MicroHawk's NewsScan

The Way to "Save" Medicare Is to Expand It

Medicare is broken. Medicare spending is out of control. Medicare will go bankrupt in 2024. If we don't act soon, Medicare will bankrupt the entire country.

Wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong.

The whole US health care system is broken, but Medicare isn't what broke it. Medicare is the glue that holds it together. Without Medicare, the whole system would have collapsed long ago.

via truth-out.org

Urban Releaf: How One Community Group Is Saving Urban Neighborhoods and Creating Jobs | Alternet

After working in Soledad Prison in the Salinas Valley, Kemba Shakur moved to North Oakland and realized the prison grounds were more attractive than many of the treeless neighborhoods throughout her city. She decided to change this by planting trees, not only to improve the landscape but also the quality of life.

via www.alternet.org

A Monetary Policy for the 99%: Twelve-Year-Old Reformer Goes Viral

Monetary reform - the contention that governments, not banks, should create and lend a nation's money - has rarely even made the news, so this is a first. Either the times they are a-changin', or Victoria managed to frame the message in a way that was so simple and clear that even a child could understand it.

via truth-out.org

 

America Beyond Capitalism: Is It Possible? | | AlterNet

Thousands of co-ops, worker-owned businesses, land trusts, and municipal enterprises are quietly beginning to democratize the deep substructure of the American economic system.

via www.alternet.org

Austerity Plans Are Based on the Wrong Diagnosis of the Wrong Problem -- And May Plunge Europe into Depression | | AlterNet

Private investment spending is cyclical in nature -- too much during up-boom periods and too little during down periods. That’s why government spending must act as a counter-balance. Instead, what we have seen is government actions fueling private sector spending (with lower interest rates and lower taxes) in boom periods (like the 1990s), and now withdrawing spending during the recessionary period when there is not enough private investment.

This is exactly the opposite of what should happen.

via www.alternet.org

When Economics Gets Political | Truthout

David Warsh finally says what someone needed to say: Friedrich Hayek is not an important figure in the history of macroeconomics.

“Certainly Hayek made a big impression on me and my friends, when, as young men, we read him in the 1970s,” Mr. Warsh, a journalist, wrote on his Web site, EconomicPrincipals.com, earlier this month. “We felt the same way about the Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick. With the passage of time, though, 19th-century liberalism has seemed, by itself, a less and less adequate framework with which to deal with the problems of the 21st century.”

via www.truth-out.org

How Finance Vultures Feed off the Poor As They Fight to Climb Out of Poverty | | AlterNet

Poverty is the result of decades of political choices that first created ghettos and then left them prey to a still growing industry that profits from their existence.

via www.alternet.org

Class Consciousness Is Back -- In These Times

Class position affects everything: access to healthcare, education, where you live, careers, income, tax breaks, who you marry (and when), who fights and dies for our country, and on and on.

via www.inthesetimes.com

SOUTH AFRICA: Climate Change Affecting Fisherwomen’s Livelihoods - IPS ipsnews.net

OCEAN VIEW, South Africa, Dec 13 , 2011 (IPS) - Having observed changes in the sea and the life cycles of the rock lobsters that their livelihoods depend on, a group of fisherwomen from the Western Cape, South Africa are calling on government to adjust fishing seasons to adapt to what they claim are climate change-related alterations.

via ipsnews.net

The invisible sex | Economic Policy Institute

A focus on the average retirement age misses the bigger story of how much more Americans are working and contributing to Social Security over the course of their lifetimes, thanks to women. It also ignores the fact that Social Security’s full retirement age is already increasing, so the ratio of working years to covered retirement years is roughly the same as it was in the early 1980s when the system was in balance. Last but not least, it ignores the fact that people are encouraged to continue working after claiming benefits. If you exclude people still working for pay as well as those who weren’t in the workforce to being with, such as full-time caregivers, the average retirement age is 65.5, not 62 as is often claimed.

via www.epi.org