How can we take it back?

[Skarekrow]

 

[Skarekrow]

 

[Stu]

[video=youtube;qCcqkyRJl7M]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCcqkyRJl7M[/video]

https://mayone.us/

 

[Skarekrow]

[video=youtube;qCcqkyRJl7M]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCcqkyRJl7M[/video]

https://mayone.us/

Great video...although, I hate to admit it...we have come to playing by their skewed rules to effect change...money talks and bullshit walks I guess.
I hope this works and those in the top ten percentile don’t just throw more money to compensate for this type of action.
I really don’t get how people are so quiet about the “Citizens United” decision and “McCutcheon” decision basically removing any restrictions from donating.
I also have difficulty with those people who say that such decisions have no sway within our democratic process...are you joking?!
Who are our elected officials beholden to if the vote of the common man no longer matters? They don’t even need to persuade voters anymore...they just re-draw the district lines to be in their favor.
It is clearly evident in public opinion polls that the majority of America no longer have a “voice”, it doesn’t matter if the people want the minimum wage raised...or health-care...or money out of our election process...they are beholden to their MEGA-donors...like the Koch brothers...they are beholden to the lobbyists...the corporations (whom are now supposedly “people”) who inject money into politics purely for profitability reasons...whether it is against the law or not...moral or not...money, money, money.
Why do the huge oil conglomerates need BILLIONS of dollars in tax breaks? Why?! They DON’T! They are the last group of people who need a tax break.
The same goes for all the Wall Street institutions...it is absolutely TRUE that the secretary of a hedge-fund manager pays a higher percentage of taxes from his/her wage than his/her boss does. Not that we know what to tax them on anyhow because sheltering their taxes offshore in tax havens is so prevalent.
And then Congress turns around and cuts funding to food-stamps...welfare...early-start programs...etc. They should quit pretending to “care” about America and just start openly spitting and cursing the “poor” and the “takers”.
But of course, corporate welfare is perfectly alright...perfectly fine...because it lines the pockets of their donors, who in turn line their pocket.
It makes me sick...and it makes me even sicker when people say shit like “...you are just jealous of those who worked hard and succeeded.”.
B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T.
Upward mobility in the US has been severely disabled for decades now...we have destroyed the unions (or they destroyed themselves by falling into greed as well), cut benefits, killed pensions and retirements...even our 401-K plans we have now get gambled away by the bankers.
Our wages have stagnated since the late 70’s...while we have record profits and CEO pay has gone up in multiples of hundred-percentiles.
Meanwhile, inflation keeps inflating...social programs to compensate for the pain all this nonsense has caused have been done away with or cut severely.
Something has got to give...there is only so much that people will be willing to tolerate before they speak up...and then step up.
*fingers-crossed on the super-PAC idea*

 

[Skarekrow]

America Is Declining at the Same Warp Speed That's Minting Billionaires and Destroying the Middle Class


Not a single U.S. city ranks among the world’s most livable cities.
​

“The game is rigged,” writes Senator Elizabeth Warren in her new book A Fighting Chance. It’s rigged because the rich and their lobbyists have rigged the rules of the game to their favor. The rules are reflected in a tax code and bankruptcy laws that have seen the greatest transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich in U.S. history.

The result?

America has the most billionaires in the world, but not a single U.S. city ranks among the world’s most livable cities. Not a single U.S. airport is among the top 100 airports in the world. Our bridges, road and rail are falling apart, and our middle class is being guttered out thanks to three decades of stagnant wages, while the top 1 percent enjoys 95 percent of all economic gains.

A rigged tax code and a bloated military budget are starving the federal and state governments of the revenue it needs to invest in infrastructure, which means today America looks increasingly like a Third World nation, and now new data shows America’s intellectual resources are also in decline.

For the past three decades, the Republican Party has waged a dangerous assault on the very idea of public education. Tax cuts for the rich have been balanced with spending cuts to education. During the New Deal era of the 1940s to 1970s, public schools were the great leveler of America. They were our great achievement. It was universal education for all, but today it’s education for those fortunate enough to be born into wealthy families or live in wealthy school districts. The right’s strategy of defunding public education leaves parents with the option of sending their kids to a for-profit school or a theological school that teaches kids our ancestors kept dinosaurs as pets.

“What kind of future society the defectors from the public school rolls envision I cannot say. However, having spent some time in the Democratic Republic of Congo–a war-torn hellhole with one of those much coveted limited central governments, and, not coincidentally, a country in which fewer than half the school-age population goes to public school–I can say with certainty that I don’t want to live there,” writes Chuck Thompson in Better off Without Em.

Comparisons with the Democratic Republic of Congo are not that far-fetched given the results of a recent report by Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development(OECD), which is the first comprehensive survey of the skills adults need to work in today’s world, in literacy, numeracy and technology proficiency. The results are terrifying. According to the report, 36 million American adults have low skills.

It gets worse. In two of the three categories tested, numeracy and technological proficiency, young Americans who are on the cusp of entering the workforce–ages 16 to 24–rank dead last, and is third from the bottom in numeracy for 16- to 65-year-olds.

The United States has a wide gap between its best performers and its worst performers. And it had the widest gap in scores between people with rich, educated parents and poor, undereducated parents, which is exactly what Third World countries look like, i.e. a highly educated super class at the top and a highly undereducated underclass at the bottom, with very little in the middle.

The report shows a relationship between inequalities in skills and inequality in income. “How literacy skills are distributed across a population also has significant implications on how economic and social outcomes are distributed within the society. If large proportions of adults have low reading and numeracy skills, introducing and disseminating productivity-improving technologies and work-organization practices can be hampered; that, in turn, will stall improvements in living standards,” write the authors of the report.

There is a defined correlation between literacy, numeracy and technology skills with jobs, rising wages and productivity, good health, and even civic participation and political engagement. Inequality of skills is closely correlated to inequality of income. In short, our education system is not meeting the demands of the new global environment, and the outlook is grim, given the Right’s solution is to further defund public education while ushering kids into private schools and Christian academies aka “segregation academies.”

The Republican-controlled South is where you see the Right’s education strategy in action. “Inspired by home-school superstars such as Creation Museum founder Ken Ham, tens of thousands of other southern families have fled their public-school systems in order to soak their children in the anti-intellectual sitz bath of religious denial.” In other words, we’re dumb and getting dumber.

While charter schools aren’t unique to the South, conservative states tend to respond most enthusiastically to their message, which makes Republican-controlled states ground zero for the further degradation of public education. The U.S. will likely continue to poll like countries like Indonesia and Tanzania, rather than Japan and Sweden when it comes to meeting the demands of a global economy.

Despite their hype and profits, study after study show that kids in charter schools perform no better on achievement tests than kids in public schools. But the correlation between a strong public education system and social mobility is demonstrated clearly in the OECD report. A 2006 report by Michael A. McDaniel of Virginia Commonwealth University showed that states with higher estimated collective IQ have greater gross state product, citizens with better health, more effective state governments, and less violent crime. In other words, were we to invest more in public education, we’d be instantly more intelligent, healthy, safe, and financially sound.

“The principal force for convergence [of wealth] – the diffusion of knowledge – is only partly natural and spontaneous. It also depends in large part on educational policies,” writes Thomas Piketty in his 700-page bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

In other words, if we really want to reduce inequality, and if we really want to be a global leader in the 21st century, we need to invest more into our education system, which requires the federal government to ensure the rich and the mega-corporations pay their share. But we need to act now.

 

[Skarekrow]

Who Is Behind the Pain Killer Epidemic? Big Pharma, Of Course


The FDA approved Zohydro, with five to 10 times the abuse potential as its predecessor, OxyContin.

There is good news and bad news when it comes to the nation's decade-long opioid/heroin addiction epidemic. The good news is the government has cracked down on pill mills, strengthened warnings on pill labels and approved an injectable form of naloxone which reverses heroin overdoses and will reduce deaths in the hands of caregivers and police.

The bad news is on the same day the FDA announced plans to tighten restrictions on hydrocodone combination products like Vicodin, it approved the long-acting drug Zohydro made from hydrocodone bitartrate which has five to 10 times the abuse potential of the infamous OxyContin. The FDA did so over the objections of many medical and public health groups and its own advisory committee. And even as public health professionals are outraged by the FDA's tin ear and refusal to learn from the opioid addiction epidemic, a pill that combines oxycodone with morphine is also inching its way toward approval.

Many of the current addicts started out on narcotic painkillers and turned to cheaper and more available heroin when their supplybecame cut off or got too expensive. This risky switch from pills to street drugs was abetted by the creation of a "deterrent-proof" version of OxyContin that people could no longer crush and snort. (The reason OxyContin had been king on the street was all 80 milligrams could be ingested at once if the pill was crushed, a rush described by users as better than cocaine.)

But why were millions of Americans on narcotic painkillers, once limited to terminal and cancer pain, surgery and accidents, to begin with? Because Big Pharma paid doctors in advisory positions to institute looser guidelines, reports the Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal-Sentinel — and quickly discovered that the medical establishment and patients neither remembered or cared why narcotic painkillers had been the most restricted of all drugs.

One example of the pay-to-play is the American Geriatrics Society, which changed its guidelines in 2009 to recommend "that over-the-counter pain relievers, such as ibuprofen and naproxen, be used rarely and that doctors instead consider prescribing opioids for all patients with moderate to severe pain," writes medical reporter John Fauber.

To recommend narcotic painkillers over over-the-counter painkillers is outrageous enough. But half the panel's experts "had financial ties to opioid companies, as paid speakers, consultants or advisers at the time the guidelines were issued," Fauber reports. The University of Wisconsin's Pain & Policy Studies Group also took $2.5 million from opioid makers even as it pushed for looser use of narcotic painkillers, he reports.

Thanks to the "second look" inspired by Pharma money, narcotic painkillers soon were prescribed for back injuries, headaches, arthritis, fibromyalgia, toothaches and mental issues like depression. They were even prescribed for "unemployment" and "withdrawal symptoms" from opioids, said Businessweek. While pill mills did a brisk business, employers were paying an extra $39,000 for a work injury case when short-acting opioids like Percocet were added and an extra $117,000 when long-acting opioids like OxyContin were added to the case. Ka-ching!

And there was another, more insidious way that Pharma got the medical establishment and prescribers to reconsider narcotic painkillers. Federal regulators and executives of Pharma companies that make pain drugs have held private meetings at expensive hotels at least once a year since 2002. The meetings are under the auspices of IMMPACT, an organization funded by 11 drug companies including makers of narcotic painkillers.

As early as 2003, Raymond Dionne, a National Institutes of Health (NIH) official, questioned the ethics of the schmoozing of federal officials and industry in closed meetings and suggested open meetings on the NIH campus. Federal officials should not be accepting expensive dinners at the Four Seasons Hotel, he wrote in correspondence to IMMPACT.

Robert Dworkin, an IMMPACT co-founder, actually found the ethical concerns amusing. If you want, we will buy you and other government officials "inexpensive sandwiches" he wrote back in an email, adding, "The rest of us undoubtedly will feel guilty, but we will probably resist the temptation to have tuna fish in respect for your plight." Dworkin is a professor and pain expert at the University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, NY.

IMMPACT has a clear and stated goal of "improving the design, execution, and interpretation of clinical trials of treatments for pain." One "improved design" federal officials admit grew out of the clandestine meetings is called "enriched enrollment." It is a new system that allows Pharma companies to eliminate people who respond poorly to a drug or don't tolerate the drug at all before the clinical trial begins.

This fait accompli system is like drawing a bull's eye around an arrow after it been shot into a wall (or "reaching the person to whom I am speaking," as Lilly Tomlin used to spoof). The sleazy science increases the chance of a drug being approved, how quickly it is approved and of course lowers Pharma's costs. Both Purdue Pharma, who makes OxyContin, and Janssen, which makes Duragesic and Nucynta, have acknowledged the value of IMMPACT's efforts to improve clinical trial procedures.

And there is more bad science associated with opioids. When it comes to long-term as opposed to short-term relief of pain, there is scant scientific evidence of narcotic painkillers' effectiveness despite Pharma's promotion of their long-term use. The drugs even paradoxically make pain worse when used for more than a short period of time. Patients risk developing opioid-induced hypersensitivity (OIH) which is an increased pain sensitivity that makes it even harder to quit the already addictive drugs.

Last year, Johnson & Johnson, Janssen's parent company, wasinvestigated by the city of Chicago for deceptive marketing of narcotic painkillers to city employees. The city claims Janssen improperly marketed the opioids for long-term treatment of chronic pain, such as back pain and arthritis. Janssen maintains the opioids are safe and effective over an extended period of time.

Thanks to Pharma, we are now seeing the reason for narcotic painkillers' traditional tight control. In addition to their addiction and abuse potential and overdoses, opioids are linked to respiratory suppression, sleep apnea, bowel obstruction, constipation, serious cognitive problems, depression, apathy, hormonal changes (decrease in testosterone), a decrease in immune responses and an increased risk of falls and fractures, especially in the elderly.

Thanks to Pharma's narcotics party, more than 17,000 people are dying in the U.S. every year from opioid overdoses and emergency room admissions for non-heroin opioids have leapt from 299,000 in 2001 to 885,000 in 2011. Poisonings from legal and illegal drugs now exceed car accidents in injury deaths.

But despite a near consensus among doctors and medical groups and public officials that narcotic painkillers are becoming a health catastrophe, the damage is not likely to end soon with Zohydro ER inexplicably approved this year and likely to become OxyContin 2.0.

Explaining the FDA's apparent nose-thumbing to patients and medical professionals in favor of Pharma, FDA spokesperson Morgan Liscinsky said, "Prescribers now have a hydrocodone option for patients who require an extended-release opioid." Most would say we do not need another opioid "option."

Martha Rosenberg is an investigative health reporter and the author of "Born With a Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp the Public Health (Random House)."

 

[Skarekrow]

White Privilege 101: Here’s the Basic Lesson Paul Ryan, Tal Fortgang and Donald Sterling Need


A refresher on how privilege works, and why race and gender matter.

It was no surprise, really, to suddenly shift from 67-year-old Cliven Bundy’s sudden exposure as a classic-style racist (though he vehemently denied it), to 80-year old Donald Sterling’s sudden exposure as a classic-style racist (though he vehemently denied it – as did even V. Stiviano), to 19-year-old Tal Fortgang‘s vehement denial that racism even exists, except as some kind of left-wing conspiracy theory:

I condemn them declaring that we are all governed by invisible forces (some would call them “stigmas” or “societal norms”), that our nation runs on racist and sexist conspiracies.

​

As Salon’s own Peter Finocchiaro pointed out, “[Fortgang's] meteoric rise to fame owes entirely to his biographical data. His youth is the entire point.” For years now, the GOP has been desperately trying to present itself in fresh-faced terms – it’s how Sarah Palin and Sharron Angle become part of our political landscape. It’s how Paul Ryan got sold as a budget wunderkind, and how he’s trying to resell himself as the second coming of Jack Kemp, if not Jesus. And above all, it’s how the Tea Party was sold to us as the reinvention of the same old conservative movement that’s been with us at least since the days of Joe McCarthy and Father Coughlin before him.

So, of course, with one wave of news cycles on Bundy’s racism, and another wave of news cycles on Sterling’s racism, there was a deep abiding need to wash all that away, and a young fresh-faced conservative college freshman was the best possible way to do that: Take that, you Millennial Obama voters! Take that, you rising new American demographic wave!

And yet, Katie McDonough correctly argued, his denial of racism and his own privileged position represents a new majority view among whites, who think they’re more discriminated against than blacks, despite all manner of evidence to the contrary (more on that below). And this is where the danger and the challenge to progressives lies – as well as the challenge to the Democratic Party. If–as recent research suggests – whites grow increasingly conservative as perceived minority voting power grows, then the “Rising American electorate” argument itself is in danger. It could be every bit as much a fantasy, in its own, much more sophisticated way, as the Tea Party fantasy that the GOP can just double down on where it is, and get by on better messaging and a sprinkling of more diverse spokes/front people.

There is a way to fight back against this very real, and so far unrecognized, threat. And that is for white people – especially white men – to step up and push back (lovingly or forcefully, as the situation dictates) against this sort of polarizing rhetoric and the thinking and feeling that’s connected to it. It’s not just a matter of paternalistically “helping out” women and minorities when they’re attacked.

The fortunes of white working-class menhave plummeted since the early ’70s – not because women and minorities have stolen their cheese, but because they’re snookered into thinking like that, making themselves easy marks for far more sophisticated actors to take advantage of. And what’s long been true for working-class white men will increasingly become true of white men with college degrees as well. One of Thomas Piketty’s central points is that any sort of labor, however skilled it may be, is going to lose out to inherited capital in the long run, if the basic structures of today’s capitalist economy aren’t changed.

So how do white men fight back, not just for the sake of others, or society as a whole, but for themselves, as well? There are lots of ways they can do this, but here I’d like to focus on just one: by gaining a much a more solid, objective understanding of what minorities (especially blacks) and women already largely understand as a basic fact of life – how racial and gender privilege work, with white male ignorance as a key component. It’s only by unifying against an already unified economic elite that Americans of all races and ethnicities can keep hope alive for a more prosperous future.

Before going any further, I just want to quote from McDonough’s article, where she references a sampling of the information already out there:

It’s likely that Fortgang will have the opportunity at Princeton to learn about the racial wealth gap, the legacy of red-lining, the unemployment rate among college educated men of color versus their white counterparts, the convergence of racism and sexism that leaves women of color disproportionately impacted by domestic violence, the gender pay gap experienced by black women, the deadly violence faced by black children and the myriad other manifestations of racism in the United States. Basically all of the things that he will never have to experience as an extraordinarily privileged white man.
​

Two Lenses
In what follows, I’m going to refer to some of the same kinds of data, but I want to do it through two particular powerful, specifically focused lenses. They are lenses that Tal Fortgang would never dream of putting on, for they would show him everything he’s hiding from. And for all his unacknowledged privilege, he is vastly the poorer for it, just as those who condemned Galileo were all the poorer for refusing to look through his lenses as well. They are lenses that will allow us to see, very clearly, the injuries of race and gender that he mocks as mere conspiracy theories – but also, how to heal them as well.

Situationism
The first lens is a very broad one, a legal theory perspective known as “situationism,” a social science-based realist approach (not to be confused with the philosophy associated with the Situationist International) that is opposed to the inherited pre-scientific conceptions of human nature and rationality as a foundation for law, public policy and related fields. It’s perhaps most readily grasped in terms of what it’s against: dispositionism. Most of us unconsciously see the world in dispositionist terms: People are who and what they are because of their dispositions, or characters.

For example, if you’re fat, it’s because you’re lazy, gluttonous or both. In a stable, uniform social environment, all other things being equal, a dispositionist explanation for things may well make a good deal of sense. But we don’t live in a stable social environment, much less a uniform one, and all other things are almost never equal. In this case, obesity in the U.S. has skyrocketed in recent decades, yet there’s no good reason to think that laziness or gluttony has changed anywhere near that dramatically. If anything, we’re more obsessed with health and fitness. Instead, what has changed is the social, economic and cultural situation in which we live – not least the profound changes in our food industry, and the advertising that goes with it.

That doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as laziness or gluttony. Situationism does not exclude the very existence of dispositions and dispositional differences. It merely provides us with a broader perspective, so that other, less obvious factors can be taken into consideration. The Situationist blog, established by Harvard law professor John Hanson, is a source of frequent reports and brief updates on related, multi-disciplinary research across a wide range of topics, among which race and gender are just two examples. Just as the situationist perspective allows us to see dispositionist explanations in a broader perspective, it also allows us to see the particular influences of racial and gender situations as part of a broader story about the many complexities of the human condition.

Perceptual Segregation
To get more specific, I would now like to take up the second lens I mentioned earlier. It’s the concept of “Perceptual Segregation,” first set forth in a law review article of the same name , by University of California, Berkeley, law professor Russell Robinson. Robinson doesn’t use the explicit language of situationism, but the analysis he engages in nonetheless fits nicely into that broader framework. Put simply, Robinson argues that the very different frameworks in which most blacks and whites are raised and live give rise to very different experiences of the world, even when they are physically present in the same place together.

Because their life situations remain highly segregated for a large part of their lives, their resulting perceptions of the world remain segregated as well – although in a way that white people usually don’t even see. In that paper, Robinson writes:
While many whites expect evidence of discrimination to be explicit, and assume that people are colorblind when such evidence is lacking, many blacks perceive bias to be prevalent and primarily implicit.

In light of situationism more broadly, there a few significant observations worth noting that can help us to unpack this brief quote, which are worth keeping in mind as we proceed. I offer them as ideas to consider, as you read further, not as dogmatic statements you must agree or disagree with. They are:

• The difference between the white and black perspectives reflects and arises from a difference in their situations.
• Blacks are largely correct on both main counts: Discrimination, though far more subtle, remains widespread, and is primarily implicit (one reason whites tend not to notice it).
• Blacks are, by necessity, far more situationally sensitive than whites, which is a large part of why their perceptions are more accurate.
• A critical, situationist examination of colorblindness is key to substantial racial progress at this point in American history.

Keeping these thoughts in mind, let’s now turn to four key points – which I’ll expand on below – that Robinson makes, which can help us both understand the full scope of the problem of a perceptual segregation, and how we can work to dismantle it, just as we dismantled slavery and legally mandated physical segregation in the past. These are:

1) Perceptual segregation is quite real, and has long-standing historical roots.

2) Given the preexisting historical reality, perceptual segregation is situationally reasonable: Both blacks and whites are acting in a manner consistent with the legal standard of what a “reasonable person” might think and do. Neither one – either individually or as a group – is dispositionally evil (although there may be individual exceptions, of course).

3) Nonetheless, even though whites are acting in a reasonable manner, that doesn’t mean that their perceptions are reliably accurate. There are situational blind spots of white colorblindness, and if we are serious about overcoming perceptual segregation, then white people will have to make intentional efforts to overcome these blind spots. This is not because of anything about their dispositions. It’s not because they are bad people – the vast majority of them are not. It’s because of the situation they are in – and the relationship of that situation to the situation of black Americans (and, to a lesser extent, other minorities).

4) In order to make progress, white people need to learn to heed the insights of black situationism.

Again, this is not for any dispositional reason. It’s not because blacks are smarter, or morally superior, or anything else about them dispositionally. It’s simply a function of the situation they are in– a situation that allows them, indeed forces them to notice things that white people’s situation makes it very hard for them to see.
Let’s now consider each of these, in turn.

Perceptual Segregation – Yesterday and Today
Historically, Robinson notes that the perceptual divide was recognized in Plessy v. Ferguson – but that black perceptions were dismissed as groundless. He quotes this passage:

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.

​

Robinson goes on to note that while Plessy’s rationale was “rebuked by Brown,” part of its logic survives and resurfaces in racial discourse to this day in “the belief that blacks tend to imagine racial discrimination and choose to perceive themselves as victims.” He adds, “The thinking underlying this charge is that discrimination is rare, and thus blacks who assert discrimination are likely using race deliberately and dishonestly as an excuse for their own failings.” This sort of thinking supports white racial agitators, like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, playing the race-card card in order to demonize those who actually see the situation of race much more clearly than most of the rest of us do.

Shifting focus to the present day, Robinson goes into some detail documenting the contemporary racial perceptual divide, beginning with a massive workplace survey of 3,000 employees from Rutgers University, and proceeding to surveys of perceived discrimination from the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, Gallup and Pew Research Center. Although the exact figures vary somewhat, the basic story is the same: Whites see a rosy world in which racial progress is substantial, and discrimination is rare, while blacks see the reverse. For example, quoting from the Rutgers survey:

[W]orkers describe two very different workplaces. The workplace described by the white worker is one where equitable treatment is accorded to all, few personally experience discrimination, and few offer strong support for policies such as affirmative action . . . . In stark contrast, the workplace of non-white workers is one where the perception of unfair treatment is significantly more pronounced, where many employment policies such as hiring and promotion are perceived as unfair to African-American workers, and where support for corrective action is high.

Following that quote, Robinson went on to say, “Half of the African-American respondents said that ‘African-Americans are treated unfairly in the workplace,’ while just 10 percent of white respondents ‘agreed with that statement…. Almost half (46 percent) of the African-Americans said their employer awarded promotions unfairly, compared to 6 percent of whites.”

One factor that’s certainly contributing to the different perceptions of fairness is the response to discrimination claims, as these claims come primarily from minorities, and the discouraging results are typically more readily shared with other minorities – part of a process that Robinson describes as creating “racialized pools of knowledge.” I’ll discuss this further in the section below regarding the insights of black situationism.

The workplace study is powerful, because everyone is reporting experience of the same specific workplace. But it’s also potentially limited. Perhaps that workplace – though fairly large – was not typical of America as a whole. That’s why it’s so significant that the broader social surveys report strikingly similar statistics. The U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board found that “More than three fourths (79 percent) of whites reported that blacks ‘have as good a chance as whites’ to ‘get any kind of job,’ but fewer than half (46 percent) of blacks shared that view. Whereas the vast majority of whites (69 percent) perceived that blacks were treated ‘the same as whites,’ the majority of blacks (59 percent) reported that blacks were treated worse than whites.”

Similarly, the Gallup poll found that “two-thirds of nonblacks say they are satisfied with the way blacks are treated,” compared to nearly two-thirds (59 percent) of blacks who are dissatisfied. The Pew Research Center survey also found high rates of perceived discrimination among blacks, varying from 67 percent when applying for a job to to 43 percent when applying to a college or university. But white supermajorities of 2-to-1 or larger believed that blacks rarely faced bias in those situations.
As we’ll see in the next section, there are plausible reasons for both whites and blacks to believe as they do. Yet, as we’ll see in the sections that follow, there are blind spots that hide important facts from whites’ common perceptions – facts that blacks are much more conscious of.

Situationally Reasonable Perceptual Segregation
Robinson clearly states at several points that in his view, both whites and blacks are largely acting reasonably – a key concept in Anglo-American law. For example, he writes, “oth the outsider [blacks and women] and insider [whites and men] may be reasonable and yet differ substantially as to the likelihood that discrimination occurred; neither can be wholly blamed for the disparity because of irrational perceptions.” Even what constitutes discrimination may be defined quite differently, Robinson notes – recalling the colorblind notion that bias must be conscious (even spoken out loud) in order for it to count for whites, while blacks are much more attuned to nuances of social dynamics.

Although Robinson doesn’t explicitly use situationist terminology, he is making a situationist argument: What is reasonable is highly dependent on the situation one finds oneself in, and the situation of the two races diverges in ways that white legal theorists and practitioners generally have failed to recognize, to put it mildly. The reasonableness of the white (and male) perspective has generally just been assumed, so Robinson feels no need to justify it with arguments. But he does argue that both races rely on racialized pools of knowledge, and that their reasoning reflects their incentives.

For blacks, the knowledge largely relates to the experience of past discrimination and how patterns set in the past persist into today; the incentives are to avoid future discrimination. Given the “pervasive prejudice” perspective, Robinson writes, “It is rational – rather than strategic or paranoid – for blacks to be attentive to racial dynamics and to view some conduct that many whites would see as benign as in fact discriminatory.”

Indeed, it can be downright dangerous not to be on guard. In a direct parallel, Lilly Ledbetter’s lack of “paranoia,” her failure to suspect discrimination and sneak a peek at the paychecks of male co-workers, was held against her by the Supreme Court, and used to deny her the right to sue for pay discrimination.
In contrast to this view, if one assumes that evidence of discrimination needs to be explicit, and that “people are colorblind when such evidence is lacking,” then it’s reasonable to think that discrimination is relatively rare, and not to recognize much of what blacks would identify as discriminatory behavior.

The Situational Blind Spots of White Colorblindness
Robinson does not devote much attention to dwelling on white blind spots, but they are obviously quite important, as Tal Fortgang clearly demonstrates. The most glaring of these blind spots are the continuing reality of racial discrimination in America today. We’ve already noted the difference between black and white perceptions of discrimination. Now it’s time to turn attention to the reality.

We noted above that the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board found that “More than three fourths (79 percent) of whites reported that blacks ‘have as good a chance as whites’ to ‘get any kind of job,’” and that, similarly, the Pew Research Center survey found that “white super-majorities of two-to-one or larger, believed that blacks rarely faced bias” in situations including applying for a job. This contrasts rather dramatically with the data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on a month-in, month-out basis.

Overall, the black unemployment rate averages around twice that of the white rate – just as it did 40 years ago. Part of that is due to educational differences, but black college graduates have an unemployment rate averaging 60 percent higher than white college graduates since 1990, with little change over time. In fact, black college graduates have a 15 percent higher unemployment rate than whites with only a two-year AA degree. In turn, blacks with an AA degree have an unemployment rate that’s almost 30 percent higher than whites with just a high-school education over this same period of time. What’s more, in 30 months since 1990, blacks with an AA degree had an unemployment rate equal to or higher than white high school dropouts!

The conclusion is inescapable: Blacks still face pervasive discrimination in the job market, regardless of whether it’s conscious or intentional. The fact that whites don’t see this constitutes a serious blind spot on their part. The same can be said about discrimination in housing, education and treatment by criminal justice system as well. In many cases, even blacks being discriminated against may not know that they are being targeted, so it’s not surprising that whites are also unaware.

For example, in the latest survey of housing discrimination for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Urban Institute found that minority home-seekers are told about and shown fewer homes and apartments than equally qualified whites, both for rentals and home sales. This is true for all minorities in all categories (including Asian-Americans), except for home sales to Hispanics, where no discrimination was found – although Hispanics were actually more discriminated against than blacks when it came to rental units. Blacks were told about 11.4 percent fewer rental units, and 17 percent fewer homes, and were shown 4.2 percent fewer rental units and 17.7 percent fewer homes.

Statistics like these make it obvious that blacks continue to experience discrimination in virtually every walk of life. Not every black. Not every time. And certainly not from every white. But when the question is phrased “Do blacks have as good a chance as whites?” the objective answer clearly is “No, their chances are not as good as whites’” and supermajorities of whites are simply blind to this reality.

Thus, whites suffer from two distinct blind spots when it comes to racial bias. First, they are blind to their own individual implicit biases, which undermines the basic dispositionist assumption behind the logic of colorblindness. And second, they are blind to the sheer magnitude and pervasiveness of racial discrimination which black Americans continue to experience, even today.

The Need to Heed the Insights of Black Situationism
As can be seen by the statistics cited above, blacks face much more discrimination than whites generally realize. Yet, it’s also the case that discrimination nowadays is most commonly not explicit or overt. That’s why attention to social dynamics is so important. It can provide clues as to what to expect, which is why blacks necessarily pay close attention to it, just as women do regarding sexism.

Whites looking for explicit expressions of racism are like 19th century scientists trying to track long-lasting, stable particles against the stable background of space; blacks paying attention to racial social dynamics are like 20th century scientists studying interactive fields of force out of which particles probabilistically emerge. It would be so much neater, so much easier if the universe worked in a 19th-century way. But it doesn’t. And black Americans have been dealing with that reality since their first ancestors were kidnapped and brought to these shores – way back in the 17th century. It’s way past time for white America to catch up.

A key learning opportunity for whites in the workplace comes when discrimination claims are made. Most often, blacks (and other minorities) will see something that whites do not – patterns of behavior that may not be conscious, but that need conscious attention to correct. Thus, it’s a perfect opportunity for whites to learn to see what they’re missing. But that’s typically not what happens – which only makes matters worse.

Indeed, the way in which discrimination claims are handled is probably one of the key factors contributing to perceptual segregation – as I noted above when discussing the Rutgers workplace survey. It’s time to take a closer look at what they found. Regarding those reporting discrimination, “Sixty-three percent of this group said the employer ignored their claim or took no action,”

Robinson wrote, while “Just 7 percent reported that the employer reprimanded the alleged perpetrator.” But it gets even worse:

In fact, the employee making the charge of discrimination was more likely to be transferred or fired as a result of the complaint (5% of the time) than the alleged perpetrator (2%).

​

A response rate like that clearly discourages making claims of discrimination – which in turn helps to perpetuate the illusion that discrimination itself has actually disappeared. Blacks have always recognized the tactical and strategic value – bordering on necessity – of playing along with white pretenses in downplaying the role of white prejudice. The forms have changed drastically over time, from slavery to Jim Crow to the formally colorblind workplace of today. But the underlying dynamic remains strikingly similar. Blacks know that it’s a bad bet to make a discrimination claim – and whites only know that they don’t hear that much about it.

Each may be a reasonable conclusion to draw, based on their different experiences, but one is much more accurate than the other, and neither leads to solving the underlying problem. Blacks come away with a much sharper, and more painful picture of the situation of discrimination that they are still caught up in. Whites come away even more oblivious than ever. Robinson goes on to note that “the survey’s authors concluded that ‘race is the most significant determinant in how people perceive and experience the workplace.’” Most blacks would not be surprised with that finding. But most whites would be–yet another example of how significant race is, even as whites continue to believe that it is not.

One obvious conclusion to draw is that to advance racial justice, we need to stop blaming blacks for calling attention to continued racial justice problems, and start seeing their insight as a valuable resource for guiding us toward better solutions. A major difficulty that stands in our way is the dispositionist mind-set, which insists on equating racism with overt racist attitudes. That mind-set turns any claim of discrimination into a “race card” attack, rather than a learning/healing opportunity. Ironically, it’s precisely blacks’ superior ability to see things situationally – seeing beyond individual dispositions – that we have the most to learn from, if only we could get the process started in the first place.

We white folks are caught in a perceptual double-bind: We can’t find our spectacles without our spectacles. That’s why we need to borrow, to take our training from what blacks have learned to see. It’s not a burden they are trying to lay on us – it’s a blessing, if only we can find the eyes to see it for what it truly is.
I don’t expect Tal Fortgang to understand any of this – any more than Cliven Bundy or Donald Sterling would. But so what? They may all be privileged, just like the kings of old. But the world cannot wait to pass them by. We only need the means – and now they are at hand.


Paul H. Rosenberg is senior editor at Random Lengths News, a biweekly serving the Los Angeles harbor area. He runs the site Merge Left, a community of progressive thinkers free to submit their own content.

 

[Skarekrow]

The Most Popular Tax in History Is Getting Real Momentum Here in the U.S.


The U.S. would do well to emulate its European neighbors' Robin Hood Tax.

This article originally appeared at The Nation, and is reprinted here with their permission.

​

The European Financial Transaction (akaRobin Hood) tax scored a big legal victory on April 30, when a challenge regarding the legality of the tax brought by the British government was thrown out by the European Court of Justice. The ECJ has struck a serious blow for fairness, as the dismissal essentially chastises the British government for championing the interests of the U.K.’s financial industry over those of its citizens. David Hillman, spokesperson for the Robin Hood campaign, told The Guardian, “This futile legal challenge tells you all you need to know about the government’s misguided priorities: it would rather defend a privileged elite in the City than support a tax that could raise billions to tackle poverty and protect public services.”

What’s more, these “misguided priorities” of David Cameron’s government became all the more apparent last Friday, when an analysis of the Bank of England’s £375 billion stimulus program determined that those public funds,according to the International Business Times,“[have] made the wealthiest five percent even richer, worsened the economic recovery, made pension pots smaller, failed to stimulate business investment, and given a bonus to financial services.” To recap, then, Britain’s response to the financial crisis has included flogging for the finance industry at the ECJ and giving them a £375 billion gift from the public coffers – what one analyst actually calls a “Robin Hood tax in reverse.”

In this environment, then, the real, non-reversed Robin Hood tax has serious momentum within Europe, just as the 11-nation coalition behind it is expected to make an important announcement about the first phase of the tax on May 5 or 6. The proposed tax includes a 0.1 percent tax on stock and bond trades and a tax of 0.01 percent on derivatives. It’s now expected that the tax will indeed be phased in, with the levy on stock-trades comprising the first step. Reportedly, the finance ministers involved in the negotiations plan to use the rest of the year to negotiate over taxes on derivative-trading, which could be introduced later in a second phase. While the German government is reportedly determined to get an agreement from the outset to include derivatives,there has been some resistance, including from the supposedly more left-wing French government.

The Robin Hood Tax is, as European FTT campaigners say, the “most popular tax in history,” and such high regard – even for something as seemingly unromantic as a 0.1 percent tax – isn’t difficult to understand: FTT revenue can be used to create jobs; spur economic development beyond the financial industry; and combat climate change, global poverty and HIV/AIDS. One measure of the tax’s popularity is that this week’s announcement about the FTT’s first phase has been scheduled to occur during the lead-up to the European Parliament elections of May 22—25, and support for the tax is expected to be a major vote-getter. Not exactly an American-election-style “October Surprise” to be sure, but certainly a signal to candidates: Robin Hood matters to European citizens. You can lend your name to the movement, too, by signing the “1 Million Strong” petition.

Even if this week’s announcement isn’t everything campaigners have been hoping for, the announcement itself will send a strong signal that the European FTT – despite the U.K.’s legal challenge, despite a strong backlash from the financial industry, and despite concerns from the U.S. Treasury Department about possible impacts on U.S. investors – is moving ahead. We’re seeing more and more popular, judicial, and – increasingly – legislative support for the tax in Europe.
This kind of visible success should boost efforts to build support for such a tax in this country, currently represented by Representative Keith Ellison’s (D-MN) Inclusive Prosperity Act. While the Obama administration has not yet supported the idea, there is increased openness in the Treasury Department to at least take a closer look at a FTT as one possible remedy for high-frequency trading (which happens to be the subject to Michael Lewis’s latest best-selling book, Flash Boys).

Thanks in part to Lewis, there’s increasing awareness of how these high-speed/high-frequency traders are rigging American markets in their favor. (Lewis writes, “…f a single Wall Street bank were to exploit the countless minuscule discrepancies in price between Thing A in Chicago and Thing A in New York, they’d make profits of $20 billion a year.” And obviously, as Flash Boys illustrates, that exploitation of those countless minuscule discrepancies is only available to a handful of deep-pocketed outfits with access to certain blazing-fast fiber-optic cable lines, effectively reducing much of the stock market down to a few guys in a black box making 10,000 trades per second. “It is hard to see the benefit to society as a whole of enabling such trades,” muses The New York Times’s Floyd Norris in a discussion of the book.)
But as Sheila Bair, former head of FDIC, has put it, an FTT “would penalize those who destabilize our markets with rapid fire trading, while rewarding those who invest for the long term.”

In the City of London and on Wall Street, the price of doing business should be paid by, well, those doing business. We pay a steep opportunity cost – ”dead weight loss,” as Robert J. Barbera of the Center for Financial Economics at Johns Hopkins puts it – when we give the finance industry free reign to make money by any means necessary, even if it destroys the economy for the rest of us. They’re on the right track in Europe; here in the U.S., we need to join them.

Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor of The Nation.

 

[Skarekrow]

Chris Hedges: We're Losing the Last Shreds of Legal Rights to Protect Ourselves from Oligarchy​

A ruling elite that accrues for itself total power, history has shown, eventually uses it.​

The U.S. Supreme Court decision to refuse to hear our case concerning Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which permits the military to seize U.S. citizens and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers without due process, means that this provision will continue to be law. It means the nation has entered a post-constitutional era. It means that extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil by our government is legal.

It means that the courts, like the legislative and executive branches of government, exclusively serve corporate power — one of the core definitions of fascism. It means that the internal mechanisms of state are so corrupted and subservient to corporate power that there is no hope of reform or protection for citizens under our most basic constitutional rights. It means that the consent of the governed — a poll by OpenCongress.com showed that this provision had a 98 percent disapproval rating — is a cruel joke. And it means that if we do not rapidly build militant mass movements to overthrow corporate tyranny, including breaking the back of the two-party duopoly that is the mask of corporate power, we will lose our liberty.

“In declining to hear the case Hedges v. Obama and declining to review the NDAA, the Supreme Court has turned its back on precedent dating back to the Civil War era that holds that the military cannot police the streets of America,” said attorney Carl Mayer, who along with Bruce Afran devoted countless unpaid hours to the suit. “This is a major blow to civil liberties. It gives the green light to the military to detain people without trial or counsel in military installations, including secret installations abroad. There is little left of judicial review of presidential action during wartime.”

Afran, Mayer and I brought the case to the U.S. Southern District Court of New York in January 2012. I was later joined by co-plaintiffs Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, journalist Alexa O’Brien, RevolutionTruth founder Tangerine Bolen, Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jonsdottir and Occupy London activist Kai Wargalla.
Later in 2012 U.S. District Judge Katherine B. Forrest declared Section 1021(b)(2) unconstitutional. The Obama administration not only appealed — we expected it to appeal — but demanded that the law be immediately put back into effect until the appeal was heard. Forrest, displaying the same judicial courage she showed with her ruling, refused to do this.

The government swiftly went to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. It asked, in the name of national security, that the court stay the district court’s injunction until the government’s appeal could be heard. The 2nd Circuit agreed. The law went back on the books. My lawyers and I surmised that this was because the administration was already using the law to detain U.S. citizens in black sites, most likely dual citizens with roots in countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen. The administration would have been in contempt of court if Forrest’s ruling was allowed to stand while the federal authorities detained U.S. citizens under the statute. Government attorneys, when asked by Judge Forrest, refused to say whether or not the government was already using the law, buttressing our suspicion that it was in use.

The 2nd Circuit overturned Forrest’s ruling last July in a decision that did not force it to rule on the actual constitutionality of Section 1021(b)(2). It cited the Supreme Court ruling in Clapper v. Amnesty International, another case in which I was one of the plaintiffs, to say that I had no standing, or right, to bring the NDAA case to court. Clapper v. Amnesty International challenged the secret wiretapping of U.S. citizens under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. The Supreme Court had ruled in Clapper that our concern about government surveillance was “speculation.”

It said we were required to prove to the court that the FISA Act would be used to monitor those we interviewed. The court knew, of course, that the government does not disclose whom it is monitoring. It knew we could never offer proof. The leaks by Edward Snowden, which came out after the Supreme Court ruling, showed that the government was monitoring us all, along with those we interviewed. The 2nd Circuit used the spurious Supreme Court ruling to make its own spurious ruling. It said that because we could not show that the indefinite-detention law was about to be used against us, just as we could not prove government monitoring of our communications, we could not challenge the law. It was a dirty game of judicial avoidance on two egregious violations of the Constitution.

In refusing to hear our lawsuit the courts have overturned nearly 150 years of case law that repeatedly holds that the military has no jurisdiction over civilians. Now, a U.S. citizen charged by the government with “substantially supporting” al-Qaida, the Taliban or those in the nebulous category of “associated forces” — some of the language of Section 1021(b)(2) — is lawfully subject to extraordinary rendition on U.S. soil. And those seized and placed in military jails can be kept there until “the end of hostilities.”

Judge Forrest, in her 112-page ruling against the section, noted that under this provision of the NDAA whole categories of Americans could be subject to seizure by the military. These might include Muslims, activists, Black Bloc members and any other Americans labeled as domestic terrorists by the state. Forrest wrote that Section 1021(b)(2) echoed the 1944 Supreme Court ruling in Korematsu v. United States, which supported the government’s use of the military to detain 110,00 Japanese-Americans in internment camps without due process during World War II.

Of the refusal to hear our lawsuit, Afran said, “The Supreme Court has left in place a statute that furthers erodes basic respect for constitutional liberties, that weakens free speech and will chill the willingness of Americans to exercise their 1st Amendment rights, already in severe decline in this country.”
The goals of corporate capitalism are increasingly indistinguishable from the goals of the state.

The political and economic systems are subservient to corporate profit. Debate between conventional liberals and conservatives has been replaced by empty political theater and spectacle. Corporations, no matter which politicians are in office, loot the Treasury, escape taxation, push down wages, break unions, dismantle civil society, gut regulation and legal oversight, control information, prosecute endless war and dismantle public institutions and programs that include schools, welfare and Social Security. And elected officials, enriched through our form of legalized corporate bribery, have no intention of halting the process.

The government, by ignoring the rights and needs of ordinary citizens, is jeopardizing its legitimacy. This is dangerous. When a citizenry no longer feels that it can find justice within the organs of power, when it feels that the organs of power are the enemies of freedom and economic advancement, it makes war on those organs. Those of us who are condemned as radicals, idealists and dreamers call for basic reforms that, if enacted, will make peaceful reform possible. But corporate capitalists, now unchecked by state power and dismissive of the popular will, do not see the fires they are igniting. The Supreme Court ruling on our challenge is one more signpost on the road to dystopia.

It is capitalism, not government, that is the problem. The fusion of corporate and state power means that government is broken. It is little more than a protection racket for Wall Street. And it is our job to wrest government back. This will come only through the building of mass movements.
“It is futile to be ‘anti-Fascist’ while attempting to preserve capitalism,” George Orwell wrote. “Fascism after all is only a development of capitalism, and the mildest democracy, so-called, is liable to turn into Fascism.”

Our corporate masters will not of their own volition curb their appetite for profits. Human misery and the deadly assault on the ecosystem are good for business. These masters have set in place laws that, when we rise up — and they expect us to rise up — will permit the state to herd us like sheep into military detention camps. Section 1021(b)(2) is but one piece of the legal tyranny now in place to ensure total corporate control.

The corporate state also oversees the most pervasive security and surveillance apparatus in human history. It can order the assassination of U.S. citizens. It has abolished habeas corpus. It uses secret evidence to imprison dissidents, such as the Palestinian academic Mazen Al-Najjar. It employs the Espionage Act to criminalize those who expose abuses of power.

A ruling elite that accrues for itself this kind of total power, history has shown, eventually uses it.

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, writes a regular column for Truthdig every Monday. Hedges also wrote 12 books, including the New York Times bestseller “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012)," which he co-authored with the cartoonist Joe Sacco. Hedges's most recent book is "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle."

 

[Skarekrow]

The College Scam Will Ruin Our Youth & This Country

The image below is a metaphorical representation of the United State’s higher learning agenda.
​

At the head we have universities, corporations, businesses, financial ventures, and other individuals who control the colleges of the United States. Their mission is to lure students into their jaws and bite down. From there, they raise tuition prices, trick students into accepting loans, tack on enormous interest rates, and feed on the students for all they’re worth.

At the end of the day, their haul is over a trillion dollars! Quite a profit.The tail end being devoured represents the generation of young adults who are graduating high school and starting their lives. They don’t see just how broken and backwards of a system they are about to commit 4+ years of their lives towards, and what kind of an awful state it will leave them in thereafter.Make no mistake, the job market is recovering from the devastating 2008 recession, but the caliber of jobs that are returning are largely not in specialized, well-paying fields.

They are low-skill, grunt-labor jobs that don’t always require a college degree, (except for formality sake, in some cases.) That means many of the degrees which universities encourage students to pursue are in fact worthless, as it will do nothing but open the doors for even higher learning, sucking them further down the spiral. And that’s about it. Grad students are not the kings of the suckers, in fact most are pursuing excellent paths that will enrich us all.

But some are there because they got a degree and realized the only thing they can do with it is to turn it into a masters and hope it comes to fruition.I had a plan when I graduated Edina High School in 2007. I was going to major in psychology, then go to law school and become an attorney, just like my grandfather. But during my time at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Campus, I came to discover the field of psychology is one giant guessing game of theories and inferences with very little concrete facts.

It’s job market opportunities are bleak at best, even for law school. It was at this time I started writing screenplays. Before I knew it, I was casting aside school work to polish my spec scripts (scripts you write for no pay with the intention of selling later). By the time I realized I wanted nothing more than to be a screenwriter, it was too late- I had already vested 2 1/2 years in school at the University of Minnesota. I could finish it out, or drop everything, transfer to UCLA, rack up 6 figures in debt, and hope it all paid off.

Luckily screenwriting is not a field that requires a college degree. It requires talent. It requires you to be a relentlessly creative writer and have a connection of some sort (whether you forge it yourself or you know someone) to get into the film industry. At this point, I began to see college as a waste of my time, but I had so much time already invested in it, I decided to just pick a major that interested me, Japanese Studies. (I also predicted Hollywood is eventually going to turn to Japanese cartoons for big-screen adaptation material, so my major was not
completely irrelevant.

)

Today I write and produce with my company, Stone Arch Entertainment. I work closely on music videos, commercials, andfilms with my long time high school friend Tomas Aksamit of Future Frame Productions. Tomas is a director, cinematographer, editor, writer, and a producer who did not go to film school. Instead, he bought all the books a UCLA film class would have its students read and taught himself everything.

He invested his college fund money into $50,000+ worth of film equipment. Because of this, the advantage he and I now have with our productions is unbelievable. He’s glad he never went to college, and frankly, I find that the most valuable things I learned at college were outside the classroom. It goes to show college is not this grandiose pre-requirement to success that society cracks it up to be. The old adage used to be go to college, get a good job, start a successful life.

That is not the case any more. In regards to film school, a degree will most likely not land you a job. It will land you an internship, which you suffer through for years before you have a job. I find Tomas’s method to be an ingenious short cut to anyone considering a career in the film industry.I graduated from the University of Minnesota in December 2012. In my home state, 70% of students graduate college with an average debt of $31,000, (and I’m right there in that statistic).

From there, graduates are expected to get jobs and pay off their debts, or to go further down the spiral and continue on to grad school. No matter what they do, their student debt suffers an interest hike that is similar to a mafia shake down. The Great Lakes Borrower Service (the overseers of student debt in my region) are nice enough to work out repayment plans, but are curt to remind you the hole is only getting deeper. By delaying my repayment process a year, I incurred more than $2,500 of additional debt! As it stands, I have until next year to pay back my loans before they incur serious interest and, from there, could literally ruin my life. I suspect I am not alone.

Student loans are disgustingly easy to get. You can’t walk down a college campus without finding someone peddling or advocating loans. Once you get one, you’re trapped. They don’t just cover your books, they give you whatever dollar amount you request, up to a maximum figure sometimes north of $20,000. They pay your tuition and send you a check for the difference. So if you think “I’m in college, I’m strapped for cash, and I don’t really have time to hold down a job,” you will instead get a loan and then find yourself flushed with cash.

The check comes with a mammoth 2000+ page small print book of all the rules which they expect you to read. In the fine print in the middle, I’m sure it says “you’re screwed, sucker.”College prices are also skyrocketing out of control. When did the educational backbone of higher learning in this country become solely about money? When I first started at the University of Minnesota in the fall of 2007, tuition was roughly $5,000 per semester for in-state students. When I graduated, it was pushing close to $10,000.

That’s a 20% increase per year. It’s shocking to think a small collect interest group cares more about making money for themselves than for enriching the entire generation of American youngsters interested in pursing higher education. It seems they’ve not bothered to think about the consequences of what they are doing for future generations, and for the American college system as a whole.And then there are the textbooks.

I remember when I would discover that my class had a required hardback textbook, I would literally swear with anger. It meant that instead of paying $40 for a book, I’d be paying $140 or more. To add insult to injury, most buyback programs are a joke in themselves. For that very textbook, I’d be lucky to see 20% of my investment back, even if I kept the book in flawless condition. In fact, a number of books would be outdated by the end of the same semester (in Psychology especially.)

Each semester, I’d buy between 10 and 20 textbooks and sometimes spend thousands. I imagine roughly $10,000 of my student debt is from overpriced textbooks. Now, most universities do offer rental services, charging a fraction of what the purchase price would be, but often times they do not stock every textbook for rent. I can honestly say there are some classes I chose not to take simply because I didn’t feel the need to spend $1,000 or more on the books.

A learning curriculum should not be compromised in favor of profit.A small group is bleeding an entire generation dry to get rich off of it, while simultaneously implement a damning system that will haunt the younger generation for years to come. Meanwhile, all across the globe in Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia, college prices are under control and the government often will pay for it. The only way an American can get this kind of benefit is if they volunteer their bodies and lives to the military.

Given our track record, the military is not exactly the safest organization to be in right now. To be fair, there are scholarships available, but they are far and few between.So what happens to the future of college when prices become so expensive, people cannot afford to go at all?

To a degree, it’s already happening now.

But further down the line, as all the other countries pass the United State’s position of student advancement, the United States will be the one who bares the damage. If we want to promote higher learning and the educational advancement of our younger generations, we need to stop thinking with dollar signs in our eyes and start thinking in regards to practicality and enriching the youth.

An entire generation right now is incurring record debt with record interest rates, and we have yet to see the consequences. One only hopes that despite this dire outcome, a realistic solution is reached before cataclysmic damage can be inflicted —The head eating the tail will finish its meal and kill the whole body.

Sources:
http://projectonstudentdebt.org/state_by_state-data.php
http://www.mrconservative.com/2013/...that-show-a-college-education-is-just-a-scam/
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/dear-class-of-13-youve-been-scammed-2013-05-17
http://www.rollingstone.com/politic...ung-america-the-college-loan-scandal-20130815
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQpodOX4-7Q
http://www.forbes.com/sites/special...s-crippling-students-parents-and-the-economy/

 

[Skarekrow]

The Animated Short Film That Explains The Truth About Money​

In 2011, Tad Lumpkin and Harold Uhl teamed up to create and release an animated short film entitled ‘The Collapse of the American Dream.’
The film follows the story of Pile, an average american citizen hoping to achieve the widely sought-after American Dream that so many of us to this day still strive for. Since it’s release, the film has received mixed reviews and feelings from its viewers.

Most seem to agree and find great value in the educational basis behind the first half, as the film does effectively explain a great deal of the history and creation of the monetary system we still depend on to this day. The second half however drifts a little deeper down the rabbit hole and as a result has received the ‘conspiracy’ label from a great number of its viewers and critics.Check out the film for yourself to see what does and does not resonate with you…

(WARNING: The film contains a bit of minor coarse language and some mature subject matter that may be frightening for children)

[video=youtube;mII9NZ8MMVM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mII9NZ8MMVM[/video]

In my opinion, the short effectively combines comedy with information to deliver an educationally entertaining experience from start to finish. Even if only the first half resonated as true to you, it is a simple tool to help us all better understand the widely misunderstood monetary and banking system.

Another really enjoyable element was the number of classic (Back to the Future) and modern film (300) references that were made, making the already impressive animation even more entertaining.

The one other detail I would like to comment on is the importance of receiving the message shared in this film as an awareness piece and not a trigger of anger or fear. As the great thinker Albert Einstein infamously said:

You can’t solve problems with the same level of consciousness that created them.


​

Use this information as the basis to looking at the monetary system differently, even let it be the starting point for further research. The American Dream may seem like the ultimate provider of peace and happiness, but is it really?

And even more so is it even attainable in the system that we are pushed to strive for it within?

 

[Average]

Thens whos gonna replace them...us lot. INFJ's.

 

[Skarekrow]

Thens whos gonna replace them...us lot. INFJ's.

Are you asking who is going to run things once we throw the trash out of Washington and close the income gap to a reasonable level?

 

[muir]

George Soros is dumping his shares in the major banks

This is likely a sign that there is a major shake up on the horizon

 

[Average]

Are you asking who is going to run things once we throw the trash out of Washington and close the income gap to a reasonable level?

No i mean disposable talk out your butt cheeks if you having got what i got.

 

[Lark]

Anyone noticed one, maybe two or three accounts similar to this one which if they're not possible alcoholics are sick in some shape or form, sort of polluting things arent they?

 

[Skarekrow]

No i mean disposable talk out your butt cheeks if you having got what i got.

It isn’t about jealousy…I can explain further if you would like.

 

[Skarekrow]

Anyone noticed one, maybe two or three accounts similar to this one which if they're not possible alcoholics are sick in some shape or form, sort of polluting things arent they?

Please do elaborate...

 

[Skarekrow]

Robert Reich: American Capitalism is Broken


Why the vast majority of Europeans and Canadians live longer, happier lives.

For years Americans have assumed that our hard-charging capitalism is better than the soft-hearted version found in Canada and Europe. American capitalism might be a bit crueler but it generates faster growth and higher living standards overall. Canada’s and Europe’s “welfare-state socialism” is doomed.

It was a questionable assumption to begin with, relying to some extent on our collective amnesia about the first three decades after World War II, when tax rates on top incomes in the U.S. never fell below 70 percent, a larger portion of our economy was invested in education than before or since, over a third of our private-sector workers were unionized, we came up with Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor, and built the biggest infrastructure project in history, known as the interstate highway system.

But then came America’s big U-turn, when we deregulated, de-unionized, lowered taxes on the top, ended welfare, and stopped investing as much of the economy in education and infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Canada and Europe continued on as before. Soviet communism went bust, and many of us assumed European and Canadian “socialism” would as well.
That’s why recent data from the Luxembourg Income Study Database is so shocking.

The fact is, we’re falling behind. While median per capita income in the United States has stagnated since 2000, it’s up significantly in Canada and Northern Europe. Their typical worker’s income is now higher than ours, and their disposable income — after taxes — higher still.

It’s difficult to make exact comparisons of income across national borders because real purchasing power is hard to measure. But even if we assume Canadians and the citizens of several European nations have simply drawn even with the American middle class, they’re doing better in many other ways.

Most of them get free health care and subsidized child care. And if they lose their jobs, they get far more generous unemployment benefits than we do. (In fact, right now 75 percent of jobless Americans lack any unemployment benefits.)

If you think we make up for it by working less and getting paid more on an hourly basis, think again. There, at least three weeks paid vacation as the norm, along with paid sick leave, and paid parental leave.

We’re working an average of 4.6 percent more hours more than the typical Canadian worker, 21 percent more than the typical French worker, and a whopping 28 percent more than your typical German worker, according to data compiled by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.

But at least Americans are more satisfied, aren’t we? Not really. According to opinion surveys and interviews, Canadians and Northern Europeans are.

They also live longer, their rate of infant mortality is lower, and women in these countries are far less likely to die as result of complications in pregnancy or childbirth.

But at least we’re the land of more equal opportunity, right?
Wrong.
Their poor kids have a better chance of getting ahead. While 42 percent of American kids born into poor families remain poor through their adult lives, only 30 percent of Britain’s poor kids remain impoverished — and even smaller percentages in other rich countries.

Yes, the American economy continues to grow faster than the economies of Canada and Europe. But faster growth hasn’t translated into higher living standards for most Americans.
Almost all our economic gains have been going to the top — into corporate profits and the stock market (more than a third of whose value is owned by the richest 1 percent). And into executive pay (European CEOs take home far less than their American counterparts).

America’s rich also pay much lower taxes than do the rich in Canada and Europe.

But surely Europe can’t go on like this. You hear it all the time: They can no longer afford their welfare state.

That depends on what’s meant by “welfare state.” If high-quality education is included, we’d do well to emulate them. Americans between the ages of 16 and 24 rank near the bottomamong rich countries in literacy and numeracy. That spells trouble for the U.S. economy in the future.

They’re also doing more workforce training, and doing it better, than we are. The result is more skilled workers.

Universal health care is another part of their “welfare state” that saves them money because healthier workers are more productive.

So let’s put ideology aside. The practical choice isn’t between capitalism and “welfare-state socialism.” It’s between a system that’s working for a few at the top, or one that’s working for just about everyone.

Which would you prefer?

Robert B. Reich has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He also served on President Obama's transition advisory board. His latest book is "Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future." His homepage is www.robertreich.org.

 

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It isn’t about jealousy…I can explain further if you would like.

Well, jealous is contagious...i see something on TED about it...besides what makes you feel those people right now dont deserve to be up there...are they vile and greedy?