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Pitchforks coming soon? CEO compensation more than 300 times that of average workers

Daniel Marans
Huffington Post
Mon, 22 Jun 2015 17:51 UTC
ceo pay
© corpwatch
CEOs at top U.S. companies earned more than 300 times what average workers did in 2014, a new study revealed on Monday.

According to the report by the Economic Policy Institute, CEOs of the top 350 publicly owned U.S. companies earned, on average, $16.3 million a year -- 303.4 times more than the average worker earned in 2014.

The ratio of CEO-to-average worker pay is up 244.7 percent since 1965, when it was 20-to-1, the report states. It is down, however, from a 2000 peak of about 376-to-1.

The Economic Policy Institute attributes the sharp increase in the ratio of CEO-to-average worker pay to skyrocketing CEO compensation even as average worker pay has stagnated. Since 1978, when pay packages began to rise more dramatically, CEO compensation has gone up 997 percent, even as the average worker pay has risen 10.9 percent in the same period.

Comment: Professor Peter Turchin at the University of Connecticut created a mathematical formula that uses numbers to explain historical cycles such as the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Communism. He measured income inequality, the minimum wage, and health. He concludes that the wider the gap between rich and poor, and the unhappier the general population is, the closer people get to revolution. His formula predicts that when the income gap finally reaches a breaking point, violence - or the threat of violence brings the pitchforks to the gates of the upper classes and they will get scared enough to take steps to mollify the masses. However, considering the nature of psychopathy and the likelihood that many of those at the highest levels of society are pathologically greedy, it is more likely that Mother Nature will intervene before any steps are taken to redistribute wealth or alleviate the suffering these pathologicals have wrought throughout society.

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Bizarro Earth

Suffocating in the USA - "I Cannot Write!"

Andre Vltchek
CounterPunch
Sun, 21 Jun 2015 14:02 UTC
american flag torn
At the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), in Los Angeles, a gigantic, carnivorous flag with torn ends was waving in an artificial wind created by enormous propellers.

There were no visitors at the exhibition. For a while I thought that in all this huge space I was totally alone. But soon I noticed two figures in black torn dresses, moving slowly, in semi-darkness, desperately clinging to the walls. Backs bent, they passed by the bookstore right near the place where someone had put a small sign on the wall that said, "I cannot breath!"

Most likely it was a performance, a desperate protest action of one man and one woman, a performance against this giant all-devouring flag.

"I cannot breath!" A man shouted before he died, before he was murdered by the regime.

"I cannot write!" I thought. Which to me was almost the same as not being able to respire.

***

It was the first time in many years that I had missed my column, my essays, for several weeks.

Even when I was arrested in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Kenya, in Senegal, I still managed to write.

I managed to write after a deranged, evangelical and fascist preacher paid hotel staff to poison me in the Indonesian city of Surabaya.

I wrote in many warzones and desperate slums, from Iraq to Mindanao, from Haiti to Marshall Islands.

But I couldn't write in the United States of America. Not one single line, not one word. Not this time.
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Heart - Black

Immigration rules could force deportation of thousands of UK nurses despite severe nursing shortage


RT
Mon, 22 Jun 2015 16:48 UTC
nursing shortage UK, nurse deportaton
© Reuters / Stefan Wermuth
New immigration rules could force up to 30,000 foreign nurses in the UK to return to their home countries despite the National Health Service (NHS) facing a severe nursing shortage, healthcare unions have warned.

A new pay threshold, due to come into effect next April, will mean non-European workers will have to leave the UK after six years if they are earning less than £35,000.

The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) warned the rules would "cause chaos" for the NHS at a time when demand on the health service is increasing.

The union called on the Home Office to add nurses to the list of shortage occupations which are exempt from the immigration rules and to reconsider the pay threshold.

Comment: Another example of incomprehensible mandates by dimwitted politicians, who obviously won't notice the lack of care and suffering that will ensue for people who must deal with an already overburdened system.

NHS to face chronic nurse shortage by 2016

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Airplane

All New Zealand flights grounded over radar glitch - reports


RT.com
Tue, 23 Jun 2015 03:45 UTC
AKL Airport
© NZ Herald
All commercial flights across New Zealand have been grounded due to a radar fault that affected the country's entire airspace, according to local media.

All the already-airborne flights are allowed to land routinely, but due to the radar fault no jets are currently allowed to take off, Radio New Zealand reports.

"We were informed by Airways New Zealand of a radar fault which is affecting all flights nationally," an Auckland Airport spokesman told the NZ Herald.
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Chart Pie

Unemployed, disabled woman with $10k yearly income ordered to repay $37k student loan debt


RT
Tue, 23 Jun 2015 00:35 UTC
Image
© Reuters/Nyimas Laula
A federal appeals court has denied a woman's bankruptcy request and ordered her to pay back student loans of more than $37,000 despite her yearly income of $10,000. The disabled woman has been unemployed for seven years.

The Maryland court judge denied Monica Stitt, 45, her bankruptcy request on June 9, and ordered her to pay the amount.

Stitt wanted to discharge student debt through bankruptcy due to "undue hardship." But this is exceptionally hard because the debtor has to prove the hardship and the definition of how hardship is measured is not defined by the bankruptcy code but is left to the courts to decide.

Stitt had borrowed $13,250 in student loans which had increased with interest to $37,400 by the time she filed for bankruptcy. After the bankruptcy judge ruled she couldn't cancel the debt, the woman appealed to the US District Court in Maryland without a lawyer, where a District judge upheld the bankruptcy court's ruling.

The appeals court used three criteria to determine whether Stitt's circumstances qualified her for relief. Those criteria are whether the loan would be too difficult to pay back while maintaining a "minimal standard of living," whether the difficult circumstances lasted a long time and whether the debtor demonstrated "good-faith efforts" to repay the loan in the past.

In Stitt's case she passed two of the three measurements. The judge said even if she paid only $3.50 a day in interest on the loan she still wouldn't qualify for a minimal standard of living. Stiff also qualified for having difficult circumstances that lasted as she was disabled, and also unemployed since 2008.

Comment: The student loan industry is booming.
The federal government of the United States made a profit of $41.3 billion on student loans for the 2013 fiscal year.

Although the profit is $3.6 billion less than the that the US government reaped from distressed borrowers the previous year, it is a profit higher than that made by all but two companies, Exxon Mobil and Apple, in the world.
Student loan debt, among other types, feeds the conscienceless capitalist (slavery) system at the expense of the disenfranchised. There's nowhere to go but down.

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Life Preserver

Greeks becoming resigned to crisis - suffer 'deadline fatigue'

Angelique Chrisafis
The Guardian
Mon, 22 Jun 2015 01:26 UTC
greek financial crisis
© Milos Bicanski/Getty
Sitting near a market in Athens as talks continue to haul the country back from the brink of bankruptcy.
With seemingly never-ending panic over 'last-ditch' talks, many have deadline fatigue and think long-term solutions are out of reach

As the "last-chance" talks rolled on towards another "last-ditch" summit possibly at the end of this week, weary Greeks have deadline fatigue.

"Unfortunately, we've become hardened and accustomed to all this, including the never-ending talks," said Christos Griogoriades, a physics and IT teacher in Greece's northern second city of Thessaloniki.

Panic about so-called "knife-edge", "life-or-death" negotiations has become so commonplace that it is almost meaningless to a population whose major concerns are still making ends meet and scrimping for enough to eat.

Griogoriades, 42, has friends who have lost good jobs and are now living back in their parents' rural northern villages, supporting their young children on €40 a month and homegrown vegetables. "We've got to the point where people here look at others, saying: 'OK, I think I've got it bad but that man over there is eating from a garbage can.' This is going to be our reality for many years, and I think the worst is yet to come."

His parents had lived through extreme post-war poverty and knew how to live very frugally. He felt the younger generation now felt condemned to live through an economic crisis that could stretch on for decades.

With the Greek crisis now dragging on longer than the first world war, there have been at least a dozen emergency summits since 2009. The nation has so often been described as perched "on the edge of a cliff" and "staring into the abyss" that it has become part of the depressing new normality, just like cash-strapped hospitals, rocketing unemployment or the families with children living in flats with no running water or electricity because they cannot pay the bills.

Comment: While not as overt as with third world countries, this is still an IMF application of "shock doctrine" tactics, designed to cement Greece as a vassal state to the EU, and ultimately the US.

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Handcuffs

Cop accused of sexually assaulting woman in her home while on duty

David Edwards
Raw Story
Mon, 22 Jun 2015 15:19 UTC
Image
© Amarillo Police Department
Former Officer Micah Meurer
The Amarillo Police Department fired Officer Micah Meurer last week after he was accused of raping a woman while he was on duty.

The Amarillo Globe-News reported that investigators determined Meurer had sexual contact with the woman after he was called to her home on June 14. The 22-year-old woman reported the incident to authorities the next day.

A redacted police report obtained by KFDA indicated that investigators recovered multiple items with bodily fluids, clothing, a Walmart receipt and other evidence from the woman's home.

Comment: If people cannot be safe from police while in their own home, then where can they be safe?

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Control Panel

False flag sign? Charleston shooting happened during federal active shooter drill ...in Charleston


Intellihub
Mon, 22 Jun 2015 06:56 UTC
Image
© FLETC.GOV
The existence and use of false flag terrorism across the world has long been established.

From the Reichstag fire to the 9/11 terror attacks, alternative researchers and open-minded individuals have proven that rogue elements of various governments, including the United States, can and do engage in false flag terror.

One of the major signs that an event may be a false flag is the scheduling of some sort of realistic drill that just so happens to simulate what then ends up actually happening. On 9/11 this was apparent when numerous exercises simulating the hijacking of a commercial airliner were literally being conducted at the exact time as the attack itself.

Now, information has come to light proving that an active shooter drill was being conducted in Charleston, South Carolina on the same day that the mass shooting happened at a historic black church.

Comment: Pattern recognition. Sometimes that's all we have - but sometimes seeing the patterns count for quite a lot. In addition to 9/11, consider also that other event-specific drills were scheduled just at or near - and at the same time of - the events of the Boston bombings and the London 7/7 bombings. Coincidence? That's what many would have us believe certainly. But consider the fact that event-specific drills enable those orchestrating such events a certain element of control over a situation where they could move right in or otherwise be 'too busy' with their activities to address the situation directly - whatever is deemed most useful at the time. Relatively speaking, the recent tragedy was logistically pretty easy to pull off from the point of view of the false-flaggers, so it seems that their active shooter practice team wasn't required to swoop in.

In addition to the intent of fomenting division and a race war in the U.S. it seems that the tragedy in Charleston is also being used to give greater strength to the idea of 'home grown' terror. See this deconstruction of the major media's coverage of the shooting and the use of language to shape the thinking around it:



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Star of David

Israeli rights group blasts military court for Palestinians as 'hollow formality'


RT
Mon, 22 Jun 2015 19:53 UTC
Image
© Reuters / Ammar Awad
Thousands of Palestinians are brought before Israeli military courts each year on charges ranging from stone-throwing to illegal entry. Most end up in custody awaiting a verdict, the judicial process reduced to a "hollow formality," a rights group says.

The Israeli B'Tselem group has stated in its 41-page report, based on 260 case files that with the exception of individuals accused of traffic violations, "remand is the rule rather than the exception. The military prosecution routinely asks for remand in custody and the courts approve the vast majority of the motions."

According to the group, most Palestinian defendants enter plea bargains simply because they may end up being in jail longer if they choose not to.

"Defendants know that if they go to trial while in custody - even if going to trial would mean eventual acquittal - they may spend more time behind bars than the prison sentence they would receive in a plea bargain. As a consequence the prosecution is seldom required to go through a full trial, in which it must present evidence to prove a person guilty," B'Tselem concludes in the report entitled 'Presumed Guilty: Remand in Custody by Military Courts in the West Bank'.

"In many cases the decision to arrest an individual effectively means a conviction. The case is decided at the time the remand is approved rather than on the basis of evidence against the defendant. When remand - a pre-trial decision regarding a person not yet convicted - is approved on a regular basis, the judicial process as such becomes a hollow formality," it adds.
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Snakes in Suits

Cancer charities busted by Feds for defrauding $187 million from Americans

L.J. Devon
Natural News
Mon, 22 Jun 2015 18:35 UTC
Image
A string of cancer charities -- the Cancer Fund of America, Cancer Support Services, the Breast Cancer Society and the Children's Cancer Fund of America -- have turned out to be manipulative frauds run by a family of con artists. The money they raised for cancer patients actually went to pay for personal luxuries instead -- Disney World trips, jet ski outings, new cars, college tuition and luxury travel.

"This is as about as bad as it can get: taking money away from cancer victims," said Jessica Rich, chief of the Federal Trade Commission Bureau of Consumer Protection. The FTC was joined by the attorney general and law enforcement officials from all 50 states in the case against the fake cancer charities.

Their benevolence doesn't end there. The con artists also gave junk food and bad drugs to cancer patients. Some children were given out-of-date antibiotics that made their condition worse. One federal complaint revealed that the charities gave breast cancer patients certain drugs that "are not typically used for the treatment of breast cancer and, in some instances, are not recommended for use by persons who have had cancer."
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