteed income can actually solve inequality
Poverty in America disproportionately affects women and people of color, and that is precisely what hinders political action to address it—even when solutions abound.
An ongoing study conducted in Stockton, California, examines how the lives of low-income Americans can improve if they are simply given money—a modest, but reliable source of income with no strings attached. The Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED) randomly chose 125 participants from poverty-stricken residential areas and gave them $500 per month to simply use for whatever they wanted over the last two years. A majority of the participants were women (69 percent) and people of color (53 percent). Preliminary results from the first year are tantalizing for anyone interested in solutions to address rising inequality in the United States, especially as they manifest along racial and gender lines. Within the first year, the study’s participants obtained jobs at twice the rate of the control group. At the beginning of the study, 28 percent of the participants had full-time employment, and after the first year, that number rose to 40 percent. Continue reading
Racism is profitable
Since the first colonizers arrived in the United States to this very moment, wealthy elites have used the tools of theft, exclusion, and exploitation to expand their wealth and power at the detriment of Black, Latinx, Indigenous people, and marginalized people of color. It all boils down to this simple truth: Racism is profitable. Continue reading
In times of crisis, how to prevent an economic meltdown and avoid privatizing profits and socializing losses
Here we go again: Another financial bubble burst and another financial crisis threatening to disrupt the real economy! This time the trigger is the health pandemic of the coronavirus crisis, the most serious in a generation, which is paralyzing the real economy and triggering crashes in the financial sector. Continue reading
‘Unacceptable’: Family farms, ag advocates hit back after Sec Perdue Says small dairy farms destined to die
‘Five years of plunging farm prices, increasing bankruptcies, and climbing suicide rates were not discussed by Perdue. His message to them was basically, stop whining, your demise is inevitable.’
Furious family farmers flamed Department of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue Wednesday after comments he made on the future of the dairy business that cast doubt on the future of small farms during a stop in Wisconsin Tuesday. Continue reading
It’s our choice, socialism or barbarism
There is no doubt that people, especially the young, are experiencing less difficulty and anxiety mentioning and even conversing about socialism as a construct. Unfortunately, most progressives are still reluctant to mention socialism or consider it as an alternative and are engaged in maintaining a capitalist structure and fighting to make it kinder and gentler. Continue reading
The gig is up
Uber just filed its first quarterly report as a publicly traded company. Although it lost $1bn, investors may still do well because the losses appear to be declining. Continue reading
How to prevent future Trumps
Why did so many working class voters choose a selfish, thin-skinned, petulant, lying, narcissistic, boastful, megalomaniac for president? Continue reading
How to stop Trump
Why did working class voters choose a selfish, thin-skinned, petulant, lying, narcissistic, boastful, megalomaniac for president? Continue reading
Student debt slavery II: Time to level the playing field
The lending business is heavily stacked against student borrowers. Bigger players can borrow for almost nothing, and if their investments don’t work out, they can put their corporate shells through bankruptcy and walk away. Not so with students. Their loan rates are high and if they cannot pay, their debts are not normally dischargeable in bankruptcy. Rather, the debts compound and can dog them for life, compromising not only their own futures but the economy itself. Continue reading
It’s time to reawaken the spirit of Occupy for the starving millions
The world is now facing an unprecedented emergency of hunger and famine, with a record number of people requiring life-saving food and medical assistance in 2017. Since the start of this year, the largest humanitarian crisis since the end of the second world war has continued to unfold, while the international community has failed to take urgent commensurate action. The extent of human suffering is overwhelming: more than 20 million people are on the brink of starvation, including 1.4 million children—a conservative estimate that is rising by the day. Famine has already been declared in parts of South Sudan, and could soon follow in Somalia, north-east Nigeria and Yemen. Continue reading
A vision of America’s future with ratification of the USVRA
Let us imagine two things. First, that the United States Voters’ Rights Amendment has been enacted and ratified as the result of a mass, nonpartisan, political movement, and that we can take a time trip into the future to see the results. Let’s visit that not-so-distant time and observe what the People have been able to accomplish—once they took control of their own government. Continue reading
Donald Trump as ‘Anti-Wilson’
A century ago, a Southern academic and racist emerged in Europe and the United States as a crusader to “make the world safe for democracy.” [1] Wilson had been inaugurated as president in 1913, the year before Europe’s imperialists plunged the world into four years of mass murder. That war alone, caused some four million direct battle casualties and untold millions of non-combatant deaths in the aftermath. Woodrow Wilson, despite the policies he actually pursued, would be turned into an icon of the 20th century’s most enduring myth—the benevolence and humanitarian virtue of the great slaveholder republic founded in 1776. Wilson could arguably be called the nation’s first celebrity politician and international celebrity export. This remarkable marketing accomplishment predated television. Continue reading
Of wizards and Washington and the dreary, unrelenting reality of American politics
A raw and sometimes darkly comic survey of America’s treacherous political terrain
The books about “The Wizard of Oz” were written as satire on American politics, but Hollywood, in its inimitable way, turned them into a song-and-dance picture for children. Still, one scene in the film has a sense of the author’s intent. That scene is when Dorothy, in Emerald City, approaches a closet-like structure, which, as it happens, is the Wizard’s control booth for sounds and smoke and lights, his special effects for intimidating visitors and impressing them with non-existent power. Continue reading
Basic Income: International experience (Brazil, Namibia, Canada, India)
Founded in 1986, the Basic Income European Network (BIEN) is the international NGO that promotes BIG around the world. It held its last conference “Re-democratizing the Economy” at McGill’s Faculty of Law in 2014. A North American congress was held in Winnipeg in May 2016 and its 16th congress will be in July in Seoul, South Korea. Its credo is that some sort of economic right based upon citizenship rather than upon one’s relationship to the production process or one’s family status is called for as part of the just solution to social problems in advanced societies. Continue reading
Basic income: Helicopter money
About 10% of Canadians live in poverty. That figure is even higher in major cities, such as Toronto where the number of children living below the line is nearly 25%. In India, 22% of the people live in poverty. A “guaranteed annual income” (GAI) could wipe out this poverty at a stroke. Continue reading
Where’s the missing part, Naomi Klein? Ask Pope Francis and Mohammed Mesbahi
The latest book by Naomi Klein is essentially a call to share the world’s resources, but its thesis on social transformation is missing a crucial factor: a profound awareness of the reality of hunger and life-threatening deprivation. While Pope Francis’ recent encyclical calls on us to prioritise this global emergency in our efforts to combat global warming, Mohammed Mesbahi proposes a people’s strategy for how we can finally end the moral outrage of extreme poverty amidst plenty. Continue reading
Through the looking glass darkly: Government as we wish it or government as we will it
One day while Alice is winding up a ball of wool that Kitty persists in undoing, she gets it into her head that there must be a world behind the looking glass (mirror) where everything is backward. Suddenly, she finds herself up on the mantelpiece staring into the looking glass. Then she walks through to the reality on the other side to find a world that is set up like a chessboard and chess pieces are animated human-like creatures. The reflected reality is the opposite of real reality. Time goes backwards. Continue reading
What we could do with a postal savings bank: Infrastructure that doesn’t cost taxpayers a dime
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is the nation’s second largest civilian employer after Walmart. Although successfully self-funded throughout its long history, it is currently struggling to stay afloat. This is not, as sometimes asserted, because it has been made obsolete by the Internet. In fact the post office has gotten more business from Internet orders than it has lost to electronic email. What has pushed the USPS into insolvency is an oppressive 2006 congressional mandate that it prefund healthcare for its workers 75 years into the future. No other entity, public or private, has the burden of funding multiple generations of employees who have not yet even been born. Continue reading
Does America need a ‘Super Congress’?
The so-called “Super-Committee,” which will be formed when the debt ceiling vote is passed, is intended to seek ways to cut $2 trillion in government spending over the next 10 years, which is a sore point for Republicans holding fast to Bush tax cuts, resisting any attempts at tax hikes to raise revenue. To “streamline” the process, the Super-Committee will have only12 members (six Republicans and six Democrats), only straight “up and down votes,” and no room for full Congressional debates, amendments, or filibusters. Somehow it sounds unconstitutional, if not a knee-jerk, punitive reaction to the debt ceiling debacle. Continue reading
The Fed’s war on America’s people
It was Abraham Lincoln who followed his Constitutional right to coin a US currency. President Lincoln created US Greenbacks from 1862–1871, printed by the US mint, delivered to the US Treasury to conduct and pay off the Civil War debt. Yet, after his tragic (if not related) assassination, the country returned and departed again from private banking systems. Continue reading
Angela Merkel governed Germany to the left of Bernie Sanders: Why don’t Americans know?
Posted on September 29, 2021 by Thom Hartmann
The headline at Fox “News” blares: “German Elections: Big Setback for Merkel’s Conservatives as Center-Left Party Comes Out on Top.” In a single sentence, it summarizes everything wrong with how American media and the American public understand what “conservative” means. Continue reading →