Paul Ryan’s ‘Path to Prosperity’ Is Really a Bad Trip on the Road to Economic Ruin

Vice-presidential hopeful Paul Ryan has a giant liability for someone hailed for his economic vision: He knows next to nothing about the facts of economic history. Ryan is celebrated by Republicans as a “super-wonk” who “masterfully and forcefully presents his free market, fiscal-policy beliefs” and brings “serious economic firepower” to the Republican ticket. Yet in truth, his vision of America’s economic future has already been proven wrong. Ryan’s claim that he has outlined what he calls a “path to prosperity” is ridiculous. What he has concocted is a bad trip on the road to ruin. Ryan’s “Concurrent Resolution On The Budget, Fiscal Year 2013” was submitted to the House of Representatives on March 23, 2012. In this resolution, Ryan argued that unless Congress reins in government spending and thereby reduces the federal debt-to-GDP ratio, the country is doomed. Accordingly, his budget resolution calls for an 8 percent reduction in on-budget federal spending in 2013 and a 13 percent reduction in 2014  (both figures relative to appropriate federal budget these expenditures for  2012). This Ryan claims will shrink the federal deficit from approximately 7.8 percent of GDP to 4 percent in 2014 and simultaneously shrink the size of the federal government from 23 percent of GDP to a projected 20 percent by the beginning  of 2015. Since military spending is not reduced, these cuts must be made in other federal spending programs such as transportation, funding for scientific research and development, education, environmental protection and Interior Department diligence regarding offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico (remember the BP spill!), and so on. Ryan expects his proposed cuts to equal $700 billion over the next decade. A sage has noted that “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat its errors.” So it is with Paul Ryan and his misguided slashing proposals. Ryan should have remembered how 1) the USA slid back into the great Depression in 1937-’38, after four years of slow but significant progress in reviving the American economy from the greatest depth of the Great Depression in 1931-1932; and 2) how the Reagan administration cut the unemployment rate almost in half. The Great Depression Lesson During his first term (1932-1936), President Franklin Roosevelt ran large annual deficits of  between 2 and 5 percent of GDP. In 1932, the federal debt-to-GDP ratio was approximately 20 percent. By 1936, the national debt had increased or approximately 40 percent of GDP, while the real GDP (adjusted for price level changes) was once again approaching the peak level it had reached in 1929. Unemployment declined from approximately 25 percent in 1932 to 16 percent officially in 1936. (Keep in mind that at the time, workers employed on public works projects financed by the federal government were listed officially as ”unemployed” thereby swelling the official unemployment rate.  If these employed public work laborers are removed from the unemployment list, it is estimated that only 10 percent were unemployed in 1936.) Despite the improvement in the economy, many, including people in Roosevelt’s administration, wrongly feared that if the government debt-to-GDP ratio increased much further, the federal government would have to declare bankruptcy. (Shades of Greece today.) Accordingly, in 1937 Roosevelt yielded to pressure to reduce the size of the deficit as well as the debt-to-GDP ratio. Roosevelt sent a budget to Congress that slashed spending in 1937 by over 13 percent and  another 11 percent in 1938. The result was a catastrophe. From the fall of 1937 to the summer of 1938, the economy collapsed, with industrial production declining by 33 percent, GDP falling by 13 percent and unemployment rising by approximately 5 percentage points. Roosevelt then abandoned his deficit reduction program and the economy again began to grow. With the advent of the World War II, all fears of the deficit and debt-to-GDP ratio were forgotten. As a result, federal debt-to-GDP rose to over 100 percent of GDP to pay for mobilization and fighting the war. Despite the large debt-to-GDP ratio, the postwar period was one of great prosperity for at least another quarter of a century. Fast-forward to the present day. Ryan’s proposed budget would have the U.S. reduce spending significantly in the next two years and therefore repeat the error of the Roosevelt administration in 1937 and 1938 that plunged us back into the Great Depression. How’s that for economic folly? The Reagan Deficit Lesson Ryan would also do well to remember what occurred under the Reagan administration from 1980 to 1988. In December 1979, the unemployment rate was 6 percent. By June 1980, it had spiked to 7.6 pecent. By September 1982, the unemployment rate had climbed past the 10 percent mark. The rate remained over 10 percent for a full 10 months, topping out at 10.8 percent in both November and December 1982. In 1983, the Reagan administration increased government spending by almost 30 percent more than it had been when Reagan took office in 1981. Government expenditures continued to rise throughout the rest of the Reagan administration until it was approximately double what it was in 1980. The debt-to-GDP ratio was 26 percent when Reagan took office. It rose to 41 percent by the end of 1988. The effect of this big government deficit spending starting in 1983 was that by the summer of 1983, the unemployment rate was below 10 percent, and by June 1984 it was at 7.2 percent. By the time Reagan left office at the beginning of 1989 the unemployment rate was 5.2 percent.  Obviously, Paul Ryan has learned nothing from the economic past history of the U.S. under either Democratic or Republican presidents. These economic facts should have taught Ryan that the worst thing one can do is cut government spending when the American economy is struggling to reduce unemployment and increase economic growth to achieve some measure of economic prosperity. Ryan’s Clouded Crystal Ball Unsurprisingly for someone so ignorant of economic history, Paul Ryan doesn’t do well when he tries to predict conditions in the future.  On February 14, 2009 in an op-ed article in the New York Times,   Ryan argued that the Obama $787 billion stimulus plan will bring forth high inflation. Ryan wrote that inflation would occur as the Federal Reserve prints money for the government to spend on economic recovery. This expansion of the money supply must be inflationary, Ryan declared, because ”it is a situation in which too few goods are being chased by too much money.” On February 22, 2009, the New York Times printed my response  to Ryan’s forecast of inflation: “Paul D. Ryan repeats the tired idea that when the Federal Reserve prints money for the government to spend on economic recovery, the result will be inflation as ‘too few goods are being chased by too much money.’ This is based on a false assumption that the output of the country will not increase when government lets contracts to businesses to produce more goods and services that will improve the productivity and health of our country. If there is significant unemployment and idle capacity in the private sector (and who can deny that there is?), then this deficit spending will not cause inflation. Rather, the ‘printed’ money spent on a recovery plan creates profit opportunities that induce private enterprise to hire and produce more goods. Then there will be many more goods available for this money to chase and no inflation need occur.” It is now more than three and a half years since Ryan predicted inflation. The Federal Reserve not only “printed money” to finance the Obama stimulus plan, but since Ryan’s op-ed piece, the Fed also pursued its policy of “quantitative easing” which pumped even more money into our economy while we are suffering high unemployment. We may ask Mr. Ryan, where is the high inflation that he saw coming? Obviously, Ryan is using a false economic theory to make predictions that have nothing to do with the world of experience in which we live. Military Spending v. Health Care In his budget proposal, Ryan seeks an increase in defense expenditures. He obviously believes that it is the responsibility of the federal government to spend whatever is necessary, without any constraints, to protect all American citizens, rich and poor, from an attack by an enemy which can cause death and disabilities. Yet, Ryan’s budget indicates that the federal government has little or no responsibility to protect all American citizens from death or disability due to an attack from cancer or any other disease, or even an accident. If we were to protect citizens from foreign enemies the way that Ryan would have the government protect seniors from disease via a voucher program for health insurance, then the government should give each American household a voucher they could use to buy some small level of protection from a market choice of private armies of mercenaries. These mercenaries would provide competition for the U.S. armed forces and would, under the Ryan philosophy, force the Army, Navy and Marines to be more efficient. Moreover, if any American citizen felt he was not getting enough military protection for his family from the value of his voucher, he would be free to spend his own money to hire more mercenaries to protect his family. Wouldn’t that be the efficient “free market,” “free choice” process for the American people to buy the best military defense possible, instead of increasing the government spending on the military? A Budget for the 1 Percent Taken as a whole, Ryan’s proposals are simply a smoke-and-mirrors way to benefit the 1 percent at the expense of poor and middle-class Americans. Hardly a “super-wonk,” Paul Ryan is simply a poser whose ignorance of economic history and extremism make him poison to any vision of true prosperity.   Wed, 08/22/2012 (All day)

N.M. State Employee Fired For Legally Using Medical Marijuana

THC FinderA state employee in New Mexico — where medical marijuana is legal — says she was fired after a drug test showed she had been using cannabis, under a doctor’s orders, to treat post traumati

Temp Worker Nation — If You Do Get Hired, It Might Not Be for Long

Almost one-third of American workers now do some kind of freelance work—and they lack almost every kind of economic security that permanent full-time workers have traditionally had. Though exact figures are impossible to find, many experts and labor organizers estimate that about 30 percent of U.S. workers are “contingent.” That means they don’t have a permanent job. They work as freelancers, temporary workers, on contract, or on call, or their employers define them (often illegally) as “independent contractors.” Their ranks include writers and warehouse workers, janitors and business consultants, truck drivers and graphic designers—and their number is rising. Richard Greenwald, a sociologist of work and professor at St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn, estimates that their share of the U.S. workforce has increased by close to half in the last ten years. In July, Staffing Industry Analysts reported that the average share of contingent workers at companies it surveyed had gone up by one-third since 2009, to 16 percent. Last year, a different survey found that contingent workers averaged 22 percent of the workers at 200 large companies. These workers are often called the “precariat,” a combination of “precarious” and “proletariat,” because the traditional social safety nets for workers don’t cover them. They have no job security as they hustle from one gig to the next, and they often don’t know where their next job is coming from or when it will come. They very rarely get paid sick days or vacation. They don’t get paid extra for working overtime. They are usually not eligible for unemployment benefits. They generally have to pay both the worker’s and the employer’s share of Social Security taxes. They have to pay for their own health insurance, and Obamacare won’t change that. (Beginning in 2014, people will be able to buy private insurance at group rates, and lower-income and working-class people will get some subsidies to help them pay for it.) They have few options if an employer cheats them out of their pay. If they are independent contractors, they do not have the right to form a labor union. “Instability is going to be with us,” says Sara Horowitz, head of the New York-based Freelancers Union. “The truth is that we’re in a period of decline for workers.” The New Way We Work Who are freelancers and contingent workers? The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics has not done an official study since 2005, when it estimated that they were 10 to 15 percent of the U.S. workforce. If their income is reported on a 1099 tax form instead of on a W-2 form with deductions, its monthly payroll surveys won’t count them as having jobs. Its household surveys will count them as employed, but don’t ask about their job arrangements. Catherine Ruckelshaus, legal codirector of the National Employment Law Project in New York, counts “everyone who’s not a W-2 employee,” including people paid on 1099s, franchisees, and people paid in cash, such as construction day laborers, as a contingent worker. Richard Greenwald arrived at his estimates by counting sole-proprietorship businesses and people who listed more income on 1099s than on W-2s. The number has risen significantly in the last 15 years, Greenwald says, and the pace has increased since the Great Recession began, with many new jobs “permatemps.” This trend affects workers at all income levels, but the fastest-growing sector is college graduates in “creative” fields. In the last few years, book publishers and advertising agencies have outsourced their graphic designers, hiring them back as freelancers with no benefits. Many publishers now hire editors on a per-manuscript basis. “As the industry or technology tweaks, it often does so in a way that’s freelance or nonunion,” says Justin Molito, director of organizing with the Writers’ Guild of America East. For example, writers on HBO’s scripted shows are unionized, but those on basic cable and reality TV shows aren’t. Greenwald distinguishes between workers who chose freelancing and those who were “shoved into it.” The most successful freelancers, he says, are information-technology, management, and finance consultants. They have a specific skill and steady clients, and “think of themselves as entrepreneurs.” Many white-collar freelancers make middle-class incomes, $45,000 to $50,000 a year, he says, but they have to pay for the office supplies, health insurance, and taxes that would normally be covered by an employer, and they have no security. This is not just a recession-induced thing, he says. It reflects a long-term change in the economy. Since the 1980s, management’s philosophy has evolved to “look at work as projects.” Instead of keeping workers on staff to perform all tasks needed, they outsource them or hire consultants. “This gives companies tremendous flexibility without any risk,” Greenwald says. “Flexibility” means they don’t have to keep people on the payroll during slack periods, pay them when they’re sick, pay for their health insurance, or obey workplace regulations. This, he says, has “shifted all the risks that large institutions used to have onto the backs of individuals.” “It’s a great business model, but as a social model, it doesn’t work,” he explains. Essentially, it means that the world of work is becoming more like the music business, in which a handful of superstars get rich and a minority of professionals have steady work with benefits, but most workers have to scuffle for intermittent, low-paying gigs, and hard work and talent are worthless without marketing skills, clout, and charisma. “The bar to get in is low, but the ability to make a living is harder and harder,” he says. The overall social change “might be as big as the shift from farm to factory,” Greenwald says. “I don’t think that many freelancers have thought of this as a permanent way of life. It seems to be a shift back to 19th-century artisanal culture.” The Casual Working Class Though the traditional image of a freelancer is a middle-class professional like a magazine writer or computer consultant, this shift affects a huge number of blue-collar workers too, especially in the fast-growing fields of warehousing, delivery, and home health care. Many of these workers are now either temps or defined as “independent contractors.” “Often relying on the use of temporary and staffing agencies, outsourcing in these industries has also resulted in comparatively lower wages for work similar to the jobs previously performed in-house,” the National Employment Law Project reported in “Chain of Greed,” a study of Walmart warehouses released in June. At the Nissan auto factory in Canton, Mississippi, more than 20 percent of the 4,400 workers are temps, according to the Labor Notes monthly newsletter. The company says it plans to hire 1,000 new workers this year, but all will be temporary. The temps start at $12 an hour, below what permanent workers earn, and workers say no temp has ever been permanently hired at the plant. Even at Ford’s Detroit-area plants, the classic bastion of union industrial labor, local activist Dianne Feeley, a retired United Auto Workers member, says a significant percentage of workers are temps or contract workers. “A huge problem,” says Catherine Ruckelshaus, is employers illegally defining workers as independent contractors. “Some employers are asking workers to form LLCs [limited liability companies, a form of business that combines features of a corporation and a partnership] before a construction drywall job.” FedEx Ground, for example, defines its 15,000 drivers as independent contractors, even though they drive company-assigned routes and must drive vans with the FedEx logo and color scheme. “There are millions of Americans classified as independent contractors by the companies they work for, but effectively working as employees,” American Rights at Work, a Washington-based labor-rights nonprofit, said in a 2007 report on FedEx Ground. “These workers suffer the worst of both worlds: they toil without the protections and benefits of employees, yet are without the control over their work that true independent contractors enjoy.” The legal definition, Ruckelshaus says, is whether the person is running an independent business—are they investing their own money, and can they pass on increased costs? The Internal Revenue Service’s general rule is that an individual is an independent contractor if the person hiring them has “the right to control or direct only the result of the work,” while the worker decides “the means and methods of accomplishing the result.” The scam’s advantage for employers is that they don’t have to pay minimum wage or overtime, Social Security, Medicare, or unemployment taxes, or workers’ compensation. The result, the American Rights at Work report said, is that FedEx drivers not only make less money than those at UPS, who are permanent workers with a union; they also have to pay for gas and maintenance for their vans. Many lease vans from a company-approved supplier, Ruckelshaus says. Some employers define even janitors and home health-care aides as “franchisees,” she continues. For example, an office building’s management might hire a cleaning-services subcontractor, which will then have its workers buy the job of cleaning one section of the building in exchange for a piece of the company’s fee. Coverall, a Florida-based cleaning-services company, calls its more than 9,000 workers “franchisees,” and its more than 90 regional offices are “support centers.” In Boston, says Ruckelshaus, these franchisees might have to pay the company as much as $10,000 to claim a job, recouping that investment from their wages. If they don’t have the money, they can borrow it from a company-recommended lender. In some cases, she says, they have had to work the first month on spec, getting paid for it only if the Coverall boss approves them for the job. They also have to buy cleaning equipment and supplies from the company. But Coverall makes the deals for the jobs, so the workers can’t raise their rates or ask the client for work on their own. In home health care, a field with 3 million workers, mostly women, that is one of the fastest-growing job categories in the U.S. economy, for-profit agencies are calling themselves “registries” of independent contractors. They do this, says Ruckelshaus, even though they hire the workers, train them, assign them to jobs, and set rates. It means they don’t have to pay minimum wage or overtime. “There’s no enforcement,” she says. “It becomes part of the structure of these jobs.” Warehouse and shipping work is a major area of abuse. Walmart and Amazon outsource their massive warehouse and shipping operations to subcontractors, who then use temporary agencies to hire workers. Workers often don’t even know who their actual employer is, says Ruckelshaus. “They pit these little subcontractors against each other,” says Erin Johansson, research director of American Rights at Work. “To compete and win a contract, you’ve got to pay your workers minimal wages.” In this system, according to the “Chain of Greed” report, workers are paid piecework, according to the number of containers or trucks they finish unloading on a shift, instead of an hourly wage. They don’t get paid for anything else they do on the job. The result is “rampant minimum wage and overtime violations,” the report said. Workers also have to unload dangerously stacked piles of boxes, some of which weigh up to 200 pounds, says Johansson. Walmart insists on ever-lower costs, so “workers are the ones getting squeezed and chiseled,” says Ruckelshaus. “This relationship is hurting low-wage women and those at the bottom of the supply chains, and the big corporations aren’t being held accountable for low wages and poor conditions.” Another issue is that freelancers have almost no recourse if an employer cheats them. State wage-theft laws do not cover freelancers. If a client stiffs them, it’s considered a business dispute, so their only recourse is to sue in small-claims court. That can take months and multiple court appearances, and even if you win your case, collecting the debt is not guaranteed. The Freelancers Union says 77 percent of its 180,000 members have had trouble collecting money they’re owed. Earlier this year, it lobbied for New York to enact a law that would let stiffed freelancers file wage-theft complaints with the state Department of Labor. But in New York’s gerrymandered legislature, the measure wound up as a “one-house bill”: It passed in the Democrat-dominated Assembly, but never reached the floor in the Republican-controlled state Senate. “If you have 30 percent of the workforce being exploited, that lowers standards for everybody,” says Johansson. What Can Be Done? Traditional union organizing is notoriously difficult with contingent workers. Organized labor’s strongest power over employers is workers’ ability to go on strike and stop production. If freelancers try that on their own, the employer will simply hire someone else. That they have neither a common location nor a collective workforce are also barriers to organizing collectively. The Writers’ Guild of America, a union of TV and movie screenwriters, has successfully organized freelancers, winning elections and creating collective-bargaining agreements at studios. In July, it won company-paid health benefits, paid vacation, and a minimum salary for writers at two New York reality-show studios. But its 4,000 members’ status is much closer to permanent workers than most freelancers are. They usually work on long-term contracts, typically three or four years, and have “professional relationships and solidarity among themselves,” says Justin Molito. “This is a long-term movement to aid those who’ve fallen through the cracks,” Molito says. “As other industries become more freelance, the labor movement has to develop strategies to create organizations that provide protections and make improvements.” Those strategies include “building a long-term movement, raising standards across the board, trying to organize an entire industry.” The Freelancers’ Union’s Horowitz has largely abandoned the traditional union model, to the point where the organization might be more accurately described as a service and lobbying group than a labor union. Permanent workers are losing security and benefits, she says, so why should freelancers expect them? “I exist in reality,” she says. “The first step is to admit that something’s changed.” Instead, she touts what she calls the “new mutualism,” freelancers banding together on the principles of “affinity and solidarity,” such as networking and organizing cooperatives to buy food and health insurance. (The group sells nonprofit health insurance to 23,000 members in New York, and plans to expand that to New Jersey and Oregon in 2014, when the Obamacare insurance exchanges open.) But how is any of that going to help get freelancers paid sick days? “Good luck with that,” she answers. Organized freelancers “will be able to make the freelance economy work even better,” she explains in an e-mail, “by influencing the freelance labor market, by continuing to improve the laws that affect freelancers (i.e., passing legislation to give freelancers recourse when they are stiffed) and by continuing to give freelancers opportunities to work together.” On the other hand, she says the Freelancers Union will not be able on its own to “reverse larger economic trends” like declining wages in the media industry. Workers should speak out about abuses, says Johansson. The bad publicity created by “shining a light on working conditions for large companies” such as Walmart and Amazon might help hold them accountable for how subcontractors and their workers are treated. Legally, she says, “just enforcing the law” against misclassification would help. In June, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that the 350 taxi drivers at Baltimore-Washington International Airport had been wrongly classified as independent contractors. Their employer, which has an exclusive contract for taxi service at the airport, is appealing the decision. Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) have introduced bills to tighten the definition of an independent contractor. Still, trying to improve conditions for freelancers and contingent workers is difficult in an economic system that has been vampirizing workers’ rights and incomes for a generation. “The social contract that was part of American society for many years is dead,” says Greenwald. “We need to have a serious conversation about who’s winning and who’s not winning.” The cutthroats can survive in this new world, he says, but “the rest of society is suffering.”   Mon, 08/20/2012 – 13:41

Babies Look Cute, But Are They Actually Jerks?

The following post first appeared on Jezebel.com.  Babies have long been known to be freeloading, pants-shitting, boob-crazed whiners with an entitlement complex who refuse to get jobs or learn English, even though  this is America . But for years, another aspect of their tiny, angry personalities was slightly less obvious: are they also jerks? Five years ago, a group of researchers claimed that a series of tests had concluded that babies do not actively wish fellow human beings harm, that from a very wee age, they’re capable of telling the difference between right and wrong. But now, new evidence has thrown those findings into a playpen of doubt, again putting babies’ morality (or lack thereof) in the hot (booster) seat. According to the original “Babies Are Not Total Dicks After All”  research , babies as young as 6 months old prefer interacting with prosocial individuals. Researchers determined this by showing the babies puppet shows involving a wooden doll that was trying to climb a hill and either helped up or pushed down the hill by another wooden doll. Following the show, the tiny, gurgling study subjects were offered a choice to play with either the helper puppet or the hinderer puppet. In almost all cases, the babies selected the helper puppet, which, to researchers, demonstrated that they recognized that the helper puppet was good, and that they preferred to hang around good people (the wanting to hang around bad people phase doesn’t start until the babies are teenagers and angry at their fathers). Case closed. Babies are good. Not so fast. Researchers who tried to stage the experiment again found that babies would react differently to the puppets depending on how the puppet attempting to climb the hill acted. One skeptical researcher explained to CBS News, “For example, when we had the climber bounce at the bottom of the hill, but not at the top of the hill, infants preferred the hinderer, that is, the one that pushed the climber down the hill,” Scarf explained. “If the social evaluation hypothesis was correct, we should have seen a clear preference for the helper, irrespective of the location of the bounce, because the helper always helped the climber achieve its goal of reaching the top of the hill.” The researchers on the original experiment countered that if the puppet bounced happily at the bottom of the hill, the babies might be confused into believing that the puppet was trying to fall all along, and the “hinderer” was actually a helper. The direction the ascending puppet was looking also influenced the babies’ picks — if the puppet was looking down as it climbed, the babies would often choose the hinderer under the mistaken assumption that the climbing puppet wanted to be pushed. If the climbing puppet looked up, the babies assumed the climbing puppet wanted to go up. And if the climbing puppet had dark circles under its eyes and is trying to just get one goddamn full night’s rest, the baby would respond by screaming very loudly every 90 minutes. So the endless debate over whether the itty bitty puke machines we call human infants have a moral compass rages on. I’ll be waiting for a definitive answer with bated breath — even though I may have been too hard on babies in the past (I’d apologize in writing, if I wasn’t 95% sure that babies can’t be bothered to learn to read), I hope to have a few of my own someday … that I’ll steal from Maclaren strollers left unattended by Angry Birds-playing mothers in the Whole Foods produce section. [ CBS ] Mon, 08/20/2012 – 12:12

In Which We Hear From The Emery Army!

Jodie Emery’s Facebook PageBy their fruits you shall know them.Handy translation tool: “Harassing Jodie” apparently equals disagreeing with her — specifically her support of Washington state’s I-502

Vermont farmer takes tractor vengeance on squad car fleet

Vermont farmer  Roger Pion , 34, jumped into his giant eight-wheel Case MX255 diesel tractor, headed to the police station in Newport town, and crushed more than seven squad cars Aug. 2, exacting vengeance for his arrest for cannabis possession last month. Pion then led cops on a low-speed chase through town before being apprehended a mile away. His act of retribution took out more than half of the district’s squad car fleet. “We’re going to have to get the jaws of life up here to pry the trunks open and see about the rifles and shotguns,” Sheriff  Kirk Martin told the Associated Press.”The radios are ruined.” read more

Hemp and the Lakota Tribes

The Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1898 is an agreement made between the US Government and the indigenous tribes of Black Hills, a mountainous range extending from South Dakota to Wyoming, guaranteeing the Lakota Tribe land ownership and their rights to govern themselves as a sovereign nation, outside of interference of the United States Government. …Read the Rest

World’s First Novel To Mention HEMP Now Has A Sequel

It has been 168 years since Alexandre Dumas (who turned 210 today) published his “Count of Monte Cristo”. Dumas planted a seed in the opening chapters that has been germinating since. That seed is the word ‘hemp’. It takes root in the first sequel, “The Sultan of Monte Cristo”, just released this month. “The Sultan of …Read the Rest

Dead Zone Pollution Is Growing Despite Decades of Work, So Who’s the Culprit?

One of our most widespread environmental problems, this pollution continues to pour into the rivers, and ultimately the Gulf, at a growing pace.

Marijuana Dispensary Operators Working As Federal Informants

The Charleston GazetteCould your medical marijuana dispensary be reporting you to the Feds? Some California collective operators are working as confidential federal informants, according to chilling n

Next Page »