June 8, 2015

These Are the 13 Cities Where Millennials Can't Afford a Home

These Are the 13 Cities Where Millennials Can't Afford a Home
Soaring home prices and stagnant wages combine to make home-buying in some cities a pipe dream for young adults


(Bloomberg) There's no place like home — except when you can't afford one.

Millennials have been priced out of some of the biggest U.S. cities, with residential real estate prices rising even as wage growth remains elusive.

Bloomberg used data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Zillow Group Inc. and Bankrate.com to quantify how much more money millennials would need to earn each year to afford a home in the largest U.S. cities. The good news is that out of 50 metropolitan areas, 37 are actually affordable for the typical 18-34 year-old.

The bad news is that the areas that often most appeal to young adults are also the ones where homeownership is the most out of reach.



The biggest disparities are on the West Coast. Take the three Californian hubs of San Francisco, San Jose (the heart of Silicon Valley), and Los Angeles (where a developer is trying to sell one of the biggest homes in U.S. history for a record $500 million). The typical young adult in those cities doesn't even make half of what's needed to afford a home. .................(more)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-08/these-are-the-13-cities-where-millennials-can-t-afford-a-home

June 8, 2015

Will the TPP Kill the Post Office?

Will the TPP Kill the Post Office?

Monday, 08 June 2015 00:00
By Dave Johnson, Campaign for America's Future | Op-Ed


Corporations are notorious for sneaking things into laws and regulations before the public can find out and rally to stop it. And we know from the conservative Supreme Court arguments against the Affordable Care Act that even what amounts to a typo can be used to change the obvious meaning and intent of a law.

These are reasons we need to see the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership before Congress votes to preapprove it with fast track trade promotion authority (TPA). They are pushing what is literally a pig in a poke on us. We the People need to open that bag and have a good, long look inside before fast track buys the TPP pig in our name.

Negotiated in secret by corporate representatives, it is probable that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is loaded with things the big corporations have snuck in. We already know from leaks that TPP contains provisions allowing companies to sue our government in "corporate courts" if they feel a law or regulation is cutting into their profits. What else is in there?

.....(snip).....

State-Owned Enterprises

The U.S. Trade Representative website says TPP will have "groundbreaking new rules designed to ensure fair competition between state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and private companies."

We are also pursuing pioneering rules to ensure that private sector businesses and workers are able to compete on fair terms with SOEs, especially when such SOEs receive significant government backing to engage in commercial activity.

… Commitments ensuring SOEs act in accordance with commercial considerations and compete fairly, without undue advantages from the governments that own them, while allowing governments to provide support to SOEs that provide public services domestically; and Rules that will provide transparency with respect to the nature of government control over and support for SOEs.

Will TPP enable the privatizers to declare things like our beloved U.S. Postal Service, schools and roads to be "commercial activity" that competes with private companies? How about our parks, libraries, public pensions, and other public services? .........(more)

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/31234-will-tpp-kill-the-post-office

June 8, 2015

Chris Hedges: "A lone soldier..who rises up inside the system..unmasks the military for what it is"

from truthdig:



by Chris Hedges


The military in the United States portrays itself as endowed with the highest virtues—honor, duty, self-sacrifice, courage and patriotism. Politicians, entertainers, sports stars, the media, clerics and academics slavishly bow before the military machine, ignoring its colossal pillaging of state resources, the egregious war crimes it has normalized across the globe, its abject service not to democracy or freedom but corporate profit, and the blind, mind-numbing obedience it inculcates among its members. A lone soldier or Marine who rises up inside the system to denounce the hypermasculinity that glorifies violence and war, who exposes the false morality of the military, who refuses to kill in the service of imperial power, unmasks the military for what it is. And he or she, as Chelsea Manning has learned, swiftly pays a very, very heavy price.

Spc. Robert Weilbacher as a new Army combat medic stationed in South Korea listened to stories told by combat veterans, many suffering from trauma and depression, about the routine and indiscriminate slaughter of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was horrified. He had believed the propaganda fed to him over the years. He considered himself a patriot. He had accepted the notion that the U.S. military was a force for good, intervening to liberate Iraqis and Afghans and fight terrorists. But after hearing the veterans’ tales, his worldview crumbled. He began to ask questions he had not asked before. He began to think. And thinking within any military establishment is an act of subversion. He soon decided he did not want to be part of an organization that routinely snuffed out the lives of unarmed people, including children. He applied in February 2014 for a classification known as Conscientious Objector (1-0).

He instantly became a pariah within his unit. No one wanted to associate with him. He was taunted as a “traitor,” “coward,” “faggot” and “hippie.” He was assigned to the most demeaning jobs on the base. And the military bureaucracy began making him jump through hoops that he is still trying to negotiate two years later. He became an example to his fellow soldiers of the physical and emotional harassment, as well as humiliation, that is visited on all who dare within the military to challenge the sanctity of war and discipline.

“I feel as if my own government is torturing me,” he said when I reached him by phone in his barracks at Fort Campbell, Ky.

.......(snip).......

He discovered the Iraq Body Count website and was appalled by what he learned there. He began to devour the writings and statements of Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, the Rev. John Dear, Muhammad Ali and the Dalai Lama. He could no longer watch violent movies or play violent video games.

“I began to read about the wars in Vietnam and World War II,” he said. “I read about Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Agent Orange, radiation and how it’s still affecting people today, how people are still dying or being born with congenital defects. I found Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. I had never heard of them. I guess there was a good reason I had never heard of them. I read ‘A People’s History of the United States,’ by Zinn. I read ‘Understanding Power,’ by Chomsky. A lot of my influences, even though I am an atheist, came from religious figures like Gandhi, Father John Dear and King. I read ‘Pilgrimage to Nonviolence.’ I know why they do not tell us the truth about war. We have a volunteer Army. If people knew the truth it would decrease the numbers who want to join. I had been betrayed.” Then, in early February of 2014, he went online to the website of the Center on Conscience & War, led by Maria Santelli and Bill Galvin. Soon he contacted the two activists and told them he was a conscientious objector. ................(more)

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/thou_shalt_not_kill_20150607

June 8, 2015

Chris Hedges "Wages of Rebellion"

Published on Jun 1, 2015

Journalist, author and war correspondent Chris Hedges spoke in Troy NY on Friday, May 29, 2015, part of the Spring 2015 season at The Sanctuary for Independent Media.

.....

Revolutions come in waves and cycles. We are again riding the crest of a revolutionary epic, much like 1848 or 1917, from the Arab Spring to movements against austerity in Greece to the Occupy movement. In "Wages of Rebellion," Chris Hedges--who has chronicled the malaise and sickness of a society in terminal moral decline in his books "Empire of Illusion" and "Death of the Liberal Class"--investigates what social and psychological factors cause revolution, rebellion, and resistance. Drawing on an ambitious overview of prominent philosophers, historians, and literary figures he shows not only the harbingers of a coming crisis but also the nascent seeds of rebellion. Hedges' message is clear: popular uprisings in the United States and around the world are inevitable in the face of environmental destruction and wealth polarization.

Focusing on the stories of rebels from around the world and throughout history, Hedges investigates what it takes to be a rebel in modern times. Utilizing the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, Hedges describes the motivation that guides the actions of rebels as "sublime madness"--the state of passion that causes the rebel to engage in an unavailing fight against overwhelmingly powerful and oppressive forces. For Hedges, resistance is carried out not for its success, but as a moral imperative that affirms life. Those who rise up against the odds will be those endowed with this "sublime madness."

June 8, 2015

Left Forum 2015, Toward a Mass Left Party

Published on Jun 2, 2015
Open University of the Left at Left Forum 2015, 5-31-15, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, New York City, Towards a Mass Left Party, Chair: Loren Anderson, Philly Socialist Party, Louis Proyect, North Star founder & editor, The Unrepentant Marxist, Stephanie Altimari, Philly Socialists, Jim Brash, The North Star, Green Party of New Jersey

June 8, 2015

It would be nice to hear it straight for once. Stopping climate change means giving up on growth.

from Dissent magazine:


Growth vs. the Climate
Daniel Immerwahr ▪ Spring 2015



[font size="1"]"We have the solutions." At the People’s Climate March, September 21, 2014 (Light Brigading/Flickr)[/font]

The year 2013 was one of the ten hottest on record. So was 2010. So were 2009, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2003, 2002, and 1998. Last year, with its polar vortex and biting winter, seemed to bring relief to North America. Except it also brought temperatures of over 120ºF to Australia, massive flooding to Malaysia, and the third harrowing year of drought to California. As it turns out, 2014 was the hottest single year since meteorologists started measuring in 1850.

By now, we’ve raised the average global temperature a little less than one degree Celsius since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The best predictions suggest that, if we go about our business as usual, we will raise it somewhere between four and six degrees by 2100. With the heat will also come side effects: fiercer and more frequent storms, droughts, acidifying oceans, melting glaciers, and the loss of species.

And the bad news is, that’s not even the bad news. Although the altered climate is threatening in its own right—heat alone killed tens of thousands of Europeans in the lethal summer of 2003—the thing to really worry about is the infrastructure. Each drought, each megastorm, each scorching summer puts a strain on the complex systems that provide us with water, food, and power and that keep disease and disorder at bay. These systems can often endure a single crisis—one Sandy, one Katrina. The problem is what happens when the Sandys and Katrinas start coming back to back, piling up on each other. That’s when the money runs out, the electricity goes off, and everyone starts wondering where to find water. If true catastrophe arrives, it will not come gradually—the frog in boiling water—but, as the historian Nils Gilman writes, “as a series of radical discontinuities—a series of bewildering ‘oh shit’ events.”

Welcome to the future. Oh shit.

Those with long memories will know that this isn’t the first time it felt like we were testing the earth’s ability to support us. In 1968, the biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which prophesied civilizational collapse for societies unable to rapidly bring down their birth rates. There were simply too many people, he argued, for the planet’s dwindling supply of resources. Ehrlich got a vasectomy and preached birth control, though he also advocated for more extreme measures: compulsory sterilization, a ban on cars, and a tax on cribs. Internationally, he proposed “triage,” aiding the countries that remained viable but writing off those, like India, that he saw as too far gone. .......................(more)

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/growth-vs-the-climate

June 8, 2015

Fiddling while the world burns.......

Sunday, June 07, 2015
by Common Dreams

With 2°C Target Falling Swiftly Out of Sight, Inaction on Climate a 'Crime Against Humanity'
With commitments failing to keep pace with soaring temperatures, dire warnings as climate negotiators meet in Bonn in preparation for Paris summit

byJon Queally, staff writer


International climate talks continue, but its is the action (or lack thereof) that humanity needs to worry about.

As representatives from nearly all the world's nations meet in Bonn, Germany this week with the aim of building a framework for a final deal that can be signed at the UN climate summit in Paris later this year, voices from the least developed countries and members of civil society are warning that the major powers are still offering far too little in the way of meaningful action.

According to the sharpest critics of the largest polluting nations—which includes the U.S., Canada, China, and the European Union—a continued failure to make bold and enforceable reductions of greenhouse gas emissions should be considered nothing less than a "crime against humanity."

As observers describe progress at the talks in Bonn as moving at a snail's pace, the attempt to forge a meaningful agreement for Paris appears to be slipping quickly through the fingers of world leaders.

.....(snip).....

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that on current emissions trends, the planet is now on target for a temperature increase of 4.8C or more by 2100 — a level of warming that would drive dramatic increases in hunger, extreme weather, species loss, and waves of climate-fueled migrations of tens of millions of people. ............(more)

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/06/07/2degc-target-falling-swiftly-out-sight-inaction-climate-crime-against-humanity

June 7, 2015

Send in the Republicans (cartoon)

http://www.truthdig.com/cartoon/item/send_in_the_republicans_20150607

June 7, 2015

Think The Net Neutrality Fight Is Over? Think Again.

WASHINGTON -- When the Obama administration approved strong new net neutrality rules earlier this year, advocates rejoiced. "We have won on net neutrality,” Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak told The Guardian. President Barack Obama declared victory and thanked Reddit, the self-proclaimed "Front Page of the Internet" for its community's activism on the issue.

But these celebrations may have been premature. Telecom and cable companies, which provide broadband access to the vast majority of Americans, are challenging the Obama administration's actions in court. If they get their way, a federal appeals court will soon delay some rules that aim to protect net neutrality, the principle that all internet traffic should be treated equally. Open-Internet advocates fear that an unfavorable decision may open the door for harmful business practices while the court battle—which could take years—plays out. A stay on part of the new rules would also likely embolden Republicans on Capitol Hill who seek to pass laws gutting the rules.

In February, the Federal Communications Commission voted along party lines to adopt rules that ban Internet service providers such as Comcast and Verizon from charging content providers such as Netflix for more reliable broadband access. ISPs and many Republican lawmakers despise the new rules, claiming that they will hamper innovation.

In April, a number of industry groups and companies challenged the new regulations in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Court. The groups later asked the court to issue a stay delaying the government from reclassifying broadband as a utility under Title II of the Communications Act, which is the legal basis underlying the new rules that ban Internet blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization. The ISPs argue that the FCC can use a different bit of telecom law to implement net neutrality rules. They also don't want the FCC to have the authority to police certain violations. ..................(more)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/05/net-neutrality-lawsuit_n_7520322.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000013

June 7, 2015

What the TiSA Leaked Documents Reveal About Negotiations

Published on Jun 7, 2015
PopularResistance.org co-director Kevin Zeese explains the most egregious portions of the secretly negotiated agreement and how the fast track battle on Capitol Hill could decide its fate