Dream Defenders and DREAMers Were Cut From ‘I Have a Dream’ Ceremony

People attending the “Let Freedom Ring” ceremony yesterday, featuring President Obama, were expecting to hear from Philip Agnew, executive director of the Dream Defenders in Florida, and Sofia Campos, chairperson of the immigrant rights youth-led organization United We Dream. Both names were listed on the ceremony’s program. But as Agnew was about to take the stage, he was told that he could not speak. Campos was also told she could not speak.

Talk about civil rights action interrupted, the Dream Defenders camped out in the Florida capitol building in Tallahassee for a full month in protest of the George Zimmerman verdict, and to demand new laws that would dismantle school-to-prison pipelines, racial profiling and Stand Your Ground gun laws. Campos, 24, is helping lead a movement demanding humane immigrant rights reform, which has called out Obama on his record-setting deportations.

Agnew is now calling for people to publish their own dream speeches on video and post them on Twitter and Facebook. The Dream Defenders are releasing today a video of the speech Agnew was going to deliver at the ceremony yesterday.

“This is about more than the speech,” said Agnew. “It’s about the voices of hundreds of thousands of people across the country that have been silenced for too long. Our generation’s dreams have been deferred for too long. While the words spoken amidst the pillars of the Lincoln Memorial yesterday may have reverberated throughout the nation, the actions, energy and love of the rising generation will resound in history books for centuries to come, like those of giants before us.”

http://colorlines.com/archives/2013/..._ceremony.html

Federal Tax news
 

Same-sex couples can file joint tax returns, IRS says

Reuters

All legal same-sex marriages will be recognized for U.S. federal tax purposes, regardless of where the couple lives, government says.


WASHINGTON — All legal same-sex marriages will be recognized for U.S. federal tax purposes, the Obama administration said on Thursday, allowing gay couples to claim the same tax benefits that heterosexual couples do.

As expected after a landmark Supreme Court ruling in June, the U.S. Treasury and Internal Revenue Service said:

"The ruling applies regardless of whether the couple lives in a jurisdiction that recognizes same-sex marriage or a jurisdiction that does not recognize same-sex marriage."

This is not really Breaking News, but certainly contemporary. It is a longish article so I will link it out.

http://www.thenation.com/sites/defau...r0916-tilt.jpg

How to Become a Part-Time Worker Without Really Trying

How corporate America used the Great Recession to turn good jobs into bad ones.

Barbara Garson August 20, 2013

Watch closely: I’m about to demystify the sleight-of-hand by which good jobs were transformed into bad jobs, full-time workers with benefits into freelancers with nothing, during the dark days of the Great Recession.
 
First, be aware of what a weird economic downturn and recovery this has been.From the end of an “average” American recession, it ordinarily takes slightly less than a year to reach or surpass the previous employment peak. But in June 2013—four full years after the official end of the Great Recession—we had recovered only 6.6 million jobs, or just three-quarters of the 8.7 million jobs we lost.

Here’s the truly mysterious aspect of this “recovery”: 21 percent of the jobs lost during the Great Recession were low wage, meaning they paid $13.83 an hour or less. But 58 percent of the jobs regained fall into that category. Rest of article...

Stopping the War in Syria

http://www.alternet.org/visions/stop...-and-much-more

Are We Being Ruled by Self-Centered Jerks? What New Studies Reveals About the Ultra Wealthy
And why increasing economic disparities will make it worse.

Two studies released last week confirmed what most of us already knew: the ultra-wealthy tend to be narcissistic and have a greater sense of entitlement than the rest of us, and Congress only pays attention to their interests. Both studies are consistent with earlier research.

In the first study, published in the current Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Paul Piff of UC Berkeley conducted five experiments which demonstrated that “higher social class is associated with increased entitlement and narcissism.” Given the opportunity, Piff also found that they were more likely to check themselves out in a mirror than were those of lesser means.

Piff looked at how participants scored on a standard scale of “psychological entitlement,” and found that those of a high social class — based on income levels, education and occupational prestige — were more likely to say “I honestly feel I’m just more deserving than others,” while people further down the social ladder were likelier to respond, “I do not necessarily deserve special treatment.”

In an earlier study, published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Piff and four researchers from the University of Toronto conducted a series of experiments which found that “upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals.” This included being more likely to “display unethical decision-making,” steal, lie during a negotiation and cheat in order to win a contest.

In one telling experiment, the researchers observed a busy intersection, and found that drivers of luxury cars were more likely to cut off other drivers and less likely to stop for pedestrians crossing the street than those behind the wheels of more modest vehicles. “In our crosswalk study, none of the cars in the beater-car category drove through the crosswalk,” Piff told The New York Times. “But you see this huge boost in a driver’s likelihood to commit infractions in more expensive cars.” He added: “BMW drivers are the worst.”

Summing up previous research on the topic, Piff notes that upper-class individuals also “showed reduced sensitivity to others’ suffering” as compared with working- and middle-class people.

"Lower-class individuals are more likely to spend time taking care of others, and they are more embedded in social networks that depend on mutual aid. By contrast, upper-class individuals prioritize independence from others: They are less motivated than lower-class individuals to build social relationships and instead seek to differentiate themselves from others."

These findings may appear to represent a bit of psychological trivia, but a study to be published in Political Science Quarterly by Thomas Hayes, a scholar at Trinity University, finds that U.S. senators respond almost exclusively to the interests of their wealthiest constituents – those more likely to be unethical and less sensitive to the suffering of others, according to Piff.

Hayes took data from the Annenberg Election Survey — a massive database of public opinion representing the views of 90,000 voters — and compared them with their senators’ voting records from 2001 through 2010. From 2007 through 2010, U.S. senators were somewhat responsive to the interests of the middle class, but hadn’t been for the first 6 years Hayes studied. The views of the poor didn’t factor into legislators’ voting tendencies at all.

As Eric Dolan noted for The Raw Story, “The neglect of lower income groups was a bipartisan affair. Democrats were not any more responsive to the poor than Republicans.” Hayes wrote that his analysis “suggests oligarchic tendencies in the American system, a finding echoed in other research.”

Hayes’ study is consistent with earlier research, including Princeton University scholar Larry Bartels’ 2005 study of “Economic Inequality and Political Representation.”

There are a few of ways of looking at these findings. They could be the result of genuinely held ideological beliefs which happen to justify inequality and privilege.

According to OpenSecrets, the average net worth of senators in 2011 was $11.9 million, so it could be a matter of legislators advancing their own interests and those of the people with whom they socialize and associate.

But MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, who co-authored Why Nations Fail with Harvard’s James Robinson, says that this kind of political inequality is a product of widening economic disparities. “It’s a general pattern throughout history,” he told Think Progress. “When economic inequality increases, the people who have become economically more powerful will often attempt to use that power in order to gain even more political power. And once they are able to monopolize political power, they will start using that for changing the rules in their favor. And that sort of political inequality is the real danger that’s facing the United States.”
http://www.alternet.org/economy/are-...thy?paging=off

Well I might be poor and I may be looking at a very financially problematic old age but at least I'm part of a group less likely to display unethical behavior, who individually do not believe they deserves special treatment and has empathy for the suffering of others. Unfortunately one can't take that to the bank, use it to keep warm or eat it when your hungry. Viva la revolución!

US Won't Block States' Legalization of Marijuana

By ASHLEY SOUTHALL and JACK HEALY
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department on Thursday said it would not sue to block laws legalizing marijuana in 20 states and the District of Columbia, a move that proponents hailed as an important step toward ending the prohibition of the drug.
In a memo to federal prosecutors nationwide on Thursday, James M. Cole, the deputy attorney general, erased some uncertainty about how the government would respond to state laws making it legal to use marijuana for medical or recreational purposes.
Citing “limited prosecutorial resources,” Mr. Cole explained the change in economic terms. But the memo also made clear that the Justice Department expects states to put in place regulations aimed at preventing marijuana sales to minors, illegal cartel and gang activity, interstate trafficking of marijuana, and violence and accidents involving the drug.
“A system adequate to that task must not only contain robust controls and procedures on paper; it must also be effective in practice,” he wrote.
Voters in Washington and Colorado recently approved measures decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of recreational marijuana, while 18 other states and the District of Columbia permit the use of marijuana for medical purposes.
In a phone call on Thursday afternoon, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. explained the government’s “trust but verify” approach to Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington and Gov. John W. Hickenlooper of Colorado, a Justice Department official said.
Marijuana advocates praised the decision as a potentially historic shift in the federal government’s attitude toward a drug it once viewed as a menace to public health. By allowing states to legalize and regulate marijuana, advocates said, the federal government could reduce jail populations and legal backlogs, create thousands of jobs, and replenish state coffers with marijuana taxes.
“This is a historic day,” said Ean Seeb, a co-owner of a marijuana dispensary called Denver Relief. “This is the beginning of the end of marijuana prohibition.”
But the prospect that marijuana could be legalized after a ban of decades drew criticism from law enforcement and drug policy officials. They warned that the Justice Department’s decision would have unintended consequences, like more impaired driving and more criminal marijuana operations.
“This sends the wrong message,” said former Representative Patrick J. Kennedy, who is a recovering prescription drug addict and a founder of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, a policy group. “Are we going to send up the white flag altogether and surrender and say ‘have at it’? Or are we going to try to reduce the availability and accessibility of drugs and alcohol? That should be our mission.”
Under the new guidance, a large scale and a for-profit status would no longer make dispensaries and cultivation centers a potential target for criminal prosecution.
However, prosecutors have broad discretion in determining, for instance, whether drug laws exacerbate “adverse public health consequences associated with marijuana use.”
If federal prosecutors believe that a state’s controls are inadequate, “the federal government may seek to challenge the regulatory structure itself in addition to continuing to bring individual enforcement actions, including criminal prosecutions,” Mr. Cole wrote.
The Justice Department official said the guidance was mandatory and did not apply retroactively.
In Colorado and Washington, the passage of ballot measures left the states’ drug laws in sharp opposition to federal drug policy, and raised questions about how federal law enforcement agents would respond to new retail marijuana stores. Some members of Congress sought to have the administration clarify whether state officials risked federal criminal prosecution while carrying out their duties under the state laws.
“It’s a relief,” said Representative Jared Polis, a Colorado Democrat. “It’ll get the criminal element out of the marijuana trade. It’ll provide legitimate business opportunities for everything from farmers to processors to retail store owners.”
Mr. Cole is scheduled to testify on Sept. 10 at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing focused on clarifying the administration’s stance.
The White House said last week that President Obama did not support changing federal laws regulating marijuana, which treat the drug as a dangerous substance with no medical purpose.
Josh Earnest, a White House spokesman, said the president believed it was best to focus on high-level offenders like kingpins and traffickers.
The decision on Thursday followed Mr. Holder’s announcement this month that federal prosecutors would no longer seek federal mandatory minimum sentences for certain low-level nonviolent drug offenders.
The announcement did not address the financial hurdles facing marijuana dispensaries and growing operations, like their access to loans and other banking services. Many banks are reluctant to do business with marijuana growers and sellers, for fear of violating federal laws. ■

Ashley Southall reported from Washington, and Jack Healy from Denver.

New York Times
PUBLISHED AUGUST 29, 2013

The Return of Direct Action

http://colorlines.com/assets_c/2013/...xauto-8917.png

Curtis Hierro speaks into the phone like he’s talking into a bullhorn. The passion the 26-year-old Dream Defenders field director has used to get himself and fellow occupiers through more than four weeks in the Florida statehouse is evident in his voice. He’s ready for their 30th (and what will turn out to be their final) night there, despite an announcement that the state will test the building’s fire alarms from 8 p.m. to midnight. That’ll make it hard to get a moment’s peace, let alone sleep. But Hierro takes it in stride, as he did when the “Star Wars” theme went blaring at dawn, the weekends when getting access to a shower was tough, and other challenges that make putting one’s body on the line to achieve a political goal a test of endurance.

“That’s expected in this work, and we’ve made sure that everyone who comes in this space knows our norms and that we’re nonviolent,” Hierro said. “They’re trying to provoke us so they can discredit us and kick us out.”

Since July 16—three days after the George Zimmerman verdict was announced—Hierro and between a dozen and 60 other Dream Defenders had camped out in Gov. Rick Scott’s office, demanding a special legislative session and the consideration of Trayvon’s Law, a bill crafted in collaboration with state legislators and the NAACP. The young Floridians are using the direct action tactics its founders honed in a previous takeover of the statehouse and in a march they organized after Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin in an effort to turn this post-verdict moment into a movement.

In doing so, they joined others around the country who are turning to civil disobedience and strategic protest as a way to force change, or at least create the conditions for a new conversation about issues ranging from racial profiling to the death penalty, workers’ rights, long term solitary confinement and immigration policy. A spirit similar to the one that motivated 250,000 people to converge on Washington, D.C. 50 years ago this month is moving today. And much of that spirit is being harnessed and directed by millennials.

Young people are filling a role they’ve held in organizing throughout history, says Cathy Cohen, a University of Chicago political science professor and founder and director of the Black Youth Project. The students who led sit-ins at lunch counters and boarded buses to challenge segregation were part of that vanguard during the civil rights era. Today’s organizers who use direct action, from the Dream Defenders to the Dream 9, are part of that legacy.

“Young people don’t always have to think about mortgages and jobs and childcare and are freer to engage in a certain kind of risk that as you get older you’re less likely to get involved in,” Cohen says.

People in their 20s and early 30s also backed Barack Obama by more than a two-to-one ratio in 2008, and now they’re frustrated by the pace of progress through institutional channels. But if North Carolina is any indication, that frustration hasn’t led them to stop believing in the power of the ballot box. Young people were at the forefront of some of the Moral Mondays demonstrations there, particularly those that called out the state GOP’s efforts to restrict access to the polls through a new law that requires photo ID, shortens the early voting period and ends the same-day registration option. More than 900 North Carolinians were arrested during the 13 weeks that Moral Mondays protests took place at the Raleigh statehouse, drawing attention to conservative attacks on abortion rights, wages and jobs. The intergenerational group of protestors had a clear effect, and approval ratings for the Republican governor and Republican-controlled legislature are down.

Black Youth Project’s Cohen said the 24-hour news cycle and the speed at which information travels via social networks has given young people a new understanding and sense of urgency of how high the stakes are.

“Given that reality that’s in their faces and the infrastructure for mobilization that’s developing, there’s an opportunity for young people to engage in direct action in a way that is hopeful for all of us,” she said.

Much of this infrastructure is dependent on what Daniel Maree, the 25-year-old lead organizer of last year’s Million Hoodies March in New York City, refers to as the democratization of technology. Using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and design techniques normally seen in corporate advertising, Maree and collaborators got thousands of people to Union Square in just two days. Despite the near absence of mainstream news stories about Martin’s death, images from the rally and Maree’s subsequent push of a petition demanding Zimmerman’s arrest helped get the incident onto the national stage.

In the days following the March 21st march, coverage of and Twitter conversations about the killing as well as signatures on a Change.org petition that had been started earlier that month skyrocketed. In June, the Pew Research Center reported that in the five years that it’s tracked weekly news coverage, Martin’s killing received more sustained coverage than any other story that was largely about race.

Maree, a digital strategist at an ad agency, worked with people such as Andrea Ciannavei, 38, a writer and Occupy Wall Street participant who offered up InterOccupy.net to help coordinate the mobilization. He hadn’t set out to position himself as a leader in the wake of the tragedy, but he saw a vacuum that needed to be filled.

“Every time I Googled Trayvon’s name, I didn’t see anything coming from any organization,” Maree said. “I thought, ‘Nobody’s doing anything about this so I have to do something.’ “

This pattern—an expectation that an established progressive or legacy civil rights organization would already be responding to a crisis, a realization that those groups didn’t have a game plan or were being slow to implement, followed by a quick pivot to take the reins and a willingness to work with (but not for) whoever then shows up—came up again and again as I spoke with young organizers. For many, the first wakeup call came with an acknowledgment of the Obama Administration’s limitations.

Nelini Stamp, an advisor to Dream Defenders who also participated in Occupy said that she’d had high hopes that the president would use the power of his office to address issues like racial profiling and police brutality. As her expectations have shifted, she’s put her hopes in the power of young people, especially young people of color, to bring about change.

“Now you have a movement that is really strong,” Stamp, 25, said. “We should push this man and this country to do better because that’s what we thought we were getting.”

One characteristic of how these younger organizers push is a willingness to move at a fast pace, abandoning what’s not working and moving on to new tactics when demands aren’t met.

“I think people are escalating a lot quicker and a lot earlier,” Stamp said.

No group demonstrates this fearlessness and righteous impatience like the Dream 9, the transnational activists who until August 7 had been held for more than two weeks at a detention center in Eloy, Ariz. In an effort to bring attention to the 1.7 million deportations that have taken place since Obama has been in office, the group of undocumented immigrants traveled to Mexico, then turned themselves in at the U.S. border seeking reentry on humanitarian grounds. This border crossing was broadcast via a Ustream live feed that attracted more than 10,000 viewers who cheered them on from around the world.

While the hashtag and rallying cry “Bring them home” shot around the Internet, the Dream 9 waited to learn whether they’d be granted return to the country they’ve known as home since they were children. Members of the group were isolated in solitary confinement, participated in a hunger strike and organized deportees inside the detention center, all in an effort to highlight the plight of many.

It’s necessary action that people at negotiating tables aren’t taking, said 27-year-old Mohammad Abdollahi, a member of the National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NIYA) and a coordinator of the action. Abdollahi said the NIYA maintains a broad view of what undocumented immigrants and their families actually need, and he echoes the sentiments of other organizers who see their work as the nimble and envelope-pushing counterpart to more plodding, bureaucratic processes that legacy organizations are often confined to.

“Our goal has always been for the greater immigration rights movement to catch up,” he said. “Folks can have a trajectory of what’s possible in the movement and hopefully replicate or come up with more creative ways to do things themselves.”

http://colorlines.com/archives/2013/...llennials.html

The 8 Types of Americans Who Suffer the Most Economic Pain
Are political and corporate leaders even remotely aware of the conditions of society beneath the wealthiest 10% or so?

We live in a society that allows one man to make $15 million a day while a low-income mother gets $4.50 a day for food, and much of Congress wants to cut the $4.50.

Are political and corporate leaders even remotely aware of the conditions of society beneath the wealthiest 10% or so?

The following are some of the victims of an economic system that has forgotten the majority of its people.

Children

One out of every five American children now lives in poverty, and for black children it's nearly one out of TWO. Almost half of food stamp recipients are children.

UNICEF places us near the bottom of the developed world in the inequality of children's well-being, and the OECD found that we have more child poverty than all but 3 of 30 developed countries. It's rather embarrassing to view the charts.

Students

Over the last 12 years, according to a New York Times report, the United States has gone from having the highest share of employed 25- to 34-year-olds among large, wealthy economies to having among the lowest. The number of college grads working for minimum wage has doubled in just five years.

Higher education was cut by nearly $17 billion in the years leading up to 2012-13. Through those same years large corporations were avoiding about $14 billion annually in taxes. To make up the difference, students face tuition costs that have risen almost ten times faster than median family income, leading them into their low-wage post-college positions with an average of $26,000 in student loan debt.

The Elderly

Three-quarters of Americans approaching retirement in 2010 had an average of less than $30,000 in their retirement accounts. The percentage of elderly (75 to 84) Americans experiencing poverty for the first time doubled from 2005 to 2009.

The folly of cutting Social Security is reflected in two facts. First, even though Social Security provides only an average benefit of $15,000, it accounts for 55 percent of annual income for the elderly. And second, seniors have spent their working lives paying for their retirement. According to the Urban Institute the average two-earner couple making average wages throughout their lifetimes will receive less in Social Security benefits than they paid in. Same for single males. Almost the same for single females. (the fact that it's only almost for single females reflects the lower wages for most women relative to men)

Wage Earners

Workers have 30% LESS buying power today than in 1968. If the minimum wage had kept up with employee productivity, it would be $16.54 per hour instead of $7.25.

Almost unimaginably, conditions for workers have gotten even worse since the recession. While 21 percent of job losses since 2008 were considered low-wage positions, 58 percent of jobs added during the recovery were considered low-wage.

As for members of Congress who say "get a job," only one of them was present at the start of a recent unemployment hearing.

The Sick and Disabled

Over 200 recent studies have confirmed a link between financial stress and sickness. In just 20 years America's ranking among developed countries dropped on nearly every major health measure. Victims suffer both physically and mentally. A recent study found that unemployment, whether voluntary or involuntary, can significantly impact a person's mental health. Even grimmer, from 1999 to 2010 the suicide rate among Americans ages 35 to 64 increased by almost 30 percent.

In the long run, the only Americans to increase their life expectancy have been seniors covered by Medicare.

Women

Recent figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveal that women earn just 80% of men's pay. In Washington, DC and California, Hispanic women make only 44 cents for every dollar made by white men. The only deviation from the norm is that in 47 of 50 large metropolitan areas, well-educated single childless women under 30 earn more than their male counterparts.

But the overall disparities have worsened since the recession, with only about one-fifth of new jobs going to women, and with median wealth for single black and Hispanic women falling to a little over $100. And there's no respite with advancing age. The average American woman's retirement account is 38 percent less than a man's, and women over 65 have twice the poverty rate of men.

Minorities

The Economist states: Before the 1960s...most blacks were poor, few served in public office and almost none were to be found flourishing at the nation's top universities, corporations, law firms and banks. None of that is true today.

Wrong. Much of that is true today. According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), median wealth for black families in 2009 was $2,200, compared to $97,900 for white families. (Pew Research reported $5,677 for blacks, $113,149 for whites). EPI said median financial wealth (stocks, etc.) was $200 for blacks, compared to $36,100 for whites.

Since the recession, black and Hispanic wealth has dropped further, by 30 to 40 percent, while white family wealth dropped 11 percent.

Blacks and Hispanics, with 29% of the population, are also severely under-represented on corporate boards and in higher education.

One of the reasons it's so hard for young blacks to be successful is that they're viewed as criminals by many white authority figures. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander documents the explosion of the prison population for drug offenses, with blacks and Hispanics the main targets even though they use drugs at about the same -- or lesser -- rate as white Americans.

The Homeless

The super-rich want homeless people to get jobs. But they don't want to pay taxes to support job creation. If the richest Americans - the Forbes 400 - had paid a 5% tax on their 2012 investment earnings, enough revenue would have been generated to provide a full-time minimum wage job for every person who was homeless in America on a January night in 2012.

Instead, it keeps getting worse for the homeless. North Carolina made it a crime to feed them. Columbia, South Carolina approved a plan to remove them. Tampa, Florida passed a law that makes it a crime for them to sleep in public.

So who's left after all this? Oh yes, rich white men.

Where Labor Day Comes from, and Where It's Headed
We are in the grasp of oligarchs who think they owe nothing to a public that has made them so wealthy.

Webster's dictionary tells us that Labor Day was "set aside for special recognition of working people."

That's nice, but "set aside" by whom? It certainly wasn't the Wall Street corporate and political powers that be. They nearly swallowed their cigars when the idea of honoring labor's importance to America's economy and social well-being was first proposed in 1882. Rather, this holiday was created by the workers themselves, requiring a 12-year grassroots struggle that finally culminated with an act of Congress in 1894.

The campaign helped coalesce unions into a national movement. And its message of labor's essential role also countered the haughty insistence of the robber barons of that time. The barons insisted they were America's "makers"—the invaluable few whose monopolistic pursuits should be unfettered. For they claimed that they and their corporations were the God-ordained creators of wealth.

Despite their bloated sense of self-importance, notice that the American people do not celebrate a CEO Day. Indeed, as Abraham Lincoln put it, the real makers are the many ground-level workers who actually do the making: "Labor is prior to and independent of capital," Abe declared in his first state of the union address. "Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

Yet on Labor Day 2013, robber barons are again ascendant, declaring that they owe nothing—not even a shared prosperity—to the workers, consumers, taxpayers, and other American people who sustain them. Quite the opposite, they and their political henchmen are blithely shredding America's social contract and again insisting that the corporate elite must be unfettered, unions eliminated, and middle-class jobs Wal-Marted.

This intentional hollowing out of our middle class is not just ignorant, but also immoral

Yet today's establishment economists are asking: Why are so many people so glum? The Great Recession ended in 2009, they note, and even job creation is picking up. So come on people—get happy!

Maybe Labor Day is a good time to clue them into one big reality behind this so-called "recovery:" Most Americans haven't recovered. Not by a long shot. In June, median household income was still $3,400 less than in 2007, when Wall Street's crash started the collapse of our real economy.

Why are working people still so far down? Take a peek at those new jobs the economists are hailing. They're really "jobettes," paying only poverty-level wages, with no benefits or upward mobility. In the recession, about 60 percent of the jobs we lost were middle-wage positions, paying approximately $14 to $21 an hour. Most of those jobs have not come back. Instead, of the jobs created since the recovery began, nearly six out of 10 are low-wage, paying less than $14 an hour. A central fact of the new American economy is that working-class people are increasingly unable to make a living from their jobs.

To grasp this widening inequity, befuddled economists might bite into a burger or pizza. Seven of the 12 biggest corporations that pay their workers the least are fast-food giants. Yum! is one. It's a conglomerate that owns Pizza Hut, KFC, and Taco Bell. Workers don't find these chains so yummy; for pay averages $7.50 an hour, with no health care, pensions, etc. In contrast, Yum!'s CEO hauls off about $20 million a year, even as he dispatches lobbyists to oppose any hike in our nation's miserly minimum wage.

This is no way to run a business, an economy, or a society. Fast-food giants are hugely profitable. (Yum! quaffed down $1.3 billion in profits last year alone.) They are more than able to pay living wages and decent benefits, as many local, independently-owned fast-food businesses do. Deliberately and unnecessarily holding down an entire workforce by funneling rightful wages into the coffers of a few ultra-rich executives and big investors is shameful—and dangerous. After all, even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over ... and being kicked.

At last, workers are beginning to kick back. All across the country, broad coalitions of religious leaders, unions, civil rights groups, community supporters, and others are joining thousands of fast-food workers in a rolling series of one-day strikes against particular chains, publicly shaming them for profiting through gross exploitation of employees. As one Baptist church leader said of his presence in these protests, "It's a matter of justice."

Yes—and that's what Labor Day has always been about.

http://media.salon.com/2013/08/NSA-L...ck-620x412.jpg

Somebody should put this on a T-shirt.

Somebody did, but The National Security Agency did not think it was funny.

Quelle surprise; I always thought they had a great sense of humor.

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/30/the_..._wear_partner/

Openly Lesbian Swimmer, Diana Nyad, Completes Cuba To Florida Swim At Age 64
 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...r=Gay%20Voices

KEY WEST, Fla. -- Looking dazed and sunburned, U.S. endurance swimmer Diana Nyad walked on to the shore Monday, becoming the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without the help of a shark cage.

Nyad swam up to the beach just before 2 p.m. EDT, about 53 hours after she began her journey in Havana on Saturday. As she approached, spectators waded into waist-high water and surrounded her, taking pictures and cheering her on.

"I have three messages. One is, we should never, ever give up. Two is, you're never too old to chase your dream. Three is, it looks like a solitary sport, but it is a team," she said on the beach...

VA To Provide Benefits to Gays, says Administration

NY Times September 4, 2013

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Wednesday escalated its effort to dismantle federal barriers to same-sex marriages, announcing that the Department of Veterans Affairs would immediately begin providing spousal benefits to gay men and lesbians despite a federal statute that limits such benefits to veterans’ spouses who are “of the opposite sex.”

In letters to Congressional leaders, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said that President Obama had directed the executive branch to stop obeying the statute because it had decided that it was unconstitutional in light of a Supreme Court ruling in June that struck down a similar law, a part of the Defense of Marriage Act.

“Decisions by the Executive not to enforce federal laws are appropriately rare,” Mr. Holder wrote. “Nevertheless, for the reasons described below, the unique circumstances presented here warrant nonenforcement.”

The move will allow the same-sex spouses of service members to receive health care benefits, and widows and widowers from same-sex marriages to receive survivor benefits, among other matters.

After the Supreme Court ruling, many agencies — the Pentagon and the Internal Revenue Service among them — have been rewriting their regulations to define marriage in gender-neutral terms. Last month the military announced that the same-sex spouses of active-duty personnel would receive similar family and spousal benefits, including housing allowances.

But the V.A. is in a different situation because Congress codified its definition of who was eligible for spousal benefits as a statute, and lawmakers have not changed it.

Eric K. Shinseki, the secretary of veterans affairs, said last month in a letter released by Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, that his agency was struggling with the question of providing benefits to surviving spouses because the statutory language defining “spouse” was slightly different from the law that the court had struck down.

In the letter, Mr. Shinseki said that although the Department of Veterans Affairs could recognize a same-sex marriage that is valid under state law, “nonetheless, a same-sex spouse whose marriage to a veteran was valid in the state where the parties resided at the time they entered the marriage would not meet the definition of ‘spouse’ ” under the federal statute for the purpose of veterans benefits.

Should Congress approve legislation revising the spousal definitions statute or should a court strike the law down, Mr. Shinseki added, the V.A. would swiftly adjust its policy.

Last week, a Federal District Court judge ruled that the veterans spouse statute was unconstitutional, but that ruling has not been reviewed by a higher court. But in his letters on Wednesday, Mr. Holder said there was no point in waiting for such a definitive result.

“In the meantime, continued enforcement would likely have a tangible adverse effect on the families of veterans and, in some circumstances, active-duty service members and reservists, with respect to survival, health care, home loan and other benefits,” he wrote.

The Obama administration’s decision to stop obeying the law without a definitive court ruling is a new step in its increasingly aggressive approach to providing same-sex marriage rights.
■

PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 4, 2013

Elizabeth Warren assails Supreme Court as too far right

LOS ANGELES — Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka denounced the United States Supreme Court on Sunday as a right-wing panel that serves the interests of corporate America, previewing a theme that is likely to rise in prominence with the approach of the 2016 election.

On the opening day of the AFL-CIO’s convention, Warren — the highest-profile national Democrat to address the gathering here — warned attendees of a “corporate capture of the federal courts.”

In a speech that voiced a range of widely held frustrations on the left, Warren assailed the court as an instrument of the wealthy that regularly sides with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. She cited an academic study that called the current Supreme Court’s five conservative-leaning justices among the “top 10 most pro-corporate justices in half a century.”

“You follow this pro-corporate trend to its logical conclusion, and sooner or later you’ll end up with a Supreme Court that functions as a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Business,” Warren said, drawing murmurs from the crowd.

Speaking to reporters earlier Sunday, Trumka sounded a similar note on the Supreme Court, calling the current panel “the best champion of corporate America” and raising the prospect of a constitutional amendment to reverse the court’s rulings against campaign finance regulation.

“If may take a constitutional amendment, because this Supreme Court, as currently constituted, equates money with free speech,” Trumka said.

The heated rhetoric about judicial power underscores a simmering anxiety within the Democratic coalition: that only a slight change in the balance of power on the Supreme Court could shift the balance sharply in Democrats’ favor, or create a more conservative majority that would have struck down the narrowly upheld Affordable Care Act, and other liberal legislation in the future.

Warren’s reception in Los Angeles also underscored her core appeal to the progressive base of the Democratic Party. Her entrance into the convention hall was greeted was effusive applause; Trumka hailed her as “an honest-to-God champion, the real deal” and a senator who stands up to “billion-dollar corporations and Wall Street on behalf of working people.”

And indeed, the former Harvard Law professor’s speech was a populist paean to the role of labor in fighting “powerful interests [that] have tried to capture Washington and rig the system in their favor.”

In particular, Warren took aim at the financial services industry, touting the importance of the Dodd-Frank banking regulation law and calling for new separation between commercial and investment banking.

“The big banks and their army of lobbyists have fought every step of the way to delay, water down, block or strike down regulations,” Warren said. “When a new approach is proposed — like my bill with John McCain, Angus King and Maria Cantwell to bring back Glass-Steagall — you know what happens — they throw everything they’ve got against it.”

Departing from her prepared remarks, Warren alluded to the long-delayed confirmation of Richard Cordray to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and told the crowd: “That’s your work.”

Warren drew some of the loudest applause of her precisely worded, sharply enunciated speech with a statement of skepticism about upcoming trade deals — debates that may pit Big Labor and liberal members of the Senate against the Obama administration.

“Wall Street, pharmaceuticals, telecom, big polluters and outsourcers are all salivating at the chance to rig upcoming trade deals in their favor,” Warren said. “I’ve heard people actually say that [trade deals] have to be secret because if the American people knew what was going on, they would be opposed.”

She continued: “I believe that if people would be opposed to a particular trade agreement, then that trade agreement should not happen.”

If the overall tone of Warren’s speech was relatively grim — not the kind of podium-pounding, emotive address that brings crowds to their feet — she closed with a riff that drew a standing ovation, proclaiming to the audience the good news that they have an electoral mandate to enact their agenda.

“I am proud to stand with you, to march with you, to fight with you,” she said. “Our agenda is America’s agenda and if we fight for it, we win.”

Returning to the stage after Warren concluded, Trumka sighed into the microphone: “Ah, if we could only clone her.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/0...ght-96449.html

5 Years Later, Wall Street Still Sucking Life Out of America Like Vampires at a Blood Drive
Only massive reform and no-holds-barred prosecutorial assault will drive a stake into the heart of this monster.

On Sept. 15, 2008, the Lehman Brothers collapse became the 9/11 of the financial world, sending the global economy into panic. Stocks plunged, credit dried up and working people were forced out of their homes. Jobs and pensions were wiped out in the ugliest financial episode since the Great Depression—mostly because the financial sector had gotten out of control..

Five years later, the big banks continue the most expansive crime spree in the history of capitalism, getting bigger, richer and bolder every day. Like undead creatures from a horror film, financial predators have spread themselves into every corner of society, preying and feeding and making us weaker. In an epic fail on the part of federal prosecutors and the SEC, no one at Lehman was ever prosecuted for financial shenanigans that included shady accounting practices former CEO Dick Fuld claims he didn't know about. As the five-year anniversary approaches and the statute of limitations runs out, we can be sure that no one will ever pay for Lehmans' crimes—except for us.

You could wallpaper your house with the list of dirty deals that have gone down since the financial crisis. JPMorgan sent $6 billion up in smoke in a bad bet, then lied about it to regulators. HSBC laundered money for drug cartels. Big banks manipulated the world’s benchmark interest rates. Every day, bankers defraud municipal and state finances with rigged deals that enrich them as schools crumble and children go without healthcare. There’s insider trading, racketeering, tax evasion, usury, and creative financial products set to explode in your face. Everything you can think of, and, alas, much that you can’t.

Oh, well, say the regulators. Stuff happens.

It’s perfectly obvious that if ginormous Wall Street banks don’t fear prosecution— and Attorney General Eric Holder told us flat-out they needn’t—then the cheating, lying, casino games, and law-breaking will continue. Jim Chanos, an early detector of the Enron fraud, warns that today’s Wall Street executives have even embraced the perverse logic that they have a fiduciary duty to cheat — if everybody else is doing it, says the executive, then I have an obligation to get in on the action.

Nothing but massive reform and no-holds-barred prosecutorial assault will drive a stake into the heart of this monster.

Yet on Tuesday, the smart financial reformer Eliot Spitzer lost his bid for NYC comptroller, a role in which he could keep public money out of the hands of financial predators, whose scams he understands. It can't escape notice that NYC is the home of several of the most powerful banking institutions on Earth: Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup. Or that newspapers, presumably on different sides of the political spectrum, melted into one giant anti-Spitzer bullhorn; ignoring positive polls, running biased stories and denouncing him on their editorial pages.

Economist and former regulator Bill Black noted in an email that “Wall Street was obsessed with defeating Eliot Spitzer in the Democratic primary election for Comptroller" and pointed out that his anti-financial fraud prosecution was extremely effective when he served as New York's attorney general: "An economic study found that victims of financial frauds received a substantially greater recovery of their losses when Spitzer's office was involved in cases compared to securities fraud cases where only the SEC brought an action." Clearly Wall Street doesn't like that kind of outcome.

It's not easy to find potent weapons against Wall Street predators, and in the meantime, we’re still waiting for reform. We wanted it so badly that we pitched tents in city parks during the Occupy movement to send the message, but the politicians wouldn’t hear us, because their ears were stuffed with Wall Street money. Thanks to an army of lobbyists unleashed in Washington, we can’t even seem to get the relatively timid Dodd-Frank rules designed to stop bankers from playing casino games with our savings.

The Federal Reserve could rein in the banks by splitting them up through antitrust laws, as economist Robert Reich has suggested. But we’d need someone at the Fed who is actually willing to take on this project. Unfortunately, over at the White House, we have Obama pushing crony capitalist poster boy Larry Summers for Fed chair—a man who played a key role in deregulating the financial sector, who has gleefully gorged himself on Wall Street money, and who, while in the White House, opposed even the weak Volcker Rule to curb risky trading contained in Dodd-Frank.

The banks continue to bigfoot their way around our legal and political systems, buying up whatever support they require to keep the show going.

If you think things have gotten pretty ugly, just stick around. Another financial crisis is likely. Former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson just told a group of bankers and economists in Manhattan to expect it, and he has a unique perspective on the topic, having helped bring on the last one.

Paulson knows something else: This time the Democrats will likely be held responsible.

Miss Tick

I notice the last three articles you have shared about economics do not have links to the original articles or any attribution/citation. I see you have provided them for other articles. Could you please provide them for these?

You are bolding and highlighting portions, were they originally written and published this way?
I like to know sources/have context since this is a news thread.

Thanks

No they were not originally written and published bolded or highlighted. I bolded and highlighted certain portions for emphasis. Although the emphasis is mine, they are otherwise written exactly as I posted.

Sorry for forgetting the links to the original articles. It was not purposeful. It's caused by my rushing through what I'm doing so I can be doing something else. A recurring issue of mine. I promise to watch more carefully in the future. And thank you for your interest. Here are the links in order of first to last.

http://www.alternet.org/hard-times-u...ory-capitalism

http://www.alternet.org/labor/where-...ere-its-headed

http://www.alternet.org/economy/lehm...rs-anniversary

Oh wait, I forgot this. The part in blue in the first article "8 groups most screwed over" is mine. It is this part "(the fact that it's only almost for single females reflects the lower wages for most women relative to men)" but it is referenced later in the article in the section entitled Women, "The average American woman's retirement account is 38 percent less than a man's, and women over 65 have twice the poverty rate of men." I should be more clear that when I post articles I put anything I have to say in blue. Like in post 3205. I should maybe add that whenever I post something in my own words near or in an article. Sorry.

All good. Thanks for the clarification.

Most threads and posts it doesn't matter as it is our own voice. When using another persons writing I like to give attribution.

Why Do We Spend Billions on the National Security State While We Let Detroit Go Bankrupt?
During a peace-time economy, the budgets of the five intelligence agencies have grown exponentially while urban cities and social services have dwindled.

By Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo
September 12, 2013 |

The existence of a secret US budget, amounting to a well-financed shadow government, used to spy on American citizens and monitor their daily activities, was always derisively consigned to insane conspiracy theorists. After recent revelations by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, called a traitor and being forced to hide from the Obama Administration in Russia, the existence of this budget is no longer in question. Snowden has smoked out the details of the secret budgets used by the intelligence community, known as the “Black Budget.”

The reported amount of this budget is approximately $52.6 billion. These funds are in addition to the congressionally-approved budgets of the Armed Forces and the Department of Defense of $526.6 billion dollars for a total of more than half a trillion dollars. According to the National Priorities project:

“In the Obama administration 2014 fiscal year, the administration is seeking a $526.6 billion budget for the Department of Defense, not including war funding or nuclear weapons activities at the Department of Energy.”

According to the Washington Post, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA) and National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) receive nearly 68% of the black budget. During a peace-time economy, the budgets of the five intelligence agencies have grown exponentially while urban cities and social services have dwindled. For example, the CIA budget was increased to $14.7 billion dollars, a 56% increase since 2004. The NSA budget for domestic and international spying has increased to $10.8 billion dollars or 53% since 2004. The NRO, the office purportedly responsible for designing, building and operating the country’s imagery satellites increased its budget to $10.3 billion dollars or 12% increase since 2004. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGIA) that provides imagery and map-based intelligence increased its budget to $4.9 billion dollars or an increase of 108% since 2004. Finally, in 2004 the General Defense Intelligence Program that conducts, collects and documents human and technical intelligence and media management within the DoD increased its budget to $4.4 billion dollars.

“Snowden has smoked out the details of the secret budgets.”

These kinds of intelligence organizations have operated in every repressive government to control populations, such as East Germany’s Stasi organization that deterred dissent, free speech and basic civil liberties of its people. In recent BAR articles, I explored “Big Brother” programs instituted and operated within the U.S. Federal government, such as the “Insider Threat Program,” created by President Obama under Executive Order 13587. This program is designed to predict any behavior by an employee in the government that could lead to blowing the whistle on corruption and abuse, contradicting his campaign promises to protect whistleblowers, enshrine government transparency, combat activities inimical to the very tenets of our basic democratic principles and rights under the law. (See BAR here, here and here.) Edward Snowden’s revelations continue to inform and illuminate the American media and public about a government operating in the shadows without accountability to the people or any pretense of adhering to democratic principles. We can only assume that there are additional funds unreported within these secrecy organizations. Yet, the country suffers from high structural unemployment, sky rocketing poverty rates, inferior education for low-income communities, infrastructure decline and environmental degradation.

The recent 50th anniversary of the historic March on Washington reminds us of the FBI surveillance of Dr. Martin Luther King in the 1960s that escalated after the march under the pretext that he was affiliated with communist organizations. This FBI surveillance earned King the label of “the most dangerous Negro in America.”

Had the US civil rights movement that was celebrated on the National Mall with pomp and presidential ceremony occurred today, the $56.2 Billion dollar budget and its thousands of foot soldiers would have left no stone unturned to undermine and destroy the movement and its leaders leaving some to face life in prison, like Bradley Manning, or others to seek refuge in foreign lands like Edward Snowden.

We now have a glimpse into the biology of the US shadow government that is stunning in depth, detail and viciousness. It allows cities and populations like Detroit to decay while exhorting the rich culture of Motown and the African heritage that gave rise to the music that became a global anthem. Dead children, particularly dead black children, perishing for lack of basic nutrition, disproportionate exposure to environmental toxins, a lack of access to quality education and an over exposure to societal violence continues while the national security state demands more power and money.

This week, the Huffington Post reports that, based on internal US government documents, “the NSA in partnership with the British government, has secretly been unraveling encryption technology that billions of Internet users rely upon to keep their electronic messages and confidential data safe from prying eyes.”

Welcome to the insane and violent world of the US national security state.

I consider Economic Violence to be the single most critical issue of our time. I feel that other ills spring forth in some way from this vile root. Power as economic force, implemented by dominating and keeping less advantaged persons powerless seems to be the name of the game.

Miss Tick, I appreciate the posts you have made regarding economic injustice.

Thanks so much!

I quote a portion of one of your posts...


Instead, it keeps getting worse for the homeless. North Carolina made it a crime to feed them. Columbia, South Carolina approved a plan to remove them. Tampa, Florida passed a law that makes it a crime for them to sleep in public.



How about all three?

Where I live, it is illegal to feed homeless without a permit, illegal for people to sleep in any public space, day or night. Even a harmless afternoon nap on the library lawn is illegal, and you will be ticketed. Any type of camping or sleeping day or night night in bushes/vacant lots is illegal of course.

Police patrol every night trying to find the poor sleeping in vehicles on the street, car, van, anythings... as it is illegal to sleep in a vehicle on city and county streets, day or night.

My city was caught putting homeless on buses and sending them to Los Angeles skid row, but stopped doing it.

Three years ago, my city had proposed a system for rounding up homeless and restricting them to a "zone". The first attempt failed. The zone was one small portion of town, near the industrial section, where most of the homeless shelters and several rehab centers are located.

Homeless people would have actually been ID'd and confined to a 7 block ghetto of sorts. (Anyone smell Nazi Germany here, or is that just me?) The first attempt failed. As I heard it... city counsel reviewed it and found the California State Constitution might be at odds, so got dropped. Rumor has it they may be working on a second version of this "law".

Oh, did I mention? In my City, two of the council members are heavily invested in local rehab centers and receive funds for consulting and admin fees, directly related to the number of clients in their facilities.

That takes me back to the first line of my post.

Thank you Licious. I appreciate you saying that.

Here is an article addressing exactly what you said in your post:
http://www.alternet.org/economy/5-sc...ess?paging=off

It really isn't necessary though because you covered the issue thoroughly and admirably with your own words.

It's a scary new world and I shudder to think what the future holds for those of us who find ourselves economically challenged. The Masters of the Universe show no signs of stopping their plundering and in an oligarchy where the rich own pretty much everything and everyone, including the supreme court, it is near impossible to get any laws passed that would slow these cowboys down. We live in interesting times.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-pol...ental-patients

Now we will shuffle our most needy and vulnerable from state to state like a demented game of hot potato. A society without a social conscious is barely a society at all. These kinds of behaviors we are seeing more and more in our country is the fruit of the pathological fear of socialism planted in us by the controlling elite. When we even hear social programs, welfare, universal healthcare, we hear socialism. And somehow somewhere in our collective psyche we have come to accept the meme that a society that compassionately cares for all its people is a bad thing. But the rich controlling 98% of the wealth and all the power, well that's very very good for us.

Yes! When I worked on an inpatient behavioral health unit years ago, this was happening back then, too.

Staff would call it "Greyhound therapy" or "bus therapy" whenever we would get an admit from out of state.

The poor, severely mentally ill patient would think that they were getting a free bus ride home and would wind up in CA.

Absolutely tragic. So sorry to read it is still going on. The severely and persistently mentally ill are the most vulnerable population of all.

Forgot the link to the article in post 3218. I really don't want it to look like I'm trying to pass these articles off as my own writing. I'm just forgetful.

http://www.alternet.org/why-do-we-sp...it-go-bankrupt

We've Got a Billionaire Bailout Society—And the 99% May Never Recover From It In Our Lifetimes
Our financial system is sucking up the wealth of the nation and using it to cover its losses.
By Les Leopold

The odds are that we in the bottom 99 percent may never see a recovery in our lifetimes. That's because our nation has evolved into something entirely new: a billionaire bailout society.

We are entering a disastrous new era in which all the economic gains go to the top 1 percent, according to data from economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty. They report that, "Top 1% incomes grew by 31.4% while bottom 99% incomes grew only by 0.4% from 2009 to 2012. Hence, the top 1% captured 95% of the income gains in the first three years of the recovery.... In sum, top 1% incomes are close to full recovery while bottom 99% incomes have hardly started to recover." (In 2012, $394,000 is the cutoff to make it into the top 1 percent.)

We see in vivid detail what the new American order looks like. The top 1 percent live in another economic universe of high finance that sucks the wealth from the rest of us. In their world, banks (owned by and for the top 1%) are able to grow larger and larger so there is no chance they will be allowed to fail, even after these same banks took down the economy. (In 1965 they had assets equal to 17% percent of the U.S. economy. Today it's more than 65% percent.)

Free from any meaningful controls, financial gambling (called proprietary trading in polite circles) is now the dominant activity within our largest banks. In fact, in these too-big-to-fail banks, more money goes to financial gambling than to loans for businesses and consumers. These are not banks—they are rigged casinos for the rich. The upside from these corrupt pursuits are kept by the top fraction of the 1 percent, while the 99 percent hold the bag when those phony bets crash the economy.

And who among us doesn't think that will happen again?

Regulation is hapless as billions of dollars slosh through the political troughs. Serious enforcement is virtually non-existent because the enforcers fear that the entire financial system will fail should these criminal banks be prosecuted. Every national policy from the bailouts to "quantitative easing" has further funneled money to the super-rich. Meanwhile, the rest of us are told to plod along until jobs miraculously appear and our incomes finally rise. Dream on.

In sum, our new economic era is characterized by the supremacy of financial capital which vacuums up the productive wealth of the nation, and then uses the nation's wealth as an insurance policy to pay for its inevitable losses.

Entering Uncharted Territory

The billionaire bailout society is quite different than previous gilded ages. This can be seen clearly in comparing the aftermath of the recent Great Recession to what took place during the Great Depression. We need to remember that after the crash of 1929, America went on a crusade to rescue the economy by controlling Wall Street, supporting unions, and fundamentally rebuilding our physical and educational infrastructure. As Harvard economist Claudia Golden put it, a Great Compression took place during which the gap between the rich and the rest of us came down—not by destroying wealth but by making sure working people got their fair share. In 1929, the top 1% grabbed 23 percent of the nation's income. By the late 1960s it was below 9 percent.

During the Great Compression we had our feet planted firmly on the neck of Wall Street. Financial gambling was held to a minimum. Incomes were no higher on Wall Street than in the productive economy. Finance and production more or less were in balance. But after deregulation set in the late 1970s, the income gap began to accelerate yet again, returning to the unconscionable levels of the late 1920s.

Here's the frightening news contained in the Saez/Piketty data: There is no Great Compression emerging this time around. We're not heading toward greater income equality. We're not building up the middle class or supporting unionization. We're not eradicating poverty and hunger. We're not expanding educational opportunity. We're not rebuilding infrastructure. Nothing we're doing looks anything like the society we built from the New Deal through the 1960s. We're not doing any of the things that would lead to a more stable and just economy. In fact, we're doing just the opposite, which means the billionaire bailout society will become even more firmly entrenched.

How do we dismantle the billionaire bailout society?

It starts with recognizing that the political circus in Washington has no chance at all in altering our pell-mell descent into crippling inequality. The Republicans are so blinded by nonexistent big government socialism that they fail to realize, yet alone acknowledge, that the capitalism they so love is long gone. Wall Street ate it for lunch.

While we could single out a handful of decent Democrats who more or less get the picture, the party as a whole is enthralled with Wall Street, many hoping to join the world of high finance after they serve their time in public service. There is no chance whatsoever that these two parties will tame high finance or undermine the growing billionaire bailout society.

But much can still be done, especially on the state and local level. That's where Wall Street is vulnerable to a strong counterattack. And that attack must be aimed at building public banks that can one day replace the Wall Street behemoths. (Many thanks to Ellen Brown and her new book, The Public Bank Solution for opening my eyes to this possibility.)

Here are some key facts we all should know about banks and public banks:

1. There is only one public state bank in the country—the Bank of North Dakota—and it's phenomenally successful. A relic from the Populist era, the BND invests in the people of North Dakota. It doesn't play with derivatives or high-risk mortgages so it didn't get burned during the crash. It doesn't pay its executives high salaries (which are lower than what chauffeurs get on Wall Street). It just builds the state's economy and returns a profit year after year to the people of North Dakota. As a result, the state has the lowest unemployment rate in the country (even after taking into account their oil boom). And this so-called socialist bank resides in one of the most conservative states in the country.

2. Right now, we taxpayers funnel over $1 trillion of our money into Wall Street banks when we pay our state and local taxes and fees. That money does not go into vaults in city hall or the state capital. It goes to Wall Street banks which at the moment are the only ones large enough to provide all the services required...except in North Dakota. There state revenues run through the state bank which in turns supports 80 community banks. If that happened in the other 49 states, we could create more than 10 million additional domestic jobs. Remember, a state bank invests in its state. Wall Street has no allegiance to any state or country.

3. State banks are the answer to funding infrastructure projects. Right now Wall Street preys upon state and local governments that need to borrow money to build schools, roads and other critical public projects. Those loans comes with enormous fees and interest rates that often double and triple the cost of these projects. Not so with public banks, whose job it is to build up the state rather than rip it off.


What will it take to win?

There are some positive signs popping up all over the country. Low-wage workers are organizing. The AFL-CIO is finally coming out of its defensive crouch and opening up to non-traditional worker organizations. More and more co-ops are forming. And more than 20 states are seriously considering moves toward public banks.

But we'll need much more to dent the billionaire bailout society. We will need nothing less than a broad movement that connects all these efforts and many more into a coherent force aimed at high finance. The money labor squanders on meaningless elections should be funding the attack on Wall Street.

It's time we looked more seriously at the last time Americans rose up against Wall Street. That was during the Populist Era of the late 19th century. Then, urban working people and farmers demanded an alternative financial system to the one run by Wall Street. It was a clear-cut struggle pitting private banking against public banking.

Then, like now, the American people were disgusted by the domination of high finance. Then, like now, the two parties were corrupted by concentrated wealth. Then, like now, the modest prosperity of the working people was collapsing. It took great courage and resilience for Americans to rise up. It took thousands of dedicated organizers and educators who believed in the justice of their cause.

Even though the movement was ultimately defeated, it left its indelible mark on America. Many of its policies and programs formed the constructive politics of the New Deal that ultimately tamed Wall Street for nearly a half a century. And it gave North Dakota its public bank.

We will need that kind of massive upheaval again if we hope to undo the billionaire bailout society.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/weve...mes?paging=off

Well, now I understand why people will continue to say “well that’s my opinion”, regardless of overwhelming proof to the contrary. Facts mean little when compared to a person’s personal belief system. This is the most depressing fact I’ve heard about the brain. I mean where can you possibly go from here. If logic, facts and truth have no power over what people believe, then what is the point. I think I will talk to my wife about selling all our worldly possessions and going to live on a sparsely inhabited island somewhere.


The Most Depressing Discovery About the Brain, Ever
Say goodnight to the dream that education, journalism, scientific evidence, or reason can provide the tools that people need in order to make good decisions.

Yale law school professor Dan Kahan’s new research paper is called “Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government,” but for me a better title is the headline on science writer Chris Mooney’s piece about it in Grist: “Science Confirms: Politics Wrecks Your Ability to Do Math.”

Kahan conducted some ingenious experiments about the impact of political passion on people’s ability to think clearly. His conclusion, in Mooney’s words: partisanship “can even undermine our very basic reasoning skills…. [People] who are otherwise very good at math may totally flunk a problem that they would otherwise probably be able to solve, simply because giving the right answer goes against their political beliefs.”

In other words, say goodnight to the dream that education, journalism, scientific evidence, media literacy or reason can provide the tools and information that people need in order to make good decisions. It turns out that in the public realm, a lack of information isn’t the real problem. The hurdle is how our minds work, no matter how smart we think we are. We want to believe we’re rational, but reason turns out to be the ex post facto way we rationalize what our emotions already want to believe.

For years my go-to source for downer studies of how our hard-wiring makes democracy hopeless has been Brendan Nyhan, an assistant professor of government at Dartmouth.

Nyan and his collaborators have been running experiments trying to answer this terrifying question about American voters: Do facts matter?

The answer, basically, is no. When people are misinformed, giving them facts to correct those errors only makes them cling to their beliefs more tenaciously.
Here’s some of what Nyhan found:

People who thought WMDs were found in Iraq believed that misinformation even more strongly when they were shown a news story correcting it.
People who thought George W. Bush banned all stem cell research kept thinking he did that even after they were shown an article saying that only some federally funded stem cell work was stopped.
People who said the economy was the most important issue to them, and who disapproved of Obama’s economic record, were shown a graph of nonfarm employment over the prior year – a rising line, adding about a million jobs. They were asked whether the number of people with jobs had gone up, down or stayed about the same. Many, looking straight at the graph, said down.
But if, before they were shown the graph, they were asked to write a few sentences about an experience that made them feel good about themselves, a significant number of them changed their minds about the economy. If you spend a few minutes affirming your self-worth, you’re more likely to say that the number of jobs increased.

In Kahan’s experiment, some people were asked to interpret a table of numbers about whether a skin cream reduced rashes, and some people were asked to interpret a different table – containing the same numbers – about whether a law banning private citizens from carrying concealed handguns reduced crime. Kahan found that when the numbers in the table conflicted with people’s positions on gun control, they couldn’t do the math right, though they could when the subject was skin cream. The bleakest finding was that the more advanced that people’s math skills were, the more likely it was that their political views, whether liberal or conservative, made them less able to solve the math problem.

I hate what this implies – not only about gun control, but also about other contentious issues, like climate change. I’m not completely ready to give up on the idea that disputes over facts can be resolved by evidence, but you have to admit that things aren’t looking so good for a reason. I keep hoping that one more photo of an iceberg the size of Manhattan calving off of Greenland, one more stretch of record-breaking heat and drought and fires, one more graph of how atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen in the past century, will do the trick. But what these studies of how our minds work suggest is that the political judgments we’ve already made are impervious to facts that contradict us.

Maybe climate change denial isn’t the right term; it implies a psychological disorder. Denial is business-as-usual for our brains. More and better facts don’t turn low-information voters into well-equipped citizens. It just makes them more committed to their misperceptions. In the entire history of the universe, no Fox News viewers ever changed their minds because some new data upended their thinking. When there’s a conflict between partisan beliefs and plain evidence, it’s the beliefs that win. The power of emotion over reason isn’t a bug in our human operating systems, it’s a feature.

http://www.alternet.org/media/most-d...ver?paging=off

Heck yeah!
2 words Margaret Mead!
Please!
She figured that out years ago!

The Most Depressing Discovery About the Brain, Ever
Say goodnight to the dream that education, journalism, scientific evidence, or reason can provide the tools that people need in order to make good decisions.




This made me chuckle and think of the old saying...."my mind is made up, don't confuse me with the facts."

Human cognitive process and decision making processes are fascinating studies in the use of applied implausibility.

Cyn, I found a link to the work book for that course I told you about eons ago on The Art Of Critical Decision Making. Remove all sharp objects from the immediate vicinity before reading this: The Art of Critical Decision Making

I do remember you telling me about this. Thanks for finding it. I am wading through it now. I'm glad I took your advice about sharp objects though. You know I always think it's purposeful this refusal to look at the facts, but after reading the chapter that picks apart that fateful climb up Mt. Everest I will have to reevaluate. There are other factors at play surely. Nobody purposely makes choices that are lethal. Well nobody who isn't planning suicide that is.

It's a weird news cycle when the most liberal message is the one coming from the Vatican.

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-an...ng-fringe-week

this is my favorite (so to speak)

3. Koch brothers: Cervical cancer is a small price to pay to defeat Obamacare.

In their abject desperation to forestall the implementation of Obamacare, right-wing zealots released some ads this week that are bound to go down in history as some of the most absurd pieces of political video ever created.

The ad campaign created by Generation Opportunity, which is funded by the ultra-conservative Koch brothers, specifically targets young people with the rather irresponsible message that they really don’t need health insurance. Better to “opt out,” pay the fine, it’s cheaper. Also, for young women, it avoids those uncomfortable gynecological exams, the ones that might save you from cervical cancer. The somewhat deranged looking advertisement features the legs of a woman in stirrups, presumably ready for her potentially life-saving pap smear, when all of sudden a wooden marionette Uncle Sam pops up between her legs. Uncle Sam apparently wants her. In the final scene, Uncle Sam is shown holding a speculum.

I clicked on the link "Generation Opportunity" and I didn't see the ad, but I was so disturbed by the site I will admit I didn't look very hard. I did find this on the bottom:1,502,194 people like this.

It's just too damn depressing. After that article on the brain I read recently I realize there really isn't much point...

maybe i just need some chocolate.

OKLAHOMA CITY -- Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin has ordered the National Guard to stop processing requests for military benefits for same-sex couples, her office confirmed Tuesday, despite a Pentagon directive to do so.


Fallin spokesman Alex Weintz said the governor was following the wish of Oklahoma voters, who approved a constitutional amendment in 2004 that prohibits giving benefits of marriage to gay couples...

http://www.military.com/daily-news/2...ml?ESRC=dod.nl

Besides Oklahoma, Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana are also going against a federal directive requiring agencies to grant same sex married couples the same benefits as any married couple.

And Louisiana is also refusing to recognize same sex marriage on its tax forms, even though state law requires the same filing status on state and federal tax forms. Sounds like even though the IRS will allow same sex married couples to file jointly, they won’t be able to do that in Louisiana because they must use the same filing status and the state won't allow them to file jointly.

Some fucked up shit.

The Republican Vote to Cut Food Stamps is Really a Decision to Kill the "Useless Eaters"

15 million Americans were “food insecure” in the United States during 2012. The Great Recession has increased the number of Americans who do not have sufficient food by 30 percent. The fastest growing group of people who need some assistance with obtaining sufficient food to maintain a basic standard of living is the elderly. Hunger in America is estimated to cost the U.S. economy 167 billion dollars.

Approximately 20 percent of American children live in poverty. Food insecurity and hunger leads to a long-term decline in life spans and a diminished standard of living for whole communities.

Last week, Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to cut 39 billion dollars from federal food assistance programs. Their vote is more than just the next act in the ongoing politics of cruelty by the Republican Party in the Age of Obama.

It is a decision to kill poor people.

In America, discussions of poverty are linked in the public imagination to stereotypes about race, class, and gender. The face of poverty is not white (the group which in fact comprises the largest group of recipients for government aid). Instead, it is the mythical black welfare queen, or an “illegal” immigrant who is trying to pilfer the system at the expense of “hard working” white Americans.

Discussions about poverty are also easily transformed into claims about morality and virtue. Consequently, while the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is very efficient and involves very little if any fraud on the part of its participants, stereotypes about the poor can be used to legitimate the policing and harassment of Americans in need of food support through mandatory drug testing and other unnecessary programs.

Here, the long-term end goal for Republicans is revealed for what it is—a desire to make being a poor person into a crime.

Such a project serves a broader effort by conservatives to further transfer resources upward to the 1 percent from the American people. The decision by Republicans to further punish the poor, while the United States is in the midst of one of the greatest economic calamities in recent memory, also exists in the context of a Republican Party whose last presidential nominee suggested that 47 percent of the American public are human leeches and parasites.

Their vote to cut food assistance programs (as well as the social safety net more broadly) exists in a bizarre political moment when the Republican Party is possessed by a radical and destructive ideology, one that is a mix of Ayn Randian fantasies, austerity and neoliberalism run amok, and libertarianism processed through the carnivalesque freak show performance and eliminationist shtick of Right-wing talk radio.

The Republican Party’s hatred of poor people overlaps with its use of white racial resentment and symbolic racism to win over white voters in the post civil rights era.

For decades, conservatism and racism have been political intimates in the United States. The Great Recession and the rise of austerity politics have facilitated a frightening union of those forces on the American Right.

With the introduction of the “Southern Strategy” during the Nixon era, and now spurred on by the election of the country’s first black president, The Tea Party GOP has been fully transformed into what is best described as a “Herrenvolk” political organization.

“Herrenvolk”--what literally means “the Master Race” or “chosen people”--is a description of a society where citizenship is tiered and hierarchical along lines of “race”. As such, the dominant group receives the full benefits of social services, transfer payments, and other supports from the State. The out-group, marked as the Other, is viewed as not deserving of such resources.

South Africa and Nazi Germany were Herrenvolk societies. The United States during its centuries-long slave regime, and then the many decades of Jim and Jane Crow, was also a society organized along similar principles of racialized citizenship.

In this arrangement, the poor and others among the out-group are stigmatized as “useless eaters” who should be separated from the body politic if some other use cannot be found for them.

I use this powerful phrase with great care. While originally used by the Nazis and the American eugenics movement to describe the handicapped, as well as the physically and mentally disabled, “useless eaters” can also be understood in the context of a Herrenvolk society to include those “surplus” people who are not “properly” contributing to society.

History echoes. For example, during the 2012 election (and through to the present) Republicans have used the language of “makers” and “takers” to describe their view of American society in which the former are “productive” citizens, and the latter are “drains” on society and “surplus” people.

The Republican Party demonstrates its Herrenvolk ethic in a number of other ways too.

Most importantly, the Republican Party’s Herrenvolk value system is enabled by its voting base where 95 percent of its voters in the 2012 presidential election were white.

The policies which result will almost by necessity serve “white” political interests, however perceived or defined by the Republican leadership and its media apparatus. This claim is buttressed by Eric Knowles of New York University whose recent research details how the Tea Party serves as a white identity organization for its members.

It is also important to call attention to how the Tea Party is both older and whiter than the nation as a whole. The country which they yearn for and “want to take back” is an appeal to the world of Jim and Jane Crow, unapologetic white male privilege, and where white people were subsidized and protected by the State at the expense of others.

As highlighted by Ira Katznelson’s essential book When Affirmative Action was White, the white middle class in the post-World War 2 era was a creation of the federal government.

The VA and FHA home loan programs were not equally accessible by blacks and other people of color. The G.I. Bill, a stepping stone to education and middle class identity, was also practically limited for African-American veterans and other people of color.

Those and other similar programs made the white American middle class and constituted one of the single greatest moments of wealth creation in the history of the United States. Such policies were examples of racially tiered citizenship in practice as day-to-day government policy.

Herrenvolk America is the dreamland and formative political and social experience that the Tea Party, as the beating heart of the Republican Party, yearns to create.

In chasing the dream of a conservative political Whiteopia, the Republican Party has also succeeded in rolling back the voting rights of racial minorities, young people, the elderly, and the poor across the country.

It also uses the racially incendiary language of “secession” and “nullification” that is drawn directly from the American Civil War and the “States Rights” movement.

This is a practical embrace of the white supremacist politics of Jim and Jane Crow, the neo Confederacy, and a rejection of the victories of the Civil Rights Movement.

The faux populist language of “real Americans” deployed by Sarah Palin for example, is a clear signal to a sense of “us” and “them”, a divide that cannot neatly be separated from a sense of a shared racial identity on the part of the speaker and its intended audience where to be “American” is to be “white”.

Birtherism is predicated on racial bigotry and the idea that for many white Americans a black man is de facto not a “real” citizen. Thus, Barack Obama is symbolically unfit to be President of the United.

The use of coded and overt racial appeals by Republicans to attack President Barack Obama is further evidence of how white racial resentment has triumphed as a type of common sense language for the Right in this political moment.

All white people do not benefit from being members of a Herrenvolk society in the same way. Anticipating this arrangement, activist and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois famously described white skin privilege as a type of “psychological wage” that does not always translate into equal material gains or rewards for its owners. In many cases, Whiteness and white racism actually hurt white people.

Thus, the following puzzle: the Republican Party is cutting food stamps under the cover of punishing the black and brown poor; in reality, white people in the heart of Red State America will be hurt the most by such a policy.

In the Tea Party GOP’s dream of Herrenvolk America all white people are equal—and borrowing from the Orwell’s classic book Animal Farm—but some white people are more equal than others.

The Republican Party has voted to kill the “useless eaters” by cutting food assistance programs. But, data on food stamp use from the USDA suggests that such a policy will cause great pain to Republican voters.

How do we reconcile this contradiction?

Ultimately, populist conservatives and the Tea Party base are so drunk on white identity politics that they are unable to realize that the plutocrats and the 1 percent have just as much disdain for them, regardless of their common racial identity and skin color, as they do the black and brown poor.

Class trumps race. Unfortunately, the common good is betrayed again by how too many poor and working class white conservatives cling to white identity politics instead of seeking shared alliances of mutual interest, aid, and support across the color line.

http://www.alternet.org/speakeasy/ch...rs?page=entire

The new party line: The Correct US Poverty Rate Is Around And About Zero
 

My words are in Blue, the article excerpts are in Black

You may wonder (or not) how Congress can vote to cut food stamps in a time when so many people are food insecure (interesting terminology that). When so few have so much and so many must make do with so little, how can logic dictate that even more be taken from the segment of society that has the least.

Well as it turns out there is a kind of convoluted thought process that makes what has just been done to those people who need help getting enough to eat understandable, acceptable, even just.

I read a few articles that mention there is little if any cheating going on with food programs. Nobody is getting food assistance who doesn’t need it, as if that might be the impetus for the wealthy literally taking the food right out of the mouths of the poor. I understand their confusion. They are grasping at straws trying to understand the logic of Congress cutting food assistance. Well corruption isn’t the story they are using at the moment. What they are selling about the poor is much more sinister.

Apparently there is no position that is indefensible. The reasoning the oligarchy is using and spreading amongst us now is that there are no poor here and the poverty rate in the US is actually ZERO.

Here is a particularly misleading excerpt from one article. Not so much misleading as out right lying actually:


“Way back when, poverty alleviation was almost entirely done by simply giving poor people cash money. This obviously made them less poor so it was a very effective strategy. However, it was felt that this wasn’t quite the right thing to do and therefore the system has changed over the years to one of sometimes giving money, but not very often, plus giving benefits in kind (Section 8, Medicaid, SNAP) and aid through the tax system (EITC). The US is now spending a great deal more on poverty alleviation (after inflation of course) than it used to but by the official measurement of poverty pretty much nothing seems to have changed.

The reason for this is that we don’t actually count benefits in kind or aid through the tax system in our definition of poverty: although we do count just giving poor people cash money. The upshot of this is that in the old days what the poverty line was really measuring is the number of people who were poor after the things we did to reduce poverty. Today that same poverty line is measuring the number of people who are poor before all the things we do to reduce poverty.

It’s worth noting that the four major poverty reduction programs are Medicaid, SNAP, EITC and Section 8 vouchers. And we include none of them, not one single groat of that money spent, in our current estimates of poverty”


This is such a crock of shit. To the best of my knowledge we never did include them in estimates of poverty, except in that one must be a certain degree of poor to qualify for the particular programs. The article says “way back when poverty alleviation was almost entirely done by giving poor people cash”. When parsed and examined this statement is a blatant falsehood, it’s just not true. There has never been a time like that. There has been some kind of food assistance since 1932 when statistics on poverty were not even recorded. Food assistance went from food surplus distribution, food stamps that you had to pay for, free food stamps and then the debit card system . There has been Medicaid, fuel assistance and Section 8 for many, many years. Not to mention EIC, but the thing with Earned Income Credit, is you actually have to have an income to get it. Since statistics were not kept during the Great Depression let alone the 1800’s I don’t understand how this article gets printed filled with such bullshit. Before 1932 there were poorhouses and local governments provided food, fuel and sometimes cash to poor residents. Cash relief to the poor depended on local property taxes. But relief outside of poorhouses was discriminatory at best. And no poverty rates were recorded. Since poverty rates have been recorded there have always been other programs that help the poor with assistance apart from handing them cash money. So that blows that out of the water.

However according to an article in Forbes, to help its non-existent poor the US is “now spending a great deal more on poverty alleviation (after inflation of course) than it used to.” So it does makes sense to cut a bit off now doesn’t it?

Again blatant lies. And it's such a ridiculous lie it doesn't even need to be debunked. It disproves itself.

The belief is that the country’s real concern should be consumption poverty and that is about zero. So no worries. Unfortunately it is the top percentile, the over rich, the beyond wealthy, who are doing all the consuming. But that seems to be beside the point. Here is an excerpt from an article in Forbes:

“The second chart takes us into another one of my pet little ideas. We don’t actually care whether people have jobs or not, we don’t even care whether people have incomes or not: we really only care that people have the opportunity to consume. Therefore it’s not income poverty that is the real concern, it’s consumption poverty that ought to be. And as chart 2 shows us this is around and about zero now in the US.

So, I think it perfectly justifiable to insist that the correct US poverty rate is around and about zero.”

The Forbes article goes on to explain that the reason the US fairs so badly when compared to the poverty rates of other advanced nations is because
“almost everyone other than the US measures poverty as a relative thing, not against some hard and fast standard…this measurement of relative poverty is not in fact a measurement of poverty at all. It’s a measure of inequality.”

So now we are at the crux of it. It is not poverty that people suffer from in the US. They are not hungry or without heat in the winter. They are jealous of inequity, the unfair distribution of wealth. They are trying to get the 1% to loosen their purse strings. People in India, China and Brazil know what it means to be poor. Even the so called poorest of the poor in the US are infinitely better off than the real poor. As explained here:

“What this tells us is that the very poorest of the poor in the US, the bottom 5% (and thus very definitely below that poverty line) are in fact richer than 95% of all Indians. And 85% of all Chinese and 55% of all Brazilians.
Sure, the US is a more unequal country than most others in the OECD, the rich countries’ club. But the real poverty rate, the number of people living in absolute poverty, is around and about zero in the US all the same.”

So I guess if you are hungry, jobless, without shelter and medical care and happen to be standing on US soil you’re not really poor. It’s all beginning to make sense now. A kind of scary freaking me out type of sense. I think this is a kind of softening approach meant to help guide us into our new future. The one where the rich 2% have everything and the rest of us become rather superfluous. Well, more than just nonessential. Unnecessary annoyances that keep whining about being hungry or cold or sick. These bizarre lies are the lube to help the coming austerity measures initially slide through without too much fuss. It has certainly worked so far. The underlying message, the song beneath the song is clear. They are saying since there are no poor what do we need social programs for? Oh those losers? Just ignore those homeless derelicts you see wandering around the streets. We are trying to figure out how best to remove them from sight. It’s not like they are actual normal people like you and I. Normal people don't become homeless. Nor are they unable to feed their children. Oh, you want safe affordable housing? Get rid of the immigrants. Not to mention its all the fault of PoC, that’s why it’s unsafe. You don’t like living with vermin, roaches and bed bugs? What a bunch of wimps. Everybody in India has bed bugs.

So now the party line is there are no really poor people in the US. It’s not like being invisible. You just don’t exist. So it stands to reason the ruling elite can continue to cut social spending. Not only that, but they can take more and more away from you. They can squeeze you long time. Austerity genocide is coming to a town near you. It will take awhile until you reach the degree of poverty the oligarchy will recognize (if that even exists). Until then Congress will continue cutting social spending perhaps until you bleed out.

Here are a couple of articles that explain how there are no poor people in the US.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworst...nd-about-zero/

http://conversableeconomist.blogspot...nsumption.html

Losing the War to Criminalize Gay Sex in the US, Religious-Right Groups Are Taking Their Fight Abroad
A legal contest in Belize over non-heterosexual sex laws is only the latest in a wider struggle being waged in Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America.


http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-an...ng-their-fight

DC Republicans in Full Panic Mode: Obamacare Will Be Hugely Popular and There's Little the GOP Can Do to Stop It
The money is already moving down the pipeline, and Americans are about to get much cheaper healthcare.

There’s a bottom line behind Congress’ latest Obamacare gyrations that is easy to miss as the most desperate Republicans keep threatening to kill the health insurance law by defunding it. They can’t stop it from taking effect, just as they haven’t been able to repeal or defund it in every federal budget fight since it passed in 2009—including their latest rants.

Moreover, there’s billions already in the fiscal pipeline to states to implement the health insurance market reforms, whether or not there’s a federal government shutdown. Thus, their posturing, such as Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s latest bill for complete defunding and his Tuesday filibuster, needs to be seen as the old cliché it is: a desperate measure for their desperate time.

What’s scaring Republicans is that the president’s most significant domestic initiative is about to hit prime time. Starting October 1, it is poised to start delivering on its central promise, which is giving millions of Americans more and cheaper choices to buy health insurance. These policies would be obtained from state-run insurance pools, or by a federal-run pool that would be accessed in person or online, and will take effect January 1. Poor people get tax refunds to buy insurance, although those won’t be seen until after next year’s taxes.

Republicans fear the law will find more supporters than critics. That’s why Democrats should be excited, because an often centrist president has enlarged the safety net for the poor and created a new system to get healthcare at a cheaper price than the insurance industry was willing to provide.

“There’s a ton of money for an indefinite time for the grants to the states to create and run the [insurance-buying] exchanges,” said C. Stephen Redhead, a Congressional Research Service analyst who has authored numerous reports about funding Obamacare in recent budget cycles. “A lot will depend on the effort that the state itself is willing to make.”

Redhead is referring to what states are and aren’t doing to publicize the government-run health insurance marketplaces. But whether your state has embraced the reforms, such as California, which received nearly $1 billion from Washington to get started, or has done next to nothing, such as in Virginia and Florida (meaning federal agencies will fill that void) is a separate issue from whether the insurance reforms are coming.

Redhead’s Congressional Research Service reports describe all of this in great detail. It’s true that Republicans have been able to chip away around edges of the law. But they have not stopped it. Perhaps their biggest dent was taking a $6.25 billion bite out of FY2013-FY2021 appropriations for a big healthcare fund to extend a payroll tax cut in 2012. However, that came from $16.75 billion the law gave the federal Prevention and Public Health Fund for that period, which is distributed among dozens of programs.

The Affordable Care Act is so big and so much of it is funded in perpetuity—like other federal entitlements—that the Obama administration has been able to move around piles of money to get it started, Redhead said. He compared Obamacare’s launch to how Medicaid, the state-run program for low-income and disabled people, began in 1965.

“Lots of states grumbled and complained,” he said. “It was optional for states. But they all did it eventually. The last holdout was Arizona. It joined in 1982, 17 years later.”

In recent federal budget fights, House Republicans have repeatedly tried to defund the so-called discretionary funding items in the law, such as all kinds of demonstration projects to develop new models for preventative care, community-based care, as well as projects to track and cut costs, and to experiment with new payment systems.

“Most of that stuff is largely irrelevant or completely incidental to the core premises of the Affordable Care Act,” Redhead said, adding that many of those projects were added by individual members for their home districts. “The ACA is like the Bible. Calling it a law is like calling the Bible a book. You have lots of books in the Bible, including stuff on the Old Testament that no one ever looks at.”

The heart of the ACA concerns a handful of core ideas about restructuring private health insurance markets, he said. There’s the creation and introduction of new government-run exchanges where individuals can buy insurance, where in the past they would be denied coverage or have had to pay higher rates. There is the coverage mandate, or requirement that every adult have health insurance. There also is the expansion of Medicaid to give lower-income people access to subsidized insurance. There also are new pathways to access care, such as community clinics and other patient-centered options.

When Washington insiders look at the many ways the Obama administration has moved money around to implement the cornerstones of the ACA, they see an executive branch that has not been deterred by GOP protests, Redhead said. Some of his colleagues say the administration has taken too many liberties, he said; however, those kinds of administrative acrobatics are nothing new in government.

As has been the case in every budget fight since Obamacare passed, the Republican-led House hasn’t gotten anywhere with defunding or repealing it, as CRS reports note in detail. Moreover, the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld it, although they did say states not implementing the expansion of Medicaid would not be penalized.

That means Americans will soon see what Obamacare is about and what impact it has in their lives, regardless of the GOP’s continuing noise about crippling or killing the law.

http://www.alternet.org/personal-hea...are?paging=off

Didn't JPMorgan Chase just get a slap on the wrist? Hummmm

Anyhow, bail out the banks on the backs of tax payers without penalties
such as bankruptcy. And then, let the banks make money off of the We the People tax dollars to feed those who already paid into the system for those
(soon to be nonexistent social services) and give the banks a check free
and clear. There is no fiscal policy that is conducive for the masses.
It is an oligarchy that the masses are supporting and subsidizing.


http://rooseveltinstitute.org/new-ro...-profit-misery

FOOD STAMPS: JPMORGAN & BANKING INDUSTRY PROFIT FROM MISERY

This week’s credit check: A record 43.6 million Americans are using food stamps. JPMorgan’s segment that makes food stamp debit cards made $5.47 billion in net revenue in 2010.

You might think that if you’re on food stamps, big banks won’t be very interested in you. What could they possibly want with someone who’s struggling just to put food on the table? But it turns out that you’re actually part of a profitable business for big bank JPMorgan. While the money to pay for the stamps comes from the government, the technology to access it lies in private hands. Food stamps used to be literally stamps — that is, pieces of paper — but in this day and age paper is so old fashioned. Now you get your food stamps with a debit card, and JPMorgan knows all about creating plastic credit products.

As the head of this division at JPMorgan, Christopher Paton, told Bloomberg, “They act and feel very much like a debit card. A lot of stores increasingly take food stamps.” What convenience! And Paton points out that his bank is the largest processor of food stamps in the country. These are boom times for such services — a new report from the US Department of Agriculture reports that 43.6 million Americans are now using food stamps, nearly 14% of the population, which is a record number. Paton notes this trend himself: “Volumes have gone through the roof in the last couple of years,” he says. “This business is a very important business to JPMorgan in terms of its size and scale.” And the numbers bear him out. According to the company’s most recent quarterly filing with the SEC, the Treasury & Securities Services segment, which is the division that includes the food stamp business, was up 2% in the last three months of last quarter and brought in $5.47 billion in net revenue for most of 2010.

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Paton’s quick to point out that this isn’t just about profit at JPMorgan — it’s also serving a “useful social function.” And department execs don’t have to sit around hoping for unemployment to skyrocket so they can make a buck — more than 40% of food stamp recipients have a job, as Paton notes. Even if you get a job, you still have an almost one in two chance of still not being able to buy groceries, so JPMorgan can continue to make its profits as unemployment falls (someday).

But it does show a misalignment between what the banks want and what’s good for the rest of us. It turns out that JPMorgan also provides unemployment benefit debit cards in some states on top of the food stamp cards. Talk about marketing off of misery — the profit made from these cards shoots up as workers lose their jobs and can’t pay for food. Whether or not they’re providing a needed service, you would be hard pressed to find a way in which the business interest of this segment is not aligned with further economic ruin for America’s workers. Instead of profiting when we all do well, they profit off of our misery.

And the decision to place card creation in private hands can turn out to be complicated for the actual users. While the government outsourced its card creation needs to JPMorgan, the bank in turn outsourced the customer service end to India. So if you’re a food stamp user who has a problem or a question, don’t expect to actually get someone in your own country to help you out. They can’t be bothered to actually deal with the people they’re giving such a necessary service to.

Bryce Covert is Assistant Editor at New Deal 2.0.

Now, God forbid we use tax payer dollars to pay for healthcare. Privatization of
the medical system is a must so that the oligarchy can fill their pockets.
Obamacare will take away a booming money making industry!
We don't need Medicare or Medicare or social security. Do we?
Nah, let them keep taking our homes and keep subsidizing the banks every time they bulldoze one of those taxpayers homes. Now, even the hospitals are laying people off because of the lack of taxpayer funds. So, we all suffer.
Great fiscal policy by the Repubs. Better watch out...without the masses having their health...
We the People can't line your pockets.
45k people die a year in the US from lack of healthcare.

http://health.usnews.com/health-news...spital-layoffs

Is Obamacare to Blame for Hospital Layoffs?
Hospitals are cutting costs and laying off employees, citing Obamcare as the main reason. But is health care reform really to blame?

By KIMBERLY LEONARD
September 20, 2013 RSS Feed Print

Cleveland Clinic officials announced this week that they would be offering 3,000 buyouts in an effort to cuts costs, citing financial pressures from health care reform as one of the reasons for their decision. More than a dozen hospitals across the country are taking similar measures, due in part to health care reform requirements, but also because of the $9.9 billion in government sequester cuts to Medicare, hospital debt and states' refusal to expand Medicaid, the government's health insurance program for the poor.

[READ: Obamacare Affect Medicare: Myths and Facts]

"For hospitals in general this is kind of the new normal," says Eileen Sheil, executive director of corporate communications for the Cleveland Clinic. According to most recent estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the hospital sector lost about 4,400 jobs in July. In May, hospitals shed 9,000 jobs, the worst month for the industry in a decade.

[READ: Hospital of Tomorrow: How the Industry is Facing the Future]

Ron Stiver, senior vice president of engagement and public affairs for Indiana University Health, which plans to cut 800 employees, says the assertion that health care reform is the reason behind hospital cuts is "overly simplified." IU Health is making cuts partially because of the health law, he says, but also because the state has not expanded Medicaid, the hospital system has fewer inpatient volumes, and payment rates for its services have been declining.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn., plans to cut 1,000 positions, citing an aging population, lower reimbursement rates, a reduction in National Institutes of Health grant funding and a lack of Medicaid expansion in Tennessee.

In 2012 the Supreme Court ruled that state legislatures could opt out of increasing the number of people who are eligible for Medicaid, and North Carolina is one of 22 states that has done so, a decision that resulted in Vidant Pungo Hospital in Belhaven, N.C., closing down, according to hospital officials.

Democratic Congressman Charles Rangel from New York, the main sponsor of the health reform bill, says organizations have several other tools they could use to reduce costs, and that many businesses are blaming health reform for actions for which they don't want to take responsibility. "U.S. health costs have been the highest in the world, yet our quality measures were middling at best," he says. "While there is no doubt that [health reform] has helped slow health care cost growth, which is beneficial to both national and household budgets, there is nothing in the law that tells hospitals to reduce staff. The fact is that patients are paying less, not more, as a result of the [health law]."

The Office of the Actuary for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services predicted that decreases like these would occur, stating in a 2010 memo that by 2019 it expected hospitals, skilled nursing facilities and home health agencies would undergo a 15 percent reduction.

For a sector that employs more than 5.5 million people, according to the American Hospital Association, the numbers are likely to get worse. The pattern of layoffs and buyouts has already begun. SouthCoast Hospital Group in Florida cited federal health reform when it laid off 100 employees in mid-September. John Muir Health in California is offering staff voluntary buyouts. NorthShore University HealthSystem in Illinois will lay off 1 percent of its workforce, and Covenant Health in Texas laid off 49 employees.

The requirements that hospitals must meet in order to receive full Medicare reimbursements are having a large impact. Hospitals once were able to bill insurance companies and the federal government for services rendered, but now they have to demonstrate that those services help keep patients healthy.
The government is capping reimbursement rates for specific diagnoses and having hospitals pay to fix their own medical errors, including hospital-acquired infections. The plan is to lower inefficiencies, thereby lowering costs. "We want hospitals to do things more efficiently," says Dr. Ross Koppel, professor of sociology and affiliate professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "We don't want to redo tests or subject people to hideous radiation because exam records have been lost, for example. There may be some inefficient practices that were money makers, but with a more efficient system hospitals can't get away with them."

Hospitals with excessive numbers of readmissions for Medicare patients will face large penalties, and hospitals that serve the poor will be particularly vulnerable.

Still, hospitals are not responsible for a significant amount of the recidivism they see, according to research published in 2011 by the University of Toronto, which revealed that only a quarter of hospital readmissions were preventable.

"Hospitals have very little control over what patients do when they leave the hospital, so in that case there is an unfairness in penalizing hospitals," Koppel says. "The hospitals may do a good job and tell patients what to do when they get home, but then the patient goes back to drinking, smoking and eating cupcakes all day."

Sheil said hospitals will be getting paid less and still have to do more. "Nobody is immune to that, not even Cleveland Clinic," she says.

The news appeared to be particularly devastating to a hospital system that President Barack Obama applauded only four years before for delivering exceptional care at costs well below the national norm. Still, Cleveland Clinic officials were attributing its most-recent cuts to a number of factors, and pointed out that it was continuously developing ways to be more efficient. "There are many factors, and any one isn't going to tip us over," Sheil says.

"We're not blaming health care reform. We think it is very necessary," she adds. "Something had to give because costs are going to continue to rise and it's unsustainable."

http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/201...ake-aim-hungry

House Republicans take aim at the hungry.
Submitted by Thom Hartmann A... on 19. September 2013 - 9:39
Live Blog Thom's Blog
The United States House of Representatives is in the midst of a food stamp showdown. House Republicans want to slash the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by nearly $40 billion dollars, and House Democrats are fighting it with all their might. The drastic cuts are almost ten times the amount approved by the U.S. Senate in June as part of the farm bill. At that time, House Republicans stripped food assistance out of the their version of the farm bill, and approved about $200 billion in subsidies for big corporate farms.

While the drastic cuts proposed by the House would never be approved by the democratically-controlled Senate, they show just how little some lawmakers care about their fellow Americans. If these harsh cuts were ever enacted, the House plan would eliminate SNAP benefits for 3.5 million hungry Americans, and eliminate states' ability to wave work requirements during times of high unemployment. In other words, no matter how bad our economy ever got, the House plan would force millions of people to go hungry.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called the cuts “a new low” for Republicans, and said that all 200 House democrats plan to vote against the proposal. If House Republicans manage to pass these drastic cuts, they will still have to negotiate a compromise with Senate Democrats. And, the upper chamber has sharply criticized the House's cuts as inhumane. Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow said, “What the House Republicans are saying is this: Get a good-paying job or your family will just have to go hungry.” As this debate heats up, millions of Americans are calling Congress, and telling lawmakers to protect this vital program that so many rely on.

NSA: Some used spying power to snoop on lovers

http://us.cnn.com/2013/09/27/politics/nsa-snooping/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

The National Security Agency's internal watchdog detailed a dozen instances in the past decade in which its employees intentionally misused the agency's surveillance power, in some cases to snoop on their love interests.