More Americans are dying needlessly every day in the United States because of President Bush's failure to provide universal health coverage than are being killed in the fighting in Iraq.
By the end of tomorrow the average Briton will have caused as much global warning as the typical Kenyan will over the whole of this year, according to a report.
The boiling, surging, churning and corporatizing economy of the United States is racing far ahead of its being understood by political economists, economists, politicians and the polis itself. Tidbits from the past week add up to this view, to wit:
Globalization was meant to be the great equalizer. Standards of living in poor countries would be raised. Governments would become more stable. Instead it has brought citizen protests, greater economic disparities between first- and third-world nations, argues Joseph Stiglitz.
With foreign investors owning 47% of all marketable US Treasury bonds in 2006 compared to 33% in 2001 and foreign holdings of US corporate debt up to 30%, James Petras provides a detailed examination of the financial ruling classes and asks 'who really owns America?'
The tax system in the United States is supposed to mitigate inequality. But a recent report by Congress’s budget agency provides fresh evidence that Bush-era tax cuts have done more to reinforce inequality than to redress it.
"We need a sane energy policy that decreases our oil consumption (the
Germans and French, "Old Europe," use half as much per capita as we do
in the U.S.). The potential for environmental disaster, and the
prospects of protracted wars for oil, demand no less."
In his Dec. 14 editorial-page commentary "The Top 1% ... of What?" Alan Reynolds casts doubts on the interpretation of our results showing that the share of income going to the top 1% families has doubled from 8% in 1980 to 16% in 2004. His critique contains serious misunderstandings of our work.
The world economy is expected to slow this year after three consecutive years of historically high growth, according to a new United Nations report issued Wednesday.
If global development priorities are not reassessed to account for massive urban poverty, well over half of the 1.1 billion people projected to join the world’s population between now and 2030 may live in under-serviced slums, according to State of the World 2007: Our Urban Future, released today by the Worldwatch Institute. Additionally, while cities cover only 0.4 percent of the Earth’s surface, they generate the bulk of the world’s carbon emissions, making cities key to alleviating the climate crisis, notes the report.
