“The Pentagon budget is, for instance, about 50 percent higher today than the Cold War average and accounts for nearly half of all military expenditures globally. And yet it has kept right on growing;”
Source : Mother Jones
Tag: Policy
Spatial Protest in the Era of Fast Capital
“There is nothing to oversee the hyper growth of derivatives or high frequency trading or endless debt games, because there is no global institution that equates with the global markets. It is a clash of the market state and the nation state … The market state is winning, which is probably why we are all on the brink of losing everything.”
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Source : Polis
US Businesses Not Being Strangled By Regulation And Taxation, World Bank Says
Rich People Create Jobs!
“This fear is easy to understand. No one likes paying higher taxes. But do lower taxes actually spur economic growth? Bruce Bartlett,an economist in the Reagan administration, has compared tax rates in various rich countries in 1979 to each country’s growth rate since then. His conclusion? There’s virtually no correlation.”
Source : Mother Jones
Why Ideas are Unprofitable
The U.S. Patent and Trademark office issues nearly 160,000 patents a year for everything from nanotechnology to jet-powered surfboards. Yet a mere 1 percent—just 1,600—reach the marketplace, according to the patent office. The dirty little secret about American ingenuity is that we’re terrible at translating original ideas into profit-producing businesses.
Source : Business Week
Perpetual warfare
“Much has been written about the role of social networks in powering the uprisings, and new media were undoubtedly an important factor. But, to an extent that has not been appreciated, the Arab protest movements emerged as an unintended consequence of western weakness. The demand for change had a specific cause: the steep rise in food prices that was produced by the liquidity released by Ben Bernanke”
Source : New Statesmen
What the NYPD Really Thinks of Occupy Wall Street
“I found John de Clef Piñeiro, a former high-ranking New York Housing Authority official, standing on the steps of Zuccotti Park in a sharp pinstriped suit and holding a large sign directed at the men in blue. “Your pay, job security, and pensions are at risk, just like ours,” it said. “We are not the enemy.” Piñeiro told me he’d been to the park four times with the sign. “
Source :Mother Jones
How lack of transparency enables police brutality
“And that rate conceals the fact that officers involved in a credible case of excessive force which resulted in a fatality are rarely charged with murder. If that were so, in every case, then the rate would more than quadruple, to 24.51 per 100,000.”
Source : The Guardian
A quick guide to the evidence on regulations and jobs
“We also examined studies of the “effects of particular regulations on particular industries. A surprising number of such studies actually show that regulations have a small positive net effect on employment; these include studies of environmental regulations on industries generating significant pollution”
Source : EPI
Capitalism vs. the Climate
“A 2007 Harris poll found that 71 percent of Americans believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause the climate to change. By 2009 the figure had dropped to 51 percent. In June 2011 the number of Americans who agreed was down to 44 percent —well under half the population.”
Source : The Nation
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