MARKETING JESUS IS A SIN

Spies, Cash, and Fear: Inside Christian Money Guru Dave Ramsey’s Social Media Witch Hunt


Ramsey is one of America’s best-known financial advice gurus, famous for his gospel of “financial peace,” “Biblically based, common sense” wisdom on debt, investing, and retirement.

Exploding out of the evangelical Christian world and onto the national stage, he has sold millions of books, hosts a popular radio show, and runs an organization that boasts more than 400 employees. 

Eight million people listen to The Dave Ramsey Show, 400 publications run his “Dave Says” column, and more than 2 million families have participated in Ramsey’s Financial Peace University. 

According to Ramsey, his Lampo Group sells “hope,” and that business has given him an estimated net worth of $55 million.

POTUS CONFRONTS CHILD ABUSE IN SPORTS

It looks like it will take an executive order from Obama to put a stop to the wanton abuse of children by parents too uninformed (or just plain stupid) about the dangers they are subjecting them to.
Obama Vs. Concussions: Why The White House Made Head Injuries A Presidential Issue
The craving for entertainment seems to completely cloud the minds of these people who sincerely believe they are doing this for all the right reasons when it's obvious the opposite is true.

Statistics

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), participation in organized sports is on the rise. Nearly 30 million children and adolescents participate in youth sports in the United States. This increase in play has led to some other startling statistics about injuries among America's young athletes:

* High school athletes account for an estimated 2 million injuries and 500,000 doctor visits and 30,000 hospitalizations each year.

* More than 3.5 million kids under age 14 receive medical treatment for sports injuries each year.

* Children ages 5 to 14 account for nearly 40 percent of all sports-related injuries treated in hospitals. On average the rate and severity of injury increases with a child's age.

* Overuse injuries are responsible for nearly half of all sports injuries to middle and high school students

* Although 62 percent of organized sports-related injuries occur during practice, one-third of parents do not have their children take the same safety precautions at practice that they would during a game.

* Twenty percent of children ages 8 to 12 and 45 percent of those ages 13 to 14 will have arm pain during a single youth baseball season.

* Injuries associated with participation in sports and recreational activities account for 21 percent of all traumatic brain injuries among children in the United States.

* According to the CDC, more than half of all sports injuries in children are preventable.
By age 13, 70 percent of kids drop out of youth sports. The top three reasons: adults, coaches and parents.

* Among athletes ages 5 to 14, 28 percent of percent of football players, 25 percent of baseball players, 22 percent of soccer players, 15 percent of basketball players, and 12 percent of softball players were injured while playing their respective sports

* Since 2000 there has been a fivefold increase in the number of serious shoulder and elbow injuries among youth baseball and softball players.

*References:
JS Powell, KD Barber Foss, 1999. Injury patterns in selected high school sports: a review of the 1995-1997 seasons. J Athl Train. 34: 277-84.
Safe Kids USA Campaign Web site. 2009.
American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. 2009.
Preserving the Future of Sport: From Prevention to Treatment of Youth Overuse Sports Injuries. AOSSM 2009 Annual Meeting Pre-Conference Program. Keystone, Colorado.

NRA CREATES PARANOIA THAT FUELS GUN SALES

The NRA plays a major role in fueling the gun craze in the US which produces the numbers seen here;



The US has the highest gun ownership in the world and the highest murder rate in the developed world.

Gun Suicides in US, 2011: 19,766

Percentage of all Murders that were committed by firearms in US: 69.3

The United States continues to be peculiar in handing out powerful magazine-fed firearms to almost anyone who wants one and not requiring background checks on private purchases even if these are made at gun shows. 80% of civilian-owned firearms world-wide are in the US, and only Yemen vaguely competes with us for rates of firearm ownership;  And even it has fewer guns per person than the USA.

It has gotten to the point where the increasing epidemic of mass shootings now threatens the US military, the most powerful military in the world.

The US is downright weird compared to civilized Western Europe or Australia (which enacted gun control after a mass shooting in 1996 and there have been no further such incidents).

There Were 30 Murders by Firearm in England in 2012 Vs. 8,855 in U.S.

THE CURSE OF INEQUALITY

Economic inequality at the levels experienced today wreaks havoc on the lives of all concerned; even those at the top.

Concentration of wealth rather than distribution is contrary to the tenets of social capitalism which is the cornerstone of what productive societies are built.

In his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty places contemporary income concentration in over two centuries worth of historical context, primarily zeroing in on France, Britain, and the United States since the late 18th century. Intense levels of income and wealth concentration have defined our industrial world for generations. The only exception: the decades of the mid twentieth century, a relatively brief interlude when the richest 1 percent’s share of society’s income and wealth dropped substantially in both Europe and the United States.

 Another landmark book on inequality — The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, co-authors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have marshaled vast arrays of data and identified nearly every social problem where reliable statistics let us compare how well or poorly the major nations of the developed world are delivering a decent quality of life.

In which developed nations, Wilkinson and Pickett ask, do people live the longest? What nations show the highest levels of obesity? Where do people born at the bottom have the best shot at climbing up? Which nations send the most people to prison? Have the most teenage moms? Tally the most homicides?

People in some developed nations, the Spirit Level documents, can be anywhere from three to ten times more likely than people in other developed nations to be obese or get murdered, to mistrust others or have a pregnant teen daughter, to become a drug addict or escape from poverty.

And the nations that do the best, on yardstick after yardstick, all turn out to share one basic trait. They all share their wealth.

“If you want to know why one country does better or worse than another,” as Wilkinson and Pickett note, “the first thing to look at is the extent of inequality.”

The United States, the developed world’s most unequal major nation, ranks at or near the bottom on every quality-of-life indicator that Wilkinson and Pickett examine. Portugal and the UK, nations with levels of inequality that rival the United States, rank near that same bottom.

People in more equal societies simply live longer, healthier, and happier lives than people in more unequal societies. And not just poor people in these societies, Wilkinson and Pickett emphasize, but all people.

Inequality.org | News, Analysis & Facts on Economic Inequality

HE IS ONE OF US!

He wasn't a gang-banger from inner-city USA or a PTSD crazed vet.



He came from an upscale  "all american" family with lot's of money and able to afford the best America has to offer; first class education, high end cars, designer clothes, and a cadre of mental health professionals to help out with the hardships that life has to offer.



By all accounts he would be considered one of the NRA "good guys." A prime target for the NRA's Wayne LaPiere, who said;


"In this uncertain world, surrounded by  lies and corruption, there is no greater freedom than the right to survive, to protect our families with all the rifles, shotguns and handguns we want." 

We know, in the world that surrounds us, there are terrorists and 

home invaders and drug cartels and car-jackers and knock-out gamers 

and rapers, haters, campus killers, airport killers, shopping mall killers, 

road-rage killers, and killers who scheme to destroy our country 

with massive storms of violence against our power grids, or vicious 

waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse the society that 

sustains us all. 

I ask you. Do you trust this government to protect you? 

We are on our own. That is a certainty, no less certain than the 

absolute truth — a fact the powerful political and media elites continue 

to deny, just as sure as they would deny our right to save our very 

lives. The life or death truth that when you’re on your own, the surest 

way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun! 

There's little doubt that this person took that message to heart; with 3 legally purchased handguns and 400 rounds of ammo those he terrorized heard his message out loud and clear.



“It sounded like I was in a war zone,” he said. “It definitely sounded like the shooter was exchanging fire with someone … it was intense.”


"The guy unloaded a full clip, a nine clip," Rodriguez said. "He was shooting fast."

The windows of the shooter's BMW were so tinted that Rodriguez said he couldn't see the flash of the shots being fired from inside the car. He said the attacker was shooting out the passenger window as he drove down the street.

 “I heard shots, I heard people scream, I realized this was actually gunfire.” De Bree said he ran back into the park.

 “I saw a few people collapse, a few people run, a few go in the store. It was chaos. There were a bunch of people on the street corner like me, and we were all running away,” De Bree said. He later heard that one woman had been shot in the leg at the 7-Eleven.

At first, the gunshots sounded like they were coming from a handgun – there were a lot of “loud bangs,” De Bree said. “But later, I distinctly remembering thinking ‘that was definitely an automatic weapon.‘ I heard like 20 shots in a row.”

Isla Vista shooting suspect targeted sorority, neighbors, strangers

THE LAND OF UN-EQUAL OPORTUNITY

Trickle down economics doesn't work and has instead effectively destroyed the middle class in the US which ranks 4th in income inequality.



Republicans continue to push for these failed policies that without a doubt has transformed this republic/democracy into a autocratic/plutocracy.



Countries with the widest gap between rich, poor


4. United States

> Gini index – post tax & transfer: 0.380
> Social spending, pct. of GDP: 20.0% (11th lowest)
> Chg. in Gini after tax & transfer: 0.119 (4th smallest)
> Job growth, 2013: 1.0% (14th highest)

Despite being one the world's wealthiest nations with the third highest GDP per capita in the OECD, the U.S. still had one of the developed world's largest income gaps. 

The U.S. spent the most of any member nation on education per student, at more than $22,700 annually as of 2010. The U.S. also had the fourth highest percentage of adults between 25 and 64 years old with a tertiary degree, at over 42%. Despite this, the country has struggled to keep workers in the labor force. In each of the last two years, labor force growth has been less than 1%, as Americans exited the workforce and the population continued to age.

BREAKING THE BANKS THAT HARBOUR TAX DODGERS

Breaking news!  Tax evasion is a crime. Well..........maybe. Aiding and abetting evaders is a crime. Well, maybe.

Even though tax evaders are going to have a harder time hiding from the IRS now that one of their favorite shelter has been forced out into the limelight there's still a long way to go before we see any of them doing the "perp" walk.

In a sign that banking giants are no longer immune from criminal charges, despite concerns that financial institutions have grown so large and interconnected that they are too big to jail, federal prosecutors demanded that Credit Suisse’s parent company plead guilty to helping thousands of American account holders hide their wealth.

As part of a deal announced on Monday, the Swiss bank met the demands, agreeing to one count of conspiring to aid tax evasion in a scheme that “spanned decades.” Credit Suisse, which has a giant investment bank in New York and whose chief executive is an American, will also pay about $2.6 billion in penalties and hire an independent monitor for up to two years.

The rebuke from federal prosecutors as well as from the Federal Reserve and New York’s state banking regulator, Benjamin M. Lawsky, is intended as a blow against overseas tax dodging and the shadowy world of Swiss bank secrecy. The deal also signals a shift in prosecutors’ tactics. It is the most prominent bank to plead guilty in the United States since Drexel Burnham Lambert in 1989, and the largest to do so since the Bankers Trust in 1999, a bank a fraction the size of Credit Suisse.

For Credit Suisse, other than the fines and the reputational stain of being a felon, the implications are likely to be limited. The bank may lose some clients but is otherwise expected to survive largely unscathed. The plea deal also enables it to move beyond a case that had prompted a congressional hearing and had thrust the bank into an international squabble over tax dodging. If the bank had continued to fight the case, it would have been indicted, calling into question its very existence.

The Justice Department sought to contain the damage. Recognizing that criminal charges could prompt regulators to revoke a bank’s license to operate, the corporate equivalent of the death penalty, prosecutors met with the Fed and Mr. Lawsky to discuss punishing Credit Suisse without putting it out of business and imperiling the economy, according to people briefed on the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly. Authorities agreed to announce the plea after the markets closed in the United States, preventing the bank’s stock from plummeting.

Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission also voted to grant Credit Suisse a temporary exemption from a federal law that requires a bank to hand over its investment-adviser license in the event of a guilty plea, according to two of the people briefed on the matter. That decision effectively spares Credit Suisse from one of the harshest repercussions of pleading guilty.

The plea from Credit Suisse, some three years after federal prosecutors in Virginia indicted eight bank employees, is expected to provide a template for prosecuting other financial misdeeds. BNP Paribas, France’s largest bank, is next in line to plead guilty in the coming weeks, the people briefed on the matter said. The bank, which is suspected of doing business with countries like Sudan that the United States has blacklisted, will also pay more than $5 billion in fines, the people briefed on the matter said.

The BNP and Credit Suisse cases may also lay the groundwork for criminal actions against American banks. While the new strategy applies to American banks like JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, those inquiries are at an earlier stage and it is unclear whether they warrant charges.
Prosecutors were not always so aggressive. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the Justice Department did not file any criminal cases against a Wall Street bank or top executives. And in 2012, the British bank HSBC escaped charges of money laundering, stoking a public outcry.

Against that backdrop, prosecutors homed in on the Credit Suisse case as a turning point in their pursuit of big banks. While Credit Suisse’s lawyers proposed a more modest guilty plea from a subsidiary rather than the parent company, people briefed on the matter said, prosecutors rebuffed the overtures.

“This case shows that no financial institution, no matter its size or global reach, is above the law,” the United States attorney general,Eric H. Holder Jr., said at a news conference on Monday.

The decision to seek a guilty plea stems in part from Credit Suisse’s failure to fully cooperate with the federal government. The bank, prosecutors say, was slow to turn over documents, deleted important emails and conducted an internal investigation that “failed to interview a number of the culpable individuals.”

The bank also kept three of the eight indicted employees on its payroll. Under the terms of the deal with Mr. Lawsky, Credit Suisse must fire the employees.

Long before the Credit Suisse case came to a head, prosecutors in Washington drafted a document outlining a possible chain reaction of a guilty plea, the people briefed on the matter said. The prosecutors, required under federal guidelines to weigh collateral consequences of charging a corporation, explained that some regulators have legal authority to withdraw a bank’s charter.

For Mr. Holder, blamed for enabling the idea that banks are “too big to jail,” the new strategy offers an opportunity to rewrite his legacy. But the public and congressional lust for Wall Street accountability may linger all the same.

For one, the plea deal will not require the bank to turn over the names of its American account holders, a hot-button issue in Congress. Credit Suisse has argued that Swiss law prevented it from turning over the names.

What is more, the cases against Credit Suisse and BNP will not quell the lingering outrage over the financial crisis. While the Justice Department levied billions of dollars in penalties on JPMorgan Chase and other banks, those cases were civil rather than criminal.


Credit Suisse Pleads Guilty in Felony Case