Society's ChildS

Take 2

The American dream is over: 70 Million people would be starving in the streets without government welfare programs

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Amid all the talk of recovery by politicians, economic officials and big business leaders, the fundamental numbers behind all the propaganda tell a starkly different story.

Home sales have dropped to record lows, more people are out of the workforce than anytime in the last 50 years, and cash-strapped consumers have run out of money to fuel economic growth.

By all meaningful measures the American boom times of old are gone.

A recent report from the Department of Health and Human Services suggests that we may have already reached the tipping point and that things are only going to get worse going forward.

According to the HHS, nearly half of all Americans are now dependent on some form of government benefit just to put food on the table. And of our population of 310 million, nearly one in four receive welfare benefits.

That's over 70 million people who, if the government safety nets broke down due to lack of funding or a monetary crisis, would be starving on our streets right now.

Books

The system's denial in the face of truth: Predatory capitalism

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© ShutterstockPredatory capitalism
Contemporary capitalism is characterized by a political economy which revolves around finance capital, is based on a savage form of free market fundamentalism, and thrives on a wave of globalizing processes and global financial networks that have produced global economic oligarchies with the capacity to influence the shaping of policymaking across nations.

As a result, contemporary advanced capitalist societies are plagued by dangerous levels of income and wealth inequality, mass unemployment, rising poverty rates, social polarization, and collapsing social provisions. Furthermore, democracy and the social contract are under constant attack by the current system and there is an ongoing pressure by the corporate and financial elite to convert all public goods and services into private goods and services.

The rising inequality in advanced capitalist countries is well documented. Most recently, Thomas Piketty's publishing sensation Capital in the Twentieth-First Century, translated into English and published by Harvard University Press, provides massive data showing a widening gap between the rich and the poor, thus questioning not only the claim that the capitalist economy works for all but also underscoring the point of how dangerous the current system is to democracy itself. Indeed, a few years ago, Larry M. Bartels's Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, published by Princeton University Press, pointed to the same gap between the rich and poor in the United States under Republican administrations.

Family

Emergency Ukrainian refugee situation in 6 Russian regions

Refugees from Ukraine
© RIA Novosti / Valery MelnikovRefugees from Ukraine in a camp in the Rostov region
Six Russian regions have introduced emergency situation plans, and two more could do so soon as people keep fleeing from the combat and destruction in South East Ukraine.

A state of emergency has been declared in the Rostov, Volgograd, Astrakhan, and Stavropol regions, in the Republic of Kalmykia and in the city of Sevastopol, Deputy Emergencies Minister Vladimir Artamonov told reporters on Thursday. The current situation has also prompted the "regime of increased readiness" in Belgorod and Voronezh regions, he added.

Artamonov said the flow of refugees from Ukraine continues to grow after the Kiev authorities ended the ceasefire and started a new advance in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions. Because of this, the Emergencies Ministry had to organize regular flights from the regions that border Ukraine to other parts of Russia. In total, 40 regions of the Russian Federation are receiving Ukrainian refugees.

The Rostov Region, which is closest to the war-torn Ukrainian areas, was the first to introduce an emergency situation in late June.

According to the UN agency for refugees, over 110,000 people have arrived to Russia from Ukraine since the beginning of the military conflict in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions. However, only about 10,000 of them have officially applied for asylum or refugee status.

Ukrainian citizens can stay in Russia for 90 days without obtaining a visa and many people have simply delayed their application and dealt with more urgent issues. Also, the arrivals could fear the lengthy process and long queues.

The Federal Migration Service has proposed a quick and simplified way to grant temporary asylum to Ukrainian refugees in a bill that was posted on the government portal for public discussion last week.

Comment: While Kiev continues its murderous campaign, Russia is actually doing something to help the civilian population of East Ukraine. What a concept! Unfortunately, it's a concept totally alien to the psychopaths in the U.S. and Kiev.


Pistol

A sign? Banker suicides return: JPMorgan executive "blasts wife, kills self" with shotgun

The end is near
With Russia and China having briefly taken over the hub of global executive suicides, the sad trend has returned back to America. In what appears to the 15th financial services executive suicide this year, yet another JPMorgan Director took his own life. As IBTimes reports, Jefferson Township (New Jersey) police report that the Global Network Operations Center Executive Director, "Julian Knott, age 45, shot his wife Alita Knott, age 47, multiple times and then took his own life with the same weapon." They are survived by 3 teenage children...

As IB Times reports,
JP Morgan executive director Julian Knott blasted his wife Alita to death with a shotgun before turning the gun on himself.

The 45-year-old, who worked for the investment bank in London until July 2010, shot his 47-year-old wife multiple times before committing suicide with the same weapon.
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Julian moved to the United States from London in 2010 and was working at JP Morgan's Global Network Operations Center in Whippany, New Jersey, at the time of the tragedy.
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Jefferson Township police, in New Jersey, confirmed on Sunday they had found two unconscious bodies at the Knotts' large suburban home at 1.12am.

A statement released on Tuesday added: "Through an extensive investigation conducted by the Jefferson Township Police Department, the Morris County Prosecutors Office and the Morris County Medical Examiner's Office the preliminary investigation has revealed that the two adults died as a result of gunshot wounds and the incident has been determined to be a murder/suicide.

"This preliminary investigation revealed that Julian Knott, age 45, shot his wife Alita Knott, age 47, multiple times and then took his own life with the same weapon."
...

Comment: Related? Protect your assets: Bank false flag event may be coming soon


Stock Up

The Guardian's publishing of NSA spying revelations helps reduce overall losses in earnings

Edward Snowden
© UnknownAmerican "Whistleblower" Edward Snowden
The sensation sparked by the revelations of ex-NSA employee Edward Snowden on the level of covert online monitoring by the U.S. online helped narrow losses at the publisher of the U.K.'s Guardian and Observer newspapers.

Guardian News & Media, which publishes the two newspapers and theguardian.com, reported a ยฃ30.6 million ($52.3 million) loss in earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortization over the year to the end of March. This marked an uptick from the ยฃ33.8 million loss posted the previous year.

It's been quite a year for the media group, which won the highest accolade in U.S. journalism - the Pulitzer Prize - for its coverage of the NSA's surveillance activities, based on the leaks by Edward Snowden. After breaking the story, the Guardian worked together with The New York Times and ProPublica to report news from the leaked documents.

Cow

Cow rampages through town, tosses cop aside and tramples over cop car

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Police in Mount Vernon, Wasington killed an agitated Angus cow that rampaged through town, tossing a police officer into the air and tap-dancing on a patrol car.

The Skagit Valley Herald reports that police spokeswoman Shannon Haigh says the cow apparently escaped from a farm outside the city limits. It was first reported in a Wal-Mart parking lot last Friday.

Haigh says the cow slipped past city police and Skagit County sheriff's deputies who tried to keep it out of the street and away from a nearby wedding.

When officers tried to catch it a few blocks away, Haigh says it charged an officer, tossing him into the air. He was sore, but not seriously hurt. The cow escaped again by jumping on the hood of a patrol car, trotting across it and running off.

Haigh says police and the cow's owner finally agreed it might need to be killed to prevent further injury or damage. An officer shot the animal.

Comment: Considering all the police brutality incidents in the news lately, one can hardly blame the cow for being a little suspicious about the cop's intentions and high-tailing it out of there.


Gold Bar

Protect your assets: Bank false flag event may be coming soon

crowd in front of bank
© fofoa.blogspot.comThe 21st Century Bank Run
Wall Street's biggest trade group has proposed a government-industry cyber war council to stave off terrorist attacks that could trigger financial panic by temporarily wiping out account balances, according to an internal document.

The proposal by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, known as Sifma, calls for a committee of executives and deputy-level representatives from at least eight U.S. agencies including the Treasury Department, the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security, all led by a senior White House official.

The trade association also reveals in the document that Sifma has retained former NSA director Keith Alexander to "facilitate" the joint effort with the government. Alexander, in turn, has brought in Michael Chertoff, the former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, and his firm, Chertoff Group.

The document sketches an unusually frank and pessimistic view by the industry of its readiness for attacks wielded by nation-states or terrorist groups that aim to "destroy data and machines." It says the concerns are "compounded by the dependence of financial institutions on the electric grid," which is also vulnerable to physical and cyber attack.

Comment: As the US economy continues its downfall, the pathocrats will be looking for creative ways to grab cash. As the 'terrorist' theme has been working well, it is likely that this Bill is a warning of what may come.

Banks have almost zero cash: Be prepared to lose your savings


People

Myths of crowd wisdom: When crowd decision-making goes wrong

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© Thinkstock
Are the many wiser than the few? Phil Ball explores the latest evidence on what can make groups of people smarter - but can also make them wildly wrong.

Is The Lord of the Rings the greatest work of literature of the 20th Century? Is The Shawshank Redemption the best movie ever made? Both have been awarded these titles by public votes. You don't have to be a literary or film snob to wonder about the wisdom of so-called 'wisdom of the crowd'.

In an age routinely denounced as selfishly individualistic, it's curious that a great deal of faith still seems to lie with the judgement of the crowd, especially when it can apparently be far off the mark. Yet there is some truth underpinning the idea that the masses can make more accurate collective judgements than expert individuals. So why is a crowd sometimes right and sometimes disastrously wrong?

The notion that a group's judgement can be surprisingly good was most compellingly justified in James Surowiecki's 2005 book The Wisdom of Crowds, and is generally traced back to an observation by Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton in 1907. Galton pointed out that the average of all the entries in a 'guess the weight of the ox' competition at a country fair was amazingly accurate - beating not only most of the individual guesses but also those of alleged cattle experts. This is the essence of the wisdom of crowds: their average judgement converges on the right solution.

Comment: See also: Need an Expert? Try the Crowd


2 + 2 = 4

US for-profit colleges engaging in predatory practices and misleading students finally called to task

Everest College
© Jeramey Jannene/FlickrCorinthian operates colleges and training programs under the names Everest College, Heald, WyoTech, and QuickStart Intelligence. This location is in Milwaukee.
Under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Education, Corinthian Colleges will put 85 of its U.S. campuses up for sale and close the remaining dozen. The for-profit college chain operates campuses under the names Heald, Everest and WyoTech. It has more than 70,000 students across North America. It's the largest-ever college, by enrollment, to be shut down in this way.

It all started in January when the U.S. Department of Education asked the company to provide detailed records, including Social Security numbers, job placement results, and attendance and grade changes, of students. This was part of compliance with federal regulations designed to make sure that colleges that don't offer a good value to students, don't get student aid money.

When Corinthian didn't fully respond, in June, the Department of Education placed a three-week hold on financial aid payments to Corinthian. The cash freeze was a big problem for the college, which had underlying financial difficulties. Inside Higher Ed reported in May that the college faced closing off or selling its business, with both enrollment and revenue slumping.

Comment: It's timely that these colleges are being scrutinized for practices that are clearly not in the best interests of the students. These for-profit colleges receive much of their revenues from federal financial aid: student loans, Pell grants and military educational benefits. Yet students often fare poorly, dropping out in large numbers and defaulting on federal loans at double the rate of their counterparts at public institutions. At the same time the executives of these companies are receiving huge salaries based only on profitability with no link to the success of the student body.

Predatory For-Profit Colleges Pay Executives Based On Corporate Profitability, Not Student Outcomes


Quenelle

After 6 years! 38 journalist groups in US protest against suppression of media by White House

White House
© Flickr.com/Chris Oakley/cc-by
38 journalism groups in the US have sent a message addressed to President Barack Obama expressing protest against the "politically-driven suppression of news and information" about the activities of the American authorities. According to the capital's online newspaper The Washington Examiner, this is an unprecedented criticism of the White House.

It is particularly significant because immediately after coming to power, Obama promised to make his government the most transparent one in American history.

"You recently expressed concern that frustration in the country is breeding cynicism about democratic government," the authors of the letter to the owner of the White House write. "You need look no further than your own administration for a major source of that frustration - politically driven suppression of news and information about federal agencies. We call on you to take a stand to stop the spin and let the sunshine in."

The journalists specifically complain that in all branches of the US government officials were banned from communicating with them, especially "on the record," that their questions and requests for interviews regularly remain unanswered, and that judiciary journalists were even included in departmental black lists.

Comment: The journalists who are now writing this polite letter to the White House were silent for almost 6 years about the current administrations: drone wars, support to terrorists in Syria, war on Libya, propping up of the mafia banking sector, support for GMO, continued creation of the police state, support for extra-judicial assassinations, regime change in Ukraine, slaughtering of the middle class, support for torture, illegal detentions, massive surveillance on everybody, destruction of health care and education and the list goes on.

In fact these same journalists have for the most been active in selling the US foreign policy and the creation of the fascist police state that the US has morphed in to.