All Entries in the "social issues" Category

World Population Forecast to Top 7 Billion in 2011 – NYTimes.com

With 267 people being born every minute and 108 dying, the world’s population will top seven billion next year, a research group projects, while the ratio of working-age adults to support the elderly in developed countries declines precipitously because of lower birthrates and longer life spans.

In a sobering assessment of those two trends, William P. Butz, president of the Population Reference Bureau, said that “chronically low birthrates in developed countries are beginning to challenge the health and financial security of the elderly” at the same time that “developing countries are adding over 80 million to the population each year and the poorest of those countries are adding 20 million, exacerbating poverty and threatening the environment.”

Projections, especially over decades, are vulnerable to changes in immigration, retirement ages, birthrates, health care and other variables, but in releasing the bureau’s 2010 population data sheet, Carl Haub, its senior demographer, estimated this week that by 2050 the planet will be home to more than nine billion people.

Full Story: World Population Forecast to Top 7 Billion in 2011 – NYTimes.com.

Top 5 Social Security Myths

Rumors of Social Security’s demise are greatly exaggerated. But some powerful people keep spreading lies about the program to scare people into accepting benefit cuts. Can you check out this list of Social Security myths and share it with your friends, family and coworkers?

Full Story: MoveOn.org Political Action: Democracy in Action.

Unintelligent By Design: Louisiana School District Considers Teaching Creationism

Members of the Livingston Parish School Board in Louisiana may be on the verge of making a huge mistake – one that could cost their community a lot of money.

During a recent meeting, several board members went off on a tangent about teaching creationism. During this public session, they openly discussed their desire to bring religion into the classroom. It was not a wise move.

The trouble began when Jan Benton, director of curriculum for the parish schools, noted that a new law in Louisiana allows schools to present “critical thinking and creationism” in science classes.

Board Member David Tate got excited and said, “We let them teach evolution to our children, but I think all of us sitting up here on this school board believe in creationism. Why can’t we get someone with religious beliefs to teach creationism?”

Full Story: Talk To Action | Unintelligent By Design: Louisiana School District Considers Teaching Creationism.

We Are in Real Trouble

Frm Senator Ernest F. Hollings:

The trouble with the President and Congress is that there are all imbued with reelection, i.e. the money for reelection.

Now we are in real trouble. We’ve lost the markets for textiles, cameras, radios, TVs, steel, electronics, computers, communications equipment, machine tools, advance technology, robots, steppers, etc. The little that we produce has now been bought up by foreigners. Big Blue, IBM and the Hummer went to China; Westinghouse Nuclear and all of its patents went to Japan; Bell labs and all of its discoveries went to France; Bethlehem Steel to is now Russian; Genentech went to Switzerland. And we can’t prepare for war. Boeing’s fighter planes depend on parts from India and Sikorsky for its helicopter must get its tail motor from Turkey.

We begin a program to stimulate American production and American jobs. But in April President Obama signs a declaration against protectionism at the summit of the big nations. And now The New York Times editorializes “’Buy American’ is a terrible idea.” You would think that having to get a Mexican loan to keep The New York Times going would have sobered them up from their mantra of “free trade” and “protectionism.” Our trouble is most people in the Congress believe The New York Times. Yet Congress is our only hope.

The United States of America began a trade war against the Mother Country’s protectionism. Under the Navigation Act of 1632, England required all production in the colony shipped back to England to be transported in English bottoms. Furthering protectionism, England enacted the Townsend Act with discriminatory tariffs causing the Boston Tea Party, igniting the Revolution. Once we had won our freedom, adopted a Constitution, and adopted a national seal, the first Congress in history, on July 4, 1789, pursuant to Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution, assigning the duty of competing in international trade to Congress, enacted a protectionist tariff on numerous articles. We financed and built the industrial giant, U.S.A., with protectionism. Now, the President, the Congress, the press, and the think tanks, all think that protectionism or “Buy American” is a terrible idea.

Full Story: We Are in Real Trouble | Economy In Crisis.

Study: 10 pct. of Mexicans may “emigrate” to US due to climate change, decreased crop yields

Global warming could drive millions more Mexicans into the United States in search of work by 2080 due to diminishing crop yields in Mexico, a study released Monday showed.

“Depending on the warming scenarios used and adaptation levels assumed… climate change is estimated to induce 1.4 to 6.7 million adult Mexicans (or two percent to 10 percent of the current population aged 15-65 years) to emigrate as a result of declines in agricultural productivity alone,” the study said.

Researchers led by Michael Oppenheimer of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University estimated the sensitivity of migration to climate change and predicted the number of Mexicans who would migrate under a range of different climate and crop yield scenarios.

Full Story: Study: 10 pct. of Mexicans may emigrate to US due to climate change, decreased crop yields | Raw Story.

Pelosi: Deficit reduction and Social Security ‘apples and oranges’

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi unambiguously said Saturday she opposes raising retirement age and rebuffed propositions to cut Social Security benefits as a way of reducing the deficit.

“Yes,” she told a large gathering of media and liberal activists at the Netroots Nation conference, when asked point blank if she’s against the idea.

“When you talk about reducing the deficit and Social Security, you’re talking about apples and oranges,” Pelosi (D-CA) said. “To change Social Security in order to balance the budget, they aren’t the same thing in my view.”

Full Story: Pelosi: Deficit reduction and Social Security ‘apples and oranges’ | Raw Story.

There’s a Battle Outside and It Is Still Ragin’

Frank Rich:

THE glittering young blonde in a low-cut gown is sipping champagne in a swank Manhattan restaurant back in the day when things were still swank. She is on a first date with an advertising man as dashing as his name, Don Draper. So you don’t really expect her to break the ice by talking about bad news. “The world is so dark right now,” she says. “One of the boys killed in Mississippi, Andrew Goodman — he’s from here. A girlfriend of mine knew him from summer camp.” Her date is too busy studying her décolletage, so she fills in the dead air. “Is that what it takes to change things?” she asks. He ventures no answer

This is just one arresting moment — no others will be mentioned here — in the first episode of the new “Mad Men” season premiering tonight. Like much in this landmark television series, the scene haunts you in part because of what people don’t say and can’t say. “Mad Men” is about placid postwar America before it went smash. We know from the young woman’s reference to Goodman — one of the three civil rights activists murdered in Philadelphia, Miss., in June 1964 — that the crackup is on its way. But the characters can’t imagine the full brunt of what’s to come, and so a viewer in 2010 is left to contemplate how none of us, then or now, can see around the corner and know what history will bring.

Full Story: Op-Ed Columnist – There’s a Battle Outside and It Is Still Ragin’ – NYTimes.com.

The Fight to Protect Social Security

The bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, which was created by President Barack Obama earlier this year, is using exaggerated rhetoric to heighten deficit fears at a time when many economists say more government spending is needed to spur hiring and avert a second dip in the worst recession since the Great Depression.

The commission – co-chaired by former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson and President Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles – is talking about cuts to Social Security, Medicare and middle-class benefits like the home mortgage deduction rather than focusing on three key causes of the deficit: massive war and weapons spending, giant tax cuts for the wealthy, and the faltering economy.

By contrast, 40 leading economists, including Nobel Prize winners, issued a statement calling for more government action in the short-term while treating the federal debt as a longer-range problem.

“We recognize the necessity of a program to cut the mid- and long-term federal deficit but the imperative requirement now, and the surest course to balance the budget over time, is to restore a full measure of economic activity,” the signers wrote.

Full Story: Consortiumnews.com.

Thom goes after Tea Party activist for destroying the middle class

Thom Hartmann

School Chancellor Fires 241 Teachers in Washington

Michelle Rhee, the reform-minded chancellor who took over the District of Columbia public schools three years ago, on Friday fired 241 teachers, or 5 percent of the district’s total. All but a few of those dismissed had received the lowest rating under a new evaluation system that for the first time held them accountable for their students’ standardized test scores.

“Every child in a District of Columbia public school has a right to a highly effective teacher — in every classroom, of every school, of every neighborhood, of every ward, in this city,” the chancellor said in a statement. “That is our commitment.”

All told, the district terminated 302 employees — 226 for poor performance, and 76 for other problems like not having the licensing required by the No Child Left Behind act. Besides the 241 teachers, those dismissed were librarians, counselors, custodians and other employees.

An additional 737 employees were put on notice that they had been rated “minimally effective,” the second-lowest category, and would have one year to improve their performance or be fired.

Full Story: School Chancellor Fires 241 Teachers in Washington – NYTimes.com.

How You Will Change the World with Social Networking

An excerpt from Deanna Zandt’s new book, ‘Share This’ explains how we share information and find community will change our lives.

Social networking is all the rage, and it’s coming at us, a million miles an hour. We’re surrounded by a flurry of new technology, and just when we begin to make sense of one tool, a new one arrives on the scene.

All this activity leaves us little time to contemplate any forest for all these trees, let alone think about the bigger picture of how this technology will change the future. But here’s the secret: How we share information, find community, and both connect and disconnect will give us unprecedented influence over our place in the world. Social media technology holds some of the biggest potential for creating tectonic shifts in how we operate, and the overall open-ended promise of technology gives us a great shot at creating the systems for change. Technology isn’t a magic bullet for solving the world’s problems, but it’s certainly a spark to the fastest fuse to explode our notions of power that the world has seen in a thousand years. In this book, I hope to show you how to light that fuse.

Full Story: How You Will Change the World with Social Networking | Media and Culture | AlterNet.

Competing currency being accepted across Mid-Michigan

New types of money are popping up across Mid-Michigan and supporters say, it’s not counterfeit, but rather a competing currency.

Right now, you can buy a meal or visit a chiropractor without using actual U.S. legal tender.

They sound like real money and look like real money. But you can’t take them to the bank because they’re not made at a government mint. They’re made at private mints.

“I sell three or four every single day and then I get one or two back a week,” said Dave Gillie, owner of Gillies Coney Island Restaurant in Genesee Township.

Gillie also accepts silver, gold, copper and other precious metals to pay for food.

He says, if he wanted to, he could accept marbles.

Full Story: YouTube – Competing currency being accepted across Mid-Michigan.

Once a Leader, U.S. Lags in College Degrees

Adding to a drumbeat of concern about the nation’s dismal college-completion rates, the College Board warned Thursday that the growing gap between the United States and other countries threatens to undermine American economic competitiveness.

The United States used to lead the world in the number of 25- to 34-year-olds with college degrees. Now it ranks 12th among 36 developed nations.

“The growing education deficit is no less a threat to our nation’s long-term well-being than the current fiscal crisis,” Gaston Caperton, the president of the College Board, warned at a meeting on Capitol Hill of education leaders and policy makers, where he released a report detailing the problem and recommending how to fix it. “To improve our college completion rates, we must think ‘P-16’ and improve education from preschool through higher education.”

While access to college has been the major concern in recent decades, over the last year, college completion, too, has become a leading item on the national agenda. Last July, President Obama announced the American Graduation Initiative, calling for five million more college graduates by 2020, to help the United States again lead the world in educational attainment.

Full Story: Once a Leader, U.S. Lags in College Degrees – NYTimes.com.

WIMPY LEADERS IGNORE A STRONG PEOPLE

Jim Hightower :

Right-wing Republicans and corporate Democrats have become a pathetic bunch of “No-can-do Nancys.”

Faced with an economy reeling from the plutocratic policies that these same lawmakers pushed down upon us, they are now whimpering that America is too weak to meet the obvious needs of its own people. “We must surrender to the Gods of Economic Despair,” they cry. At a time when history calls for our leaders to step forth with a bit of FDR boldness and rally grassroots people to rebuild our economy, they trumpet for retreat, giving up on America’s historic ideal of the common good.

A jobs program? “Everyone for themselves,” they shout. Health care for all? “Go to the emergency room,” they scream. Social Security? “Socialism,” they screech, “run away from it!” Public education? “Can’t afford it,” they tell us, as they turn their backs on hundreds of thousands of teachers soon to be fired. Repair America’s rotting infrastructure? “Too big for us, ” they wail, “leave it to the next generation.”

audio and transcript at link

Full Story: Jim Hightower | WIMPY LEADERS IGNORE A STRONG PEOPLE.

America Can’t Afford its Empire

One day the deficit will force us to bring all those troops home, like it or not.

It’s a lot of work being an empire. Expensive, but well worth it. Americans make up only 4 percent of the world’s population, but we get to use up 25 percent of its resources. That’s pretty high living and you don’t get to pull it off by being a wimpy socialist nonentity. We also get to spew 25 percent of the earth’s unsustainable pollution. Sure, this all has to come to an end eventually, but no matter; it’s been a great ride.

And at least it won’t come to an end militarily. Our army puts Rome to shame. We have 865 foreign bases, and blanket every continent with soldiers and CIA nests. ESPN World Cup announcers “welcome our men and women in uniform serving in over 175 countries and territories.” Japan hosts 47,000 of our troops, paying $2 billion for the privilege and annoying its own citizens no end. It just ousted a prime minister over that spat.

Full Story: America Can’t Afford its Empire | World | AlterNet.

Keith Olbermann Special Comment On Shirley Sherrod Controversy

Keith Olbermann Special Comment On Shirley Sherrod Controversy (Part 1) – 07/21/10

Part 2

Why the US Is So Badly Equipped to Deal with Unemployment

By Dean Baker

15 million are unemployed, but unfortunately none of the people responsible for the recession are in that category.

It has been two-and-a-half years since the recession officially began in the United States. While the economy has been growing for more than a year, unemployment remains near the 10.1 percent peak of October 2009. Few economists predict a rapid decline from its June level of 9.5 percent and, with stimulus being phased down over the next year, it is very plausible that the rate will edge higher in coming months.

The US, unlike most western European countries, is not set up to sustain long periods of high unemployment. Its system of social welfare is very much centered on work. This is most evident with health care. The vast majority of non-elderly people get their health care through employer provided health insurance. Individual policies tend to be very expensive, especially for people with any history of medical problems. When people lose their jobs, they generally lose their health care coverage as well. While there is a public program for low-income families, it doesn’t cover most of the unemployed, and the quality is often quite poor.

The same is true of other forms of public support. The US was never very generous to people who are not working, and it has become less so in the last three decades. That is why the prospect of a prolonged period of high unemployment in the US is likely to mean serious hardship for large numbers of people.

Full Story: Why the US Is So Badly Equipped to Deal with Unemployment | Economy | AlterNet.

‘Racism’ Video That Led To Firing USDA Official Shirley Sherrod Was Materially Altered

The Obama administration is standing by its quick decision to oust a black Agriculture Department employee over racially tinged remarks at an NAACP banquet in Georgia, despite evidence that her remarks were misconstrued and growing calls for USDA to reconsider.

Shirley Sherrod, who until Tuesday was the Agriculture Department’s director of rural development in Georgia, says the administration caved to political pressure by pushing her to resign for saying that she didn’t give a white farmer as much help as she could have 24 years ago when she worked for a nonprofit group.

Sherrod says her remarks, delivered in March at a local NAACP banquet in Georgia, were part of a story about racial reconciliation, not racism. The white farming family that was the subject of the story stood by Sherrod and said she should keep her job.

Full Story: ‘Racism’ Video That Led To Firing USDA Official Shirley Sherrod Was Materially Altered.

Jobless “Recovery” Requires Us to Rebuild America

Jim Hightower:  :

The good news is that America’s economy continues to grow. The bad news is that most people’s personal economies continue to shrivel.

The June report on jobs glows with the happy news that America’s unemployment rate has fallen to 9.5 percent — the best we’ve had in a year! “We are headed in the right direction,” trumpeted President Obama.

Great … if true. However, the ballyhooed jobs statistic is a mirage. It looks good only because 650,000 more Americans became so frustrated with their fruitless search for work last month that they quit looking. In StatWorld, such “discouraged” seekers are — abracadabra! — no longer considered unemployed, even though they are. There are now 1.2 million Americans in this statistical purgatory.

Full Story: Jobless “Recovery” Requires Us to Rebuild America | Economy In Crisis.

The Gulf Region as a New “Sacrifice Zone”

Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo:……………

It is possible that the day will come when vast areas of the Gulf and its coastal regions will be declared sacrifice zones.”

The Obama administration has a double BP problem: the oil giant and the other BP: Black People. “It appears that BP and the Obama administration find it easier to stanch the flow of information than they do the deepwater gusher,” which at some point may cause great stretches of the Gulf to be written off as “sacrifice zones,” like atomic testing sites in the 50s and inner cities in the 70s. The author knows something about the inner workings of the Environmental Protection Agency, having won the largest award ever against the EPA for sexual and racial discrimination.

By now, if asked to describe the BP problem facing Carol M. Browner, the Special Advisor to the President for Energy and the Environment, there is little doubt that most people could likely site some details about the April 20th explosion that killed eleven people and triggered the worst environmental disaster in US history. With tens of thousands of gallons of crude oil blasting daily into the Gulf of Mexico at pressure equivalent to a power washer—it is possible that the day will come when vast areas of the Gulf and its coastal regions will be declared sacrifice zones. That is, areas that are so contaminated that the cost and feasibility of cleaning and restoring them to there prior state will exceed their total economic worth

There are already examples of official sacrifice zones in the United States today. The Yucca salt flats in Nevada, for example—the staging area for hundreds of nuclear tests—were declared a sacrifice zone in 1997 by the US Geological Survey. Before discussing the catastrophe unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico, however, there is a perfect example of widespread sacrifice zones occurring in cities all across America, so obvious it needs pointing out—gentrification. City neighborhoods were abandoned by white America after World War II with the great northern migration of African Americans filling those abandoned cities. It wouldn’t be until increasing awareness of sustainable environments, increase commuting costs and the need to break oil addiction began to argue for a return by whites to the cities that banking institutions started pouring serious resources back into American inner cities. For decades these same areas had been sacrifice zones where poverty and its poor cousins despair, and hopelessness flourished. In many instances, even the sacrifice zones were sacrificed when toxic waste, brown fields, and landfills were commonly the neighbors of poor and largely communities of color.

Full Story: The Gulf Region as a New “Sacrifice Zone” | Black Agenda Report.

America: hooked on war and getting poorer

With record foreclosures and child poverty at a shameful level, can we really afford to stay in Afghanistan and Iraq for 10 years?

There’s plenty of good money to be made /
Supplyin’ the army with tools of the trade
– Country Joe and the Fish

I hallucinate easily, a hangover from time spent in an acid-rock commune in London in the fevered 60s. Most evenings when I switch on the television 6.30 news with its now cliched pictures of deep sea oil spurting from BP’s pipe rupture, I see not bleeding sludge but human blood surging up into the Gulf of Mexico.

I’ve learned to trust my visions as metaphors for reality. The same news programmes, often as a dutiful throwaway item, will show a jerky fragment of Afghan combat accompanied by the usual pulse-pounding handheld shots of snipers amid roadside bomb explosions, preferably in fiery balls. My delusional mind converts this footage into a phantasmagoria where our M60 machine guns are shooting ammunition belts full of $1,000 bills.

Blood, oil, bullets … and cash.

Why is nobody talking about the Afghanistan adventure as a cause of our plunging recession? Or at least citing the 30-year-old endless war as a major contributory factor in wasting our money to “nation-build” in the Hindu Kush while our own country falls to pieces on food stamps, foreclosures and child poverty – one in five kids – that would put the world’s poorest nations to shame?

Full Story: America: hooked on war and getting poorer | Clancy Sigal | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

How Giant Food Corporations Are Giving Kickbacks to Schools to Get Their Products on Kids’ Trays

The reason why kids are served sugary cereals, Pop-Tarts, Otis Spunkmeyer muffins, and flavored milk that has nearly as much sugar as Coke or Mountain Dew.

D.C. Public Schools in the last two years have taken in more than $1 million in corporate rebates — referred to by some as “kickbacks” — paid by giant food manufacturers as an inducement to place their brands on kids’ cafeteria trays at school.

Documents I obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show that Chartwells, the company hired by D.C. Schools to provide food services at 122 schools across the city, through February of this year had declared $1,076,738 in rebates it received since its contract began in the fall of 2008. That represents 5 percent of the $18.7 million in purchases Chartwells billed the school system during that period. Under federal law, Chartwells is required to credit D.C. schools for any rebates it receives.

Food manufacturers use the rebates as an incentive to entice purchasing agents to buy certain products over others for school meals. Rebates sometimes are referred to as “kickbacks” because powerful food service companies such as Chartwells expect to receive them, much the way grocers expect manufacturers to pay to have their goods displayed prominently on supermarket shelves.

Full Story: How Giant Food Corporations Are Giving Kickbacks to Schools to Get Their Products on Kids’ Trays | Food | AlterNet.

WikiLeaks founder: Site getting tons of ‘high caliber’ disclosures

WikiLeaks.org, the website that released secret video of a U.S. airstrike in Iraq that killed a dozen civilians, is “getting an enormous quantity of whistle-blower disclosures of high caliber,” the site’s founder, Julian Assange, said Friday in a rare public appearance here.

Speaking at the TED Global conference, Assange said that “we are overwhelmed by our growth” and the site can’t keep up with the volume of the new material because it doesn’t have enough people to verify it.

He later told reporters that “there are many things which are very explosive.”

Assange said the organization gets material from whistle-blowers in a variety of ways — including via postal mail — vets it, releases it to the public and then defends itself against “the regular political or legal attack.”

Full Story: WikiLeaks founder: Site getting tons of ‘high caliber’ disclosures – CNN.com.

Imprisoned for debt in America

People are being thrown in jail for failing to pay debts in the United States, despite the fact that federal imprisonment for debt was abolished in 1933.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune has documented such arrests, essentially for poverty, increasing throughout the United States. During the last four years, the use of arrest warrants against debtors in Minnesota has jumped by 60 percent, to 845 cases in 2009. The exposé showed that sometimes the unpaid bills were as low as $85.

The mechanism used to extract payment from the impoverished is the bench warrant. Workers are not actually incarcerated for debt, but for failing to respond to the legal system. However, the perpetrators of the court filings, the debt buyers and their legal representatives, are transparently using the system to intimidate, harass and frighten individuals into payments, sometimes for debts they do not even owe.

Full Story: Imprisoned for debt in America.

Conservatism’s Death Gusher

George Lakoff:

Conservatism is an ideology of death. It was conservative laissez-faire free market ideology – that maximizing profit comes first – that led to:………………………………………….

The issue is death – death gushing at ten thousand pounds per square inch from a mile below the sea, tens of thousands of barrels of death a day. Not just death to eleven human beings. Death to sea birds, sea turtles, dolphins, fish, oyster beds, shrimp, beaches; death to the fishing industry, tourism, jobs; and death to a way of life based on the beauty and bounty of the Gulf.

Many, perhaps a majority, of the Gulf residents affected are conservatives, strong right-wing Republicans, following extremist Governors Bobby Jindal and Haley Barbour. What those conservatives are not saying, and may be incapable of seeing, is that conservatism itself is largely responsible for what happened, and that conservatism is a continuing disaster for conservatives who live along the Gulf.

Conservatism is an ideology of death. It was conservative laissez-faire free market ideology – that maximizing profit comes first – that led to:

Full Story: Conservatism’s Death Gusher | CommonDreams.org.

The IMF Is Coming for Your Social Security

A few years back, there was a fear in some parts about black UN helicopters that were supposedly taking part in the planning of an invasion of the United States. While there was no foundation for this fear, there is basis for concern about the attack of another international organization, the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Last week, the IMF told the United States that it needs to start getting its budget deficit down. It put cutting Social Security at the top of the steps that the country should take to achieve deficit reduction. This one is more than a bit outrageous for two reasons.

First, the IMF deserves a substantial share of the blame for the economic crisis that gave us big deficits in the first place. The IMF is supposed to oversee the operations of the international financial system. According to standard economic theory, capital is supposed to flow from rich countries like the United States to poor countries to finance their development. In other words, the United States should be having a trade surplus, which would correspond to the money that we are investing in poor countries to finance their development.

Full Story: t r u t h o u t | The IMF Is Coming for Your Social Security.

America Builds an Aristocracy

AMERICANS have always assumed that wealth comes and goes. A poor person can work hard, become rich and pass his money on to his children and grandchildren. But then, if those descendants do not manage it wisely, they may lose it. “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,” the saying goes, and it conforms to our preference for meritocracy over aristocracy.

This assumption is now being undermined, however, through the increasing use of so-called dynasty trusts. These estate-planning instruments enable affluent people to provide their heirs with money and property largely free from taxes and immune to the claims of creditors. And rather than benefit only children and grandchildren, dynasty trusts provide for generations in perpetuity — truly creating an American aristocracy.

Congress is feeling pressure to deal with taxes on inherited wealth, which have fallen to zero this year thanks to lawmakers’ inaction. In the process, it should address the more pernicious problem of dynasty trusts.

This type of trust is new because until very recently most states had a “rule against perpetuities,” which limited the term of any family trust to about 90 years, after which time the family members would own the property outright. This rule derived from the idea that property is best controlled by the living.

Full Story: Op-Ed Contributor – America Builds an Aristocracy – NYTimes.com.

More and more Americans preparing for social unrest

From the outside, Jerry Erwin’s home in the northwestern US state of Oregon is a nondescript house with a manicured front lawn and little to differentiate it from those of his neighbors.

But tucked away out of sight in his backyard are the signs of his preparations for doomsday, a catastrophic societal collapse that Erwin, 45, now believes is likely within his lifetime.

“I’ve got, under an awning, stacks of firewood, rain catching in barrels, I’ve got a shed with barbed concertina wire, like the military uses,” he told AFP.

He and his wife also have also stockpiled thousands of rounds of ammunition and enough food for about six months.

“Several years ago I worked on paying off the house, replacing all the windows, and just very recently, I’m proud to say, we’ve replaced all our exterior doors with more energy-efficient ones, with as much built-in security features as I could get,” he told AFP

Full Story: More and more Americans preparing for social unrest | Raw Story.

Casey: U.S. Could be at War Another Decade – Political Hotsheet – CBS News

General George Casey, the Chief of Staff of the Army, said today the United States could face another “decade or so” of persistent conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In two months, the U.S. will have been at war in Afghanistan for nine years.

The four-star general said the U.S. military moved beyond conventional warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan “long ago,” and that the focus is now on the people. Casey highlighted job, education and economic growth as essential to success in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When asked if enemies of the U.S. have to be a part of the reconciliation process for it to be considered a success, Casey said that is a “matter of debate,” but that enemies have to be convinced they will lose.

Full Story: Casey: U.S. Could be at War Another Decade – Political Hotsheet – CBS News.

Poll: 55% of Likely Voters Think Obama Is a Socialist

This new poll from James Carville’s Democracy Corps firm is bad, bad news for Obama, incumbent Democrats, and the White House’s economic message. If you’re a Republican, be happy for the midterms.

First, when asked if they thought the president was a socialist, 55 percent of likely voters said yes. Only 39 percent said no. Oh god.

For the record, if Obama’s trying to be a socialist, he’s doing a terrible job! He’s cut taxes for small businesses and increased government spending mostly to replace lost income and state revenue. Financial reform is less like a straitjacket for banks and more like a tight sweater whose dimensions and fit will be determined by future studies.

Full Story: Poll: 55% of Likely Voters Think Obama Is a Socialist – Business – The Atlantic.

Reassembling Amercia’s Democracy

by Jim Hightower :

On the Fourth of July, we celebrated Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Madison and all the other great men who created our democracy, right?

Not exactly. The Founders did create the framework for a democratic republic, but they didn’t create much democracy. Indeed, in America’s first presidential election, only 4 percent of the people were even eligible to vote.

The Founders created the possibility for democracy, but it took the struggle (often bloody and always hard) of ordinary people over the years to create the substance. In some decades, we’ve made advances; in others, we’ve fallen back — including in the past three decades, when the power of America’s workaday majority has steadily been usurped by corporate elites. So now, We the People must put America back on its historic path toward economic and political democracy.

“Fine,” you might say, “but how? I’m just one person. What can I do?”

Full Story: Reassembling Amercia’s Democracy by Jim Hightower on Creators.com – A Syndicate Of Talent.

Inherited wealth shouldn’t get a free pass on taxes

Repeal of the estate tax imposes significant costs on the taxpaying public and promotes concentrations of wealth that harm our democracy.

Dan Duncan is reportedly the first billionaire to die during the one year since 1916 in which there is no estate tax in place. His heirs have hit the tax-free jackpot.

Duncan is the poster child for opponents of the estate tax. Described by the New York Times as a “soft-spoken farm boy who started with $10,000 and two propane trucks,” he grew his business until he became the 74th wealthiest person in the world.

With an estimated net worth of $9 billion, Duncan embodies the rags-to-riches story that Americans love. Even his choice of bequests — leaving his money to his family and his favorite charities — makes him seem “just like us.” Who better to enjoy Congress’ largesse?

Full Story: Inherited wealth shouldn’t get a free pass on taxes – latimes.com.

Calls to Suicide Hot Lines Surge as Stress of Joblessness Increases

In one of the darkest tallies of the nation’s still-sputtering recession, experts say financial desperation has played a significant role in increased calls to suicide-prevention hot lines — and likely has led to increased suicide rates.

While government statistics on suicides often lag by two or three years, experts say the easier-to-track calls to hot lines have grown significantly. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, which operates 24-hour crisis help lines around the country, reported an increase of 18 percent from January to May this year. The rates have fluctuated wildly, from 13,424 in January 2007 to a peak of 59,500 two months ago.

Dr. John Draper, director of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, said it’s hard to tell whether the increased pace reflects more people needing help, or whether it’s the effects of media attention on the problem and increased outreach by crisis counselors.

Full Story: Calls to Suicide Hot Lines Surge as Stress of Joblessness Increases.

The Million-Dollar Penny

Every summer, several financial firms competing to get the banking business of the world’s mega millionaires release what amounts to scorecards on global wealth. These data-packed reports tally the current number of our international rich and super-rich, by nation and region.

World Wealth Report 2010 is the most comprehensive of these scorecards. It’s got some fascinating details about the planet’s wealthiest of the wealthy, those households worth at least $30 million–that’s not counting their primary residence and “collectibles.”

These “ultra-high-net worth” households make up less than 1 percent of the global millionaire total, yet in 2009 and 2008 they held more than a third of combined global millionaire wealth. In other words, the global financial crash that mega-millionaire speculation triggered has ended up concentrating even more wealth in mega millionaire pockets.

The Merrill Lynch and Capgemini researchers who prepared this report also offer some lusciously revealing information about what they call “passion investing,” the vast sums the rich plow into everything from country club memberships and yachts to jewelry and fine art.

Full Story: OtherWords: The Million-Dollar Penny.

Divorce ‘is contagious’

Divorce can be contagious within groups of friends, according to a new study.

Full Story: Divorce ‘is contagious’ – Telegraph.

Punishing the Unemployed

Paul Krugman:

There was a time when everyone took it for granted that unemployment insurance, which normally terminates after 26 weeks, would be extended in times of persistent joblessness. It was, most people agreed, the decent thing to do.

But that was then. Today, American workers face the worst job market since the Great Depression, with five job seekers for every job opening, with the average spell of unemployment now at 35 weeks. Yet the Senate went home for the holiday weekend without extending benefits. How was that possible?

The answer is that we’re facing a coalition of the heartless, the clueless and the confused. Nothing can be done about the first group, and probably not much about the second. But maybe it’s possible to clear up some of the confusion.

Full Story: Op-Ed Columnist – Punishing the Unemployed – NYTimes.com.

Recession Forever Altering Americans’ Lives

The current downturn has affected the majority of Americans. Over half of all the nation’s working age adults experienced work hardships in the form of a job loss, pay cut or involuntary reduction in hours.

Thirty months into the Great Recession, many Americans believe that their lives will be forever altered in ways both large and small by the crisis, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center.

Americans are generally less optimistic about their futures and their childrens’ futures, more concerned about pocketbook issues and worried about retirement security.

The nation is going through what is by far the worst recession since World War II. Unlike past recessions, the current downturn has affected the majority of the American people. In fact, over half of all the nation’s working age adults experienced work hardships, either in the form of a job loss, pay cut or involuntary reduction in hours, according to the survey. Nearly one-third of all Americans – 32 percent – have been unemployed at one time or another during the recession.

Full Story: Recession Forever Altering Americans’ Lives | Economy In Crisis.

FEMA Plans to Evacuate Tampa Bay Area In Place?

The Wayne Madsen Report (WMR) and the Examiner reported that FEMA has plans in place for the evacuation of the Tampa Bay in the event of a controlled burn of oil threatening to take toxic plumes through Tampa Bay.

There’s no question that the Gulf oil spill is the biggest environmental disaster in the history of this country and maybe the world.

FEMA has plans to evacuate the Tampa Bay area in the event of a controlled burn of surface oil in the Gulf of Mexico, or if wind or other conditions are expected to take toxic fumes through Tampa Bay, according to a report by Maryann Tobin in the Hernando County Political Buzz Examiner.

Tobin has been a freelance writer for more than twenty years, writing for local publications in New York and Florida. Maryann Tobin’s news story has generated high reader interest.  It’s obvious that the Gulf oil spill continues to be the leading story in the media as long as the oil well remains uncapped and the threat of exposure to environmental hazards like benezene exists.

Full Story: FEMA Plans to Evacuate Tampa Bay Area In Place? : Veterans Today.

Fourth of July 1776, 1964, 2010

Frank Rich:

ALL men may be created equal, but slavery, America’s original sin of inequality, was left unaddressed in the Declaration of Independence signed 234 years ago today. Of all the countless attempts to dispel that shadow over the nation’s birth, few were more ambitious than the hard-fought bill Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law just in time for another Fourth of July, 46 summers ago.

With the holiday weekend approaching, Johnson summoned the television networks for the signing ceremony on Thursday evening, July 2. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, first proposed more than a year earlier by John F. Kennedy, banished the Jim Crow laws that denied black Americans access to voting booths, public schools and public accommodations. Johnson told the nation we could “eliminate the last vestiges of injustice in our beloved country” with the help of a newly formed “Community Relations Service” and its “advisory committee of distinguished Americans.” Talk about an age of innocence!

Still, there were some heartening reports of America’s first full day under the new law. A front-page photo in The Times on July 4 showed 13-year-old Gene Young of Kansas City being shorn by a white barber at the Muehlebach Hotel shop “formerly closed to Negroes.” But that Norman Rockwell-like tableau was paired with the image of a white businessman, Lester Maddox, and a teenage accomplice respectively wielding a pistol and an ax handle as they turned away blacks from Maddox’s restaurant in Atlanta. The summer of 1964, which had begun with the lynching of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss., would soon erupt in a bloody wave of terrorism, marked by dozens of bombings of black churches, homes and businesses.

Full Story: Op-Ed Columnist – Fourth of July 1776, 1964, 2010 – NYTimes.com.

Maude Barlow The World Has Divided into Rich and Poor as at No Time in History

Democracy NOW!

Is the Depression Coming? Or Is It Here?

Danny Schechter:

Lying and Spying: The Economy is Sinking, Confidence is Down Along With the Market. Is a Depression Coming?

The FBI arrests 1,200 Americans for mortgage fraud in the largest crackdown of its kind in history. There is no media focus on the companies that securitized and insured their toxic loans. This white-collar crime sweep is, at best, a one-day story with most of the reports carried by local outlets.

Clearly the FBI did not get the media punch it had hoped for. The issue of financial industry fraud did not even register on the media’s Richter scale.

Two weeks later, the FBI tried again, this time with an ill-timed, years in the making bust of 11 alleged Russian spies accused, so it seems, of impersonating Americans with no sign that they carried out successful espionage missions.

Full Story: Is the Depression Coming? Or Is It Here? | The Smirking Chimp.

We Are Losing Our Nation to Lies About the Necessity of War

Rep. Dennis Kucinich:

In a little more than a year the United States flew $12 billion in cash to Iraq, much of it in $100 bills, shrink wrapped and loaded onto pallets. Vanity Fair reported in 2004 that “at least $9 billion” of the cash had “gone missing, unaccounted for.” $9 billion.

Today, we learned that suitcases of $3 billion in cash have openly moved through the Kabul airport.

One U.S. official quoted by the Wall Street Journal said, “A lot of this looks like our tax dollars being stolen.” $3 billion. Consider this as the American people sweat out an extension of unemployment benefits.

Last week, the BBC reported that “the US military has been giving tens of millions of dollars to Afghan security firms who are funneling the money to warlords.” Add to that a corrupt Afghan government underwritten by the lives of our troops.

Full Story: Rep. Dennis Kucinich: We Are Losing Our Nation to Lies About the Necessity of War.

Gutting Public Education: Neoliberalism and the Politics of Opportunism

America’s political and economic elites have declared a war on working, middle-class and poor Americans. Now that war is coming to a head with the draconian cuts in education, among other vital services, under the economic recession. Progressive critics of Republicans and Democrats have attacked the return of “Hooverian economics” in recent years – understood as the do-nothing approach to dealing with the economic crisis and declining state budgets. Political officials stubbornly refuse to either raise taxes or increase federal or state spending, so as to stimulate economic demand and fill in annual state deficits, at a time when the private sector is unable to produce an economic recovery. Keynesian government spending – which aims at stimulating economic demand during times of recession and depression – has received support at one level or another from most economists, but has become taboo at a time when officials worship at the altar of “budget cuts” and fiscal austerity. Neoliberal policies have long been known to be extremely destructive in less developed countries where they have been implemented for decades. Now, these same policies are appearing in the US and are set to decimate social services along with any lingering economic vitality.

The Hooverian approach should more accurately be classified, not as a “do nothing” approach to dealing with the economy and budgets, but as a “do much against” American workers policy – one that aims at gutting vital social services such as education, health care, police and public transit services, spending for the disabled, and other areas of state services and employment. Quite cynically, subsidies to corporate elites in the form of the 2008 TARP bailout are given urgent priority, while officials speak of the need to “tighten our belts” when it comes to sacrificing access to quality education.

Full Story: t r u t h o u t | Gutting Public Education: Neoliberalism and the Politics of Opportunism.

Top court extends gun rights to states, cities

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday extended gun rights to every state and city in the nation in a ruling likely to spur new challenges to gun control measures across the United States.

The 5-4 ruling could ultimately make it easier for individuals to own handguns in a country that already has the world’s highest civilian gun ownership rate. Some 90 million Americans own an estimated 200 million guns.

Splitting along conservative and liberal lines, the nation’s highest court extended its landmark 2008 ruling — that individual Americans have a constitutional right to own guns — to all cities and states for the first time.

The decision extending gun rights, one of the country’s most divisive social, political and legal issues, was a setback for Chicago’s 28-year-old ban on handguns, which now faces new judicial review and is likely to be eventually overturned.

Full Story: Top court extends gun rights to states, cities | Reuters.

Did 9/11 Justify the War in Afghanistan?

Using the McChrystal Moment to Raise a Forbidden Question

There are many questions to ask about the war in Afghanistan. One that has been widely asked is whether it will turn out to be “Obama’s Vietnam.”1 This question implies another: Is this war winnable, or is it destined to be a quagmire, like Vietnam? These questions are motivated in part by the widespread agreement that the Afghan government, under Hamid Karzai, is at least as corrupt and incompetent as the government the United States tried to prop up in South Vietnam for 20 years.

Although there are many similarities between these two wars, there is also a big difference: This time, there is no draft. If there were a draft, so that college students and their friends back home were being sent to Afghanistan, there would be huge demonstrations against this war on campuses all across this country. If the sons and daughters of wealthy and middle-class parents were coming home in boxes, or with permanent injuries or post-traumatic stress syndrome, this war would have surely been stopped long ago. People have often asked: Did we learn any of the “lessons of Vietnam”? The US government learned one: If you’re going to fight unpopular wars, don’t have a draft –  hire mercenaries!

There are many other questions that have been, and should be, asked about this war, but in this essay, I focus on only one: Did the 9/11 attacks justify the war in Afghanistan?

Full Story: Did 9/11 Justify the War in Afghanistan?.

More Guns, Less Crime…or is it more equality, less crime?

Thom Hartmann

Dem-Sponsored Loophole In Financial Reform Bill Could Hurt Seniors

House Democrats provided the key votes to help adopt a measure that critics argue will hurt senior citizens by inadequately regulating financial products long associated with deception and predation, overturning court rulings and federal regulators in the process.

The measure, unrelated to the pending financial reform bill, was introduced by Rep. Gregory W. Meeks, a New York Democrat long known for his friendly relations with banking and corporate interests. It’s the House version of a provision introduced earlier this week by Sen. Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa.

The provision prevents the Securities and Exchange Commission from regulating equity-indexed annuities, financial products that promise guaranteed returns and other similar products by designating them as exempt from securities regulation — even though they act like securities. It overturns court rulings and an SEC rule that determined these products were indeed securities, and thus should be regulated as such.

Full Story: Dem-Sponsored Loophole In Financial Reform Bill Could Hurt Seniors.

Food stamp usage drastically rises in Gulf region following oil spill.

In addition to the environmental devastation that BP’s oil disaster has caused, the spill has also destroyed the livelihoods of countless people who live on the southeastern coast of the United States who depend on jobs based along the Gulf of Mexico. Florida’s Capitol News Service reports today that food stamp applications have “soared” along the Florida coast following the spill:

Applications for food stamps in Panhandle counties have soared since oil began gushing from the broken BP pipe leak. Since May 1st application are up 15 percent. The Department of Children and Families is keeping separate data to track people who qualify for food stamps because the oil has destroyed their careers. Don Winstead is the Welfare Advisor for DCF. He says along with the growing need for food assistance is a growing need for councilors to help families going through hard times.

“Being not only in the food stamp program and other benefit programs but also seen through our mental health program also. One of the things we typically do after disaster is increase our counseling capacity because people are going to be affected in a variety of ways,” said Winstead.

Full Story: Think Progress » Food stamp usage drastically rises in Gulf region following oil spill..

California town to lay off all city employees, disband police

Economic hard times are causing many municipalities to look for ways to reduce their payrolls, but none has taken it as far as the town of Maywood, California.

On Monday night, the Maywood City Council voted unanimously to fire all 100 city employees and contract out most services, including record-keeping, street maintenance, and parks and recreation, to the neighboring town of Bell.

“We will become 100% a contracted city,” Maywood’s interim city manager stated.

Even the Maywood police department will be disbanded. Those services will be provided by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, since a proposal earlier this month to merge Mayfield’s police department with that of Bell was met with angry protests by Bell residents.

Full Story: California town to lay off all city employees, disband police | Raw Story.

Conservative Feminism: The Idea That Women Are Too Stupid To Know the Difference

the most irritating meme of 2010—we’re looking at new kind of feminism, a “conservative feminism”.

The slightly higher-than-usual numbers of female candidates this election season’s crop of increasingly right-wing challenger candidates has created possibly the most irritating meme of 2010—that we’re looking at new kind of feminism, a “conservative feminism”. Never mind that this crop of politicians doesn’t actually have any feminist positions outside of the narrow belief that they personally should have power despite being female. Never mind that there’s nothing new about women using anti-feminism to advance their own interests. Never mind that actual feminists find the whole thing incredibly tedious. The idea that electing a few female conservatives to office should be the apex of feminism has evenmade its way into the editorial pages of the New York Times.

To be fair, there’s more to these conservative women’s arguments that they’re a new breed of feminist than simply pointing to their own briefcases and saying, “So there.” The whole strategy of declaring obviously anti-feminist women to be “feminist” was started by anti-choice groups like the Susan B. Anthony List and Feminists for Life, and it was popularized by Sarah Palin. The argument is that there could be such a thing as “pro-life feminism,” i.e. a feminism grounded in the idea that women should be forced to bear children against their will.

Common sense would demand that one not agree that there could be a kind of feminism that would declare the entire female sex incapable of handling the right to bodily autonomy. But the anti-choice feminists swear they have an argument! The argument is that Abortion Is Bad For Women, because it thwarts women from their true desires—so deep and true that many women don’t even realize they have them—to bring every pregnancy to term, no matter how much they think they don’t want it. They marshal all sorts of made-up evidence to support this argument, claiming incorrectly that abortion causes depression and breast cancer and probably ingrown toenails. The conclusion is that women have to be forced to bear children against their will for their own good. They hope that if you squint at it sideways, this argument looks kind of like feminism. After all, real feminists talk about real things that hurt women, so fake feminists pretending that things that don’t hurt women do could fool someone.

Full Story: Conservative Feminism: The Idea That Women Are Too Stupid To Know the Difference | RHRealityCheck.org.

Protecting our Water Commons: Interview with Robert Kennedy Jr.

We can be the most powerful protectors of our own sources of water.

Whose job is it to protect our waterways? Water quality laws and enforcement are only as strong as the popular movements that press for them. Unless we stand up, those who would privatize, pollute, or divert our waters get away with it. That’s the message of Robert Kennedy Jr., founder of the international Waterkeeper Alliance and chief prosecutor of the New York-based Riverkeeper, which helped lead the successful movement for the restoration of the Hudson River.

Sarah van Gelder: When did it first occur to you that ordinary people might be the best protectors of their waterways?

Robert Kennedy Jr.: I started working with Riverkeepers in 1984 when it was still called the Hudson River Fishermen’s Association. It was a blue-collar coalition of commercial and recreational fishermen who mobilized to reclaim the river from its polluters.

Full Story: Protecting our Water Commons: Interview with Robert Kennedy Jr. by Sarah van Gelder — YES! Magazine.

The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is

Discusses research paper by Cornell psychology professor David Dunning examining human incompetence: “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments.” Dunning argues in his paper, “When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden:Wow, this explains a lot, including the Tea Party movement and why people continue to vote Republican.

1. The Juice

David Dunning, a Cornell professor of social psychology, was perusing the 1996 World Almanac. In a section called Offbeat News Stories he found a tantalizingly brief account of a series of bank robberies committed in Pittsburgh the previous year. From there, it was an easy matter to track the case to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, specifically to an article by Michael A. Fuoco:

ARREST IN BANK ROBBERY,

SUSPECT’S TV PICTURE SPURS TIPS

At 5 feet 6 inches and about 270 pounds, bank robbery suspect McArthur Wheeler isn’t the type of person who fades into the woodwork. So it was no surprise that he was recognized by informants, who tipped detectives to his whereabouts after his picture was telecast Wednesday night during the Pittsburgh Crime Stoppers Inc. segment of the 11 o’clock news.

At 12:10 a.m. yesterday, less than an hour after the broadcast, he was arrested at 202 S. Fairmont St., Lincoln-Lemington. Wheeler, 45, of Versailles Street, McKeesport, was wanted in [connection with] bank robberies on Jan. 6 at the Fidelity Savings Bank in Brighton Heights and at the Mellon Bank in Swissvale. In both robberies, police said, Wheeler was accompanied by Clifton Earl Johnson, 43, who was arrested Jan. 12.[1]

Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight. What made the case peculiar is that he made no visible attempt at disguise. The surveillance tapes were key to his arrest. There he is with a gun, standing in front of a teller demanding money. Yet, when arrested, Wheeler was completely disbelieving. “But I wore the juice,” he said. Apparently, he was under the deeply misguided impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to video cameras.

Full Story: The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is (Part 1) – Opinionator Blog – NYTimes.com.

My Father and Alan Greenspan

Robert Reich:

When I was a small boy at the start of the 1950s, my father gave me my first economics lesson. “Bobby,” he said with obvious concern, “you and your children and your children’s children will be repaying the national debt created by Franklin D. Roosevelt.”

I didn’t know what a national debt was, but I remember being scared out of my wits.

Dad was wrong, of course. Even though the national debt then was a much higher percentage of the national economy than it is today, it shrank as the economy boomed. My children have never mentioned FDR’s debt. My granddaughter (almost 2) will never pay a penny of it.

Full Story: Robert Reich (My Father and Alan Greenspan).

Attacks on census workers double

An unexpected result for some census takers: the wrath of irate Americans [Teabagers]

This is the scary season for the nation’s census takers.

Since they began making follow-up house calls in early May, census takers have encountered vitriol, menace and flashes of violence. They have been shot at with pellet guns and hit by baseball bats. They have been confronted with pickaxes, crossbows and hammers. They’ve had lawn mowers pushed menacingly toward them and patio tables thrown their way. They have been nibbled by ducks, bitten by pit bulls and chased by packs of snarling dogs.

Some days, being cursed at seems part of the job description.

So far, the Census Bureau has tallied 379 incidents involving assaults or threats on the nation’s 635,000 census workers, more than double the 181 recorded during the 2000 census. Weapons were used or threatened in a third of the cases.

Full Story: An unexpected result for some census takers: the wrath of irate Americans.

The New Poor – Peddling Relief, Firms Put Debtors in Deeper Hole

For the companies that promise relief to Americans confronting swelling credit card balances, these are days of lucrative opportunity

So lucrative, that an industry trade association, the United States Organizations for Bankruptcy Alternatives, recently convened here, in the oceanfront confines of the Four Seasons Resort, to forge deals and plot strategy.

At a well-lubricated evening reception, a steel drum band played Bob Marley songs as hostesses in skimpy dresses draped leis around the necks of arriving entrepreneurs, some with deep tans.

The debt settlement industry can afford some extravagance. The long recession has delivered an abundance of customers — debt-saturated Americans, suffering lost jobs and income, sliding toward bankruptcy. The settlement companies typically harvest fees reaching 15 to 20 percent of the credit card balances carried by their customers, and they tend to collect upfront, regardless of whether a customer’s debt is actually reduced.

Full Story: The New Poor – Peddling Relief, Firms Put Debtors in Deeper Hole – NYTimes.com.

One in Five People Between 18 and 65 Have No Health Insurance

More than 15 percent of Americans lacked health insurance in 2009, a slight but insignificant rise from 2008, according to U.S. government survey data released on Wednesday.

The survey by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed a stable pattern over recent years of Americans without health insurance — numbers used as the basis for battles over healthcare and health insurance reform.

The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics said in its report that 15.4 percent of Americans lacked health insurance in 2009, compared to 14.7 percent in 2008.

The survey found that 46.3 million people had no health insurance in 2009, a bit up from 43.8 million in 2008. This included more than 6 million children under 18.

Full Story: In U.S., 15 Percent Lack Health Insurance – Survey – NYTimes.com.

U.S. ‘On A Collision Course With The Future’ In Terms Of Projected Demand For Educated Workers

A landmark report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce forecasts an uneven relationship between colleges and the job market. Although more future jobs will require advanced education, colleges are not doing enough to prepare their students for the projected workforce.

Inside Higher Ed talked to the Georgetown center’s director:

The colleges that most students attend “need to streamline their programs, so they emphasize employability,” said Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Georgetown center.

Carnevale acknowledged that such a shift would accept “a dual system” in which a select few receive an “academic” college education and most students receive a college education that is career preparation. “We are all offended by tracking,” he said. But the reality, Carnevale said, is that the current system doesn’t do a good job with the career-oriented track, in part by letting many of the colleges on that track “aspire to be Harvard.” He said that educators have a choice: “to be loyal to the purity of your ideas and refuse to build a selective dual system, or make people better off.”

Full Story: U.S. ‘On A Collision Course With The Future’ In Terms Of Projected Demand For Educated Workers.

More Than 1 In 5 American Children Are Now Living Below The Poverty Line

Perhaps the greatest victims of the economic nightmare that is unfolding right in front of our eyes are our children. The overall economic numbers are really bad, but when you examine the impact that this economy is having on children things get really horrifying. Today, 1 in 5 American children live in poverty and 1 in 4 American children are on food stamps. Experts tell us that about 50 percent of all U.S. children will be on food stamps at some point before they reach the age of 18. Up to half a million American children are homeless even as you read this. And yet we continue to insist that we are the wealthiest nation in the world. Well, if we are so wealthy, then why are so many millions of our children suffering so desperately?

Part of the reason is because an increasing number of parents can’;t find work. According to a U.S. Labor Department report, the average duration of unemployment in the United States hit 34.4 weeks in May, which was a big increase from 33 weeks during April. To give you some perspective how incredibly bad that is, the average duration of unemployment was only 16.5 weeks in December 2007.

The truth is that when U.S. workers lose their jobs they are finding it exceedingly difficult to find new ones.

Full Story: More Than 1 In 5 American Children Are Now Living Below The Poverty Line.

Exclusive: Republican senator’s plan to let guns on Amtrak moves closer to reality

A Government Accountability Office study quietly released Thursday has bolstered a Republican senator’s efforts to force Amtrak’s rail service to accommodate gun toting riders or face shutdown, Raw Story has found.

The GAO ruled Thursday that an amendment inserted into a transportation funding bill by Republican Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) was permanent law, erasing doubts that Amtrak would have to comply. The mandate would force Amtrak to reverse a longstanding rule banning passengers from bringing guns onto trains instituted after 9/11.

The ruling comes just one week before the cash-strapped rail service must report back to the U.S. Senate with a plan to provide for gun-owning passengers. Wicker’s amendment would strip the passenger rail service of $1.6 billion in federal funding if it does not formulate a gun-friendly plan.

Full Story: Exclusive: Republican senator’s plan to let guns on Amtrak moves closer to reality | Raw Story.

You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught

Younger People Are Fundamentally Less Concerned with Race, Putting the Republicans on the Defensive
I spent Memorial Day in New Orleans, where I watched a group of citizens lay a wreath at the foot of a statue of Jefferson Davis. It was a jarring reminder of how the South understands American history. Memorial Day was founded after the Civil War to honor Union soldiers. When Southerners choose to memorialize Confederate leaders, it is an act of subversive historical revision and an indication of the unresolved political and cultural anxieties that stir just below the surface of the “New South.”

The white New Orleanians paying their respects to Davis made me nervous. Few things disgusted Confederates more than property-owning women, free blacks and evidence of miscegenation. I am all of these, so I feel the very legitimacy of my citizenship is challenged by their nostalgia. But I noticed that those gathered at the monument appeared to be mostly senior citizens. In contrast, young New Orleanians were hanging out in integrated groups in the park, listening to music, drinking beer and worrying about how the impending hurricane season would affect the BP oil disaster.

The generational divide in how these Southerners spent Memorial Day was jarring and instructive. In May, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed a bill cutting state funding to schools that offer classes “designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group” or “advocating ethnic solidarity.” The law aims to ban ethnic studies curriculums and implies that classes in African-American history or Latino literature are dangerous and discriminatory. Then the Texas State Board of Education voted to introduce a considerably more conservative slant to the social studies curriculum. In the revised Texas version of history, there is an increased emphasis on Phyllis Schlafly, segregationist George Wallace and the National Rifle Association, while the United Nations is presented as an enemy of American sovereignty and the separation of church and state is reduced to an ideological suggestion rather than a constitutional mandate.

Full Story: You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught | The Nation.

Atlas Shagged: Colorado Springs Is What Happens When Rich Twits Refuse To Pay Taxes

The city of Colorado Springs, Colo., has become a microcosm of what happens when those in the community who are prospering are unwilling to pay the taxes needed to fund basic government services.

I visited C.S. way back in 1984, and was blown away by what a beautiful place it was. There were gorgeous plants and flowers everywhere. You could see Pike’s Peak through some residents’ kitchen windows. There were mild days and cool nights even in August. And, most of all, one was taken by how pristine everything always looked. “This is Heaven!” one resident, a former Texan, told me unabashedly.

But, one other thing I noticed: I had never seen so many extreme right-wingers congregated in one place in my whole life. And, mind you, I’m an almost lifelong Texan.

Full Story: Manifesto Joe’s Texas Blues: Atlas Shagged: Colorado Springs Is What Happens When Rich Twits Refuse To Pay Taxes.

Sex Pill for Women: Big Pharma Trying to Profit from Low Sex Drive?

A new pill promises to cure low sex drive in women. Is big pharma just trying to profit from another made-up disorder?

Drugs to boost women’s libido are not recent. They date all the way back to Roman times when the wife of Augustus Caesar dosed her guests to liven a party. Marquis de Sade did the same, seventeen hundred years later.

Now a new female libido drug, dubbed the Pink Viagra, has husbands, boyfriends and Wall Street cheering, if not its intended patients.

On June 18 an FDA advisory committee will consider approval of flibanserin, manufactured by Germany-based Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, for “treatment of hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) in premenopausal women.”

Full Story: Sex Pill for Women: Big Pharma Trying to Profit from Low Sex Drive? | Reproductive Justice | AlterNet.

‘The Time We Have Is Growing Short’

Paul Volker:

Some five years ago, at a conference of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, I lamented that “the growing imbalances, disequilibria, risks” were giving rise to “circumstances as dangerous and intractable” as any I could recall—intractable not just because of the combination of complicated issues, but because there seemed to be “so little willingness or capacity to do much about it.”

Part of the story is familiar. In the United States, savings practically disappeared as consumption rose far above past relationships to national production. That consumption was satisfied by rapidly growing imports from China and elsewhere in Asia at remarkably cheap prices, helping to keep inflation well subdued. The resulting seemingly inexorable increase in our current account deficit was easily financed by an equally large flow of short-term funds from abroad at exceptionally low interest rates. In fact, money was so easily available that it supported what became a bubble in housing, with rising home prices reinforcing a sense of prosperity and high consumption.

It was not so much that the imbalances were hidden or unknown. In particular, the Chinese surpluses and American deficits were widely thought to be unsustainable. But for the time being, the world economy was growing strongly. China in particular was mainly interested in developing its industry by encouraging exports, and the United States was not prepared to balance its national budget or to restrain the consumption and housing boom.

Full Story: ‘The Time We Have Is Growing Short’ | The New York Review of Books.

Funeral Protests Should Not Be Protected Say 48 States: Amicus Brief Filed In Supreme Court Case

Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia have submitted a brief to the Supreme Court in support of a father who sued anti-gay protesters over their demonstration at the 2006 funeral of his son, a Marine killed in Iraq.

Only Virginia and Maine declined to sign the brief by the Kansas attorney general.

Albert Snyder sued over protests by the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church at his son’s funeral in Maryland. The church pickets funerals because they believe war deaths are punishment for U.S. tolerance of homosexuality.

The Supreme Court has agreed to consider whether the protesters’ message is protected by the First Amendment.

Full Story: Funeral Protests Should Not Be Protected Say 48 States: Amicus Brief Filed In Supreme Court Case.

Despite Food Assistance Programs, Many American Children Experience Hunger

Approximately 49 million people, including 17 million children, experience household food insecurity – the lack of resources required to sustain the nutritional needs of family members – according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. However, this number may be even higher when examining the specific food needs of children. In a recent University of Missouri study, researchers found that food insecurity and hunger among children still persist, even in food secure households and despite food assistance programs and efforts to increase food security.

Children are considered food insecure if, in the last year, they did not eat enough, did not eat for a day, skipped a meal or were hungry because their family could not afford adequate food. In the study, ManSoo Yu, assistant professor in the MU School of Social Work and Master of Public Health Program, examined different factors related to food security among households and children, including racial comparisons among vulnerable households, participation in the food stamp program and informal food supports.

“We found that household food security does not equate to food security for children within those households,” Yu says. “Therefore, children who experience food insecurity may live in households that are defined as food secure. This is alarming considering previous research that indicates food insecure children are more at-risk for being overweight, having poor health, poor academic performance and poor psychosocial functioning.”

Full Story: On The Hill: Despite Food Assistance Programs, Many American Children Experience Hunger.

A Nation Lost

How deluded have we become as a country to think that we have the power to tell other nations what to do? We cannot even run our own country properly. Are we crazy?

We are already in too many wars. We are locked into wars in the Middle East that we cannot win. We are losing, if we haven’t lost already, the all important economic war. We are in phantom wars on drugs, terrorists and other abstract ideas with no identifiable enemy to fight.

America has become a nation lost. We can’t make our own weapons, we are so entrenched in debt that our children’s children will not even be able to pay it all back. We owe China over $600 billion plus interest. China, along with other countries, build all the things our country needs to live on to survive. We cannot tell them how to run their country when we are living on imports and debt.

Right now we are taking sides with South Korea against North Korea. South Korea does not show us preferential treatment. The South Korean government keeps our imports out of their markets. In 2007 South Korea sold the U.S. 615,000 cars while only allowing 7,000 of our cars into their country. They are not our friends any more than North Korea.

Full Story: A Nation Lost | Economy In Crisis.

United States: Next empire on the precipice of collapse?

After generations of ignoring the future for the sake of immediate gains, the United States is at a crossroads. Our government has to start voting for the future, instead of trying to build up the status quo.

We have heard for months that the sky is falling and the American economy is on the verge of collapse. The Bush administration warned of an economic Armageddon if its Wall Street bailout wasn’t approved immediately. The Obama administration has talked about saving us from the “verge of collapse.”

The fact is more nuanced than that; America may well be collapsing before our eyes, but it is happening more slowly than some would believe. A country like the United States is not going to go away over night, but it could very well be a shell of its former self a decade or more from now.

British historian Niall Ferguson, writing for Foreign Affairs, outlines the decline of the American empire as a result of its inability to squash desires for international commercial, military and political dominance. As our leadership struggles with the day-to-day problems of political sausage making, the seams of this nation could be coming apart.

Full Story: United States: Next empire on the precipice of collapse? | Economy In Crisis.

What Obama Isn’t Telling American Workers

Most importantly, a cheaper dollar lowers the living standards of U.S. workers, since the price of foreign goods will become inflated. With a catastrophic U.S. debt, inflation will continue for years to come.

A lot is happening in the tumultuous realm of global economics. The “Great Recession” has caused tectonic shifts internationally, with outcomes that will dramatically change the lives of millions of people in the U.S. and beyond. And while Obama is acknowledging this fact with repeated references to “a new world order,” he isn't explaining how this adversely affects working-class Americans. The truth would be far too “controversial.”

The first unmentionable fact is the inevitable, long-term decline of the dollar, a phenomenon that can now be considered government policy. The business magazine Forbes comments:

“The Treasury Department would never admit this, but for the time being it's in the country's interest to keep its currency low because it stimulates exports for the economy's manufacturing base and lowers the value of the debt that the Treasury is piling up.” (October 5, 2009)

These policies are essentially economic attacks on foreign corporations and governments, and U.S. workers.

Full Story: OpEdNews – Article: What Obama Isn’t Telling American Workers.

California passes bill to counteract ‘disturbing’ Texas curriculum

Measure ensures Texas standards don’t ‘creep into our textbooks,’ senator tells Raw Story

texastextbooks California passes bill to counteract disturbing Texas curriculum

The California Senate on Friday approved legislation that sends a clear message to Texas and textbook publishers: don’t mess with our kids’ minds.

“My bill begins the process of ensuring that California students will not end up being taught with Texas standards,” State Senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco), who authored and sponsored the legislation, told Raw Story in an interview. Texas standards had better not “creep into our textbooks,” he said.

The S.B. 1451 measure – approved on a bipartisan vote of 25-5 – requires California’s Board of Education to examine and report any discrepancies between the new Texas standards and California’s standards. “At that point,” Yee told Raw Story, “we will make it very, very clear that we won’t accept textbooks that minimize the contributions of minorities and propagate the close connection between church and state.”

Full Story: California passes bill to counteract ‘disturbing’ Texas curriculum | Raw Story.

Clinton: Rich aren’t paying their fair share

Hillary Clinton struck a strong populist chord while wading into territory secretary of states rarely go Thursday: Domestic policy.

During a conference at the Brookings Institution on national security, the nation’s top diplomat bluntly aired her own views on the nation’s tax policies, saying she feels “the rich are not paying their fair share.”

“The rich are not paying their fair share in any nation that is facing the kind of employment issues [like the U.S.] – whether it’s individual, corporate or whatever the taxation forms are,” Clinton said after clearly stipulating that these were her opinions, no those of the Obama administration.

Full Story: CNN Political Ticker: All politics, all the time Hillary Clinton « – Blogs from CNN.com.

Social Security Will Fall To Obama Before The Taliban Does

Paul Craig Roberts:

We constantly hear from Wall Street gangsters and from Republicans and an occasional Democrat that Social Security and Medicare are a form of welfare that we can’t afford, an “unfunded liability.” This is a lie. People pay for Social Security and Medicare all their working lives.

Hank Paulson, the Gold Sachs bankster/U.S. Treasury Secretary, who deregulated the financial system, caused a world crisis that wrecked the prospects of foreign banks and governments, caused millions of Americans to lose retirement savings, homes, and jobs, and left taxpayers burdened with multi-trillions of dollars of new U.S.debt, is still not in jail. He is writing in the New York Times urging that the mess he caused be fixed by taking away from working Americans the Social Security and Medicare for which they have paid in earmarked taxes all their working lives.

Wall Street’s approach to the poor has always been to drive them deeper into the ground.

As there is no money to be made from the poor, Wall Street fleeces them by yanking away their entitlements. It has always been thus. During the Reagan administration, Wall Street decided to boost the values of its bond and stock portfolios by using Social Security revenues to lower budget deficits. Wall Street figured that lower deficits would mean lower interest rates and higher bond and stock prices.

Full Story: Social Security Will Fall To Obama Before The Taliban Does | Economy In Crisis.

The Ten Wealthiest Financiers in America Are Not Worth $900,000 an Hour

Dear Messrs, Tepper, Soros, Simons, Paulson, Cohen, Icahn, Lampert, Griffin, Arnold and Falcone,

It’s now estimated that about 150,000 teachers will lose their jobs next year because of the financial crisis touched off by your industry.

On behalf of the 3 million young people who would have been their students, I have a proposition for you: Donate 50 percent of your 2009 earnings to keep those 150,000 teachers in their classrooms. Each of you, on average, still would net over $935 million dollars for the year (you should be able to scrape by on that) — and the money you’d forgo would ensure that 3 million kids would get an education.

That the ten of you personally received $18.7 billion (not million) from your hedge fund proceeds in 2009 is quite a feat, given that it was the worst economic year since the Great Depression. You each got roughly $36 million a week — over $900,000 an hour! Meanwhile, as result of the Wall Street shenanigans you helped engineer, 29 million Americans are now without work or forced into part-time jobs.

Full Story: The Ten Wealthiest Financiers in America Are Not Worth $900,000 an Hour « SpeakEasy.

THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND THE REVOLUTION OF 2017

Yesterday Speaker of the House Dennis Kucinich was sworn in as President, replacing President Jeb Bush, who had fled to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, aboard Air Force One seeking asylum in his father’s well guarded compound on the grounds of the Bin Laden family’s palace. Vice President Dick Cheney, who has been in a coma since August after suffering his fifteenth heart attack, was declared incompetent. President Kucinich immediately announced a wide-ranging package of policies designed to bring an end to the Great Depression, which began with the global financial crisis of 2007. He called for calm and pleaded with leaders of the Revolutionary Tea Party Army that has encircled Washington to call off the attack that had been planned for today, the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. Commandant Dick Armey said he is willing to meet for a discussion of a ceasefire so long as his militia can take their weapons home.

President Kucinich apparently ordered the Marines to invade Goldman Sachs headquarters in Manhattan early this morning. While there were some reports of small arms fire, most of the 6000 employees were reportedly removed without struggle and are on their way to various jails and prisons in the greater New York area. CEO Timothy Geithner was captured at La Guardia, attempting to board a private jet said to be headed for Riyadh. An anonymous source claimed that Geithner complained that President Bush had left him behind after promising protection. President Kucinich announced that Geithner would be charged with fraud, racketeering, and tax evasion. The case dates back to 2012 but had been put on hold when former President Sarah Palin ordered the attorney general’s office to stop its investigation of the Treasury Secretary. President Kucinich said that Goldman, the last remaining bank in America, would be nationalized. He assured depositors that the bank would reopen next Monday under management of a team of presidential appointees led by William Black. All insured deposits will be protected, but it is believed that other claims will not be honored. FBI agents have reportedly moved to seize all assets of current and former Goldman employees. Warrants for the arrest of former Treasury Secretaries Paulson, Rubin, and Summers were also issued.

President Kucinich’s package of policies includes universal and comprehensive debt cancellation. Under the plan, all private debts will be declared null and void. The implications are not immediately clear since delinquency rates have already reached 95% on most categories of debt. Several economists said that the new President was only validating reality, but others argued that it gave legal protection to squatters who have refused to leave their foreclosed homes over the past decade. The global movement for the “Year of Jubilee” had been pushing for such debt relief since the crisis began.

Full Story: New Economic Perspectives: THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND THE REVOLUTION OF 2017.

“Government Doesn’t Have the Resources to Stop It”

People want the President to exert leadership to turn things around.

The oil leak. Unemployment. Credit card scams. Foreclosures. Predatory corporations. Environmental destruction. Global warming. Roads and bridges crumbling. Incomes stagnant. Schools getting worse. Companies moving overseas. Problem after problem.

People want to know, “Why doesn’t the government push BP aside and take over?” The answer is, “Government doesn’t have the resources to stop it.”

People want to know why the government can’t do more to help unemployed people, help with health care, help provide good educations, help with college, maintain the infrastructure, and all the other things that government does.

The answer, these days, is always, “Government doesn’t have the resources.” And that, in a nutshell, was exactly the plan.

Full Story: “Government Doesn’t Have the Resources to Stop It” | OurFuture.org.

Louisiana oyster harvester Kuzma Tesvich…BP has hurt more than just a job

Thom Hartmann

Unchecked oil flow would cause disaster ‘heretofore unseen by humanity’

If  BP fails to plug its ruptured offshore oil well, intense underground pressure would be enough to pump vast quantities of thick brown crude into the Gulf of Mexico for months, even years.

If even BP’s backup plans fail, it would cause a pollution disaster “heretofore unseen by humanity,” said one expert.

It is this rapidly accelerating realization that is giving BP’s attempt Wednesday to cap the well new political and environmental urgency.

The worst-case scenario is hoped and believed to be a continued flow of 5,000 barrels per day, and by some estimates vastly more, until August, when BP completes “relief wells” to intercept the damaged well.

But, experts say, there are no sure things when operating equipment a mile under the water and 13,000 feet below the ocean floor.

Full Story: Unchecked oil flow would cause disaster ‘heretofore unseen by humanity’ – The Hill’s E2-Wire.

Following BP’s Lead on the Oil Spill

Bob Herbert

Old Shell Beach, La.

I asked the sheriff of St. Bernard Parish, Jack Stephens, if he was at all optimistic about BP stopping the gusher of oil that is fouling the Gulf of Mexico in time to prevent a long-term environmental catastrophe in the southern Louisiana wetlands.

The sun was high in the sky, and the day was hot. The sheriff was in a small boat, patrolling the waterways that wend their way through the delicate marshes. He thought for a long moment. Oil was already seeping into the marshes, getting into the soil and plant life and coating some of the wildlife.

“I’ll tell you the truth,” said Mr. Stephens. “It may already be too late.”

Full Story: Op-Ed Columnist – Following BP’s Lead on the Oil Spill – NYTimes.com.

Is Porn Bad for You?

Out of the Shadow: What’s the Prevalence of Porn Doing to Our Psyches?

“Porn is an easy outlet, a one-way outlet. What a rush! What a release! The Internet puts an endless stream of images at my fingertips. I’ve conveniently conned myself thinking it’s okay, but deep down I know it’s wrong. It makes me feel dirty and has hurt my relationship with my wife. I beat myself up afterward, hate myself, and swear that was the last time. But before I know it, I’m back at it again. I’m scared where it’s leading. Can you help me?”—Scott, 44 years old.

Scott, a successful lawyer with a wife and two children, showed up at my office for his first session confused and angry about his relationship with pornography. He could see the damage his Internet porn habit was having on his marriage, health, and career, but he couldn’t stay away from it. His story is typical of men and women—of all ages, backgrounds, incomes, and lifestyles—who are seeking counseling for serious problems related to pornography.

When I began counseling in the mid-1970s, cases like Scott’s were rare and almost inconceivable. Hardcore pornography was difficult to obtain. But in recent decades, new electronic technologies, such as cable television, computers, and iPhones, have transformed it into a product that’s available to anyone—anytime, anywhere, and often cheap or free. It’s become a substantial part of our economy, boasting annual revenues in excess of $13 billion in the United States and $100 billion worldwide.

Full Story: Out of the Shadow.

Buyer Beware: Over the Counter DNA Tests Can Cause More Harm Than Good | | AlterNet

There’s a huge push to market over-the-counter genetic tests. But the faulty tests can cause more harm than good.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 7-2 ruling this week in U.S. v. Comstock, which declared that the federal government has the right to hold convicted sex offenders in “civil commitment” even after they have completed their prison sentences, has alarmed civil libertarians, many of whom are asking: If the government can keep sex offenders in preventive custody as long as they remain “dangerous,” what will stop it from doing the same with terror suspects? The rights of terrorists — like those of sex offenders — might matter little to the average American, but the implications for a free society are unmistakeably dangerous.

The possibility that Comstock could help justify the legal black holes at Bagram or Guantanamo is certainly a concern worth raising, particularly given the Obama administration’s embrace of indefinite detention. But it seems equally important to consider the immediate implications for the prisoner population that may be affected by this law. It could be bigger than we think.

Full Story: Buyer Beware: Over the Counter DNA Tests Can Cause More Harm Than Good | | AlterNet.

Modern Day Slavery in America — Over 300,000 U.S. Children Fall Prey to Sex Trafficking | Reproductive Justice | AlterNet

People may have trouble believing that child prostitution has become a national problem — but it’s on the verge of becoming out of control.

Child prostitution has become a national problem in this country. Yes, I know that you have trouble believing that. You don’t want to believe it, so you tend not to.

“Widespread sex trafficking in children?” you may be saying to yourself. “Sure, it happens overseas in places like Thailand and Moldova, and while there may be some of it here there’s not that much of it in our country.”

Based on a months-long investigation and some reportorial digging, I’m here to tell you that you are wrong. We all are. We’re in denial.

In covering news for more than 60 years, I’d like to think that few stories shock me anymore. But this is one of them. We ran across it late last year and the more we dug, the more disturbing it became.

Eighty-year-old men paying a premium to violate teenage girls, sometimes supplied by former drug gangs now into child sex trafficking big time? You’ve got to be kidding. Nope. That’s happening and a lot more along the same lines.

Full Story: Modern Day Slavery in America — Over 300,000 U.S. Children Fall Prey to Sex Trafficking | Reproductive Justice | AlterNet.

How Alcohol Companies Launched a Digital Campaign Against America’s Kids | Media and Culture | AlterNet

According to a new study, companies like Captain Morgan and Budweiser have become extremely savvy at targeting young audiences.

Visit captainmorgan.com, and next to the brand’s iconic smiling pirate, you’ll see the question, “Are you old enough to come aboard?” Go to Budweiser.com, and you’ll get the request, “ID please.” Absolut.com’s home page tells visitors, “You have to be over 21 to enter this site.” All three brands, like the rest of the alcohol industry, require visitors to type in a birth date to show they are of legal drinking age before entering their websites.

That, so parents and the rest of public are supposed to believe, is how alcohol companies keep their online marketing away from kids. Riiight. If only bars and restaurants allowed every customer ordering a drink to simply pop the cap off a Sharpie, write his or her birth date on a napkin and pass it to the bartender. Wrote down the wrong date? No problem — just cross it out and write down a new one. Or, in the online world, quit your browser and relaunch. It’s that easy.

If alcohol companies were only touting their products on company websites, the fact that the industry is flimsily self-regulated might not be much cause for alarm. The trouble is, according to a new report released last week from the Center for Digital Democracy and Berkeley Media Studies Group, they’re also saturating kid-popular websites like YouTube and Facebook with branded games, contests and viral videos, and tapping into people’s cell phones with apps and text messages. And research shows the marketing works.

Full Story: How Alcohol Companies Launched a Digital Campaign Against America’s Kids | Media and Culture | AlterNet.

HUD is Trying to Privatize and Mortgage Off All of America’s Public Housing

The Obama Administration’s move to the right is about to give conservatives a victory they could not have anticipated, even under Bush. HUD, under Obama, submitted legislation called PETRA to Congress that would result in the privatization of all public housing in America.

The new owners would charge ten percent above market rates to impoverished tenants, money that would be mostly paid by the US government (you and me, the taxpayers). To maintain the property, the new owners would take out a mortgage for building repair and maintenance (like a home equity loan), with no cap on interest rates.

With rents set above market rates, the mortgage risk would be attractive to banks. Either they make a huge profit on the mortgages paid for by the government. Or if the government lowers what it will pay for rents, the property goes into foreclosure. The banks get it and can sell it off to developers.

Full Story: HUD is Trying to Privatize and Mortgage Off All of America’s Public Housing | CommonDreams.org.

More Than Just an Oil Spill

Bob Herbert:

The warm, soft winds coming in off the gulf have lost their power to soothe. Anxiety is king now — all along the coast.

“You can’t sleep no more; that’s how bad it is,” said John Blanchard, an oyster fisherman whose life has been upended by the monstrous oil spill fouling an enormous swath of the Gulf of Mexico. He shook his head. “My wife and I have got two kids, 2 and 7. We could lose everything we’ve been working all of our lives for.”

I was standing on a gently rocking oyster boat with Mr. Blanchard and several other veteran fishermen who still seemed stunned by the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. Instead of harvesting oysters, they were out on the water distributing oil retention booms and doing whatever else they could to bolster the coastline’s meager defenses against the oil making its way ominously and relentlessly, like an invading army, toward the area’s delicate and heartbreakingly vulnerable wetlands.

Full Story: Op-Ed Columnist – More Than Just an Oil Spill – NYTimes.com.

Texas education board approves social studies curriculum

The State Board of Education Board, ending nearly two years of politically divisive deliberations, approved new social studies curriculum standards for the state’s 4.7 million students despite vigorous objections from the board’s five minority members.

The revisions have drawn national attention amid complaints that conservative Republicans on the board are attempting to alter history and trying to inject their political beliefs into the curriculum. Minorities reiterated assertions that the standards obscured ignored the role of Hispanics and African-Americans in Texas history and gloss over generations of abuses.

Several minority members, previewing their intentions to vote against the curriculum standards, denounced the document and made an unsuccessful push to delay the final vote on the high school curriculum until the next board meeting in July.

Full Story: Texas education board approves social studies curriculum | McClatchy.

California Institute Formed to Certify Safety of Consumer Products

California’s crackdown on harmful materials in consumer products is gaining a new tool: a nonprofit institute that plans to help manufacturers come up with safer alternatives.

The new Green Products Innovation Institute will help establish standards for product safety that will be used by California regulators when they begin enforcing a state law that requires manufacturers to find safer ways to make consumer products, said Maureen Gorsen, former director of the state’s Department of Toxic Substances Control. For example, the institute will keep a database of the chemistry of certain materials, as supplied by companies who participate in sharing information.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who signed the measure into law in 2008, joined several large companies and other participants at an event at Google Inc.’s headquarters discussing the effort. Enforcement of the law will begin in 2011.

Full Story: California Institute Formed to Certify Safety of Consumer Products – WSJ.com.

Progressive Texas Board Of Education Candidates Promise To Undo Textbook Changes

The Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) has faced national scrutiny and ridicule in recent months for its right-wing revisions to the state’s social studies and history curriculum. Changes have included requiring students to learn the difference between legal and illegal immigration, examine “documents that supported Cold War-era Sen. Joseph McCarthy,” and study prominent right-wing political figures.

This massacre to the state’s educational system is engineered by the SBOE’s bloc of far-right conservatives, who have little to no background in education policy. Members include Cynthia Dunbar, a Republican who has called public education a “tool of perversion.” There’s also Chairman Don McLeroy, a dentist who has stated, “The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel.”

There’s beginning to be a backlash against these far-right members, however. McLeroy lost his primary to a more moderate Republican candidate, and Dunbar is not running for re-election. Yesterday, ThinkProgress spoke to Judy Jennings and Rebecca Bell-Metereau, two Democrats who are running for SBOE in Districts 10 (Dunbar’s area) and 5, respectively. Both of them stated that the SBOE has lost focus and abandoned other areas of its mission in the quest to politicize the Texas’ curriculum, said that constituents are frustrated with the negative attention, and promised to try to repeal the textbook revisions:

Full Story: Think Progress » Progressive Texas Board Of Education Candidates Promise To Undo Textbook Changes.

Texas State Board Of Education Swamped With Criticism Over New Textbook Guidelines

Conservatives on the Texas State Board of Education were defiant Wednesday as a parade of critics came before them, most urging a fresh rewrite of new classroom social studies guidelines and a delay of a scheduled vote to adopt them.

Critics, including the president of the NAACP, a former U.S. education secretary and the committee that wrote the draft guidelines being edited by the board, complained that the proposal has become a vehicle for political ideology, has watered down the teaching of the civil rights movement and slavery and reveals a lack of historical knowledge from the board.

The standards will guide how history and social studies are taught to some 4.8 million public school students over the next 10 years.

“Of course it’s political,” Republican David Bradley said to one critic who complained that the process was too focused on politics rather than history. “So what’s your solution

? Would you support a benevolent dictator?”

Full Story: Texas State Board Of Education Swamped With Criticism Over New Textbook Guidelines.

NAACP president: Texas curriculum will turn world ‘upside down’ for kids | Raw Story

Previewing the tone of his testimony in Austin on Wednesday ahead of a crucial vote, NAACP president Ben Jealous forcefully condemned the influential Texas State Board of Education’s slew of pending revisions to history and social studies curriculum.

The modified curriculum – approved in March on a party line vote and facing a final motion this Friday – diminishes Thomas Jefferson’s significance and commitment to secularism, tempers criticism of McCarthyism, downplays Darwin’s theory of evolution, and emphasizes the “conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s.”

“It’s outrageous,” Jealous said Tuesday on a conference call with reporters. “It’s going to lock kids into the dark ages, where the whole world’s been turned upside down – where Thomas Jefferson is not a founding father, there’s no good reason to talk about [the first black Justice] Thurgood Marshall, and Joe McCarthy is a hero.”

Full Story: NAACP president: Texas curriculum will turn world ‘upside down’ for kids | Raw Story.

Texas ready for textbook showdown

Is Texas on the verge of rewriting history, or just correcting it?

The answer depends on whom you listen to on the state’s Board of Education, which is poised to vote this week on new social-studies curriculum standards that could significantly shape what Texas children — and perhaps those outside the nation’s second-largest state — are taught in the classroom.

Social conservatives on the 15-member Republican-dominated board are optimistic they will be able to push through curriculum changes that, according to board member and conservative Texas lawyer Cynthia Noland Dunbar, “promote patriotism.”

Full Story: Texas ready for textbook showdown – Life- msnbc.com.

Homeboy Industries, Nation’s Largest Anti-Gang Program, Lays Off 300 Workers

For over 20 years, Father Greg Boyle has worked to help Los Angeles gang members rebuild their lives. The organization Boyle founded, Homeboy Industries, has become the nation’s largest anti-gang program, offering substance abuse counseling, tattoo removal, educational programs and more to ex-gang members. Through Homeboy Industries’ multiple business ventures, the organization has also provided jobs for former gang members in multiple sectors, including working at a cafe, installing solar panels and silk-screening T-shirts.

Now, facing an overwhelming financial struggle, the organization has been forced to lay off 300 employees. Homeboy Industries will continue to provide services to the community, provided former staff members can lend their time on a volunteer basis. The nonprofit needs an estimated $5 million to stay afloat — Father Greg Boyle hopes “somebody will rescue us.”

CNN reports.

WATCH:

Full Story: Homeboy Industries, Nation’s Largest Anti-Gang Program, Lays Off 300 Workers.

The Declining Value Of Work

One of the great joys that men in free societies have long enjoyed is the ability to earn an honest wage for an honest day of work. In particular, the amazing capitalist engine that powered the U.S. economy for decade after decade greatly rewarded the incredible hard work and industriousness of the American people. America was known as the land of opportunity, and we built the largest middle class in the history of the world by working incredibly hard. But today, all of that is fundamentally changing. Thanks to rapid advances in technology, and thanks to the globalization of the work force, the labor of American workers is rapidly losing value. Automation, robotics and computers have made many jobs obsolete. Today one man can do the work that a hundred men used to do. Not only that, but today American workers literally have to compete against workers from all over the globe. Global corporations often find themselves having to choose whether to build a factory in the United States or in the third world. But in the third world workers often earn less than 10% of what American workers earn, corporations are often not required to provide any benefits to workers, and there are usually hardly any oppressive government regulations. How can American workers compete against that?

The truth is that labor is now a global commodity. How can an American worker compete against a desperate, half-starving worker in the third world that will work like mad for a dollar an hour?

But this is what we get for letting the politicians push “free trade” down our throats.

Most American workers had no idea that free trade would mean that they would suddenly be competing for jobs against workers in the Philippines and Malaysia.

But that is the cold, hard reality of globalism.

Full Story: The Declining Value Of Work.

Killing Our World

by: William Rivers Pitt,

“I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I’d never have,” wrote Chuck Palahniuk in his novel,”‘Fight Club.” “Burn the Amazon rain forest. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn’t afford to eat, and smother the French beaches. I wanted the whole world to hit bottom … I wanted to breathe smoke. I wanted to burn the Louvre. I’d do the Elgin Marbles with a sledgehammer and wipe my ass with the Mona Lisa. This is my world, now.”

This is our world now, indeed. All those terrible things Palahniuk’s protagonist wanted to do, well, most of them are happening or have already happened. The Louvre is still there, for now, and neither the Marbles nor the “Mona Lisa” have been violated, but as for the rest of that rant … yeah, they’re pretty much fact.

Our world.

The Boston Globe web site put together a series of pictures detailing the inexorable advance of spilled petroleum in the Gulf, the slow dread of aftermath from the destruction of the Deepwater Horizon nearly a month ago. I’ve been staring at them for the last hour, and I’m beginning to believe I have lost the capacity to weep.

Full Story: t r u t h o u t | Killing Our World.

Now independent thinkers are considered diseased by psychiatry

Psychiatrists have been working on the fourth revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and, in it, they hope to add a whole slew of new psychiatric disorders. Unfortunately, many of these disorders are merely differences in personality and behavior among people.

The new edition may include “disorders” like “oppositional defiant disorder”, which includes people who have a pattern of “negativistic, defiant, disobedient and hostile behavior toward authority figures.” Some of the “symptoms” of this disorder including losing one’s temper, annoying people and being “touchy”.

Other “disorders” being considered include personality flaws like antisocial behavior, arrogance, cynicism or narcissism. There are even categories for people who binge eat and children who have temper tantrums.

Full Story: Now independent thinkers are considered diseased by psychiatry.

Calif. bill would block Texas textbook changes

California may soon take a stand against proposed changes to social studies textbooks ordered by the Texas school board, as a way to prevent them from being incorporated in California texts.

Legislation by Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, seeks to protect the nation’s largest public school population from the revised social studies curriculum approved in March by the Texas Board of Education. Critics say if the changes are incorporated into textbooks, they will be historically inaccurate and dismissive of the contributions of minorities.

The Texas recommendations, which face a final vote by the Republican-dominated board on May 21, include adding language saying the country’s Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles and a new section on “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s.” That would include positive references to the Moral Majority, the National Rifle Association and the Contract with America, the congressional GOP manifesto from the 1990s.

The amendments to the state’s curriculum standards also minimize Thomas Jefferson’s role in world and U.S. history because he advocated the separation of church and state, and require that students learn about “the unintended consequences” of affirmative action and Title IX, the landmark federal law that bans gender discrimination in education programs and activities.

Full Story: Calif. bill would block Texas textbook changes – San Jose Mercury News.

The Terminator ‘Soaks the Poor’

Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The terminator has terminated futures for some 1.3 million citizens with sweeping budget cuts that affect only the poor. The terminator’s cuts eliminate CalWorks, the state’s main welfare program. Some 1.3 million –one million of which are children who will be left to fend for themselves with little choice but to turn to crime.

The rest will be unemployed, cut off, some left to starve or turn to crime. Is this what the GOP has mind? Is this an opportunistic move to fill up the corporate-owned prison, like those in Texas, in which every child that is left behind? Is this a deliberate move to provide ‘corporate-persons’ with slave labor because the ‘state’ has refused to support education?

This is slavery –pure and simple, a crime against humanity! Nothing in the old south was nearly so horrible.

Full Story: The Existentialist Cowboy: The Terminator ‘Soaks the Poor’.

Detroit to Demolish 10,000 Abandoned Properties

Wrecking crews are preparing to tear down a landmark 5,000-square-foot house in the posh neighborhood of Palmer Woods in the coming weeks, a sign that Detroit is finally getting serious about razing thousands of vacant and abandoned structures across the city.

In leveling 1860 Balmoral Drive, the boyhood home of one-time presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Detroit is losing a small piece of its history. But the project is part of a demolition effort that is just now gaining momentum and could help define the city’s future.

Detroit is finally chipping away at a glut of abandoned homes that has been piling up for decades, and intends to take advantage of warm weather and new federal funding to demolish some 3,000 buildings by the end of September.

Full Story: Detroit to Demolish 10,000 Abandoned Properties – WSJ.com.

OPS: Just like the 1930′s Great Depression dust bowl, without the dust.  And this hasn’t been the second Republican Great Depression?  Wonder how many homes were demolished in the 30′s?

Schwarzenegger unveils budget plan: slashes welfare, mental health

The governor’s proposal would eliminate the state’s welfare-to-work program and most child care for the poor. ‘California no longer has low-hanging fruits,’ he says.

Proposing a budget that would eliminate the state’s welfare-to-work program and most child care for the poor, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger outlined on Friday a stark vision of a California that would no longer lend a helping hand to some of its poorest and neediest citizens.

His $83.4-billion plan would also freeze funding for local schools, further cut state workers’ pay and take away 60% of state money for local mental health programs. State parks and higher education are among the few areas the governor’s proposal would spare.

The proposal, which would not raise taxes, also relies on $3.4 billion in help from Washington — roughly half of what the governor sought earlier this year — to help close a budget gap now estimated at $19.1-billion. Billions of dollars more would be saved through accounting moves and fund shifts.

Full Story: Schwarzenegger unveils budget plan – latimes.com.

College For All? Experts Say Not Necessarily

In a town dominated by the University of Missouri’s flagship campus and two smaller colleges, higher education is practically a birthright for high school seniors like Kate Hodges.

She has a 3.5 grade-point-average, a college savings account and a family tree teeming with advanced degrees. But in June, Hodges is headed to the Tulsa Welding School in Oklahoma, where she hopes to earn an associate’s degree in welding technology in seven months.

“They fought me so hard,” she said, referring to disappointed family members. “They still think I’m going to college.”

Full Story: College For All? Experts Say Not Necessarily.

OPS: Idiots.

Alabama Teachers’ Union Undermines Education by Getting in Bed With Creationists

When I first watched this video, I thought it was satirical. Check it out; you’ll see why:

“Geez, Wonkette has gone a little far with their mockery of southerners’ love and protection of their own ignorance,” I thought. “But come on. No one would actually use a belief in evolution as the main reason to oppose a candidate for state-wide office, even in Alabama!”

I was more incorrect than I thought I could be. Not only is belief in evolution a worthy slur against a candidate, but it is a slur that the Alabama Teachers Union is comfortable hurling. The ad in question was apparently funded by a half-million dollars in contributions by the Alabama Education Association (AEA) to a newly-formed group known as the True Republican PAC of Linden, AL.

It is sad that a group associated with both teachers and progressive values such as equal access to a quality education would put out a political smear advocating ignorance.

But perhaps even more depressing is that the targeted gubernatorial candidate, Bradley Byrne, decided to double down on dumb. In response to the ad (which he totally could have laughed off) he told his uber-religious constituency that he believes “the Bible is the Word of God and that every single word of it is true” and that his “belief in Jesus Christ… guides my every action.” Furthermore, Byrne recommitted himself to ensuring “the teaching of creationism in our school text books.”

Full Story: Alabama Teachers’ Union Undermines Education by Getting in Bed With Creationists | BuzzFlash.org.

Arizona governor signs bill banning ethnic studies

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer has signed a bill targeting a school district’s ethnic studies program, hours after a report by United Nations human rights experts condemned the measure.

State schools chief Tom Horne, who has pushed the bill for years, said he believes the Tucson school district’s Mexican-American studies program teaches Latino students that they are oppressed by white people.

Public schools should not be encouraging students to resent a particular race, he said.

Full Story: Arizona governor signs bill banning ethnic studies | Raw Story.