Wednesday, July 30, 2014

RRR; THE NEW KKK

You don't have to think too hard to understand the game plan; one that has been at play from the day the a black man took the oath of office. The rage felt by old conservative white men who in their wildest dreams never imagined a day when a black man would lead this country has fueled this unprecedented attack that will not let up until the day Obama leaves office; the sooner the better if these clowns have their way. 



The vote to allow Speaker John Boehner to sue Obama was 225 to 201. Five Republicans voted no, while no Democrats voted in favor of pursuing the lawsuit.

NCAA ACKNOWLEDGES FOOTBALL SCRAMBLES BRAINS

Now that the NCAA acknowledges that football scrambles brains maybe parents will think twice before sending their kids off to be possibly brain damaged for no other reason than playing a game and entertaining themselves. The writing is on the wall but it's doubtful people are smart enough to read it.



"Changes were necessary to preserve the talent well of kids that feeds the game of football," he said. "Absent these kinds of changes, the sport will die."

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

FROM THE TANNING BOOTH TO THE ONCOLOGY WARD

In an economy driven by profits first regardless the consequences it takes a crisis to get anyone's attention.



Even though anyone with average intelligence is aware that tanning booths are dangerous the industry continues to thrive, and people willingly subject themselves to harmful radiation with a real threat of getting skin cancer just to get a "tan."



This self destructive behavior is reinforced by those who market it as safe and are allowed to flood the media with false advertising and little consequence.


Every year, 5 million Americans are treated for skin cancers. About 400,000 of those cases are directly linked to indoor tanning, according to Lushniak. The rate of melanoma, the most deadly form of skin cancer, has tripled over the past 30 years to 63,000 new cases annually. And roughly 9000 patients per year die of melanoma — many of them adolescents or young adults.

“That’s one person every single hour that’s dying from melanoma,” Lushniak told the Post. “It’s one of the most common types of cancer amongst U.S. teens and young adults. So when we’re looking at impact, the term in epidemiology that we use is ‘years of potential life lost.’ We’re really talking about a tragic disease here, something that really affects the young.”

“That’s something, from a public health perspective, we have to do something about,” Lushniak said.

The Surgeon General’s report contains the usual advice to individuals: wear sunscreen, wear protective clothing, limit exposure, and be smart about time in the sun. Lushniak also comes down hard on the dangers of tanning beds.

“I’ve got to … call out the facts,” he told the Washington Post. “And the facts are that indoor tanning is a source of ultraviolet radiation, period. Ultraviolet radiation is a known carcinogen, period. This is a needless exposure to ultraviolet radiation.”


Surgeon General's Report: "We Need To Do Something" About Climbing Skin Cancer Rates

Monday, July 28, 2014

HOW THE 1% WASTE WEALTH

When it comes to hoarding the 1% hold the championship title hands down.



Billions of human beings survive on $1.00 a day while a very small and obviously greedy elitist spend their time and resources looking for ways to waste money.



One of the ways these wealth laden bulimics binge and purge is in real estate where billions are wasted on mausoleums glutted with  bathrooms, bedrooms, garages,pools,bowling alleys, etc. that serve no practical purpose and only serves to feed egos.



The waste is insidious and is slowly destroying the culture and society. Much like cancer it metastasizes and will eventually be terminal and beyond repair.  



Billionaire Heiress Petra Ecclestone Shopping Spelling Manor For $150 Million

Friday, July 25, 2014

MINDLESS BLOOD LUST

Americans are obsessed with violence and are more and more seeing it as a form of entertainment. Contact sports is a prime example; the bloodier the better. There's nothing that pumps them up more than witnessing over sized kids pummel each other mindless just to entertain themselves.



It's gotten so bad in fact that parents are willing to sacrifice their kids to the "game"claiming it builds character and being completely mindless about the potential and very real danger they subject their children to.



It also plays out in the streets when a recent incident in front of a nightclub in which a woman was literally pummeled to death by 2 other women while a cadre' of pumped up gawkers grabbed their cell phones; not to call 911 but to record the action. 

The bystander effect
is an inherent trend among people, however, in recent years and with the aid of technology, an entirely new social phenomenon has been born. One that takes the bystander effect a step further. With desensitization that has become a natural byproduct of the Internet and the media, as well as the social media craze that has enticed a generation to capture everything they see, the notion to pull out a camera in the most inappropriate of times has become as monotonous and predictable as the workings of an assembly line.

In the case of Kim, she was knocked unconscious before her attackers continued to beat her. Not surprisingly, there is video footage of the event, with bystanders crowded around, cell phones in hand.

Bystanders are not just avoiding involvement as in the case of Kitty, they are, in fact, directly involving themselves in the incident, but not doing anything to stop it. Yes, film has helped authorities make arrests, but it doesn't save lives.

It’s discouraging to think that we have become a culture that is more likely to record an incident, such as the beating of Kim Pham, rather than make any effort to prevent the worst possible outcome. But after all, we are a generation that chooses to stare emotionless through a screen. If the person next to you started dancing, you would probably instinctively reach for your phone.

If you turned around to notice a beautiful sunset, your hand would probably find it’s way to your pocket while you fumbled for the camera icon. And if a 23-year-old were being mercilessly beaten on the street, too many of us would once again reach for our phones, perhaps excited by the thought of uploading it online later on, or texting it to a friend.



Tuesday, July 22, 2014

UKRAINE SEPERATISTS AND US NAVY SHOOT DOWN AIRLINER

TERRORISM?  ACT OF WAR? ACCIDENT?



Well, that depends.

On July 3, 1988, in an unprovoked move, US carrier USS Vincennes fired two missiles at an Iranian passenger plane, Iran Air flight 655 that was on route to Dubai.

All 290 innocent civilians perished. The passenger airliner, so recognizable even from the ground was “mistaken” for a jet fighter (jetfighter is two-thirds smaller than a passenger plane). 


The United States called its own act of terrorism “a regrettable accident”.

In short, the Malaysian airliner is easily recognizable from the ground, according to reports, but the Iran Air plane was ‘mistaken’ for a much smaller jetfighter.

Listening to the media news surrounding the MH 17 incident, one cannot help but conclude that the USS Vincennes captain, Will Rogers III was too dumb and blind not to see the easily recognizable passenger plane, or else, he was/is a terrorist.

In spite of this stark reality, in 1990, President Bush Sr. awarded Capt. Rogers the Legion of Merit decoration “for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service as commanding officer … from April 1987 to May 1989.”



 

THE AIRLINE THAT COULDN'T FLY STRAIGHT

What comes first?



Money or human life?



There is no rational reason for an airline to fly over a war zone and doing it is irresponsible and negligent on the part of the carriers that do.



The downing of this commercial airliner was an accident that could have been avoided.





In the weeks before MH17’s downing, several Ukrainian planes and helicopters had been shot down. But although MH17 had reportedly flown a few hundred miles north of its planned course, in order to avoid a thunderstorm, its altitude should have marked it out as a passenger plane. No one thought that commercial jets would be in any danger over eastern Ukraine.

Monday, July 21, 2014

WHAT WOULD THE FOUNDING FATHERS SAY?

America was founded in part as an alternative to empires like the British Empire they fled. Ironically it looks like we have come full circle and are now nothing more than a super-sized version of what we fought to free ourselves from.



The historian who chronicles US Empire,William Blum, issued his 130th Anti-Empire Report this week. In it he notes that the US, by far, is seen by the people of the world as “the greatest threat to peace in the world today” with 24% taking that view. Only 2% see Russia as such a threat, and 6% see China.

This should not come as a surprise since, as this map shows, much of the world has been bombed, had their democratically chosen government overthrown and has been occupied by the United States.

Saturday, July 19, 2014

7 REASONS WHY CAPITALISM DESTROYS SOCIETIES

When all is said and done only a very small percentage of our population benefit from a capitalistic system. They are commonly referred to as the 1%; creating what could be called an "economic black hole" that sucks the life blood out of the rest of society.

Until recently they successfully lived in the shadows drawing as little attention to themselves as possible except what they "canned" for public consumption. The cronies that pander to them successfully hoodwinked the rest of us into believing that by allowing them to run the show; unfettered by laws and regulations they would "trickle" their wealth down on us so that we would one day become one of the "haves". They convinced us that there was no such thing as a "have not" but rather a bunch of "soon to haves" - promise!

To no ones surprise this very well scripted talking point has turned out to be none other than a gigantic con job that has played itself out once too many times.

Capitalism and the apocalypse go together in that the former could well cause the latter. Certainly much has already been said about the basic incompatibility between a system predicated on infinite growth and the finite resources of Earth, but capitalism has other, related design flaws that are already proving fatal, not only to various life forms but to the vitality of human communities as well.
We now know that capitalism as we know it is not good for the majority of us. And here's 7 reasons why.


1) Usury. If anything can be considered the root of all evil, it would have to be usury. The practice of lending money at interest is condemned by most religions, including the Abrahamic faiths, although the Bible allows Jews to profit from foreigners as a way of “fighting without a sword.” The implication of violence is inherent in usury, which is basically the opposite of a gift.

In our modern economic system, institutional theft is the business of commercial banks and the (private) Fed, which have been empowered to conjure money into existence as interest-bearing debt. Since the money to repay all these loans (with interest) doesn’t exist, society is driven by a sense of competition and a mentality of scarcity. Worse yet, usury creates a demand for continuous economic growth (measured in GDP), without which the economy is subject to collapse.


2) Private property. The Romans were the first to advance the legal concept of dominium, which was considered "the ultimate right, the right which had no right behind it, the right which legitimated all others, while itself having no need of legitimation... the right ‘of using, enjoying, and abusing. This dominator mindset prevailed throughout Europe and eventually infiltrated what is now America, where the ownership of land is still considered an unalienable and unquestioned right.

But to the native peoples of this continent who were so brutalized, land ownership was an absurd concept, for it suggested that a greater power (nature) could be owned by a lesser power (humans). In all parts of the world, indigenous groups have upheld reverence for nature and a respect for “the commons”—the air, water, and land that supports life and thus rightly belong to all living creatures.

By contrast, capitalism strives to privatize and profit from everything; not only land but water, slices of the electromagnetic spectrum, species, seeds, genes, songs, images, ideas, etc. This vice was summed up by the anarchist Proudhon, who said, “Property is theft.”


3) Gross Domestic Product. GDP is supposed to monitor economic wellbeing by tallying up all the goods and services exchanged within a given area and time frame. But GDP sinfully ignores what is being exchanged, such that war, natural disasters, accidents, disease, depression, and other negatives are counted as positives for GDP because they generate revenue, while life-affirming activities like volunteering and gifting are not counted at all. Furthermore, GDP ignores the distribution of wealth.

The bottom line is that a simple number says nothing about human happiness or ecological integrity. In fact, a rise in artificial wealth generally corresponds with a decline in natural wealth. As author Paul Hawken has said, “We are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it GDP.”


4) Externalization. To externalize a cost is to pass it along to someone else, typically the general public and the environment. The most obvious example is pollution: when Company X dumps its toxic waste into a river, downstream communities pay with health problems and ecological degradation. Another example is given in the now-classic Story of Stuff when Annie Leonard talks about buying a $4.99 radio and realizing that the low price is only possible because of the many externalized costs and the people around the world who paid them.

The main purveyors of this capital vice are corporations, which function mainly by privatizing profits and publicizing costs. Indeed a corporation has been described as an “externalizing machine, in the same way that a shark is a killing machine,”1 each doing what they are designed to do. Externalization is legally enshrined in the limited liability corporation (LLC), which cleverly enables risk-taking and pathologically encourages irresponsibility. A 2013 UN-sponsored study showed that if the world’s top industries were forced to absorb their own costs, none of them would make a profit.



5) Poverty. One of the most common arguments for global capitalism is that it helps alleviate poverty. Problem is, global poverty statistics are generated by the World Bank, an institution explicitly designed to promote globalization. Critics argue that (1) the numbers are usually skewed by one or two rapidly developing countries, (2) the definition of deep poverty as a wage of $1.25/day is set arbitrarily low in order to yield the desired stats, and (3) daily wages say nothing about access to potable water, adequate nutrition, healthcare, education, community, and other things that determine quality of life. Moreover, poverty rates mean little when economic disparity has increased so dramatically in recent decades.

Actually, a compelling argument can be made that global capitalism doesn’t alleviate poverty but causes poverty. After all, the aim of globalization is to expand markets by infiltrating “undeveloped” (read: self-sufficient) communities and dragging them into the money economy, thus creating new laborers and consumers. Could members of a gift-based, indigenous tribe really be called “poor”? Only by the logic of capitalism, which defines poverty as the inability to purchase one’s basic necessities (which might include designer clothing) from an outside party using fiat currency.



6) Intrinsic inequality. Due largely to deadly defects in the monetary system (see #1 below), capitalism divides the world into haves and have-nots, inevitably concentrating wealth in the hands of the former—as we have seen in recent years and in the period preceding the Great Depression—until redistribution or revolution. Despite the rhetoric, a rising economic tide does not raise all boats; it only raises the yachts while the dinghies, deprived of bailouts, inevitably go under.


7) Amorality. Although some economic actors do indeed behave immorally (while many strive to do good), the system as a whole frankly doesn’t give a damn. Its only “concern” is its own survival and growth, which always trumps the welfare of those living within its constraints. As a refutation of the claim that capitalism is the most efficient distributor of resources, consider that almost 50% of food is wasted in America, much of it by producers and vendors. Such waste is all the more egregious when witnessed by actual hungry people

In a capitalist society, the motive behind the production of food is not to feed people, housing is not made to give them shelter, clothing is not made to keep them warm, and health care is not offered primarily to keep people healthy. All of these things, which are and should be viewed as basic rights, are nothing other than commodities—to be bought and sold—from which to make a profit. If a profit cannot be made, usually due to overproduction in relation to the market, the commodity is considered useless by the capitalist and destroyed.

By a similar logic, money better spent on the curing of serious diseases like malaria and HIV is often funneled into relatively trivial conditions like male baldness and erectile dysfunction that affect fewer people but generate greater revenue.

Friday, July 18, 2014

SOME US CORPORATIONS UNPATRIOTIC FREELOADERS

Corporations that dodge taxes are doing harm to this country.  Corporations that do business in this country have both a legal and moral obligation to share what they reap from this country by contributing to it's welfare. Anything short of this is nothing more than freeloading.




In a sharply worded letter to key congressional tax code writers, Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew pushed for legislation that would make it more difficult for U.S. companies to reorganize as foreign firms in lower-tax nations.

The practice, known as inversion, enables the new company to avoid paying the high U.S. corporate tax rate on its foreign earnings.


“Congress should enact legislation immediately – and make it retroactive to May 2014 – to shut down this abuse of our tax system.What we need as a nation is a new sense of economic patriotism, where we all rise or fall together… We should not be providing support for corporations that seek to shift their profits overseas to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.”

Thursday, July 17, 2014

CRIME DOESN'T PAY IS A MYTH

Banks operate as criminal enterprises but are immune from the consequences imposed on others involved in organized crime.



After years of investigations and accumulation of mountains of evidence exposing untold numbers of crimes by individuals only a few have been charged and convicted of these crimes. Fines; though significant in size, have not even come close to reimburse those who were victimized. Guilty pleas are empty and toothless and only serve as a tactic to exonerate  rather than punish the perpetrators.





Citi: Where A $7 Billion Fine Makes Your Shares Go Up 4%



Citigroup has reached a $7 billion settlement with the Department of Justice, the bank said Monday morning, but the multi-billions it will pay to settle the investigation over its handling of mortgage-backed securities did not, remarkably, drag its second quarter earnings results from the black to the red — though it did do significant damage: Citi also revealed Monday that including a near-$4 billion charge related to the settlement, its second quarter profit fell 96%.

Saturday, July 12, 2014

Are these 21st Century Loan Sharks?

These payday loan operations are no different than the loan sharks of old short of using baseball bats to break elbows and kneecaps.  Rather than slapping them on the wrist they should be shutting them down and throwing the operators in jail.




ACE Cash Express, a leading payday lender, has agreed to pay $10 million to settle federal allegations it used false threats of lawsuits and other illegal tactics to pressure customers with overdue loans to borrow more to pay them off.

The Irving, Texas, firm, which has 1,500 locations in California and 35 other states, will pay a $5-million fine and $5 million in refunds to tens of thousands of borrowers, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which oversees payday lenders, said Thursday.

Monday, July 7, 2014

Seychelles; A rat hole for the 1%

Financial inequality is not inevitable but it will take a concentrated effort on the part of the world's governments to reign in those few who cavort and scheme to hoard wealth by hook or by crook regardless of it's destructive effects on the rest of the worlds population.



By one estimate, as much as $32 trillion in private financial wealth is hidden in offshore havens — roughly equivalent to the annual output of the U.S., Chinese and Japanese economies combined.



Sun and Shadows: How an Island Paradise Became a Haven for Dirty Money


Thanks to its offshore industry, Seychelles, an island nation with a population smaller than Davenport, Iowa, maintains a Zelig-like presence in the annals of international corruption and money laundering. Where there’s an odor of financial scandal, there’s often a good chance Seychelles is involved.

The history of the rise of Seychelles’ offshore industry offers a case study in the rise of tiny, out-of-the-way tax havens. At a time when tax havens have become an flashpoint of debatearound the world — even becoming an issue in 2012 U.S. presidential race, thanks to Republican Mitt Romney’s Cayman Islands holdings — understanding how small havens emerged and how they have prospered is important to understanding how the offshore financial system has flourished.
Like most small tax havens, Seychelles has an outsized impact that belies its modest market share. As Al Jazeera’s undercover muckrakers discovered, offshore patrons and the accountants, bankers and other operatives who help them usually don’t settle for a single offshore company or bank account. They create elaborate webs that use multiple jurisdictions, multiple front men and multiple layers of ownership. Smaller havens such as Seychelles are crucial links in these chains of secrecy and in the wider offshore system.

They support a system that, critics charge, caters to drug traffickers, fraudsters, money launderers and high-net-worth tax dodgers, fueling onshore corruption and poverty.

Thursday, July 3, 2014

WE ARE ALL ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS

Just ask a Native American or the Brits.



This nation was built on the backs of illegal immigrants and terrorists.



If the history books are accurate there's not one of our ancestors who were "legally" admitted to this country.



At one time in our history the Statue of Liberty symbolized what this country stood for;



The Promise of the Golden Door
"A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning,and her name, Mother of Exiles."


Immortalized in the poem of Emma Lazarus, the Statue speaks eternally the words of compassion: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." These words from the "The New Colossus," written in 1883, appear on the Statue's pedestal.

The Statue of Liberty was originally called "Liberty Enlightening the World," and this is truly her task - to enlighten mankind to the noble ideals of freedom and equality that belong to each one, and to hold high the standard of hope that light will always triumph over darkness. This is the promise represented in the Statue - that through every conflict, war, or loss, through every dispossession or abandonment of principle, the torch of freedom will continue to be held high.

Now we wave flags in protest of those very people we once were Protesters block migrant buses in Calif.

More than 100 people waving American flags and holding signs that opposed "new illegals" waited in the hot sun for the three charter buses to arrive at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection station in Murrieta, about an hour north of San Diego.

Federal agents tried to avoid a conflict by taking a route that steered clear of the front entrance.

But instead, the crowd blocked the street and forced the buses to make an unplanned detour to an undisclosed processing center in San Diego County.

"We can't start taking care of others if we can't take care of our own," said protester Nancy Greyson, 60, of Murrieta.