LifeItself

Dr. Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate and professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton, wrote this in his Op-Ed, entitled " Natural Born Drillers ": And this tells us that giving the oil companies carte blanche isn’t a serious jobs program. Put it this way: Employment in oil and gas extraction has risen more than 50 percent since the middle of the last decade, but that amounts to only 70,000 jobs, around one-twentieth of 1 percent of total U.S. employment. So the idea that drill, baby, drill can cure our jobs deficit is basically a joke. Why, then, are Republicans pretending otherwise? Part of the answer is that the party is rewarding its benefactors: the oil and gas industry doesn’t create many jobs, but it does spend a lot of money on lobbying and campaign contributions. The rest of the answer is simply the fact that conservatives have no other job-creation ideas to offer. His piece was followed by 554 reader comments, many of which read like this: ...They...

Almost a year ago, in The Global Las Vegas , I told you how the runaway betting on imaginary things screwed up real people. Today I was reminded that nothing has changed, and Goldman Sachs continues to do what they've always done, ripping off clients, while disparaging them verbally. Goldman Sachs, an evil twin of Federal Government, remains the dominant player in our crazy megalopolis, the Earth-encircling Las Vegas.  There is no place to hide anymore, unless we wish to escape into the past. In the meantime, the real world economy continues to consume Earth's resources at an ever-increasing rate as more of very desperately poor people are now just poor, and want to have some of the same amenities we take for granted. The results are predictable and the price you and I pay to commute in the U.S. is at an all-time high. To put this price index into perspective, it now costs 10 times more to move from point A to B in the U.S. metropolitan areas than it did 60 years ago. ...