Costs of Climate Change Touching Down All Around: Insurers

Climate Change: Insurers Confirm Growing Risks, Costs

- Common Dreams staff 

 

As southern Indiana, Kentucky and other midwestern states woke Saturday to devastated communities and a rising death toll, the world again was treated to pictures and video of mother nature's ferocious power and the merciless power of her most precise and terrifying storm, the tornado.  Most striking to some is the early arrival of this year's tornado season, which usually begins later in the spring and runs into summer.  For climate scientists, who have long predicted longer or more powerful storms and less predictable seasons, the events are an affirmation that offer no comfort.

More striking this week, however, was a little noticed hearing -- just a day before these massively destruction storms -- where the nation's insurance and re-insurance companies came together to recognize the impact that climate change is having on their industry, a direct measure of the financial costs on US taxpayers and private businesses.

Matt Taibbi: Bank of America is a “raging hurricane of theft and fraud”

There are two things every American needs to know about Bank of America.

The first is that it’s corrupt. This bank has systematically defrauded almost everyone with whom it has a significant business relationship, cheating investors, insurers, homeowners, shareholders, depositors, and the state. It is a giant, raging hurricane of theft and fraud, spinning its way through America and leaving a massive trail of wiped-out retirees and foreclosed-upon families in its wake.

The second is that all of us, as taxpayers, are keeping that hurricane raging. Bank of America is not just a private company that systematically steals from American citizens: it’s a de facto ward of the state that depends heavily upon public support to stay in business. In fact, without the continued generosity of us taxpayers, and the extraordinary indulgence of our regulators and elected officials, this company long ago would have been swallowed up by scandal, mismanagement, prosecution and litigation, and gone out of business. It would have been liquidated and its component parts sold off, perhaps into a series of smaller regional businesses that would have more respect for the law, and be more responsive to their customers.

Can’t Have It Both Ways

One of the things about checking out of political talk for a day or two is that it offers a moment for regaining perspective. Checking back in today, I see a panel on MSNBC where a Republican consultant is complaining that Republican candidates are talking about anything other than the economy. I hear Rick Santorum complaining that “the media” have invented the current preoccupation with contraception. I read background reports that congressional Republicans feel trapped by the furor over the Blunt-Rubio Amendment, and wish it would all go away.

Making the United States More Like Greece

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Simon Johnson

One of the big problems in Greece over the past decade or so is that the government was not honest with its data.  Various people assisted in the matter – including Goldman Sachs with respect to some debt issues – but ultimately this was a political decision at the highest level.  The people running the country decided to conceal the true nature of their budget and their debt.  This deception ended up costing the country dearly – completely undermining its credibility under pressure and making it much harder to turn the fiscal and economic situation around.

House Republicans are now proposing something similar for the United States.

Free Trade or Democracy, Can't Have Both

Saturday 3 March 2012

by: Dave Johnson, Campaign for America's Future | Op-Ed 

 

Recent stories about the conditions of Apple's contractors in China have opened many people's eyes about where our jobs, factories, industries and economy have been going, and why. The stories exposed that workers live 6-to-12-to-a-room in dormitories, get rousted at midnight to work surprise 12-hour shifts, get paid very little, use toxic chemicals, suffer extreme pollution of the environment, etc. Is this "trade?" Or is it something else?

Is This "Trade?"

"Trade" means to exchange, to buy and sell, you buy from me and I buy from you. I have something you want and you have something I want, and we exchange. We both end up better off than where we started.

Reckless: The Inside Story of How the Banks Beat Washington (Again)

By Jesse Eisinger/ProPublica

One year ago, the largest financial institutions on Wall Street were desperate to show off their strength by paying out, or raising, dividends for the first time since the Great Recession. After conducting a secretive test of the banks' health, the Federal Reserve granted most of their requests in March 2011 -- over loud objections from economic luminaries in Washington and across the country. Now, for the first time, we tell the story of why the Federal Reserve caved, and how Wall Street still owns the place.

Reuters
In early November 2010, as the Federal Reserve began to weigh whether the nation's biggest financial firms were healthy enough to return money to their shareholders, a top regulator bluntly warned: Don't let them.

"We remain concerned over their ability to withstand stress in an uncertain economic environment," wrote Sheila Bair, the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., in a previously unreported letter obtained by ProPublica.

The letter came as the Fed was launching a "stress test" to decide whether the biggest U.S. financial firms could pay out dividends and buy back their shares instead of putting aside that money as capital. It was one of the central bank's most critical oversight decisions in the wake of the financial crisis.

Paul Krugman: Four Fiscal Phonies

Mitt Romney is very concerned about budget deficits. Or at least that’s what he says; he likes to warn that President Obama’s deficits are leading us toward a “Greece-style collapse.”

So why is Mr. Romney offering a budget proposal that would lead to much larger debt and deficits than the corresponding proposal from the Obama administration? 

Dangerous Pedagogy in the Age of Casino Capitalism and Religious Fundamentalism

Wednesday 29 February 2012

by: Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | News Analysis 

 

Introduction
 

All over the world, the forces of neoliberalism are on the march, dismantling the historically guaranteed social provisions provided by the welfare state, defining profit-making and market freedoms as the essence of democracy while diminishing civil liberties as part of the alleged "war" against terrorism. Secure in its dystopian vision that there are no alternatives to a market society, free-market fundamentalism eliminates issues of contingency, struggle and social agency by celebrating the inevitability of economic laws in which the ethical ideal of intervening in the world gives way to the idea that we "have no choice but to adapt both our hopes and our abilities to the new global market."[1]

Middle-Class Welfare State Is Invisible by Design: Ezra Klein

By Ezra Klein Feb 29, 2012 7:00 PM ET

What is a government program? And are you on one right now? Those are the questions Cornell University political scientist Suzanne Mettler has been posing.

For her book “The Submerged State,” she asked a scientifically selected sample of 1,400 Americans whether they had ever used a government social program. Only 43 percent copped to having done so. Then she read off 21 social programs, such as Medicare (FFSOMED) and the home-mortgage interest deduction, and asked the same question again: Have you ever used a government social program? This time, 96 percent said yes, in fact, they had.

Occupy Takes Aim at ALEC Today in 70 US Cities

Wednesday 29 February 2012

by: Yana Kunichoff, Truthout

The Occupy movement, since its inception in September 2011, has been against corporate greed. And in 70 cities across the country, it's found one target that best shows the rampant corporate control of our judicial system that Occupiers see as a central grievance: the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

ALEC brings legislators and corporations together in a "public-private partnership" to draft model legislation that Occupy groups say serves the interests of the 1 percent.

Forget Michigan. Worry About Rep. Steny Hoyer (Corporate Party - MD) and Social Security

By Richard (RJ) Eskow

February 28, 2012 - 10:57pm ET 

Forget Michigan. Worry about Steny Hoyer.

While most political eyes are fixed on Romney's primary results, the middle class faces a threat to its financial security right in the heart of the Capitol.The Democratic Party does, too.

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, who is the living embodiment of Washington's corporatized politics, is once again pushing a "Grand Bargain" that would cut Social Security and Medicare - and result in more electoral losses like the ones he helped bring upon his party in 2010.

Throwing Out the Free Market Playbook: An Interview with Naomi Klein

Perhaps one of the most well-known voices for the Left, Canadian Naomi Klein is an activist and author of several nonfiction works critical of consumerism and corporate activity, including the best sellers No Logo (2000) and Shock Doctrine (2007).

In your cover story for the Nation last year, you say that modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to the political Left, including redistribution of wealth, higher and more progressive taxes, and greater government intervention and regulation. Please explain.

The piece came out of my interest and my shock at the fact that belief in climate change in the United States has plummeted. If you really drill into the polling data, what you see is that the drop in belief in climate change is really concentrated on the right of the political spectrum. It’s been an extraordinary and unusual shift in belief in a short time. In 2007, 71 percent of Americans believed in climate change and in 2009 only 51 percent believed—and now we’re at 41 percent. So I started researching the denial movement and going to conferences and reading the books, and what’s clear is that, on the right, climate change is seen as a threat to the Right’s worldview, and to the neoliberal economic worldview. It’s seen as a Marxist plot. They accuse climate scientists of being watermelons—green on the outside and red on the inside.

Heavy metal pollution causes severe declines in wild bees

Wild bees are important pollinators and numerous studies dealing with pollination of wild plants and crops underline their vital role in ecosystems functioning. While honey bees can be easily transported to various location when needed, wild bees' presence is dependent on the availability of high quality semi-natural habitats. Some crops, such as apples and cherries, and many wild flowers are more effectively pollinated by wild bees and other insects rather than managed honey bees.

G.I. Bill

Wednesday, 02/29/2012 - 12:19 pm by Elena Callahan

What is the G.I. Bill?

The G.I. Bill is commonly referred to as the G.I. Bill of Rights and is also known as The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944. It was signed into law on June 22, 1944 by President Roosevelt. The law provided a comprehensive benefits package that included up to four years of education or training, federally guaranteed home, business, or farm loans with no down payment, and unemployment compensation that set aside a weekly unemployment allowance of $20 for 52 weeks. Those eligible had to have been in active duty for at least 90 days, even if they were not in combat, and couldn’t have been dishonorably discharged. The Veterans Administration was responsible for implementing these key components of the bill.

What’s the significance?

While for most Americans higher education and home ownership were unattainable dreams before WWII, the G.I. Bill allowed millions of veterans to take part, and by 1947 they made up 49 percent of college admissions.

Winning Makes People More Aggressive Toward The Defeated

COLUMBUS, Ohio – In this world, there are winners and losers – and, for your own safety, it is best to fear the winners.

A new study found that winners – those who outperformed others on a competitive task – acted more aggressively against the people they beat than the losers did against the victors.

“It seems that people have a tendency to stomp down on those they have defeated, to really rub it in,” said Brad Bushman, co-author of the study and professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State University.

2 genes do not make a voter

DURHAM, N.C. -- Voting behavior cannot be predicted by one or two genes as previous researchers have claimed, according to Evan Charney, a Duke University professor of public policy and political science.

In "Candidate Genes and Political Behavior," a paper published in the February 2012 American Political Science Review, Charney and co-author William English of Harvard University call into question the validity of all studies that claim that a common gene variant can predict complex behaviors such as voting.

Conservative Experts Say That Obama Was Right To Apologize For Quran Burning

February 28, 2012 12:51 am ET

 

Several conservative foreign policy and military experts have agreed with President Obama's decision to apologize to Afghanistan for the burning of Qurans by U.S. military personnel. Ignoring these experts, Fox News' conservative hosts and pundits have tried to flame outrage over Obama's apology.

Gas in the Presidential Race

by Dean Baker

 

President Obama seems to be enjoying some good luck in that the economy appears to be picking up just in time for his re-election campaign. While the economy is still weak by almost any measure, growth is likely to be in the 2.5-3.0 percent range for 2012. This should lead to the creation of close to 2 million jobs and a modest drop in the unemployment rate.

That is not much to cheer about in an economy that is still down close to 10 million jobs from its trend level; however, compared to the recent past, this is good news. And research shows that voters tend to focus primarily on the direction of change. This means that if the unemployment rate is falling and the economy is creating jobs at a respectable pace throughout the year, President Obama stands a very good chance of being re-elected in November.

The Best and Worst Economic Ideas of This Election Season

By Robert Pollin, AlterNet
Posted on February 27, 2012, Printed on March 2, 2012

As the severe unemployment crisis drags into its third year, proposals for solving the crisis are proliferating. Still more ideas will be tossed into the mix as the 2012 election season intensifies.

These proposals include some good, some less good, as well as some truly awful ideas. The plan offered by President Obama last September included a mix of some good ideas, such as more spending on infrastructure and education, along with some bad ones, like cutting Social Security taxes (otherwise known as payroll taxes).

The single worst idea in the mix, supported by deficit hawks in both the Democratic and Republican parties, is that we are facing a fiscal train wreck and that we therefore, above all, need to cut government spending. At the same time, there are actually some major avenues still open for stimulating job creation—both because they could create lots of jobs relatively quickly and because they could do so cheaply—that most policymakers and politicians have thus far ignored.

Five Things Rick Santorum Could have Learned in College

Posted on 02/26/2012 by Juan

Rick Santorum attacked President Obama on Saturday for being “a snob” because, Santorum said, the president wanted all Americans to have a college education (Obama hasn’t actually said such a thing). Then it turns out that when Santorum was in the Senate he said he wanted all Pennsylvanians to go to college. Hypocrisy much? Moreover, Santorum has a BA from Penn State, an MBA and a JD, so when he says not everyone is cut out for college (the way he was), it seems to me that he is the one who is being a snob.

Santorum is cynically making a play for the Reagan Democrats, the white, ethnic blue collar workers who typically only have a high school education, and who are skittish about both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. But whoever told him that they don’t aspire to a college education for their children doesn’t actually know any working class people.

The payroll tax law's best measure

Tucked in the small print of the payroll tax bill is a work-sharing plan that could save more than a million jobs this year

Dean Baker
guardian.co.uk, Monday 27 February 2012 10.35 EST

One of the little-noticed items attached to the extension of the payroll tax cut was a provision that would promote work-sharing as part of state unemployment insurance systems. The provision, which is based on a bill introduced in the Senate by Jack Reed and in the House by Rosa DeLuaro, would reimburse states for money spent on work-sharing programs that are part of their unemployment insurance system. It would also provide funds for the states that do not currently have work-sharing systems to establish them.

This provision is a rare victory of bipartisanship and commonsense. The basic logic of work-sharing is straightforward. Under the current system of unemployment insurance, workers who lose their jobs can get roughly half of their pay in benefits. However, if a worker has their hours cut back because of inadequate demand, they don't get in any way compensated for the lost pay. This effectively encourages employers to go the route of layoffs, rather than shortening work hours, since that is the only way that workers can benefit from unemployment insurance.

Paul Krugman: What Ails Europe

Lisbon

Things are terrible here, as unemployment soars past 13 percent. Things are even worse in Greece, Ireland, and arguably in Spain, and Europe as a whole appears to be sliding back into recession.

Why has Europe become the sick man of the world economy? Everyone knows the answer. Unfortunately, most of what people know isn’t true — and false stories about European woes are warping our economic discourse. 

Read an opinion piece about Europe — or, all too often, a supposedly factual news report — and you’ll probably encounter one of two stories, which I think of as the Republican narrative and the German narrative. Neither story fits the facts.

Wall Street Fixer Rodge Cohen: Big Banks Key to American Global Dominance

Monday, 02/27/2012 - 9:45 am by Matt Stoller 
 
Sometimes finance executives let slip the way they really feel: that they hold the world in the palm of their hands.

It’s not often that the people in charge admit what is really going on: a global game for political dominance. I just saw an interview with Wall Street superlawyer Rodge Cohen, the secret force behind (among other things) the expanded emergency lending power of the Federal Reserve through section 13(3). You know, that’s the law allowing the Fed to lend unlimited sums based on whatever it wants to lend, a section amended in 1991 at Cohen’s behest. He was involved in “more than 17 deals” during the crisis in 2008, including the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the $85 billion AIG bailout deal, and the takeover of Fannie Mae by the federal government. He is, as Bill Black said, the fixer of Wall Street. Here’s his quote, at minute 3:39 of this Bloomberg interview:

Hopefully we will not see the major financial institutions in this country disappear because if we do we will also see a loss of ability to influence events not only financially but also politically throughout the world.

ECB President Draghi Declares War on Europe’s Social Safety Nets
I’m late to the remarkable interview given by ECB president Mario Draghi to the Wall Street Journal. I find the choice of venue curious, since the Financial Times has become the venue for top European politicians and technocrats to communicate with English speaking finance professionals.

But Draghi’s drunk-on-austerity-Kool-Aid message was a perfect fit for the Wall Street Journal. While he wasn’t as colorful as Andrew Mellon’s famous “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” Draghi is still a true heir in believing that his prescription, per Melllon, will result in “High costs of living and high living will come down.” The “high living” that Draghi is particularly opposed to is Europe’s social safety nets.

7 Dangerous Lies About Plastic

By Stiv Wilson, AlterNet
Posted on February 26, 2012, Printed on February 29, 2012

To receive a Ph.D in industrial chemistry in the United States, no American university requires candidates to take even a single toxicology class as part of their course work. We churn out new chemists with the divine power to manipulate the very structure of nature itself, without teaching them the divine wisdom of how to wield that power.

Nearly everything we consume or even interact with these days is made of plastic. The industry that produces plastic, largely represented by the American Chemistry Council (ACC), has an annual budget of over $120 million to protect its interests. But as the plague of plastic that wreaks havoc on our environment slowly gains the attention of policymakers, concerned citizens and the media, the makers of plastic resins and the companies that package their products have become increasingly aggressive about defending their respective bottom lines.

Rick Santorum Represents Everything Europeans Find Weird About America

Feb 24 2012, 8:33 AM ET

The GOP contender confirms some of Europe's dimmest views on U.S. politics. 

Continental Europeans aren't yet glued to the U.S. presidential race the way they will be in the fall. They've plenty of their own issues to worry about right now. But even this early, poking out of what's otherwise a pile of standard wire reports, there's a theme in European media coverage: Rick Santorum is a bit odd. The Republican presidential candidate, to some, is apparently even a walking, talking incarnation of the gulf between American and European politics.

Granted, the European media, like most free media, doesn't really speak with one voice. But when the press isn't letting American pundits, quoted in translation, interpret the Santorum phenomenon, you'll notice very few positive adjectives and more than a few verbal clues pointing to amusement, bewilderment, or distaste.

Michael Hudson: A Planned Economy for the 1%

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

In our everyday discourse, there are many tropes, narratives, and models for elites, elite behavior, and changes in the nature of elites: The eternal question: Stupid and/or evil?, the Greek’s cycle of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, and back to democracy again (OK, oversimplified); socio- and psychopathy; “big government vs. small government”; William Black’s accounting control fraud; kleptocracy; and the idea that statism as such is the problem. (Did I miss one?) The grand theories, and not conspiracy theories, a la Weber, Marx, Hegel seem not to figure in every day discourse at all (unless one considers religiously derived theories of government grand). The most rigorous model in that list — Black’s model of accounting control fraud — shows that a large number of the ruling elite (C-level executives of very large institutions) are unindicted criminals, and exposes their modus operandi — but that’s not the same as having a solidly grounded explanatory narrative of elite behavior as such. Is it?

The poor, in fact, are less likely to sue their doctor

New York / Heidelberg, 27 February 2012

Study sheds light on why physicians mistakenly believe that poor people sue more often

Contrary to the common perception among physicians that poor people sue doctors more frequently, Ramon L. Jimenez from the Monterey Orthopaedic and Sports Medicine Institute and his team demonstrate that socioeconomically disadvantaged patients, in fact, tend to sue physicians less often. Their work suggests that this myth may exist because of subconscious prejudices or stereotypes that affect thinking and decision making without doctors being aware of it - a phenomenon known as unconscious bias. Dr. Jimenez and his colleagues' work is published online in Springer's journal, Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research.

Brad Kittel Builds "Tiny Texas Houses"

Sunday 26 February 2012

by: Thorne Webb Dreyer, The Rag Blog

Brad Kittel, who has developed an entire philosophy around the concept of “sustainability through salvage,” builds “Tiny Texas Houses” that are as much as 99% “pure salvage.”

Some as small as 120 square feet, the houses come wired for electricity and outfitted for plumbing, and include a shower and toilet and a loft for sleeping. Kittel, who trains people to do "salvage mining," says "we have the power to create solutions to our global problems by the simplest of choices we make each day."

Rick Santorum On Religious Freedom: What He Has Forgotten Since Law School

By P. Scott Russell

A law school peer of Santorum's offers a lesson on what the Constitution says about religious freedom for a wayward classmate and his followers.

February 23, 2012  |  Samuel Johnson famously wrote, in 1775, that a false “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” Now, it appears that modern scoundrels – politicians and their puppet masters  – have added another disguise to their wardrobe: false constitutional scholarship.

 

Not content to wrap themselves in the flag alone, financial wolves are now relying on politicians, wrapped in the sheep’s clothing of uninformed constitutional platitudes, hoping to sway the voting masses who lack the inclination to study the Constitution themselves. Nowhere is this more true in 2012 than with pronouncements concerning religious freedom, especially those made by my fellow law school graduate, Rick Santorum.

How Right-Wing Smears Against Occupy Exploit Victims of Rape in the Movement

Right-wingers are using sexual assault at Occupy to justify smears and attacks. Here are the facts. 

By Sarah Seltzer, AlterNet
Posted on February 26, 2012, Printed on February 26, 2012

“On the morning of October 29, a woman participating in OWS was sexually assaulted at Liberty Plaza.” This was the opening of the November 4 statement released by the NYC survivors’ support team (an offshoot of Safer Spaces OWS) responding to a sexual assault that had become a lightning rod within the movement--and for its agenda-laden critics.

In November, those critics of Occupy included Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who used the assault to maneuver toward eviction. Now they include notorious right-wing smear operative Andrew Breitbart, who went on his already infamous “stop raping people!” and "you're filthy animals" rant directed at Occupy-affiliated progressives outside of CPAC and has caused a media firestorm as a result. He has acknowledged that his campaign is part of a smear effort to wreak vengeance on progressives who criticized racism within the Tea Party.

No Student Left Untested

Diane Ravitch

Last week, the New York State Education Department and the teachers’ unions reached an agreement to allow the state to use student test scores to evaluate teachers. The pact was brought to a conclusion after Governor Andrew Cuomo warned the parties that if they didn’t come to an agreement quickly, he would impose his own solution (though he did not explain what that would be). He further told school districts that they would lose future state aid if they didn’t promptly implement the agreement after it was released to the public. The reason for this urgency was to secure $700 million promised to the state by the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, contingent on the state’s creating a plan to evaluate teachers in relation to their students’ test scores.

The new evaluation system pretends to be balanced, but it is not. Teachers will be ranked on a scale of 1-100. Teachers will be rated as “ineffective, developing, effective, or highly effective.” Forty percent of their grade will be based on the rise or fall of student test scores; the other sixty percent will be based on other measures, such as classroom observations by principals, independent evaluators, and peers, plus feedback from students and parents.