Society's ChildS


Footprints

Many economically distressed older Americans are living a desperate, nomadic life to find work

Richard Eisenberg
Market Watch
Sat, 25 Aug 2018 10:27 UTC
RV trailers
They live in RVs and drive from one low-wage job to another

In her powerful new book, "Nomadland," award-winning journalist Jessica Bruder reveals the dark, depressing and sometimes physically painful life of a tribe of men and women in their 50s and 60s who are - as the subtitle says - "surviving America in the twenty-first century." Not quite homeless, they are "houseless," living in secondhand RVs, trailers and vans and driving from one location to another to pick up seasonal low-wage jobs, if they can get them, with little or no benefits.

The "workamper" jobs range from helping harvest sugar beets to flipping burgers at baseball spring training games to Amazon's AMZN, +1.67% "CamperForce," seasonal employees who can walk the equivalent of 15 miles a day during Christmas season pulling items off warehouse shelves and then returning to frigid campgrounds at night. Living on less than $1,000 a month, in certain cases, some have no hot showers. As Bruder writes, these are "people who never imagined being nomads." Many saw their savings wiped out during the Great Recession or were foreclosure victims and, writes Bruder, "felt they'd spent too long losing a rigged game." Some were laid off from high-paying professional jobs. Few have chosen this life. Few think they can find a way out of it. They're downwardly mobile older Americans in mobile homes.
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Dollars

The 'American Dream' has drastically shrunk and the reason why is debt

Michael Snyder
The Economic Collapse
Mon, 03 Sep 2018 00:00 UTC
The American Dream
Over the past decade, an unprecedented stock market boom has created thousands upon thousands of new millionaires, and yet the middle class in America has continued to shrink. How is that even possible? At one time the United States had the largest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the planet, but now the gap between the wealthy and the poor is the largest that it has been since the 1920s. Our economy has been creating lots of new millionaires, but at the exact same time we have seen homelessness spiral out of control in our major cities. Today, being part of the middle class is like playing a really bizarre game of musical chairs. Each month when the music stops playing, those of us still in the middle class desperately hope that we are not among the ones that slip out of the middle class and into poverty. Well over 100 million Americans receive money or benefits from the federal government each month, and that includes approximately 40 percent of all families with children. We are losing our ability to take care of ourselves, and that has frightening implications for the future of our society.
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Stop

India: Parents of young boy who has 24 fingers and toes 'risks being sacrificed by his own family'


RT
Tue, 04 Sep 2018 15:58 UTC
knife sharpening
© Athar Hussain / Reuters
The parents of a 12-year-old born with 12 fingers and 12 toes have appealed to police to protect the boy from being sacrificed by his own greedy relatives.

According to Asian news agency ANI, the boy - named Shivanandan, from the village of Gurri in Uttar Pradesh's Barabanki district - is facing life threats by his very own family because of his "disorder."

His parents were quoted saying their relatives are seeking to end their child's life after a sorcerer told them sacrificing the boy would guarantee them a life full of wealth.

Comment: This is horribly reminiscent of these recent stories:

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Stock Up

American wheat can hardly compete with Russia's agricultural dominance in world trade


RT
Wed, 05 Sep 2018 21:47 UTC
wheat field
© Ilya Naymushin / Reuters
US Wheat Associates (USW) has announced the closing of its Moscow office on October 1 due to lack of demand for American wheat in Russia. Since 2016, Russia has been the global leader in grain exports.

"With much more public information available about Russia's wheat supply, we believe it is time to end our mission there and continue allocating more resources in markets where our export volume is growing," said USW Vice President of Overseas Operations Mark Fowler.

According to him, "Russian wheat is obviously very competitive in certain markets, but it is important to point out that our marketing and technical teams based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, and Casablanca, Morocco, will continue competing for export business in the Middle East and North Africa."
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Handcuffs

Russian feminist slapped with criminal charges after posting jokes about men on social media


RT
Wed, 05 Sep 2018 21:20 UTC
Vkontakte
© Natalia Seliverstova / Sputnik 1324Vkontakte social media page as seen on a computer screen
Russian investigators have launched a criminal case against a feminist from the Siberian city of Omsk on charges of inciting hatred after posting jokes about men on her page in Russia's most popular social network, Vkontakte.

"A criminal case has been started against Lubov Kalugina on suspicion of crimes described in the Article 282 of the Russian Criminal Code, the investigation is currently underway," an aide to the head of the Omsk Region branch of Russia's Investigative Committee, Larisa Boldinova, told the Gorod55 news site.

Article 282 of the Russian Criminal Code targets such crimes as publicly inciting hatred or deliberate humiliation of human dignity. The maximum punishment for such crimes is five years in prison (six years for criminals who act as an organized group or people who use their official position).
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Bullseye

Investigative journalist Abby Martin takes aim at US media hegemony, who along with tech giants are 'curating our reality'


RT
Wed, 05 Sep 2018 19:44 UTC
Abby Martin
Abby Martin
A journalist whose documentary series was shut-down by financial difficulties due to US sanctions on Venezuela, has told RT that the US along with tech giants "are curating our reality" when it comes to independent media.

Abby Martin, who until last month hosted The Empire Files on Latin American TV network teleSUR, told Mike Papantonio's America Lawyer program that recent Trump administration sanctions had "completely ceased TeleSur's ability to function."

"The latest round of sanctions," argued Martin, has resulted in all contract journalists at the company "unable to receive funds all around the world," while the ability to send and receive funds through Caracas "have also been completely halted."

"There's a reason why people like you, people like me work for outlets like RT, like TeleSur," Martin told Papantonio.

"There's very little places, virtually no places obviously in the corporate media apparatus that you can tell the truth to challenge corporate tyranny and this US imperialist narrative of constant regime change all around the world."
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Attention

Florida: Still using Kathrine Harris trick to purge black voters

Greg Palast
GregPalast.com
Wed, 29 Aug 2018 00:00 UTC
Katherine Harris Jeb Bush
© news.wjct.org/Vanity FairKatherine Harris • Jeb Bush
Florida's up to its old tricks again, using dubious lists of felons and computers that come up with criminal mismatches to rob votes from people of color. This is a prime example of how the vote heist - first mastered by Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris in 2000 - works:

In yesterday's Florida election, an African-American attorney named Thomas Joseph Brown, who lives in Tallahassee, had his vote stolen. When he showed up to his polling station in Leon County, he was told he'd been purged from the rolls. When he took the matter up with the Election Supervisors they said it was because his name "matched" that of a felon called Thomas Jerald Brown, who lived 200 miles away in Daytona. Seems the fact that the middle names, addresses, and other identifying information didn't match wasn't an impediment for the state when it came to stripping a citizen of his or her right to vote. Fortunately, as an attorney, Thomas Joseph Brown knew exactly how to steal his vote back, but most people in his position would've had their vote irrevocably snatched by the state.


Comment: See also:
Candace Owens predicts there will be a major black exit from the Democrat Party leading up to the 2020 election

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Nuke

Tokyo admits first death resulting from 2011 Fukushima radiation exposure


RT
Wed, 05 Sep 2018 15:48 UTC
Fukushima Nuke Power plant
© File Photo/Richard Atrero de Guzman/Global Look PressFukushima nuclear power plant.
The Japanese authorities have acknowledged for the first time that a man died from cancer resulting from acute radiation poisoning at the Fukushima nuclear plant that went into meltdown following an earthquake back in 2011.

A Japanese man in his 50s, who previously worked at the crippled Fukushima power plant, has recently died of a lung cancer. Japan's Health, Labour and Welfare Ministry then acknowledged that his death was in fact triggered by a radiation poisoning and recognized his family as eligible for compensation in the first such case since the disaster.

According to the ministry, the diseased worked mainly at the Fukushima plant, which was hit by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011 as well as at some other nuclear power station for more than 28 years until 2015. Notably, he was in charge of measuring radiation levels at the plant and its premises immediately after the incident, the Japanese media report.

It is said he was exposed to a total radiation dose of some 195 millisieverts - a dose that is about 4 times higher than the one that leads to a serious risk of developing cancer.

So far, the ministry also admitted that a total of four Fukushima plant workers developed various types of cancer, including leukemia and thyroid cancer, triggered by radiation poisoning. However, this was the first case involving death.
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Stock Down

South Africa now in economic recession amid failing government reforms


RT
Tue, 04 Sep 2018 15:09 UTC
Rand coins
© The Nerve AfricaThe African Rand
Massive declines in the agricultural, transport and retail sectors have dragged the South African economy into recession after nearly a decade of growth. It is a huge blow to President Ramaphosa's controversial reforms.

GDP in the second quarter contracted by 0.7 percent compared to the first three months of the current year. South African national currency, the rand, extended declines against the US dollar to more than two percent as government bonds fell after the released data.

"We are in a recession," Statistician-General Risenga Maluleke said, commenting on the reports that reflect two consecutive quarters of contraction.

According to Statistics South Africa, agricultural production declined by 29.2 percent, while the transport, communication and storage sector dropped 4.9 percent. At the same time, mining output grew by 4.9 percent and finance by 1.9 percent.
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Bad Guys

Deranged man intentionally rams truck into FOX 4 studios

Patrick Poole
PJ Media
Wed, 05 Sep 2018 18:17 UTC
man truck Fox building
© Denton County Sheriff's Office/FOX 4Michael Chadwick Fry, 34, was arrested after ramming his truck into the FOX 4 building on Wednesday.
A man rammed his truck into the studios of Dallas Fox affiliate KDFW earlier this morning, just two days after Meet the Press host Chuck Todd published an article calling on his media colleagues to "start fighting back" against Fox News.


KDFW reports on the incident targeting their offices:
A man was arrested Wednesday morning after crashing a truck into the side of the FOX4 building in downtown Dallas.

The man, after repeatedly crashing his vehicle into a side of the building with floor to ceiling windows, got out of his vehicle and began ranting.

FOX4 photojournalists were able to film him placing numerous boxes next to a sidedoor filled with stacks of paper. The papers were also strewn across the sidewalk and street adjacent to the building.

The man ranted about "high treason" and also mentioned a sheriff's department.

Comment: Fox News provides a bit more of the story. The man, it appears, was mentally unstable. While pundits like Chuck Todd contribute to the social hysteria sweeping across the United States and the Western world, it's more likely that there is a larger influence at play that effects both the mentally and character disturbed. And no, we're not talking about HAARP. Something much bigger is going on.
Webb said that Fry appeared to be upset about an officer-involved shooting elsewhere and left numerous flyers that were "mostly rambling."


Photojournalists from the station filmed Fry placing numerous boxes next to the side of the building "filled with stacks of paper." The papers were then strewn along the sidewalk and adjacent to the building.


FOX4 reporter Brandon Todd said that Fry stood outside the building saying something about "high treason," ranted about a sheriff's department and then held up papers against windows. Webb had no further details about the man's motivation, other than other than they don't believe he was targeting the media.


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