Economist Dean Baker points out that speculation by the big banks and investment houses is the cause of much of our financial woes and that a financial speculation tax would be well worth implementing as a means of curbing that practice. He explains why such a tax is needed. [Read more…]
Jon Oliver was on fire in this series of three clips dealing with the strikes by fast-food workers who are trying to get the minimum wages raised from the current $7.25 an hour (which works out to about $15,000 per year for a 40 hour week) to a more realistic $15. Of course this is generating huge amounts of protests by the very same people who think that raising taxes on the rich, even the top 1%, would create enormous hardship on the wealthy. I don’t know if it was ever truly the case that minimum wage fast food jobs were exclusively for adolescents to earn some pocket money but it is clearly no longer true. These jobs have become primary ones for adults and they deserve to have a living wage. [Read more…]
That excellent organization Physicians for a National Health Program has highlighted a new study by Gerald Friedman, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst that shows that by simply upgrading and expanding the current Medicare system to cover everyone, the country would save billions of dollars in costs as well. There would even be money left over to help pay down the national debt. [Read more…]
It turns out that Colorado lawmakers have devised a system in which their car license plates don’t show up in the database when speed cameras catch them. Because of that, they never get speeding (or parking) tickets and are free to be repeat offenders. [Read more…]
The name Jesselyn Radack keeps popping up in whistleblower stories. This is because she is a lawyer with the Government Accountability Project and has been assisting whistleblowers defend themselves against government retaliation. [Read more…]
The appalling saga of serial sexual abuser San Diego mayor Bob Filner gets steadily worse. Once the allegations came out and the first victim went public, there has been a steady stream of women coming forward describing similar events. The Daily Show chronicles his disgusting behavior. [Read more…]
I have written before about how one should never answer the questions of any law enforcement officers who come to question you unless you have a lawyer present.
Reader SC (Salty Current), OM provided an excellent document produced by the Center for Constitutional Rights that explains what you should do if someone ever wants to question you. [Read more…]
The close 217-205 vote defeat in the House of Representatives on the amendment by freshman congressman Justin Amash and veteran John Conyers (both from Michigan) to curb the surveillance powers of the NSA clearly has shaken up the establishment. David Kravets finds that there was a significant pattern in how people voted: “It turns out that those 217 “no” voters received twice as much campaign financing from the defense and intelligence industry as the 205 “yes” voters.” [Read more…]
Felix Salmon tells us what happened, comparing two cases, one in which Goldman Sachs sided with the defendant, the other in which they were part of the prosecution, and the big differences in the outcomes. Can you guess which case resulted in the harsher punishment? He concludes: [Read more…]
I dream a lot. Not a night goes by when I do not have quite vivid and complicated dreams so I am naturally interested in the phenomenon. Many of the details in my dreams can be clearly related to events that occurred within the previous day or two but some dreams are recurring. One is a dream in which I want to go to the bathroom and find it extraordinarily hard to find one or the ones that I find are so disgusting that I don’t want to use them. The other is where I have driven somewhere, parked the car and gone inside, and when I return the car is gone and I spend some time trying to search for it, without success. These two recurring dreams are apparently quite common for a lot of people. [Read more…]