From Moderate Republican to Green Reaganite

"Let the Workers Control the Means of Production"—OK, John, I'll read this tonight.I’ve known my share of
libertarian Reaganites and I’ve known my share of libertarian
greens. But John McClaughry, the
founder of the Ethan Allen Institute and a contributing
editor at Reason, might be the country’s only
libertarian Reaganite green: The same decentralist impulse that led
him to take a job as a Reagan speechwriter also made him the
chairman of the
E.F. Schumacher Society and got him interested in worker-managed
enterprises. The mix of interests reminds me of Karl Hess, but while
Hess started his career as a Goldwaterite, McClaughry began in the
un-Goldwater camp: the “moderate Republican” sector of the ’60s,
which evidently contained multitudes.

McClaughry is now serializing his memoirs at the Front Porch
Republic site. The
first chapter, which covers those moderate-Republican years, is
valuable both as a glimpse into that forgotten milieu and as a look
at what happens when the government tries to get into the business
of promoting “voluntary” behavior. The young McClaughry was heavily
influenced by a libertarian text of the day, Richard Cornuelle’s

Reclaiming the American Dream, which celebrated the
“independent sector” of voluntary mutual associations. The
political class responded to Cornuelle’s ideas by co-opting them,
with Cornuelle’s assistance; Murray Rothbard mocked
their efforts at the time, writing in The Libertarian
Forum that

I don't think Hank done it this way.a “central theme” of the new [Nixon]
Administration will be a nationwide drive to stimulate “voluntary
action” against social ills. It adds that Secretary George Romney
is “in charge of planning the voluntary action effort.” This
concept needs to be savored: government, the quintessence of
coercion, is going to plan a nationwide “voluntary”
effort. George Orwell, where art thou now? War is Peace, Freedom is
Slavery, Voluntary Action is Government Planning.

The Post goes on to say that Romney, Secretary Finch, and the
President “are devotees of the idea that vast and untapped energies
of volunteers in an ‘independent sector’ can transform the Nation.”
Nixon endorsed the idea in 1965, and recently declared that “the
President should be the chief patron of citizen efforts.” And it
turns out that last year, Secretary Finch was co-author of a book
on the independent sector, with — you guessed it — Richard C.
Cornuelle, the “godfather of independent action” and head of the
Nixon task-force on independent voluntary action. Two major
programs are emerging: a mixed public-private organization
chartered by the Federal government to stimulate voluntary action
drives, and a series of Presidental awards, like the World War II
Navy “E” for Efficiency, to be bestowed by the President in person
for outstanding voluntary efforts.

Cornuelle was eventually disillusioned with all this.
(McClaughry quotes him: “I cannot imagine why I thought for a
moment that the state could be persuaded to contrive its own
undoing.”) But the more interesting disillusionment is
McClaughry’s, and one of the pleasures of McClaughry’s memoir
is the opportunity to see a young Cornuellean getting fed up with
the unfolding process. McClaughry’s sardonic account hits its peak
when he serves on Nixon’s National Voluntary Service Action
Council, chaired by “Frank Stella, a Michigan auto dealer whose
qualifications pretty much began and ended with his chairmanship of
Italians for Nixon.” By this time, Nixon’s vision of “voluntary
action” was so stunted that the council’s only concern “was the
operation of the federal government’s volunteer agencies — VISTA,
the Peace Corps, Retired Senior Volunteer Programs, the Foster
Grandparents Program and several others.” At the council’s
organizational meeting, it was decided that the new
organization

The lost prophet of voluntarism.needed an “honorary chairperson,” an epitome of
caring, selfless service, and probity. With one heart and voice the
Council found exactly the right choice: Mrs. Patricia Nixon.
Approved by acclamation! Tongue in cheek, I moved that the staff be
asked to compile a complete list of Mrs. Nixon’s many contributions
to voluntary service. Approved! (So far as I can recall, it was
never produced.)

As the feds transformed quasi-libertarian ideas into a
bureaucratic self-parody, McClaughry himself moved in the opposite
direction, becoming more libertarian in outlook. An account of the
National Home Ownership Foundation Act (NHOF), a
McClaughry-conceived attempt to offer a decentralist alternative to
urban renewal and public housing projects, shows the bill evolving
further and further from its original form before being completely
supplanted by LBJ’s National Housing Act of 1968. McClaughry in
turn evolved “from the ‘government pump priming and assistance’
model of the NHOF to the more libertarian ‘get the hell out of the
way and let people produce’ model.” For a sense of what that shift
looked like in practice, compare McClaughry’s summary of the
National Home Ownership Foundation Act’s provisions, which included
a substantial role for federal dollars, with the ideas he was
espousing in this 1978
Reason article. “What, then, should be the government’s
role in the housing industry?” the ’78 piece concludes. “[O]ne is
hard put to disagree with Elbert Hubbard’s pungent phrase: ‘Keep
away from that wheelbarrow! What the hell do you know about
machinery?'”

from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/11/25/from-moderate-republican-to-green-reagan
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The 2013 Holiday Shopping Must-Have: A Discount

The U.S. holiday shopping season traditionally begins on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, with alluring sales and promotions. On the day the ultimate discounter, Wal-Mart’s CEO resigns, as Bloomberg’s Rich Yamarone notes, the most agreed-upon take so far is that sales will be difficult amid a deteriorating economy – every major retailer in the Bloomberg Orange Book has made mention of the competitive market for the consumer’s dwindling dollar. Target Corp. CEO Gregg Steinhafel said, “it’s clear that the holiday season will be highly promotional and that consumers will be laser-focused on value.”

Via Bloomberg Economist Rich Yamarone,

Holiday spending expectations are not exactly lofty. A Gallup poll conducted Nov. 7-10 found Americans estimated spending $704 per household on Christmas gifts this season, notably lower than the $770 they projected at this time last year. A separate survey conducted by the National Foundation for Credit Counseling found the persistently high rate of unemployment coupled with the long duration of unemployment are still “very real challenges many people are facing.” The November poll revealed 53 percent said they would “cut back on spending, since I am worse off financially this year,” and 33 percent claimed they would “not spend at all, because I anticipate further financial distress.” Only 11 percent had intentions to spend at the same level as a year ago, while 3 percent looked to spend more.

 

Target’s CEO told investors last week consumer spending remain constrained. “In particular, lower and middle income households are shopping cautiously, as they work to stay within tight, very tight, household budgets, which have seen additional pressure from this year’s payroll tax increase,” he said.

Consumers simply don’t have the wherewithal to get the economy moving — real disposable personal incomes are advancing by a gradual 1.9 percent pace, while real average hourly earnings are only 1.3 percent higher than year ago levels. The household sector is limiting its purchases to necessities, like food, and retailers are well aware of this.

My colleague Matt Nolfo and I stopped by a Target in Birmingham, Alabama during a recent speaking tour. The biggest takeaway — other than a six-pack of Bud — was the enormous size of the grocery section. What used to be a few aisles of dry goods — coffee, cereal, and chips — has ballooned to a sizable dedication of square footage including frozen food, alcohol, and freshly baked produce.

Dollar Tree Inc. has been moving in this direction for several quarters. CEO Bob Sasser highlighted this during his company’s earnings report, noting comparative sales growth in the third quarter was the result of increased sales in need-based consumables. “We’re rolling out freezers and coolers at a faster pace,” Sasser said. In the third quarter Dollar Tree installed freezers and coolers in 122 additional stores for a total of 566 store installations year-to-date exceeding the company’s original plan for 550 store installations. “We now offer frozen and refrigerated product in 3,115 stores,” Sasser said.

All this food considered, maybe the year’s best seller will be fruitcake — a heavily discounted one.

 

Source: Bloomberg


    



via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/Cce5kgN1uMc/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Beware The ‘Head-Fake’ Taper As “Markets Have Now Discounted Their Own Dishonesty”

Submitted by James Howard Kunstler of Kunstler.com,

The financial wires and pod-waves are all lit up these days like it was happy hour at the Lottery Winner’s Lounge.  It appears that the American economy – capital management division – has found the long-wished-for magic alternative energy source: horseshit. It is fueling the conversation all over the Web and over the senile mainstream media megaphones. One technical analyst, celebrity Tweeter Ralph Acampora of Altaira Wealth Management, actually said this week that the USA would be “energy independent by 2016.” That’s rich. We’d only have to come up with 8.5 million new barrels of oil a day, or give up driving cars altogether.

Apparently, the Federal Reserve is not just hosing down the markets with liquidity (i.e. money for nothing), but has also turned its headquarters in lower Manhattan into the world’s biggest stationary crack pipe. Meanwhile, more than a few professional observers of the financial scene say there can’t be any bubble because that’s the only thing everybody talks about and bubbles only form when nobody notices them.

That’s just not true. Plenty of people were hollering and finger-pointing about the housing bubble years before it blew up the banking system, including yours truly in a book published in 2005 (The Long Emergency). The reason there is so much anxious chatter about the current bubble is because the bubble is there for all to see, and when it pops it is sure to leave a lot more rubble on the ground than the last time — for instance, the wreckage of trust in all paper investments, which would be quite an historic financial innovation. Since the interventions and manipulations of markets and interest rates are perfectly obvious, one would have to conclude from the current sentiment that faith in the crookedness of finance has completely solidified. The markets have now discounted their own dishonesty.

The story making the rounds these days is that the USA’s industrial economy is on the rise again; that the housing market has “recovered;” that (according to Meredith Whitney) the “central corridor” of the nation (Texas to Minnesota) is the second coming of Japan in the 1960s; that we have more oil than we know what to do with; that the nation has bred a super-race of intrepid entrepreneurial risk-takers like unto no other society in history; and finally that whatever else we are or are not, America is the cleanest shirt in the laundry basket of Mother Earth.

This is all horseshit of course, being smoked in the New York Fed’s crack pipe.

Here’s what’s actually going on. The Federal Reserve can only pretend to have any option besides force-feeding “money” into Wall Street as if it were a Strasbourg Goose with Crohn’s disease. What passes through goose is a vile toxic substance called malinvestment, which turns the energies of society into activities that produce nothing of value, like hedge fund employee bonuses, NSA operations, Tesla car promotion, Frank Gehry condo towers, drone strikes against Afghani wedding parties, Obama photo ops, inflated auction prices of oil paintings, and Barney’s new Jay-Z holiday fashion collection.

The Fed makes regular noises about ending the force-feeding program (a.k.a. “quantitative easing” or “bond purchases”) issued in the recorded minutes of its Open Market Committee (FOMC). The propaganda is called “forward guidance” to give it the appearance of seriousness and rectitude, but its actual nature is more like what goes on in a Jerry Lewis movie of the 1960s — a kind of antic mugging. Lately it’s referred to as “taper talk” in reference to the threat of tapering the Fed’s purchases of US Treasury bonds and other debt paper, which runs at around $85 billion a month. Sometime soon, the Fed may announce a tiny taper of say $10 billion a month. This head-fake taper will cause the interest rates on the ten-year-bond to shoot up north of 3 percent and threaten to bankrupt the government — which is too broke to pay interest that high on the loans it takes. The markets will have a whack attack over the tiny taper. The Fed will freak out at the odor of deflationary depression and go back to full-tilt force-feeding of the sick goose.

The outcome will be some combination of a complete loss of faith in paper currency and the “assets” denominated in it, a complete loss of trust between banks that they are solvent enough to do business with each other, and a conclusive implosion of Wall Street and all the institutions in and around it, extending to the executive branch of the federal government. The sorry little appendage to all that, US economy, will be left in the cold and dark, whimpering for its mommy.


    



via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/Q-05c_R-DZ0/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Beware The 'Head-Fake' Taper As "Markets Have Now Discounted Their Own Dishonesty"

Submitted by James Howard Kunstler of Kunstler.com,

The financial wires and pod-waves are all lit up these days like it was happy hour at the Lottery Winner’s Lounge.  It appears that the American economy – capital management division – has found the long-wished-for magic alternative energy source: horseshit. It is fueling the conversation all over the Web and over the senile mainstream media megaphones. One technical analyst, celebrity Tweeter Ralph Acampora of Altaira Wealth Management, actually said this week that the USA would be “energy independent by 2016.” That’s rich. We’d only have to come up with 8.5 million new barrels of oil a day, or give up driving cars altogether.

Apparently, the Federal Reserve is not just hosing down the markets with liquidity (i.e. money for nothing), but has also turned its headquarters in lower Manhattan into the world’s biggest stationary crack pipe. Meanwhile, more than a few professional observers of the financial scene say there can’t be any bubble because that’s the only thing everybody talks about and bubbles only form when nobody notices them.

That’s just not true. Plenty of people were hollering and finger-pointing about the housing bubble years before it blew up the banking system, including yours truly in a book published in 2005 (The Long Emergency). The reason there is so much anxious chatter about the current bubble is because the bubble is there for all to see, and when it pops it is sure to leave a lot more rubble on the ground than the last time — for instance, the wreckage of trust in all paper investments, which would be quite an historic financial innovation. Since the interventions and manipulations of markets and interest rates are perfectly obvious, one would have to conclude from the current sentiment that faith in the crookedness of finance has completely solidified. The markets have now discounted their own dishonesty.

The story making the rounds these days is that the USA’s industrial economy is on the rise again; that the housing market has “recovered;” that (according to Meredith Whitney) the “central corridor” of the nation (Texas to Minnesota) is the second coming of Japan in the 1960s; that we have more oil than we know what to do with; that the nation has bred a super-race of intrepid entrepreneurial risk-takers like unto no other society in history; and finally that whatever else we are or are not, America is the cleanest shirt in the laundry basket of Mother Earth.

This is all horseshit of course, being smoked in the New York Fed’s crack pipe.

Here’s what’s actually going on. The Federal Reserve can only pretend to have any option besides force-feeding “money” into Wall Street as if it were a Strasbourg Goose with Crohn’s disease. What passes through goose is a vile toxic substance called malinvestment, which turns the energies of society into activities that produce nothing of value, like hedge fund employee bonuses, NSA operations, Tesla car promotion, Frank Gehry condo towers, drone strikes against Afghani wedding parties, Obama photo ops, inflated auction prices of oil paintings, and Barney’s new Jay-Z holiday fashion collection.

The Fed makes regular noises about ending the force-feeding program (a.k.a. “quantitative easing” or “bond purchases”) issued in the recorded minutes of its Open Market Committee (FOMC). The propaganda is called “forward guidance” to give it the appearance of seriousness and rectitude, but its actual nature is more like what goes on in a Jerry Lewis movie of the 1960s — a kind of antic mugging. Lately it’s referred to as “taper talk” in reference to the threat of tapering the Fed’s purchases of US Treasury bonds and other debt paper, which runs at around $85 billion a month. Sometime soon, the Fed may announce a tiny taper of say $10 billion a month. This head-fake taper will cause the interest rates on the ten-year-bond to shoot up north of 3 percent and threaten to bankrupt the government — which is too broke to pay interest that high on the loans it takes. The markets will have a whack attack over the tiny taper. The Fed will freak out at the odor of deflationary depression and go back to full-tilt force-feeding of the sick goose.

The outcome will be some combination of a complete loss of faith in paper currency and the “assets” denominated in it, a complete loss of trust between banks that they are solvent enough to do business with each other, and a conclusive implosion of Wall Street and all the institutions in and around it, extending to the executive branch of the federal government. The sorry little appendage to all that, US economy, will be left in the cold and dark, whimpering for its mommy.


    



via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/Q-05c_R-DZ0/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Debt Is Failing as a Driver of Economic Growth

 

The US is heading towards a debt crisis.

 

Today, the US’s Debt to GDP ratio stands at over 105% (debt of $16.7 trillion on a GDP of $15.68 trillion). The only other time we’ve had more debt relative to our GDP was during WWII when the Debt to GDP ratio hit 112%:

 

 

Debt is not inherently evil. Debt that doesn’t create growth is. 

 

In the 1960s every new $1 in debt bought nearly $1 in GDP growth. In the 70s it began to fall as the debt climbed. By the time we hit the ‘80s and ‘90s, each new $1 in debt bought only $0.30-$0.50 in GDP growth.

 

And today, each new $1 in debt buys only $0.10 in GDP growth at best.

 

 

Put another way, the growth of the last three decades, but especially of the last 5-10 years, has been driven by a greater and greater amount of debt. As you can see, after the Crisis began in 2007, the US moved into the point of debt saturation at which each new $1 in debt generates no additional growth.

 

This is why the Fed has been so concerned about interest rates. With a debt load of this size, every 1% rise in the US’s debt payments means another $100 billion in debt payments.

 

Unfortunately for the Fed, rates will eventually rise. It is guaranteed. As you can see in the below chart, rates have fallen almost nonstop since the early ‘80s. This is not sustainable. At some point rates will rise again. I cannot state expressly when, but that point is coming sooner rather than later.

 

 

 

With that in mind, investors should take steps today to shield their wealth from the impact of this.

 

If you have not taken steps to prepare this, we have a FREE Special Report that outlines how to prepare your portfolio. To pick up a copy, swing by:

http://phoenixcapitalmarketing.com/special-reports.html

 

 

Best Regards

 

Phoenix Capital Research

 

 

 

 

 


    



via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/S8IDgHCX8qk/story01.htm Phoenix Capital Research

Barack Obama, Trustworthiness Plummeting, Claims He’s “Not a Particularly Ideological Person”

not ideologicalPresident Obama is fast approaching lame duck
status as the public’s opinion of him sours. Only four in ten
Americans
now think he can effectively manage the federal
government,  and a majority (53 percent) don’t find him honest
or trustworthy. But there is one thing Americans can still trust
Obama to do,
raise lots of money for Democrats running in elections next
year. It may not matter what Obama says at these fundraisers (even
if they’re attended by the 47 percent that still trust him) as it’s
presumably his position as president that draws donors. He doesn’t
just show up and smile, though. Sometimes he’s good for a
laugh.


From Reuters:

President Barack Obama, on a fundraising swing in
Seattle on Sunday, described himself as “not a particularly
ideological person” despite ongoing political clashes with
Republicans over healthcare, the economy, and immigration
reform.

He’s
not a socialist, he just thinks he’s always right. And
everything that’s not is Republicans’ fault. That may not make him
seem particularly ideological, but it does make him seem
particularly partisan and petty.

Follow these stories and more at Reason 24/7 and don’t forget you
can e-mail stories to us at 24_7@reason.com and tweet us
at @reason247.

from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/11/25/barack-obama-trustworthiness-plummeting
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Interventionists Attempt to Isolate Rand Paul Over Iran Deal

Only The Shadow knows.... ||| Al JazeeraAt The American Conservative, W. James
Antle III has a
shrewd, pessimistic take on how GOP opposition to the Iran
nuclear deal threatens to isolate intervention-skeptic Sen. Rand
Paul (R-Kentucky):

The most hawkish conservatives follow a simple script: Obama is
an apologizing appeaser while Republicans are the muscular party of
Reagan and anyone to the right of Jimmy Carter. That narrative is
complicated by the fact that they often side with the Obama
administration—when they aren’t divided among themselves—against
the rest of the right on military interventions and civil liberties
questions.

Iran brings the foreign-policy debate back to the hawks’ comfort
zone. The Iranian ayatollahs have been villains since at least the
1979 hostage crisis, much longer than Saddam Hussein was so
perceived before the Iraq war. As a state sponsor of terrorism, it
is not an undeserved reputation. […]

Republican lawmakers, aided by Democrats like New Jersey Sen.
Robert Menendez, are insisting on zero enrichment as a condition
for relaxing any sanctions against Iran. Some would even like to
authorize the use of military force. There are no partisan or
opportunistic reasons for any Republican to resist such
legislation.

In the Senate, Rand Paul—who has supported some sanctions—may be
alone. If he decides to push back against Marco Rubio, John McCain,
and Lindsey Graham this time around, it’s hard to envision Ted Cruz
or even Mike Lee joining him.

Whole thing
here; Antle’s 2010 Reason profile of then-candidate
Paul here.

Interventionists recently seen stomping on
Paul’s Iran positioning include longtime critics Jennifer Rubin
at the Washington Post (“Rand
Paul: Worse than Obama on Iran“) and the
Washington Free Beacon.

After the jump read what Paul told me in late August when I
asked whether the U.S. has “moral standing” to stop nuclear
proliferation in Iran and elsewhere:

Q: What about developments pursuant of nuclear weapons?
Iran, North Korea….Do we actually have moral standing to stop
that, and what are the tools that you think are
appropriate?

A: You know, what we’ve been trying with Iran is sanctions, and
I think the sanctions have had some influence, and I think they’ve
at least superficially brought the Iranians to the point where
they’d like to negotiate. I think ultimately, though, that no
successful negotiation will happen unless Russia and China are
included in it.

I think we’ve made the mistake of having sort of superficial
show-votes in the Security Council. There’s always going to
be—particularly as we came out of the Cold War—there’s ah, I guess
the best way to describe it is Russia feels a diminished manhood.
And they want to assert their manhood, and assert their former
superpowerdom by voting against us in the Security Council, and I
think they will. But I think if you were to talk to them one-on-one
in a basis, same with China, and convince them that 1) trade with
us is important and that we want to expand trade with them, but in
order to do that we need to quit diverting so many resources to
Iran. If you just get Iran to behave we’d all trade better, we’d
all make more money, and it’d be much better for all of our
countries.

But I think you need their influence. Because if both Russia and
China were to not trade with Iran, and go and talk to Iran, and say
“Look, just cut this nonsense of building a nuclear bomb, and we’ll
see if we can get some of the sanctions relaxed; we’re talking with
the United States”—I don’t think we’re going to be able to talk
with Iran directly probably very well, although I’m not sure that
doesn’t happen. But I think through Russia and China.

The same goes for North Korea. I think China holds the cards for
us with North Korea. I think they’re inept and poverty-stricken and
unable to really do anything; even the weapons they make usually
don’t work. So I don’t think we fear North Korea as a great ability
to attack the United States. But they have a nuclear weapon and
they need to be watched for that reason and contained. And I think
one of the ways you contain them, is that 1) you shouldn’t feed
them. When they run out of food, we shouldn’t give them any. But we
should encourage China that it’s to China’s benefit with us, and
our relations, to try to control North Korea.

from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/11/25/interventionists-attempt-to-isolate-rand
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A. Barton Hinkle on Taxpayer-Subsidized Projects for the Elite

As Richmond, VA considers a broad new
redevelopment plan that includes a baseball stadium, A. Barton
Hinkle recalls a quote. “We should be careful to get out of an
experience only the wisdom that is in it,” Mark Twain advised,
“lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She
will never sit down on a hot stove lid again … but also she will
never sit down on a cold one.” Hinkle says that Richmond should be
wise enough not to assume the stadium project will be another hot
stove lid that will leave everyone feeling burned. But the city
also should recognize that the project has some parallels.

View this article.

from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/11/25/a-barton-hinkle-on-taxpayer-ballparks-ho
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Mayor Bloomberg Pushes for Ban on Styrofoam Cups

New York City elected Bill De Blasio as their new mayor earlier
this month, but Bloomberg still has some time in office. Before he
goes out, he wants to push a final, significant piece of
legislation into law:
banning plastic foam cups and plates. 

Bloomberg has supported the ban

since it was introduced by Brooklyn Councilman Lewis
Fidler this summer. Now, at Bloomberg’s request, the City
Council’s Sanitation Committee will hold a hearing Monday to
discuss the bill.

Bloomberg has said the ban is a no-brainer for environmental
reasons. According to the
New York Post, Bloomberg spokesman Jake Goldman said,
“When polystyrene foam is used for food service it becomes a
devastating pollutant that infects our parks and waterways while
never biodegrading and has been classified a carcinogenic health
hazard by the National Institute of Health.”

The Post also reports that plastic foam food
containers add 23,000 tons of trash a year to landfills.

Although Mr. Bloomberg is notorious
for his Nanny State tendencies, the plastic foam bill is not as
unprecedented as, say, the large soda ban. Many cities, including

Seattle and
Los Angeles, have banned the substance.

However, the bill’s opponents argue that the ban will be
extremely costly for small businesses. The American Chemistry
Council reports that replacing polystyrene cups and trays with the
cheapest alternative will cost New Yorkers $91.3 million
per year. MB Public Affairs found that for every $1 spent on
polystyrene foam goods, businesses 
will have to spend $1.94 on alternative replacements,
effectively doubling costs. Their report finds that “this 94% is in
effect an “environmental tax” far higher than any current sales tax
or import duty rates affecting the cost of consumer products.” And
given that most large chains in the city have
already stopped using polystyrene, small businesses will be hit
especially hard.  

Additionally, some trade groups and politicians have noted
alternative approaches to reducing environmental harm. In
California, 65 cities
with a total population of around 8
million (similar to New York City’s) have polystyrene recycling
centers. New York City’s recycling centers currently reject the
material, citing prohibitively high costs.

Forbes’ Jeff Stier
writes of Seattle’s problems with their polystyrene ban:

In coffee-loving Seattle, where styrofoam cups are already
banned, they’ve been having a hard time recycling their allegedly
green paper cups, according
to The Seattle Times.

They’ve found that mills don’t want recycled coffee cups because
the process takes longer, making cups more expensive to process
than items like recycled cardboard boxes. And facilities that do
accept the “mixed paper” that paper coffee cups and other food
service items contribute to, only use it in a 1:10 ratio
with higher-quality fibers. So there’s not much of a market for it,
at least in the U.S.

Even if Bloomberg doesn’t manage to get the ban passed, his
successor may try. On his campaign website, De Blasio pledges
to end government use of plastic foam. 

from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/11/25/mayor-bloombergs-final-act-ban-plastic-f
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A Greek Tragedy: Half Of New Greek HIV Cases Are Self-Inflicted To Receive €700 Per Month Benefits, Study Finds

When one reads the following stunning, and tragic, excerpt from the World Health Organization’s recent report “Review of social determinants and the health divide in the WHO European Region: final report” what can one say but… Grecovery.

From the WHO:

Case study: countries’ experiences of financial crisis – Greece

 

Suicides rose by 17% between 2007 and 2009 and to 25% in 2010, according to unofficial 2010 data (398). The Minister of Health reported a further 40% rise in the first half of 2011 compared with the same period in 2010. Suicide attempts have also increased, particularly among people reporting economic distress (610). Homicide and theft rates have doubled. HIV rates and heroin use have risen significantly, with about half of new HIV infections being self-inflicted to enable people to receive benefits of €700 per month and faster admission on to drug-substitution programmes. Prostitution has also risen, probably as a response to economic hardship. Health care access has declined as hospital budgets have been cut by about 40% (398) and it is estimated that 26 000 public health workers (9100 doctors) will lose their jobs (611). Further cuts are expected as a result of recent negotiations with the IMF and European Central Bank.

But at least they have the Euro.

h/t @timmyconspiracy


    



via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/9jaPUF5Emjs/story01.htm Tyler Durden