eridani

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/american-mass-layoffs

We have come to accept mass layoffs (defined as 50 or more workers losing their jobs at a single company during a five-week period) as the inevitable cost of doing business in a highly competitive global economy. A successful corporation, Americans are led to believe, has to be ruthless…[Read more]

https://www.commondreams.org/news/record-number-postponed-healthcare-usa-2022

Nearly 40% of people in the United States said they or a family member delayed medical care last year due to the prohibitively high cost of treatment under the nation’s for-profit healthcare model, according to a Gallup survey published Tuesday.

As U.S. residents faced…[Read more]

For Every $1 Gained by a Bottom 90 Percenter Since 2020, a Billionaire Got $1.7M

These extreme gains have come after world leaders across nearly every continent have been carrying out extraordinary cuts to income and inheritance taxes for the richest people since the 1980s, the report finds, kicked off in part by the…[Read more]

Way too many humans in all countries IMO.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/17/chinas-population-falls-for-first-time-in-more-than-60-years

Online, some Chinese people were unsurprised by the announcement, saying the social pressures which were driving the low birthrate still remained.

“Housing prices, welfare, education, healthcare –…[Read more]

https://nypost.com/2023/01/16/home-depot-soon-changing-how-it-pays-hourly-employees//

Home improvement retailer Home Depot is making a nationwide change in how it pays hourly employees.

“As laws, technology and workplace practices continue to evolve, we’re changing our practice nationwide effective Jan. 16, 2023, to pay hourly associates to th…[Read more]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/16/linguists-language-culture-loss-end-of-century-sea-levels-rise

Speakers of minority languages have experienced a long history of persecution, with the result that by the 1920s half of all Indigenous languages in Australia, the US, South Africa and Argentina were extinct. The climate crisis is…[Read more]

China Miéville: Marx’s Communist Manifesto Has Much to Teach Us in 2023

Part of the argument is that it is still worth engaging with the manifesto. To preempt the second half of this answer, I disagree with that sense that it’s a purely historical curiosity, for reasons that I try to make clear in the book. But I…[Read more]

https://www.alternet.org/medicare-advantage-money-making-scam/

I regret my participation in those efforts. Over the 20 years since Congress passed the Medicare Modernization Act, the Medicare Advantage program has become an enormous cash cow for insurers, in large part because of the way they have rigged the risk-scoring system to maximize…[Read more]

https://theintercept.com/2023/01/12/inflation-cpi-report-larry-summers/

Summers had been hailed as a prophet for warning back in 2020 that pandemic-driven inflation was long term rather than temporary, necessitating, in his opinion, an engineered slowdown in the economy — a tough-love approach he was credited with having the courage to v…[Read more]

https://www.rsn.org/001/health-care-giants-are-making-millions-off-of-unfair-medicare-overpayments.html

Medicare Advantage has become a major profit-driver for the insurance industry, with government funds now accounting for a majority of most big insurers’ health plan revenues. That’s especially true for Humana, which received more than 90 per…[Read more]

In other news, water is wet, and babies, kittens and puppies are cute.

https://www.rsn.org/001/what-to-do-about-americas-labor-shortage-easy-pay-people-more.html

Jerome Powell and the Fed don’t want to hear this. They’re aiming to deal with the “labor shortage” by slowing the economy so much that employers can find all the workers they need wi…[Read more]

Study Reveals Exxon Accurately Predicted Global Warming Decades Ago

It finds that Exxon’s scientists predicted, on average, that burning fossil fuels was going to cause the earth to warm by 0.20 degrees Celsius per decade, with an uncertainty of 0.04 degrees. Within uncertainty, this was the same warming that was p…[Read more]

Building New Worlds in an Era of Collapse

The need to create openings is a real one in these times. Many had hoped, as Arundhati Roy famously wrote, that the pandemic might be a portal to a more just world. In the early days of COVID-19, there was a sense that the world as we knew it was gone, and that everything about…[Read more]

https://www.rawstory.com/julie-hudson-arrest/

Julie Hudson, 31, went to the Webster Police Department to inquire why there was an arrest warrant for her in Texas, which was preventing her from getting a job.

“Julie went down to our local police department in Philadelphia thinking, ‘I’ll get to the bottom of it in person.’ And when she went th…[Read more]

https://www.rsn.org/001/how-the-braslia-violence-has-its-roots-in-bolsonaros-war-on-nature.html

He and his environment minister, Marina Silva, promised zero deforestation in the Amazon, an end to invasions into any of Brazil’s biomes, and greater participation for Indigenous peoples in national decision making. These are changes on a h…[Read more]

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/larry-summer-cryptocurrency

Summers worked with DCG for over six years. Particularly last year, during a high point for Bitcoin and crypto more broadly, he issued widely-reported public pronouncements about the crypto industry, including declaring that Bitcoin “is here to stay.” Summers also called for new reg…[Read more]

https://progressive.org/magazine/chicago-homegrown-resistance-environmental-racism-johnson/

So far, so good, right? Move a highly polluting company from Chicago’s affluent and white Lincoln Park neighborhood to a Latinx and African American community on the South Side. The “Chicago Way” appeared to be alive and well in the twenty-first century…[Read more]