Friday, November 15, 2013
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Unless Social Security Is Expanded with Increased Funding, We Face An Unprecedented Crisis of Millions of Baby Boomers In Poverty | Alternet
Unless Social Security Is Expanded with Increased Funding, We Face An Unprecedented Crisis of Millions of Baby Boomers In Poverty | Alternet. Thanks to thepoliticiams who drop to their knees to service the rich!
Thursday, October 3, 2013
Money As Debt - Full Length Documentary
Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal, there is no human relation between master and slave. Debt- government, corporate and household has reached astronomical proportions. Where does all this money come from? How could there BE that much money to lend? The answer is…there isn’t. Today, MONEY IS DEBT. If there were NO DEBT there would be NO MONEY.
If this is puzzling to you, you are not alone. Very few people understand, even though all of us are affected. This fast-paced and highly entertaining animated feature by artist & videographer, Paul Grignon explains today’s magically perverse DEBT-MONEY SYSTEM in terms that are easy to understand.
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
MCSPI - Hardened Cultures and the War on Youth - An interview with Henry Giroux
This interview was conducted at the McMaster Centre for Scholarship in the Public Interest's 2013 "War on Youth" Summer Institute, Summer 2013.
Where Have All the (New) Dollars Gone?
Where Have All the (New) Dollars Gone?
A couple of comments on recent DollarCollapse posts have included a strange assertion, that the paper money in circulation in the US is all dated 2009 or before. Apparently there are no new bills:
Suzanne, September 4
I’d like to point out something:Look at your cash… you won’t see any paper dollars of any denomination printed after 2009. The money the Fed is printing is strictly numbers in data entry.If everyone goes to get their money out of the bank or stock market, there isn’t enough cash to go around. Get cash into your hands, use some to buy precious metal, and keep cycling that cash, and keep a chunk of it in the house for use in case of a “bank holiday”.Bruce C., October 1
Rather than comment on this subject, I’d like to ask other readers for feedback about something that seems very mysterious.About a month ago, someone called “Suzanne” wrote a comment here that read, “I’d like to point out something: Look at your cash… you won’t see any paper dollars of any denomination printed after 2009.” (http://dollarcollapse.com/the-economy/confluence/)I thought that was very interesting and have since checked hundreds of bills of all denominations (up to $100) and haven’t found any of Series 2010, 2011, 2012, or 2013. She may be right about that, and that the Fed is “printing”/creating money in digital form only, in the account balances at the primary dealer banks (mostly as “reserves”).It’s not clear to me yet why this might be happening, but if it’s true then the net effect is the gradual reduction of physical US currency in the world. (The “money supply” may be increasing but in digital form only, not as cash in circulation.) The reason for this is that a portion of all cash transactions eventually make their way into the banking system in which worn out bills are supposed to be replaced with new ones, presumably ones that show the year the bills were printed (e.g., Series 2012). But, evidently, that may not be what’s happening, so fewer and fewer bills remain in circulation over time. I haven’t even found a new looking Series 2009, in case all new bills printed after 2009 continue to have that mark, for whatever reason. I’ve heard that banks want to create a cashless monetary system, and this could be the way they are trying to do it. Another possibility is that a new devalued currency is being planned that will replace US dollars, rendering them obsolete. Nevertheless, it probably is a good idea to stash some real cash while it’s still readily available in case the SHTF.Has any one out there found any bills of Series 2010 or later?
Today I checked the cash that’s lying around the house (about $300, mostly in twenties), and found nothing newer than 2009.
Thoughts? ...
IPCC Claims the Oceans are Dying to Save Us from Ourselves
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report on Friday, in which it stated that the evidence that climate change is caused by human activity has become a fact. It also stated that without the oceans, who have been absorbing most of the CO2 and the negative effects of climate change, at cost to their own health, we would be suffering far more severe weather.
Some people claim that the planet has actually started to cool, but the IPCC state that it is still heating up, and that the fact that the rate of warming may have slowed, does not mean that the climate is cooling.
The IPCC claims that without the 320 million cubic miles of seawater across the planet that absorb 93 percent of the heat trapped by rising greenhouse gas levels, the climate change we are experiencing would be many times worse.
Trevor Manuel, the co-chair of the Global Ocean Commission, confirmed that “without the immense capacity of the ocean to absorb heat and carbon dioxide, we would be experiencing much more severe climate change impacts than we see today.”
The ocean’s surface water first absorbs the heat, but with time that is then passed down into deeper water where it not only kills marine flora and fauna, but also shifts ecosystems, changes ocean currents, and causes seawater to expand, raising global sea levels.
Qin Dahe, IPCC co-chair, explains that “as the ocean warms, and glaciers and ice sheets reduce, global mean sea level will continue to rise, but at a faster rate than we have experienced over the past 40 years.” The oceans are also absorbing about 25% of the CO2 in the atmosphere, increasing their acidity.
A major problem that will result from this change to the oceans, is the loss of wildlife, which will basically mean less fish to eat. David Milliband, another co-chair of the Global Ocean Commission, said that “disruption to ocean life results in less food for people — that's the stark reality. With nearly a billion hungry people in the world already, we need to take every option we can for increasing our food supply sustainably, rather than allowing climate change to compromise it.”
By. Joao Peixe of Oilprice.com
IPCC Claims the Oceans are Dying to Save Us from Ourselves
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report on Friday, in which it stated that the evidence that climate change is caused by human activity has become a fact. It also stated that without the oceans, who have been absorbing most of the CO2 and the negative effects of climate change, at cost to their own health, we would be suffering far more severe weather.
Some people claim that the planet has actually started to cool, but the IPCC state that it is still heating up, and that the fact that the rate of warming may have slowed, does not mean that the climate is cooling.
The IPCC claims that without the 320 million cubic miles of seawater across the planet that absorb 93 percent of the heat trapped by rising greenhouse gas levels, the climate change we are experiencing would be many times worse.
Trevor Manuel, the co-chair of the Global Ocean Commission, confirmed that “without the immense capacity of the ocean to absorb heat and carbon dioxide, we would be experiencing much more severe climate change impacts than we see today.”
The ocean’s surface water first absorbs the heat, but with time that is then passed down into deeper water where it not only kills marine flora and fauna, but also shifts ecosystems, changes ocean currents, and causes seawater to expand, raising global sea levels.
Qin Dahe, IPCC co-chair, explains that “as the ocean warms, and glaciers and ice sheets reduce, global mean sea level will continue to rise, but at a faster rate than we have experienced over the past 40 years.” The oceans are also absorbing about 25% of the CO2 in the atmosphere, increasing their acidity.
A major problem that will result from this change to the oceans, is the loss of wildlife, which will basically mean less fish to eat. David Milliband, another co-chair of the Global Ocean Commission, said that “disruption to ocean life results in less food for people — that's the stark reality. With nearly a billion hungry people in the world already, we need to take every option we can for increasing our food supply sustainably, rather than allowing climate change to compromise it.”
By. Joao Peixe of Oilprice.com
IPCC Claims the Oceans are Dying to Save Us from Ourselves
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report on Friday, in which it stated that the evidence that climate change is caused by human activity has become a fact. It also stated that without the oceans, who have been absorbing most of the CO2 and the negative effects of climate change, at cost to their own health, we would be suffering far more severe weather.
Some people claim that the planet has actually started to cool, but the IPCC state that it is still heating up, and that the fact that the rate of warming may have slowed, does not mean that the climate is cooling.
The IPCC claims that without the 320 million cubic miles of seawater across the planet that absorb 93 percent of the heat trapped by rising greenhouse gas levels, the climate change we are experiencing would be many times worse.
Trevor Manuel, the co-chair of the Global Ocean Commission, confirmed that “without the immense capacity of the ocean to absorb heat and carbon dioxide, we would be experiencing much more severe climate change impacts than we see today.”
The ocean’s surface water first absorbs the heat, but with time that is then passed down into deeper water where it not only kills marine flora and fauna, but also shifts ecosystems, changes ocean currents, and causes seawater to expand, raising global sea levels.
Qin Dahe, IPCC co-chair, explains that “as the ocean warms, and glaciers and ice sheets reduce, global mean sea level will continue to rise, but at a faster rate than we have experienced over the past 40 years.” The oceans are also absorbing about 25% of the CO2 in the atmosphere, increasing their acidity.
A major problem that will result from this change to the oceans, is the loss of wildlife, which will basically mean less fish to eat. David Milliband, another co-chair of the Global Ocean Commission, said that “disruption to ocean life results in less food for people — that's the stark reality. With nearly a billion hungry people in the world already, we need to take every option we can for increasing our food supply sustainably, rather than allowing climate change to compromise it.”
By. Joao Peixe of Oilprice.com
IPCC Claims the Oceans are Dying to Save Us from Ourselves
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report on Friday, in which it stated that the evidence that climate change is caused by human activity has become a fact. It also stated that without the oceans, who have been absorbing most of the CO2 and the negative effects of climate change, at cost to their own health, we would be suffering far more severe weather.
Some people claim that the planet has actually started to cool, but the IPCC state that it is still heating up, and that the fact that the rate of warming may have slowed, does not mean that the climate is cooling.
The IPCC claims that without the 320 million cubic miles of seawater across the planet that absorb 93 percent of the heat trapped by rising greenhouse gas levels, the climate change we are experiencing would be many times worse.
Trevor Manuel, the co-chair of the Global Ocean Commission, confirmed that “without the immense capacity of the ocean to absorb heat and carbon dioxide, we would be experiencing much more severe climate change impacts than we see today.”
The ocean’s surface water first absorbs the heat, but with time that is then passed down into deeper water where it not only kills marine flora and fauna, but also shifts ecosystems, changes ocean currents, and causes seawater to expand, raising global sea levels.
Qin Dahe, IPCC co-chair, explains that “as the ocean warms, and glaciers and ice sheets reduce, global mean sea level will continue to rise, but at a faster rate than we have experienced over the past 40 years.” The oceans are also absorbing about 25% of the CO2 in the atmosphere, increasing their acidity.
A major problem that will result from this change to the oceans, is the loss of wildlife, which will basically mean less fish to eat. David Milliband, another co-chair of the Global Ocean Commission, said that “disruption to ocean life results in less food for people — that's the stark reality. With nearly a billion hungry people in the world already, we need to take every option we can for increasing our food supply sustainably, rather than allowing climate change to compromise it.”
By. Joao Peixe of Oilprice.com
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
Currency Systems - How money is created and destroyed and how to bring about monetary/economic stability
We all imagine that we understand why money exists, but given that our understanding of money is coloured by our social conditioning, it is worth revising, in a rigorous and rational way, exactly why money exists.
If we think about it, we ought to realise that money only performs one really practical and fundamental function for us, which is to provide “liquidity”. That is to say, it allows us to represent divisions of the value attributed to things. This function of dividing value is the singular and most important reason for inventing money, it is fundamental because without it, we would be unable to trade a piece of our house for food.
Also, without this divisibility function, we would not be able to establish a standard means for measuring economic transactions nor keep records of debts and positive accounts. Hence, the fundamental rationale for money is to provide a measure of value so that we can represent value and its divisions.
It turns out that there are only two requirements that need to be met in order to achieve this functionality:
Maintain stable records of the inputs and outputs of the value dividing process. ...
CONTINUE READING HERE!
The LED lights in your home could be spying on you!
Published on May 23, 2013
An LED light can be used to spy on someone and hear everything that they are saying in their home. Don't believe? Here's your proof!
World Bank Whistleblower Karen Hudes Reveals How The Global Elite Rule The World
Karen Hudes is a graduate of Yale Law School and she worked in the legal department of the World Bank for more than 20 years. In fact, when she was fired for blowing the whistle on corruption inside the World Bank, she held the position of Senior Counsel. She was in a unique position to see exactly how the global elite rule the world, and the information that she is now revealing to the public is absolutely stunning. According to Hudes, the elite use a very tight core of financial institutions and mega-corporations to dominate the planet. The goal is control. They want all of us enslaved to debt, they want all of our governments enslaved to debt, and they want all of our politicians addicted to the huge financial contributions that they funnel into their campaigns. Since the elite also own all of the big media companies, the mainstream media never lets us in on the secret that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way that our system works.
Remember, this is not some "conspiracy theorist" that is saying these things. This is a Yale-educated attorney that worked inside the World Bank for more than two decades. The following summary of her credentials comes directly from her website...
Karen Hudes studied law at Yale Law School and economics at the University of Amsterdam. She worked in the US Export Import Bank of the US from 1980-1985 and in the Legal Department of the World Bank from 1986-2007. She established the Non Governmental Organization Committee of the International Law Section of the American Bar Association and the Committee on Multilateralism and the Accountability of International Organizations of the American Branch of the International Law Association.
Today, Hudes is trying very hard to expose the corrupt financial system that the global elite are using to control the wealth of the world. Duringan interview with the New American, she discussed how we are willingly allowing this group of elitists to totally dominate the resources of the planet...
A former insider at the World Bank, ex-Senior Counsel Karen Hudes, says the global financial system is dominated by a small group of corrupt, power-hungry figures centered around the privately owned U.S. Federal Reserve. The network has seized control of the media to cover up its crimes, too, she explained. In an interview with The New American, Hudes said that when she tried to blow the whistle on multiple problems at the World Bank, she was fired for her efforts. Now, along with a network of fellow whistleblowers, Hudes is determined to expose and end the corruption. And she is confident of success.Citing an explosive 2011 Swiss study published in the PLOS ONE journal on the “network of global corporate control,” Hudes pointed out that a small group of entities — mostly financial institutions and especially central banks — exert a massive amount of influence over the international economy from behind the scenes. “What is really going on is that the world’s resources are being dominated by this group,” she explained, adding that the “corrupt power grabbers” have managed to dominate the media as well. “They’re being allowed to do it.”
Previously, I have written about the Swiss study that Hudes mentioned. It was conducted by a team of researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. They studied the relationships between 37 million companies and investors worldwide, and what they discovered is that there is a "super-entity" of just 147 very tightly knit mega-corporations that controls 40 percent of the entire global economy...
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.
But the global elite don't just control these mega-corporations. According to Hudes, they also dominate the unelected, unaccountable organizations that control the finances of virtually every nation on the face of the planet. The World Bank, the IMF and central banks such as the Federal Reserve literally control the creation and the flow of money worldwide.
At the apex of this system is the Bank for International Settlements. It is the central bank of central banks, and posted below is a video where you can watch Hudes tell Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com the following...
"We don’t have to wait for anybody to fire the Fed or Bank for International Settlements . . . some states have already started to recognize silver and gold, the precious metals, as currency"
Most people have never even heard of the Bank for International Settlements, but it is an extremely important organization. In a previous article, I described how this "central bank of the world" is literally immune to the laws of all national governments...
Nuclear Engineer: Japan's PM "Lying to the Japanese People" About Safety of Fukushima
Published on Oct 1, 2013
Arnie Gundersen: Japan's PM claims Fukushima is safe but the nuclear disaster is underfunded and lacks transparency, causing the public to remain in the dark
THIS IS WHAT LYING AUTHORITARIANS WORLDWIDE DO!
“The President’s Private Army“: NSA-CIA Spying is Central to Carrying Out the Obama Administration’s Assassination Program
THIS IS WHAT AUTHORITARIAN SHILLS FOR THE RICH MAN DO!
By Washington's Blog
Global Research, September 29, 2013
Url of this article:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/
http://www.globalresearch.ca/
Intelligence Agencies Central In Assassination Programs Carried out Without Oversight
We’ve previously documented that the NSA isn’t just passively spying like a giant peeping tom, but is actively using that information in mischievous ways ... such asassassinations.A lot more information is about to come out on the topic. AP reports:
Two American journalists known for their investigations of the United States’ government said Saturday they’ve teamed up to report on the National Security Agency’s role in what one called a “U.S. assassination .”JSOC , as well as the CIA, have been described as “the President’s private army“, which operate at the President’s beck-and-call with no real oversight.
***
Jeremy Scahill, a contributor to The Nation magazine and the New York Times best-selling author of “Dirty Wars,” said he will be working with Glenn Greenwald, the Rio-based journalist who has written stories about U.S. surveillance based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
“The connections between war and surveillance are clear. I don’t want to give too much away but Glenn and I are working on a project right now that has at its center how the National Security Agency plays a significant, central role in the U.S. assassination program,” said Scahill ....
***
“Dirty Wars” the film, directed by Richard Rowley, traces Scahill’s investigations into the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC. The movie, which won a prize for cinematography at the Sundance Film Festival, follows Scahill as he hopscotches around the globe, from Afghanistan to Yemen to Somalia, talking to the families of people killed in the U.S. strikes.
But a fourth agency is also centrally involved in both intelligence-gathering and assassinations: the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). NCTC is responsible for generating the “disposition matrix” of who to murder using drones or other means.
As Greenwald noted last year:
The ACLU has long warned that the real purpose of the NCTC ... is the “massive, secretive data collection and mining of trillions of points of data about most people in the United States” .... In particular, the NCTC operates a gigantic data-mining operation, in which all sorts of information about innocent Americans is systematically monitored, stored, and analyzed. This includes “records from law enforcement investigations, health information, employment history, travel and student records” – “literally anything the government collects would be fair game”. In other words, the NCTC – now vested with the power to determine the proper “disposition” of terrorist suspects – is the same agency that is at the center of the ubiquitous, unaccountable surveillance state aimed at American citizens.But don’t worry, the government would never assassinate Americans living on U.S. soil ... would it?
Worse still, as the ACLU’s legislative counsel Chris Calabrese documented back in July in a must-read analysis, Obama officials very recently abolished safeguards on how this information can be used. Whereas the agency, during the Bush years, was barred from storing non-terrorist-related information about innocent Americans for more than 180 days – a limit which “meant that NCTC was dissuaded from collecting large databases filled with information on innocent Americans” – it is now free to do so. Obama officials eliminated this constraint by authorizing the NCTC “to collect and ‘continually assess’ information on innocent Americans for up to five years”.
And even if it would, it would only consider truly bad guys to be terrorists ... wouldn’t it?
Copyright © 2013 Global Research
Monday, September 30, 2013
The Sparks of Rebellion
Occupy Wall Street rally, March 16, 2012. (Photo: Michael Fleshman / Flickr)
I am reading and rereading the debates among some of the great radical thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries about the mechanisms of social change. These debates were not academic. They were frantic searches for the triggers of revolt.
Vladimir Lenin placed his faith in a violent uprising, a professional, disciplined revolutionary vanguard freed from moral constraints and, like Karl Marx, in the inevitable emergence of the worker’s state. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon insisted that gradual change would be accomplished as enlightened workers took over production and educated and converted the rest of the proletariat. Mikhail Bakunin predicted the catastrophic breakdown of the capitalist order, something we are likely to witness in our lifetimes, and new autonomous worker federations rising up out of the chaos. Pyotr Kropotkin, like Proudhon, believed in an evolutionary process that would hammer out the new society. Emma Goldman, along with Kropotkin, came to be very wary of both the efficacy of violence and the revolutionary potential of the masses. “The mass,” Goldman wrote bitterly toward the end of her life in echoing Marx, “clings to its masters, loves the whip, and is the first to cry Crucify!”
The revolutionists of history counted on a mobilized base of enlightened industrial workers. The building blocks of revolt, they believed, relied on the tool of the general strike, the ability of workers to cripple the mechanisms of production. Strikes could be sustained with the support of political parties, strike funds and union halls. Workers without these support mechanisms had to replicate the infrastructure of parties and unions if they wanted to put prolonged pressure on the bosses and the state. But now, with the decimation of the U.S. manufacturing base, along with the dismantling of our unions and opposition parties, we will have to search for different instruments of rebellion.
We must develop a revolutionary theory that is not reliant on the industrial or agrarian muscle of workers. Most manufacturing jobs have disappeared, and, of those that remain, few are unionized. Our family farms have been destroyed by agro-businesses. Monsanto and its Faustian counterparts on Wall Street rule. They are steadily poisoning our lives and rendering us powerless. The corporate leviathan, which is global, is freed from the constraints of a single nation-state or government. Corporations are beyond regulation or control. Politicians are too anemic, or more often too corrupt, to stand in the way of the accelerating corporate destruction. This makes our struggle different from revolutionary struggles in industrial societies in the past. Our revolt will look more like what erupted in the less industrialized Slavic republics, Russia, Spain and China and uprisings led by a disenfranchised rural and urban working class and peasantry in the liberation movements that swept through Africa and Latin America. The dispossessed working poor, along with unemployed college graduates and students, unemployed journalists, artists, lawyers and teachers, will form our movement. This is why the fight for a higher minimum wage is crucial to uniting service workers with the alienated college-educated sons and daughters of the old middle class. Bakunin, unlike Marx, considered déclassé intellectuals essential for successful revolt.
It is not the poor who make revolutions. It is those who conclude that they will not be able, as they once expected, to rise economically and socially. This consciousness is part of the self-knowledge of service workers and fast food workers. It is grasped by the swelling population of college graduates caught in a vise of low-paying jobs and obscene amounts of debt. These two groups, once united, will be our primary engines of revolt. Much of the urban poor has been crippled and in many cases broken by a rewriting of laws, especially drug laws, that has permitted courts, probation officers, parole boards and police to randomly seize poor people of color, especially African-American men, without just cause and lock them in cages for years. In many of our most impoverished urban centers—our internal colonies, as Malcolm X called them—mobilization, at least at first, will be difficult. The urban poor are already in chains. These chains are being readied for the rest of us. “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets or steal bread,” W.E.B. Du Bois commented acidly. ...
5 Industries That Are Mercilessly Robbing the American People
This system is tearing our once-great society to shreds.
Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/emrCartoon
There are more than five ways, of course. There are numerous product ripoffs, as described in a recent article byLynn Stuart Parramore, who identified textbooks and bottled water and print cartridges as a few of the ways Americans are duped into paying a lot more than reason and regulation would dictate.
And there are many industry-specific ripoffs, most notably in health care. We have the most expensive health care system in the world, and yet we're falling behind other developed countries in numerous health measures.
Here are five more industry-specific ripoffs of the American people:
1. The Retail Industry (Walmart): Building Owner Fortunes with Public Tax Money
A study in Wisconsin by the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce determined that a typical Walmart store costs taxpayers over $1.7 million per year, or about $5,815 per employee. A 2004 study in California put the cost per employee at $2,103.
For the year 2012, Walmart's pre-tax U.S. income was almost $18.7 billion. That's over $14,000 per U.S. Walmart employee.
For the year 2012, the four Walton family members made over $20 billion from their investments. That's over $15,000 per Walmart employee.
2. The Financial Industry: Printing Their Own Money
Thanks in good part to the derivatives market, the world's wealth has doubled in ten years. Estimates of the speculative value of the financial derivatives market vary, from $708 trillion to $1.2 quadrillion. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange alone reported a 2011 trading volume of over $1 quadrillion on 3.4 billion annual contracts.
A quadrillion is a thousand trillion. A return to the financiers of just .1 percent (a tenth of a penny from every dollar) would generate $1 trillion, the total Adjusted Gross Income for half of Americans.
3. The Private Prison Industry: Billing Taxpayers for Empty Cells, then Selling Inmate Labor and Paying Them Sub-Minimum Wages
Almost two-thirds of the private prison contracts analyzed by In the Public Interest "included occupancy guarantees in the form of quotas or required payments for empty prison cells (a 'low-crime tax')."
Some private prisons, such as Corrections Corporation of America and G4S, sell inmate labor to corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM, and pay the prisoners less than a dollar an hour.
4. The Telecommunications Industry: Low Quality at High Prices
In the 1990s the FCC deregulated phone and cable and Internet companies, with the intention of promoting competition. But just a few companies -- Verizon and AT&T and Comcast and Time Warner -- have divided up the market, reducing competition as they remain poorly regulated.
So now South Korea has Internet access speeds 200 times faster than us at half the cost. Same thing in Hong Kong. And in Europe unlimited texting and voice from Verizon costs about a third of U.S. prices.
It gets worse, according to David Cay Johnston, who reports that regulations have been written that allow large corporations to add unsubstantiated charges to cell phones, cable TV, internet service providers and others that can cost American families over $2,000 per year.
5. The Drug Industry: Buy American...But Tax Us Like We're Foreigners
Bernie Sanders notes that pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly and Pfizer have lobbied to keep Americans from buying cheaper prescription drugs from Canada and Europe, but then they their shift drug patents and profits to offshore tax havens to avoid paying U.S. taxes.
Higher drug prices cost an average American family over $1250 per year.
Drug companies also participate in "Pay-for-Delay" deals, through which brand-name firms pay generic makers to keep their cheaper drugs out of the market for a number of years.
That's capitalism. Ripping a once-strong society into little pieces.
And there are many industry-specific ripoffs, most notably in health care. We have the most expensive health care system in the world, and yet we're falling behind other developed countries in numerous health measures.
Here are five more industry-specific ripoffs of the American people:
1. The Retail Industry (Walmart): Building Owner Fortunes with Public Tax Money
A study in Wisconsin by the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce determined that a typical Walmart store costs taxpayers over $1.7 million per year, or about $5,815 per employee. A 2004 study in California put the cost per employee at $2,103.
For the year 2012, Walmart's pre-tax U.S. income was almost $18.7 billion. That's over $14,000 per U.S. Walmart employee.
For the year 2012, the four Walton family members made over $20 billion from their investments. That's over $15,000 per Walmart employee.
2. The Financial Industry: Printing Their Own Money
Thanks in good part to the derivatives market, the world's wealth has doubled in ten years. Estimates of the speculative value of the financial derivatives market vary, from $708 trillion to $1.2 quadrillion. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange alone reported a 2011 trading volume of over $1 quadrillion on 3.4 billion annual contracts.
A quadrillion is a thousand trillion. A return to the financiers of just .1 percent (a tenth of a penny from every dollar) would generate $1 trillion, the total Adjusted Gross Income for half of Americans.
3. The Private Prison Industry: Billing Taxpayers for Empty Cells, then Selling Inmate Labor and Paying Them Sub-Minimum Wages
Almost two-thirds of the private prison contracts analyzed by In the Public Interest "included occupancy guarantees in the form of quotas or required payments for empty prison cells (a 'low-crime tax')."
Some private prisons, such as Corrections Corporation of America and G4S, sell inmate labor to corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM, and pay the prisoners less than a dollar an hour.
4. The Telecommunications Industry: Low Quality at High Prices
In the 1990s the FCC deregulated phone and cable and Internet companies, with the intention of promoting competition. But just a few companies -- Verizon and AT&T and Comcast and Time Warner -- have divided up the market, reducing competition as they remain poorly regulated.
So now South Korea has Internet access speeds 200 times faster than us at half the cost. Same thing in Hong Kong. And in Europe unlimited texting and voice from Verizon costs about a third of U.S. prices.
It gets worse, according to David Cay Johnston, who reports that regulations have been written that allow large corporations to add unsubstantiated charges to cell phones, cable TV, internet service providers and others that can cost American families over $2,000 per year.
5. The Drug Industry: Buy American...But Tax Us Like We're Foreigners
Bernie Sanders notes that pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly and Pfizer have lobbied to keep Americans from buying cheaper prescription drugs from Canada and Europe, but then they their shift drug patents and profits to offshore tax havens to avoid paying U.S. taxes.
Higher drug prices cost an average American family over $1250 per year.
Drug companies also participate in "Pay-for-Delay" deals, through which brand-name firms pay generic makers to keep their cheaper drugs out of the market for a number of years.
That's capitalism. Ripping a once-strong society into little pieces.
The Rise of Green Collar Jobs
We spend a lot of time discussing how to create sustainable lifestyles for ourselves and other members of our communities. The idea is that if our local community is strong, it can withstand just about anything.
A failing economy, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and whatever else you can think of could significantly change our standard of living.
As a result, we focus on sustainable food production, conservation techniques, and other methods that are impervious (or close to it) to these outside influences. In a word, we are trying to become more resilient.
This is all well and good; however, it does nothing to address the concerns that many of us have regarding employment and income. Every year, more people join the ranks of the unemployed as companies downsize and struggle to remain competitive. Many of those reading this now have fallen victim to unemployment or at least know someone who has.
So what can we do to increase resiliency in this aspect? After all, we can’t be expected to produce everything we need on our own. We need assets (money, goods, or services) that can be traded for items that we are unable to produce ourselves.
We also need to provide fellow community members with options. They need to be made aware of the importance of resiliency.
Fortunately, there’s a simple answer. We need to create local businesses based on our sustainable ideals. If you been with us for a while, you’ve likely read many stories that detail the potential small business opportunities inherent to most of the topics we discuss.
Biomass pellet manufacturing, solar installation, mushroom farming, and orchard management are just a few examples of small business opportunities that can be started on a shoestring budget while providing sustainable value to our communities.
Of course, these opportunities also provide us with an income stream. It could be part-time or full-time; the scalability of these businesses is unlimited.
Maybe you are thinking “yeah, yeah…this sounds great, but does it really work?” In short, absolutely! Let’s look at an example that showcases how one local business is generating revenue using technology that helps farmers in their community.
The work being done by Tom McKinnon and Jim Sears in Colorado is interesting to say the least. These guys have developed a low-cost, remote control drone that takes multispectral images of farmland.
This technology saves farmers money because it is much less expensive than manned aircraft flights or satellite imagery while providing useful information about the health of their plots. These drones can also be fitted with infrared cameras that map the soil moisture content of the area; affording farmers the opportunity to correct dry conditions before they affect crop production.
You may think this technology sounds expensive, but it is actually very affordable and could be used in our own communities to monitor the health of larger, community sponsored agricultural plots.
From a DIY perspective, a drone similar to the one created by McKinnon and Sears could be made for less than $1,000. This is cutting-edge technology that is affordable on most budgets.
With drone in hand, it’s very easy to see how a part-time or better revenue stream can be generated using this technology. What’s unique about this idea is how it leverages technology in a new way that can benefit a wide range of community members.
****Spoiler alert: We discuss drones in more detail in our September newsletter. We have arranged a way you can sign up and get this month's issue and the entire archives for a hugely discounted price. Sign up to receive the newsletter here.****
The possibilities are truly endless. In the past, we have discussed LoGROcal, a small mushroom farm that specializes in the production of 100% organic oyster mushrooms and how you can replicate their success at home.
We have looked at purchasing a small scale biomass pellet machine and creating a local business producing pellets for the community; either as a sole proprietor or as a CSA-type model.
The point is that our resiliency is not simply based on what we grow in our personal gardens or what alternative energy sources we have implemented at home. We have to take a community approach that aims to strengthen every resident, not just ourselves.
What better way to do this then to create a business that promotes resiliency and produces income?
I’ll leave you with some final ideas that are working in communities around the country. Perhaps one of these will spark your entrepreneurial fire.
SOURCE
As a result, we focus on sustainable food production, conservation techniques, and other methods that are impervious (or close to it) to these outside influences. In a word, we are trying to become more resilient.
So what can we do to increase resiliency in this aspect? After all, we can’t be expected to produce everything we need on our own. We need assets (money, goods, or services) that can be traded for items that we are unable to produce ourselves.
We also need to provide fellow community members with options. They need to be made aware of the importance of resiliency.
Fortunately, there’s a simple answer. We need to create local businesses based on our sustainable ideals. If you been with us for a while, you’ve likely read many stories that detail the potential small business opportunities inherent to most of the topics we discuss.
Biomass pellet manufacturing, solar installation, mushroom farming, and orchard management are just a few examples of small business opportunities that can be started on a shoestring budget while providing sustainable value to our communities.
Of course, these opportunities also provide us with an income stream. It could be part-time or full-time; the scalability of these businesses is unlimited.
Maybe you are thinking “yeah, yeah…this sounds great, but does it really work?” In short, absolutely! Let’s look at an example that showcases how one local business is generating revenue using technology that helps farmers in their community.
The work being done by Tom McKinnon and Jim Sears in Colorado is interesting to say the least. These guys have developed a low-cost, remote control drone that takes multispectral images of farmland.
This technology saves farmers money because it is much less expensive than manned aircraft flights or satellite imagery while providing useful information about the health of their plots. These drones can also be fitted with infrared cameras that map the soil moisture content of the area; affording farmers the opportunity to correct dry conditions before they affect crop production.
From a DIY perspective, a drone similar to the one created by McKinnon and Sears could be made for less than $1,000. This is cutting-edge technology that is affordable on most budgets.
With drone in hand, it’s very easy to see how a part-time or better revenue stream can be generated using this technology. What’s unique about this idea is how it leverages technology in a new way that can benefit a wide range of community members.
****Spoiler alert: We discuss drones in more detail in our September newsletter. We have arranged a way you can sign up and get this month's issue and the entire archives for a hugely discounted price. Sign up to receive the newsletter here.****
The possibilities are truly endless. In the past, we have discussed LoGROcal, a small mushroom farm that specializes in the production of 100% organic oyster mushrooms and how you can replicate their success at home.
We have looked at purchasing a small scale biomass pellet machine and creating a local business producing pellets for the community; either as a sole proprietor or as a CSA-type model.
The point is that our resiliency is not simply based on what we grow in our personal gardens or what alternative energy sources we have implemented at home. We have to take a community approach that aims to strengthen every resident, not just ourselves.
What better way to do this then to create a business that promotes resiliency and produces income?
I’ll leave you with some final ideas that are working in communities around the country. Perhaps one of these will spark your entrepreneurial fire.
- Greywater recycling system installation
- Backyard Orchard management
- Permaculture consultant
SOURCE
Saturday, September 28, 2013
Noam Chomsky: 'The Foundations of Liberty Are Ripped to Shreds'
THIS IS WHAT AUTHORITARIAN SCUMBAGS DO!
The U.S. openly brags about boom times for its drone wars, while casually abandoning our 800 year-old system of due process.
This article first appeared at Satellite Magazine, whose author Steven Garbas met with Chomsky in Cambridge, Massachusetts earlier this year to discuss the development of the drone era under president Obama.
Noam Chomsky: Just driving in this morning I was listening to NPR news. The program opened by announcing, very excitedly, that the drone industry is exploding so fast that colleges are trying to catch up and opening new programs in the engineering schools and so on, and teaching drone technology because that’s what students are dying to study because of the fantastic number of jobs going on.
And it’s true. If you look at the public reports, you can imagine what the secret reports are. It’s been known for a couple of years, but we learn more and more that drones, for one thing, are already being given to police departments for surveillance. And they are being designed for every possible purpose. I mean, theoretically, maybe practically, you could have a drone the size of a fly which could be buzzing around over there [points to window] listening to what we’re talking about. And I’d suspect that it won’t be too long before that becomes realistic.
And of course they are being used to assassinate. There’s a global assassination campaign going on which is pretty interesting when you look into how it’s done. I presume everyone’s read [a May 29] New York Times story, which is more or less a leak from the White House, because they are apparently proud of how the global assassination campaign works. Basically President Obama and his national security advisor, John Brennan, now head of the CIA, get together in the morning. And Brennan’s apparently a former priest. They talk about St. Augustine and his theory of just war, and then they decide who is going to be killed today.
And the criteria are quite interesting. For example, if, say, in Yemen a group of men are spotted by a drone assembling near a truck, it’s possible that they might be planning to do something that would harm us, so why don’t we make sure and kill them? And there’s other things like that.
And questions did come up about what happened to due process, which is supposedly the foundation of American law—it actually goes back to Magna Carta, 800 years ago—what about that? And the justice department responded. Attorney General Holder said that they are receiving due process because it’s “discussed in the executive branch.” King John in the 13th century, who was compelled to sign Magna Carta, would have loved that answer. But that’s where we’re moving. The foundations of civil law are simply being torn to shreds. This is not the only case, but it’s the most striking one.
And the reactions are pretty interesting. It tells you a lot about the mentality of the country. So one column, I think it was Joe Klein, a bit of a liberal columnist for one of the journals, was asked about a case in which four little girls were killed by a drone strike. And his answer was something like, “Well, better that their little girls should be killed than ours.” So in other words, maybe this stopped something that would ultimately harm us.
There is a reservation in the United Nations Charter that allows the use of force without Security Council authorization, a narrow exception in Article 51. But it specifically refers to “imminent attack” that’s either underway or imminent so clearly that there is no time for reflection. It’s a doctrine that goes back to Daniel Webster, the Caroline Doctrine, which specifies these conditions. That’s been torn to shreds. Not just the drone attacks, but for a long time....
UN: Greenland ice melting six times faster than previous decades
Published on Sep 27, 2013
Environmental expert Subhankar Banerjee breaks down the latest UN climate change report
Friday, September 27, 2013
Seymour Hersh on Obama, NSA and the 'pathetic' American media
Pulitzer Prize winner explains how to fix journalism, saying press should 'fire 90% of editors and promote ones you can't control'
Seymour Hersh exposed the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. Photograph: Wally McNamee/Corbis
Seymour Hersh has got some extreme ideas on how to fix journalism – close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90% of editors in publishing and get back to the fundamental job of journalists which, he says, is to be an outsider.
It doesn't take much to fire up Hersh, the investigative journalist who has been the nemesis of US presidents since the 1960s and who was once described by the Republican party as "the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist".
He is angry about the timidity of journalists in America, their failure to challenge the White House and be an unpopular messenger of truth.
Don't even get him started on the New York Times which, he says, spends "so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would" – or the death of Osama bin Laden. "Nothing's been done about that story, it's one big lie, not one word of it is true," he says of the dramatic US Navy Seals raid in 2011.
Hersh is writing a book about national security and has devoted a chapter to the bin Laden killing. He says a recent report put out by an "independent" Pakistani commission about life in the Abottabad compound in which Bin Laden was holed up would not stand up to scrutiny. "The Pakistanis put out a report, don't get me going on it. Let's put it this way, it was done with considerable American input. It's a bullshit report," he says hinting of revelations to come in his book.
The Obama administration lies systematically, he claims, yet none of the leviathans of American media, the TV networks or big print titles, challenge him.
"It's pathetic, they are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama]," he declares in an interview with the Guardian.
"It used to be when you were in a situation when something very dramatic happened, the president and the minions around the president had control of the narrative, you would pretty much know they would do the best they could to tell the story straight. Now that doesn't happen any more. Now they take advantage of something like that and they work out how to re-elect the president.
He isn't even sure if the recent revelations about the depth and breadth of surveillance by the National Security Agency will have a lasting effect.
Snowden changed the debate on surveillance ...
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