Debt is not good - austerity is worse.

(To read more on the impact of austerity, follow the link.)

From the Political Carnival

Now Reuters is buttressing those reports with this:

    Austerity is having a devastating effect on health in Europe and North America, driving suicide, depression and infectious diseases and reducing access to medicines and care, researchers said on Monday.

    Detailing a decade of research, Oxford University political economist David Stuckler [a senior researcher at Oxford University and co-author The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills] and Sanjay Basu, an assistant professor of medicine and an epidemiologist at Stanford University, said their findings show austerity is seriously bad for health. [...]

    [M]ore than five million Americans have lost access to healthcare during the latest recession, they argue, while in Britain, some 10,000 families have been pushed into homelessness by the government's austerity budget.

Explaining the European Economy

On Climate Change

From The Guardian (click on the link to read more)...

The Sahara has crossed the Mediterranean, forcing thousands to migrate as a lethal combination of soil degradation and climate change turns parts of southern Europe into desert.

A major UN conference was told yesterday that up to a third of Europe's soil could eventually be affected.

A fifth of Spanish land is so degraded that it is turning into desert, according to figures released for the first time yesterday, and in Italy tracts of land in the south are now abandoned and technically desert.

One can't help but wonder if the droughts in the western and southern US might eventually result in desert like conditions here as well.