LinkBlog: social+issues

Sara Kruzan was 11 years old, a middle school student from Riverside, Calif., when she met a man -- he called himself GG -- who was almost three times her age. GG took her under his wing; he would buy her gifts, take her and her friends rollerskating. "He was like a father figure," she recalls. Despite suffering severe bouts of depression as a child, until then, Kruzan was a good student, an "overachiever" in her words. But her mother was abusive and addicted to drugs; as for her father, she had only met him a couple of times. So, more and more, GG filled in. "GG was there -- sometimes," she said. "He would talk to me and take me out and give me all these lavish gifts and do all these things for me …" Before long, he started talking to her about sex, giving her his expert advice on what men were really like and telling her that she didn't "need to give it up for free." Unbeknownst to her, GG was grooming Kruzan to be a prostitute. When she was 13, he raped her. "He uses his manhood to hurt," Kruzan recalls, "Like, break you in. I guess." Kruzan worked for GG as a prostitute for three years. The hours were 6 p.m. until 5:30 or 6 in the morning. She and "the other girls" would come back and hand over their earnings to him. "He was, like, married to all of us I guess," she says. " … Everything was his." After years of prostitution and sexual abuse, when she was 16, Kruzan snapped: She killed GG, was arrested and convicted of first-degree murder. Despite attempts by her lawyer to have her sentenced as a juvenile, the judge described her crime as "well thought-out" and sentenced her to life without parole. "My judge told me that I lacked moral scruples," she recalls, a term she did not know the meaning of.

From 1998 - 2007, financial and banking companies "spent $1.7 billion on federal campaign contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists." In 1999, Glass-Steagall was repealed, the landmark 1933 law that curbed speculation and separated commercial from investment banks and insurance companies. In January 2000, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act legitimized swap agreements and other hybrid instruments, at the core of today's problems by preventing regulatory oversight of derivatives and leveraging, thus letting Wall Street legally pillage and speculate, so they did. The result was a financial coup d'etat "cement(ing) the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders" who choose candidates, control elections, weaken financial regulations, and run the country for their own self-interest. As a result, Washington today is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Wall Street financial giants. What they want, they get, no questions asked.

I would like to sell you some hunger insurance. Are you insured against hunger? Perhaps you should be! Without this coverage, you may find it impossible to continue to afford feeding yourself and your family. With this coverage, not only will you be assured of continuing to get at least some food, but so will I. In fact, thanks to this plan, I will get to eat very, very well indeed.

The system had many decades to work, but widespread apathy and low quality of work paralyzed the healthcare system. In the depths of the socialist experiment, healthcare institutions in Russia were at least a hundred years behind the average US level. Moreover, the filth, odors, cats roaming the halls, drunken medical personnel, and absence of soap and cleaning supplies added to an overall impression of hopelessness and frustration that paralyzed the system. According to official Russian estimates, 78 percent of all AIDS victims in Russia contracted the virus through dirty needles or HIV-tainted blood in the state-run hospitals.

Technology is a double-edged sword, the cliche goes. It can save and even extend your life, but it can also kill you in new and unpredictable ways. In the several years since the Arizona-based Taser International has deployed its terminologically challenging Electronic Control Devices (ECDs), colloquially known as stun guns or simply tasers, what started out as a midrange law enforcement weapon has turned into a surreal nightmare that has gone viral from streets to screens. It's now to the point that only a hyperreal comedian like Stephen Colbert can make sense of it.

“After decades of stability in the post-war period, the top decile share has increased dramatically over the last twenty-five years and has now regained its pre-war level,” Saez writes. “Indeed, the top decile share in 2007 is equal to 49.7 percent, a level higher than any other year since [records began in] 1917 and even surpasses 1928, the peak of stock market bubble in the ‘roaring’ 1920s.” By comparison, during most of the 1970s the top 10 percent earned around 33 percent of all the income earned in the United States. The contrast is even starker for the super-rich. The top 0.01 percent of earners in the US are now taking home six percent of all the income, higher than the 1920s peak of five percent, and a whopping six-fold increase since the start of the Reagan administration, when the top 0.01 percent earned one percent of all the income.

In Los Angeles, the fine for truancy is $250; in Dallas, it can be as much as $500 — crushing amounts for people living near the poverty level. According to the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, an advocacy group, 12,000 students were ticketed for truancy in 2008. Why does the Bus Riders Union care? Because it estimates that 80 percent of the “truants,” especially those who are black or Latino, are merely late for school, thanks to the way that over-filled buses whiz by them without stopping. I met people in Los Angeles who told me they keep their children home if there’s the slightest chance of their being late. It’s an ingenious anti-truancy policy that discourages parents from sending their youngsters to school. The pattern is to curtail financing for services that might help the poor while ramping up law enforcement: starve school and public transportation budgets, then make truancy illegal. Shut down public housing, then make it a crime to be homeless. Be sure to harass street vendors when there are few other opportunities for employment. The experience of the poor, and especially poor minorities, comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks. And if you should make the mistake of trying to escape via a brief marijuana-induced high, it’s “gotcha” all over again, because that of course is illegal too. One result is our staggering level of incarceration, the highest in the world. Today the same number of Americans — 2.3 million — reside in prison as in public housing.

As the area's economy worsens --unemployment was over 16% in July -- food stamp applications and pantry visits have surged. Detroiters have responded to this crisis. Huge amounts of vacant land has led to a resurgence in urban farming. Volunteers at local food pantries have also increased. But the food crunch is intensifying, and spreading to people not used to dealing with hunger. As middle class workers lose their jobs, the same folks that used to donate to soup kitchens and pantries have become their fastest growing set of recipients.

Well then, if we have these essential elements of truth and suffering, why is there still no large, forceful, coherent, and well organized body of popular grassroots resistance in the US? The main reason is simply that the requisite deep suffering and penetrating hard truths are not yet sufficiently widespread. Another reason is the extensive dumbing down of our society, along with the non-stop lies and propaganda spoon fed us daily by mainstream corporate media. Also there’s the ever present fear created by our government, using both rhetoric and legislation designed to consistently reinforce the clear threat so plainly put to us in the wake of 9-11 by George W. Bush: “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.” In any case, with our Bush initiated upward spiraling national debt, exploding unemployment, and massive war related economic hemorrhaging, all continuing unabated under Obama and our wholly owned Congress, the furtherance of expanded suffering is a foregone conclusion. It will be left to the small but growing numbers of would-be resisters and truth-tellers (citizens Big Brother will vilify as home-grown terrorists) to advance the spread of truth.

Prostitutes are considered more trustworthy in China than government officials and scientists, a recent survey of more than 3,000 respondents showed.

My shock became anger as it became clear that none of these people had to die, that no one had to be hurt. This accident was about as predictable as the setting sun. The wreckage by my house is not an accident site. It is a crime scene. And it happened for one reason: the twisted policies of the underfunded Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority.

I'm not a prude by any stretch of the imagination but when a mainstream-Americana company like Burger King chooses to put such a degrading image of women out there as a way to peddle their junk food to the public, I feel the need to say something. They have the right to be tasteless and sexist... And I have the right to tell them they will not see a dime of my money as long as they are using these types vulgar images and tactics in their advertising.

But this new form of ersatz capitalism, in which losses are socialised and profits privatised, is doomed to failure. Incentives are distorted. There is no market discipline. The too-big-to-be-restructured banks know that they can gamble with impunity – and, with the Federal Reserve making funds available at near-zero interest rates, there are ample funds to do so. Some have called this new economic regime "socialism with American characteristics". But socialism is concerned about ordinary individuals. By contrast, the US has provided little help for the millions of Americans who are losing their homes. Workers who lose their jobs receive only 39 weeks of limited unemployment benefits, and are then left on their own. And, when they lose their jobs, most lose their health insurance too. America has expanded its corporate safety net in unprecedented ways, from commercial banks to investment banks, then to insurance and now to cars, with no end in sight. In truth, this is not socialism, but an extension of longstanding corporate welfarism. The rich and powerful turn to the government to help them whenever they can, while needy individuals get little social protection.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens are homeless. But instead of allowing them to find shelter in abandoned buildings we destroy the buildings. The accepted excuse is safety and health concerns. Is facing the elements safer? Try that out one fine Michigan winter...

The people of the Detroit Metropolitan region got a glimpse of the ruined block a few months ago when the police convened a press conference from the blood-stained porch of 654 Robinwood claiming they had rounded up 61 outlaws including the killer who assassinated the dope man at that address in broad daylight. And then like quicksilver, the police and the press slipped away. The six families remain. Trapped. "Do I live in Hell? Yes I do and no I don't," said Jerry Williams, who lives at 666 Robinwood and spoke through a steel gate dressed in a bathrobe and dirty socks. "It would be Hell if I was dead, but I ain't. So that just makes the place ugly. The most ugly thing that human beings can create."

My husband is a retired college professor, and what the teaching profession lacks in salary it often makes up for with generous benefits. His health insurance would cover most of the emergency costs related to the fall -- the surgeries, the hospitalization, the drugs. But in the astronomical sums the cost of medical care often entails, "most" is not a reassuring word. Months later, as his discharge from the hospital drew near, I sat in my living room looking at the bills piling up on the table. The co-pays, uncovered care and other costs had already reached $8,000, and we had virtually nothing left.

After Citibank becomes nationalized, expect to see commercials like this.

Volunteer organizations such as the Peace Corps and Teach for America say the floundering economy and President Obama's call for service have led to a major increase in applications. Teach for America received a record 14,000 applications by November, an almost 50 percent increase over the previous year. And Peace Corps applications rose 16 percent from fiscal 2007 to 2008.

Chris and Georgia Frankel have no idea what it must be like to live alone as a married couple. They started out their life together staying with relatives and later friends. Those early years proved to be good training because their house in Albuquerque, New Mexico, now has 12 people calling it home. In addition to their three daughters, ages 3, 6 and 17, the couple shares their space with five adults and two teens. The family started taking in people before the economy soured, and now they say they are weathering the downturn better than some, in part because of their unconventional living arrangement.

In the winter of our economic discontent, women now hold more than 49 percent of jobs on the nation’s payrolls. If we cross the 50 percent line—hold the applause—it will be because men are losing their jobs even faster than women. This dubious equality is in large part an ongoing tale of two economies. Men tend to work in manufacturing and construction, areas that were the hardest and first hit. Women tend to work in jobs such as health care and education that haven’t (yet) been as affected. In the past year, eight out of 10 pink slips went to men. The unemployment rate for women is bad enough at 6.2 percent, up 2 percentage points since 2007. But the unemployment rate for men is 7.6 percent, up three points. Add to that the fact that more men stop looking for jobs. You not only have a near-equal number of women in the work force, you have a lot of women in formerly two-earner families who’ve become the breadwinners. Breadwinners? Or should I say crustwinners. The other dubious part of this “equality” for families is that even if women fill half of the payroll jobs, they don’t bring home half the paychecks. They still earn only 78 cents for every male dollar. In two-worker households, husbands earn close to two-thirds of the income and usually hold the job with health insurance.

The spectacle of bankers continuing to award themselves bonuses while taking taxpayer support is feeding an extraordinary public rage and a fierce sense of injustice. With 40,000 people losing their jobs each month, it is a recipe for trouble, come the traditional rioting months of the summer.

Like West, Kevin Cain, 44, has also paused his search for romance. The biotechnology marketer has been out of work for a year and has been actively looking for jobs since April. He's now doing part-time catering work to help cover his $3,000 mortgage in Hingham, earning a tenth of what he once made. When he considers what it would cost to take a woman on a date he thinks: "That's my electric bill."

The referendum's most vocal supporter, city Councilman Eric Crafton collected enough signatures to get the "English First" charter amendment on the ballot because he fears government won't run smoothly if his hometown mirrors New York City, where services are offered in Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Korean, Italian, and French Creole. Crafton has tried to eliminate the city's language translation services since 2006, but the mayor vetoed a similar measure in 2007. "A community that speaks a common language is unified and efficient," said Crafton, who is fluent in Japanese and married to a native of Japan.

Boyes notes that Iceland, Bulgaria, and Latvia are not natural protest cultures and that something is worryingly amiss. He cites the warning of respected LSE economist Robert Wade, who recently told a protest meeting in Reykjavik that the world was approaching a tipping point and that March to May would be marked by widespread global civil unrest. “It will be caused by the rise of general awareness throughout Europe, America and Asia that hundreds of millions of people in rich and poor countries are experiencing rapidly falling consumption standards; that the crisis is getting worse not better; and that it has escaped the control of public authorities, national and international,” said Wade.

With nearly one in six homes worth less than the mortgage owed on it, according to Moody’s Economy.com, divorce lawyers and financial advisers around the country say the logistics of divorce have been turned around. “We used to fight about who gets to keep the house,” said Gary Nickelson, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. “Now we fight about who gets stuck with the dead cow.”

The US has committed nearly three trillion dollars to the financial bailout so far. The Federal Reserve has made more than $2 trillion in emergency loans and another $700 billion has been pledged through Congressional action. Much more money is coming. Things better for your community? I didn't think so. Welcome to Katrina world. Despite pledges of a hundred billion dollars, we are still in deep pain along the Gulf Coast. What happened? Unless citizens are vigilant and demanding, the entire US will be subjected to the same forces that swept through the Gulf Coast after Katrina - spending huge amounts of money and leaving a second disaster behind.

"Nobody really wants to talk about consumption, itself, as the issue," says Michael Maniates, co-editor of Confronting Consumption, a scholarly dissection of the origin and politics of America's consumer society. "We talk about ways to save, ways to conserve, ways to be more efficient, but when we do, we don't get at the heart of the problem: Our demand is simply too high." Only when the question is placed directly on the table, he says, will government consider measures to reduce consumption. And only then, he says, will Americans confront the fundamental assumptions of economic policy that underlie their consumer behavior.

Home values have plummeted to levels not seen in 1/2 a century… and the 21% unemployment has in some cases been projected to double within 12 months if the auto industry totally collapses. To make matters even worse, Detroit has superseded New Orleans as the “worst city” in America…. but New Orleans had a Hurricane they could assign blame to… Detroit has no such natural disaster crutch.

Some 100,000 current and former hourly employees of Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores in Minnesota – and the state of Minnesota itself – will share up to $54 million from the giant retailer under a settlement announced Tuesday. The agreement is the final stage in a wage-and-hour class action suit that put a spotlight on Wal-Mart's practice of having employees work through their rest and meal breaks. In July, Dakota County District Judge Robert King ruled the company committed more than 2 million violations of the Minnesota Fair Labor Standards Act and ordered it to pay $6.5 million in back pay.

The swelling numbers waiting outside homeless shelters and food pantries around the country, many of them elderly or single women with children, have grown by at least 30 percent since the summer. General welfare recipients receive $140 a month in cash and another $140 in food stamps. This is all many in Trenton and other impoverished areas have to live on. Trenton, a former manufacturing center that has a 20 percent unemployment rate and a median income of $33,000, is a window into our current unraveling. The financial meltdown is plunging the working class and the poor into levels of destitution unseen since the Depression. And as the government squanders taxpayer money in fruitless schemes to prop up insolvent banks and investment houses, citizens are callously thrown onto the street without work, a place to live or enough food.

The study found that no more than 3% of Americans remember “petition” among the First Amendment’s five basic freedoms. However, freedom of speech was remembered by the majority of respondents - 56%. The others freedoms enshrined in the constitution appeared to have made little impression: freedom of religion was named by 15%; the same percentage remembered press freedom as a constitutional right while just 14% knew they had a right to assembly.

Those who continue to assert, “It can’t happen here,” only need to look at the scenes in Reykjavik to realize that similar events could unfold across the U.S., where the reaction of militarized riot cops and even the military itself may be a little more heavy handed to say the least. With top Russian analysts predicting the breakup of the U.S. into different parts, allied with people like deadly accurate trends forecaster Gerald Celente warning of food riots and tax rebellions, the scenes in Reykjavik may be amplified in the U.S. should a significant portion of the public wake up to the monumental fraud of the bailout and begin to feel the impact of its consequences as we enter 2009.

After the 2000 election made the United States look like something out of a Marx Brothers movie, former presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter co-chaired a National Election Commission. Their report concluded that the country has one of the most burdensome voter registration systems - and one of the lowest participation rates - in the developed world. Even with the Obama wave, voter turnout this year was only about 61 percent of registered voters. One simple change would solve several problems that have bedeviled recent national elections: universal voter registration. Under this plan, promoted by the watchdog Brennan Center for Justice and others, the government would be responsible for automatically registering citizens when they turn 18. This would eliminate sometimes sketchy private groups, such as ACORN, from the business of registering voters. It would substantially reduce registration challenges - and lawsuits - that can disenfranchise voters. And, by capturing the 28 percent of Americans who are not now registered to vote, it would add almost 50 million voters to the rolls.

There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation's population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book. The illiterate rarely vote, and when they do vote they do so without the ability to make decisions based on textual information. American political campaigns, which have learned to speak in the comforting epistemology of images, eschew real ideas and policy for cheap slogans and reassuring personal narratives. Political propaganda now masquerades as ideology. Political campaigns have become an experience. They do not require cognitive or self-critical skills. They are designed to ignite pseudo-religious feelings of euphoria, empowerment and collective salvation. Campaigns that succeed are carefully constructed psychological instruments that manipulate fickle public moods, emotions and impulses, many of which are subliminal. They create a public ecstasy that annuls individuality and fosters a state of mindlessness. They thrust us into an eternal present. They cater to a nation that now lives in a state of permanent amnesia. It is style and story, not content or history or reality, which inform our politics and our lives. We prefer happy illusions. And it works because so much of the American electorate, including those who should know better, blindly cast ballots for slogans, smiles, the cheerful family tableaux, narratives and the perceived sincerity and the attractiveness of candidates. We confuse how we feel with knowledge.

While Gov. Sonny Perdue took part in a ceremony Wednesday to honor veterans, Democrats criticized the state’s decision to close a Georgia War Veterans Home facility in Milledgeville to save money. Dale Parham, 67, a former U.S. Marine who lives at the home, told reporters after Wednesday’s ceremony that he doesn’t know where he’ll go when the domiciliary unit is closed Nov. 30. Neither do many of the 81 veterans who live in the facility. “A lot of them (the veterans) have been there 10, 15 years,” Parham said. “They don’t know what to do.”

The spectre of the Winter of Discontent threatened to return to haunt Labour last night after funeral directors revealed that the burial of 'hundreds' of bodies is being delayed for financial reasons. Undertakers hit by the credit crunch are refusing to carry out funerals until the Department for Work and Pensions has confirmed it will foot the bill. In a bleak new sign of the growing economic crisis, hard-up families are having to wait more than two months before receiving Government money for funerals.

Less than two weeks after Uncle Sam gave American International Group (AIG) an $85 billion loan - staving off financial collapse - execs from one of its insurance subsidiaries, AIG American General, gathered for a conference at the uber-swank St. Regis Monarch Beach Resort, billed as “California’s only Mobil Travel Guide Five-Star Resort,” where ocean-view rooms start at $565 a night and “world class luxury” is the rule.

The latest federal statistics indicate that nationally, participation in the low-income nutrition supplement program rose from 28.08 million in April to 29.05 million in July, the last month for which the figures are available, a department spokeswoman said.

The number of people crammed in has overtaken those in Holland, long the most densely-populated major nation on the continent. A count released to MPs showed England now has 395 people per square kilometre. Crowding has increased because of high immigration into England while the Dutch population has fallen or remained steady.

Women in trouble are there through no fault of their own, they need understanding and nurturing. Men in trouble have only themselves to blame, might be dangerous and should be contained and controlled. It never seems to occur to the writers of these articles that their double standards have a whiff of self-fulfilling prophecy about them. That a woman knows society will react sympathetically to her problems and so is less likely to react with obvious destructiveness. That a man knows society doesn't give a damn, will spit on him when he lands in the gutter and so might react from rage. (Never mind the specious claim that women turn their troubles inward but men turn them outward. Then explain the fact that male suicide is several times more prevalent than female.)

The Third Court of Appeals, acting on a suit brought by lawyers on behalf of 38 mothers, said in a unanimous decision that the state did not have the evidence of ongoing sexual abuse necessary to justify the summary removal of the children and the separation from their mothers.

Human history proves that as soon as we are all slaves to a One-World Government, it is inevitable that this government will fall into the hands of another Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or Torquemada. No purported safeguards can prevent that from happening. Hitler was elected by the German people, and our own recent history proves that elections can be rigged by powerful individuals or agencies. Past genocidal monsters were stopped because the nations they ruled, however powerful, were only one out of many. Those other nations were then able to band together to stop the single monster, as was the case in World War II. What happens if a One-World Government falls into the hands of another Hitler? The people of the world would be no more able to stop a new Hitler than the people of Germany were able to stop the first one. Imagine the world today if Hitler had won WW II. That is the world which MUST sooner or later come to exist, cannot help but come to exist, under a One-World Government. That danger alone, of the creation of a one-world dictatorship waiting to be plucked as a prize by the most ruthless cutthroat the species can breed, is alone reason to abandon the suggestion of a One-World Government.

You or someone you know is having an affair. We know, it sounds surprising, shocking even, but apparently that is the case. Cookie Magazine and "AOL Body" did a survey on the subject and 30,000 people responded. As far as surveys go, that is a big number, and it's even bigger when you consider that their questions were aimed solely at married women with children. Yep, lots of mommies are getting action on the side.

In the big immigrant marches that swept the country on May Day in 2006 and 2007, one sign said it all: "We are Workers, not Criminals!" Often it was held in the calloused hands of men and women, who looked as though they'd just come from working in a factory, cleaning an office building or picking grapes. The sign stated an obvious truth. Millions of people have come to this country to work, not to break its laws. Some have come with visas, and others without them. But they are all contributors to the society they've found here, not people who mean it harm. Again this May Day, immigrant workers are filling the streets, making the same point.

Less industrialized countries have borne the brunt of the most severe effects of water commodification. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the corporate ownership of water has only aggravated an already dire situation-both in terms of compromising the democratic, innate rights of citizens and endangering the environment. For example, during the Fox Administration in Mexico, water privatization often left Mexican citizens — specifically the poorest sector of the population — deprived of water resources as well as a deteriorating infrastructure. By 2002, precisely a decade after the Mexican government constitutionalized the jurisdiction of foreign-based corporations over what formally had been municipal water services, 28 of the country’s 30 states had been affected by privatization practices; this represented roughly 70 percent of the nation’s water supply. Once President Fox had created the Program for the Modernization of Water Management Companies (PROMAGUA), an agenda geared towards the commodification of the nation’s water supplies, Mexican citizens began to feel the harsh consequences of private ownership of water — and at an exceedingly expensive price. During the 2004 World Water Forum in Kyoto, Japan, Maude Barlow, a highly regarded Canadian field expert in the subject of water privatization, described the actions of one very irate Mexican citizen in the midst of confronting a panel of executives and specialists in water policy:

Just how close are we to the homeless that we help, but hope like hell we never to have to live their lives? What happens to us, the USA, as a family? Will America become one huge tent city, manned by armed gunmen? Or a fighting, biting, screaming free for all-citizens running wild-dirty and hungry and ruthless? Let's hope the changes that come turn us back into a family-united and prepared. I shudder to think too much about the alternative.

Never has it been possible to divorce a woman, take her children, not let her see them, make her pay you to look after them for her, then, if she isn't able to, complain that she must not love her children and throw her in jail. The mere idea is transparently unjust. Yet, today that is exactly what custodial parents can do to non-custodial parents, under the full protection of the law. That almost always means what mothers can do to fathers. No one even seems to notice unless the mother doing it is a lesbian.

Most Atheists have the tendency to thumb their noses at Jesus, and then log onto World of Warcraft so they can pretend to be an orc for a couple of hours. They sneer at the Bible, but have no problem playing endless hours of vampire role playing games. The message is clear. Fantasies are OK as long as they include gratuitous violence and some sort of porn.

As the national and global food situation becomes economically precarious, there is real danger that the balance could be tipped, resulting in actual food shortages around the world. The U.S. dollar, which quantifies not only oil sales but also agricultural commodities, continues to fall against just about every other denomination of value. In the U.S., the result is increasing energy costs for farmers as they produce food, truckers to ship it, processors to process it, and retailers to sell it. In short, sharply higher prices at your grocery store. And food constitutes more than three times the 4 percent of household spending used for gasoline. For many around the world, the situation is already resulting in greater consequences than simply reapportioning their discretionary spending. The United Nations has said food prices are expected to remain high until 2010 at the earliest, which could fuel a “new hunger” around the world. Contrasted against the newly wealthy, the “newly hungry” are being plunged into poverty and hunger by sharply climbing prices for basic foods. In some cases, violence has resulted in places like Burkina Faso, Cameroon and Senegal.

As one writer put it: "It’s all smoke and mirrors. The financial system has decoupled from the productive elements of the economy and is now beginning to show disturbing signs of instability."

Little Girl: Mommy, why did Daddy go to jail today? Mother: Shh! Because he didn’t pay his child support.

Adding a single dissenter - just one other person who gives the correct answer, or even an incorrect answer that's different from the group's incorrect answer - reduces conformity very sharply, down to 5-10%.

I can barely imagine a hospital telling someone that is dying to go away because they refuse to treat them. That doesn't happen in Canada or any other country with universal healthcare. You can't deny someone life-saving surgery, it's unconscionable.

A 7-year-old-girl is being hailed as an "angel from heaven" and a hero for jumping in front of an enraged gunman, who pumped six bullets into the child as she used her body as a shield to save her mother's life. Alexis Goggins, a first-grader at Campbell Elementary School, is in stable condition at Children's Hospital in Detroit recovering from gunshot wounds to the eye, left temple, chin, cheek, chest and right arm. The girl's mother, Selietha Parker, 30, was shot in the left side of her head and her bicep by a former boyfriend, who police said was trying to kill Parker. . . . Police identified him as Calvin Tillie, 29, a four-time convicted felon whom Parker had dated for six months.

Soldiers who suffered appalling injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan were verbally abused as they swam in a public swimming pool. During a weekly rehabilitation class at a council leisure centre, 15 servicemen – including several who have lost limbs or suffered severe burns – were heckled and jeered by members of the public.

One does not have to be a member of a militia group to see that gun control only leaves people at the mercy of thugs and dictators. You can cling to the fantasy that gun control works, contrary to all reason and despite all evidence to the contrary, but it has been demonstrated time and again to be a universal failure. It is, frankly, foolish and immoral.

Our President is an ignorant, egotistical jackass and our country is in shambles. Sometimes, as we sit in cozy coffee shops sipping on our lattes, we rail against this fact. We consider things like the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq and we wonder how those things came to be. We wrinkle our brows and ask ourselves if the basic premise of democracy is that majority rules, how is it possible that Bush is still in office even though almost every single person in this country hates his guts? Then we shrug our shoulders, pay our bills, and continue to live our lives under the guise of supposed ‘freedom’ while our sons and daughters die in a war that none of us (You know, the majority) want to be fighting. Standing before that deer this morning, I think I figured out exactly how all of this happened. Americans have gone soft. We have become completely and totally dependent on our government. We don’t know how to take care of ourselves. We’re whining, puling, stupid, weak willed little children wearing big kid clothes. We don’t understand real hardship because our big, strong government has shielded from it. And while this might sound like a good thing at first glance, we need to consider that our government is corrupt. What they give with one hand, they take away with another. So as our basic rights are slowly being whittled away, we remain complacent because deep down, we know we lack the basic survival skills that would enable us to hack it on our own.

In Boulder, two days ago, a rosy-cheeked thirtysomething mother of two small children, in soft yoga velours, started to tear up when she said to me: "I want to take action but I am so scared. I look at my kids and I am scared. How do you deal with fear? Is it safer for them if I act or stay quiet? I don't want to get on a list." In D.C., before that, a beefy, handsome civil servant, a government department head -- probably a Republican -- confides in a lowered voice that he is scared to sign the new ID requirement for all government employees, that exposes all his most personal information to the State -- but he is scared not to sign it: "If I don't, I lose my job, my house. It's like the German National ID card," he said quietly. This morning in Denver I talked for almost an hour to a brave, much-decorated high-level military man who is not only on the watch list for his criticism of the administration -- his family is now on the list. His elderly mother is on the list. His teenage son is on the list. He has flown many dangerous combat missions over the course of his military career, but his voice cracks when he talks about the possibility that he is exposing his children to harassment. Jim Spencer, a former columnist for the Denver Post who has been critical of the Bush administration, told me today that I could use his name: he is on the watch list. An attorney contacts me to say that she told her colleagues at the Justice Department not to torture a detainee; she says she then faced a criminal investigation, a professional referral, saw her emails deleted -- and now she is on the watch list. I was told last night that a leader of Code Pink, the anti-war women's action group, was refused entry to Canada. I hear from a tech guy who works for the airlines -- again, probably a Republican -- that once you are on the list you never get off. Someone else says that his friend opened his luggage to find a letter from the TSA saying that they did not appreciate his reading material. Before I go into the security lines, I find myself editing my possessions. In New York's LaGuardia, I reluctantly found myself putting a hardcover copy of Tara McKelvey's excellent Monstering, an expose of CIA interrogation practices, in a garbage can before I get in the security line; it is based on classified information. This morning at my hotel, before going to the sirport, I threw away a very nice black T-shirt that said "We Will Not be Silenced" -- with an Arabic translation -- that someone had given me, along with a copy of poems written by detainees at Guantanamo.

Cambodia’s notorious Khmer Rouge regime swept to power in 1975. They emptied the capital city Phnom Penh of its inhabitants within days of their April 17 victory. Thirty-two years later, and thousands of Phnom Penh’s residents are again being forced out of the city, and dumped on empty land in abysmal refugee-camp conditions. But this time, they are not being evicted with the aim of creating a Marxist agrarian utopia, but in the name of development and private enterprise. After the Khmer Rouge lost power in 1979, Cambodians returned to their capital city in droves. Private property had been abolished under the radical communist regime, and ad hoc squatter communities sprang up all around the city as people occupied what vacant land or buildings they could find. The new government has passed a plethora of progressive laws since 1992, but nevertheless increasing numbers of Cambodians are finding that the land they’ve lived on for decades – and assumed was theirs – has been sold behind their backs. Internationally well-connected individuals are brokering the deals, and the Australian Government is one of the players.

That's a side issue though. The real point, which the CEOs and their usual defenders are strangely reticent about making, is that it's damn expensive to be rich, and extravagantly expensive to be super-rich. Before you start playing your air violins, consider the costs of maintaining up to five different homes, some of them up to 45,000 square feet in size, most with swimming pools, tennis courts, guest houses, and wine cellars requiring constant supervision. The poor whine about having no home at all, or maybe a two-bedroom apartment for a family of six. They should just think for one moment of the tribulations involved in running four or more mansions, each with its own full-time staff. There's the problem of getting between them, for example. A friend of mine, of very modest means himself, consults for a billionaire couple who commute between London and Los Angeles by private jet, with their dogs following in a second private jet.

Tim McGraw — the biggest contemporary country star — has a hit single with If You're Reading This, about a dead soldier's last letter home, and the Dixie Chicks, boycotted in 2003 after lead singer Natalie Maines told an audience in London: "We're ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas," won five Grammy Awards this year. The changing tone reflects a growing scepticism in heartlands that have disproportionately contributed the young soldiers who have been fighting and dying.Brian Hiatt, associate editor of Rolling Stone magazine, said: "Popular music is reflecting the culture, as it always does."

From the outset of the evening, the talk was of Walt and Mearsheimer. Richard Fox, the real estate mogul who supports the new pro-war group Freedom’s Watch, opened the discussion by referring to the book. "They have been getting a lot of press. A real problem: we Jews who represent a fraction of the population are in control. These two professors are not the first to teach antisemitism and they won't be the last."

They will howl like stuck pigs and no metaphor intended. The time has come for the millions of unsatisfied customers to say, “I want my money back. I want my country back and I want you OFF MY BACK. When you stop the machine… the money stops. Repeat after me, “When you stop the machine, the money stops.” “WHEN YOU STOP THE MACHINE, THE MONEY STOPS!” and then…

My interpretation of a psychopath is a person whose reptile brain has murdered their conscience. This is their first offense and it is against themselves. Some seem to have been born this way. Some are forged out of their environment at the hands of their parents and other forces. It’s my belief that they are predisposed in this direction. Many of us have suffered greatly but we don’t turn out like that. Often our suffering makes us into better people than we might have been. For some reason, at certain times, these psychopaths flower; the earth has the right chemical balance, there’s the right amount of sun and rain and so on and so forth. I’d blame materialism but that’s my take.

This was a city in America that was left to fend for itself after the largest natural disaster in U.S. history, with money tossed at it like it was a sidewalk drunk with a cup. It is part of America. You fail New Orleans, you fail the nation. And while Mayor Nagin and President Bush talk about people returning, Jean says, "We are moving...I'm tired."

"Boo hoo! My rights are being infringed!" Well, if you're advocating that anyone ELSE'S rights be infringed, serves you right! If you think it's just fine for the "legal" thugs to kick down doors, drag people away, and put them in cages, because they had a LEAF the politicians don't approve of, then when those same thugs rob and control YOU, don't whine about it. Or, to quote a far more eloquent expression of the same sentiment: "No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck." [Frederick Douglass]

Leopold Rosen measures the world by the pipe that connects him to his oxygen machine. He suffers from several chest complaints dating back to when he hid from the Nazis in a forest in Poland. The German government pays him compensation every month and he gets a small pension from Israel, but he can barely pay for both his drugs and his food. "I was born of the 5th of June, 1922. Do I have time to wait for help from the government? There are a lot of people in the same position. They don't have time to wait," he told Al Jazeera. Holocaust survivors have been trying to embarrass the Israeli government into action.

If you are going to deny the findings of the independent 9/11 research community then it is incumbent upon you to provide a detailed and verifiable counter argument. If you can not do this you are basically living in denial and even worse you might be supporting the very people who committed or permitted the atrocities of September 11th 2001. Don’t you think you owe it to yourself, to the victims of the event and to your nation to start taking a closer look at the events of 9/11 and at the people responsible for preventing it?

As Iraqi families continue to fall on hard times, some have been forced to make the most painful of decisions – selling their daughters. Abu Ahmed, a handicapped father of five who is himself a widower, sold his daughter Lina to an Iraqi man who came to Iraq to "shop" for sex workers. Abu Ahmed said he could not afford to buy food for his other children. He told Al Jazeera: "I'm sure that whatever she is, at least she is having food to eat. I have three other girls and a son and what they paid me for Lina is enough to raise the remaining ones."

"... And I go, “Well, you know what, I think it’s come out that, you know, these people had nothing to do with 9/11, there was no Iraqi on those planes. We can see around here there’s no Al Qaida, there’s no terrorist syndicates in Baghdad, or Iraq. Saddam had stamped ‘em out.” And I asked my buddies, “Well, you know, we’re here to find ‘weapons of mass destruction’.” And they laughed at me. And I said, “Well, you know, we’re here to ‘help the people.’” And they laughed at me. And I said, “What’s our mission? What’s our goal?”…They’re like, “All we’re trying to do is make it home alive…” Anderson describes the escalation of violence against unarmed civilians: “In April, they told us, “In a crowded area, if one person shoots at you, kill everybody.” Anderson explains the rationale from the officers, “They [members of the crowd of people] are letting them [the person or persons firing at the U.S. military] attack you. They’re no longer innocent if they’re there at the time of the crime…”

Then there's the study which concluded that one in five people are stalked in a two year period. Buried in the study itself (pdf), you'll find that the definition of stalking is so broad that one might wonder they didn't find the fraction to be larger, including, as it does, irate phone calls and email flames and possibly finding yourself on the same street as someone you don't much like. One wonders if a better conclusion is that one in five people experience significant episodes of paranoia over a two year period. But that wouldn't suit the victim culture we live in, where we must extend the definition of victim as far as possible and then expect "the police and prosecutors to identify these cases before they take a deadly turn". Before you know it, a pointed finger is enough to have you tarred for stalking and carted off to jail as a potential murderer. Thoughtcrime, guys. It gets to the point that either you're a victim or a perpetrator, which would you rather be?

People often ask me why I bother amassing more wealth when I repeatedly claim I have everything I need. Generally, I shrug my shoulders or find some other way of avoiding the question. But the truth is, someday, I’d like to open up a pet rescue. Often, I have envisioned what it would be like. I would have many acres of lands with various heated/air conditioned buildings with their own fenced in yards. I would split the pets up based on their individual needs. For example, I’d have separate areas for feral cats, declawed cats, senior cats, aggressive dogs, submissive dogs and so on and so forth. My shelter would be no kill and no cage. Perhaps I could convince a few vets to volunteer their time for a good cause or maybe I’ll hire my own to work full time. Either way, I’d like to open up a shelter where anyone could bring injured or unwanted pets, no questions asked. And even if I couldn’t adopt them all out to loving homes, I could make sure they lived their lives in relative comfort…as opposed to dying on the street or rotting in cages at the local pound. This has always been a very vivid dream of mine.

So let's put this in perspective now. I got two Iraq tours, multiple kills, I picked up plenty of dead bodies, American bodies, enemy bodies. I killed an 8-year-old girl, which still haunts me to this day. I come back home. My wife finds somebody else. I'm sleeping on my brother's couch while she has the apartment, the kids, the car, everything that we worked on together. I work as a bail bondsman making $432 a week, which all goes to my brother. I have to fight just to see my boys because she's at the point where she thinks I don't deserve to see my kids because I haven't had help for my PTSD. She's scared I might do something stupid. And the VA won't help me out because of my other-than-honorable discharge. What else do you want to know?

During June 27th to July 1st, approximately 9,400 people from across the America, and beyond, gathered in Atlanta for the historic, first-ever United States Social Forum. Thanks to donations from some of our generous supporters, 911Truth.org was there, together with about 15 other 911Truth activists from Georgia, California, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Washington DC, and Maryland. We went with the idea we'd work to "convince" people to look at the need for a real investigation into the crimes of 9/11. After all, the various issues and causes represented by this diversity of People were predicated, to such a strong degree, upon the events of 9/11, and it made sense that if presented with the information, we'd win some allies. We were wrong. What we found, instead, was that nearly everyone we spoke with was already aware of at least some questions about 9/11 and agreed with us! The People, in spite of resistance we've heard from many of their organizational "leaders," are already with us.

In virtually every city in the country a cable company negotiates with the local government — in exchange for monopoly status — to offer its service to the people in that community. There’s so much wrong with this relationship that it’s hard to know where to begin.

Only 38% of a nationally representative sample of 1,017 American adults were able to correctly state that US invaded Iraq in 2003, while more than a third of the respondents incorrectly picked the year of the invasion was 2002, while 9% and 4% picked 2004 and 2005 respectively. Less than half of the respondents knew that approximately 3,500 American soldiers were killed since the beginning of the war, with 40% either underestimating the figure, or being ignorant of the number of US casualties in Iraq.

The Department of Defense recently announced that it was hiring additional mental health professionals to deal with the stream of traumatized vets returning from the occupation of Iraq. A widow of an earlier war warns that the effort may be too little and too late.

The tactic of imperial expansion as domestic diversion, begun in Cuba and the Philippines a century ago, has achieved its ultimate expression in the “War on Terror” and the over 130 countries where our military presence is felt. The cost to Americans is not just measured in our thousands of dead and wounded child soldiers, but in the persistent lack of national health care, decent schools, adequate housing, fair wages and a livable environment. Our dear old republic, the hope of a New World free of aristocracy and injustice, has now fallen so low into the muck of corrupt privilege and imperial pretension that it rivals the excesses of the worst European autocracies. Though we posses powers and riches undreamed of by the Sun King himself, as of the early 21st Century our rulers have done virtually nothing to raise the great mass of Americans out of ignorance and poverty, and much to ensure that they stay there.

Mark Dice and friends visit San Diego State University's job fair and find out that some students have forgot what year 9/11 happened.

According to the survey, 41 per cent of retired Britons named internet usage as one of their favourite pastimes. DIY and gardening were named by 39 per cent, hobbies by 36 per cent and travel and walking by 28 per cent. Four in 10 retired people said they were regular internet shoppers. The most popular online activity was emailing (84 per cent), followed by searching for information (83 per cent). The survey found that 45 per cent bought travel tickets online, 35 per cent used internet banks and 28 per cent surfed the internet for news.

Americans are asleep. They have tuned out and shut down to recent events because of the staggering amount of outrage and abuse by their government during the past half-dozen years. Even in the best of times, a large portion of the population pays little attention to world events. If you visit the outlying sections of the country and pick up a local newspaper, you might conclude that the readers of that gazette were only concerned about local events. An international incident, which ought to be of concern for everyone, is either given no attention at all or buried in a minor paragraph at the back of the paper. One wonders what kind of outrage would finally draw Americans into the streets as the citizens of Istanbul and Tel Aviv did earlier this week.

So there are a few thoughts from my new proletarian job (which I need, even though it makes me dread every morning… yippee, I get to do backbreaking work to pretty up places for rich people to live!!!). I’m way past too old for this; and thank goodness it’s raining today. But if these random ruminations can provoke a discussion or two, it may be worthwhile after all.

All across the United States, municipal water systems are being bought up by multinational corporations, turning one of our last remaining public commons and our most vital resource into a commodity.

The number of US households with a net worth of more than $5 million, excluding their primary residence, surged 23% to surpass one million for the first time in 2006, according to a survey released Tuesday. The Spectrem Group found that the number of US households with more than $5 million rose from 930,000 in 2005. In 1996, just 250,000 households were “super-rich.” Meanwhile, the number of Americans living below the poverty line reached a 10-year high in 2005, the latest year for which numbers are available, with 37 million Americans considered impoverished.

I think we crossed the line somewhere between 1984 and 1988, around the time we outlawed lawn darts and every mini van in America had a ‘baby-on-board’ sign. While lawn darts and baby on board signs may seem trivial, they were warning signs of a mass shift in American values – a shift away from freedom and liberty as predominant values to health and safety as predominant values. There will be no end to the loss of freedom if we believe being healthy and safe trumps all else. I believe there was day when most Americans accepted that life was risky. They accepted that bad things can happen to good people. They accepted that risk was an inherent part being free. They didn’t need a new law or government program every time something bad happened. It is sad to watch our freedom slowly disappear in front of our eyes with so few people taking action.

Gun free zones may be well intentioned, but good intentions that is not enough. It is an understandable desire to ban guns. After all, if you ban guns from an area, people can’t get shot, right? But time after time when these public shootings occur, they disproportionately take place in gun free zones. It is the law-abiding good citizens who would only use a gun for protection who obey these bans. Violating a gun free zone at a place such as a public university may mean expulsion or firing and arrest, real penalties for law-abiding citizens. But for someone intent on killing others, adding on these penalties for violating a gun free zone means little to someone who, if still alive, faces life in prison.

Police have arrested an activist for feeding the homeless in downtown Orlando, Florida. Eric Montanez, 21, of the radical antipoverty group Food Not Bombs, became the first person charged with violating a controversial law against feeding large groups of people in the city center, police said Thursday. Police collected a vial of the stew Montanez was serving as evidence. Critics consider the law just one more way the city is trying to hide rather than address its homelessness problem.

Cities are cracking down on charities that feed the homeless, adopting rules that restrict food giveaways to certain locations, require charities to get permits or limit the number of free meals they can provide. Orlando, Dallas, Las Vegas and Wilmington, N.C., began enforcing such laws last year. Some are being challenged.

Consider this: According to a 2006 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, African Americans make up an estimated 15% of drug users, but they account for 37% of those arrested on drug charges, 59% of those convicted and 74% of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. Or consider this: The U.S. has 260,000 people in state prisons on nonviolent drug charges; 183,200 (more than 70%) of them are black or Latino.

These are children increasingly raised by a single parent. Too often they are starved from the start — of adequate nutrition, adequate health care, adequate learning stimulants that are vital for young minds. They go to overcrowded schools stocked with inexperienced teachers. In school, they face discrimination in discipline and in being slated for special-ed courses. They are underrepresented in advanced-placement courses that are key for college. Some will overcome these odds and make it out. Most will not. They are headed toward jail, not toward Yale. Williams argues we have to change what we’re doing if we want to offer them any hope. The schools — even the schools that he leads — are failing them. “Their No. 1 problem,” he says, “is that they cannot read. If you can’t read, you cannot succeed.”

More than 18,000 adults in the USA die each year because they are uninsured and can't get proper health care, researchers report in a landmark study released Tuesday.

Here I am, give me a high five and a Starbucks. And it's nobody's fault but ours, the boomers. We're the ones who were squealing with delight if the kid drew an egg. We were the ones who said, "Johnny tried, and that's what counts." And that's why these misguided Johnnies show up and give working a try, then wonder where they find the counter where success is handed out. They see "work ethic" as "show up and shut up," and no wonder they want no part of it.

Benoit told police after his arrest that he had been depressed, had not been able to get his Prozac prescription, and was worried about not having food in the house. He told police he killed his wife while his daughter slept and then strangled the child.

Which means, according to new research emerging from many quarters, that our continued devotion to growth above all is, on balance, making our lives worse, both collectively and individually. Growth no longer makes most people wealthier, but instead generates inequality and insecurity. Growth is bumping up against physical limits so profound -- like climate change and peak oil -- that trying to keep expanding the economy may be not just impossible but also dangerous. And perhaps most surprisingly, growth no longer makes us happier. Given our current dogma, that's as bizarre an idea as proposing that gravity pushes apples skyward. But then, even Newtonian physics eventually shifted to acknowledge Einstein's more complicated universe.

What do we do to you that is so awful? Why do you feel compelled to come after us with such frightful energy? Does this somehow make you feel safer and legitimate? What possible harm comes to you if we marry, or are taxed just like you, or are protected from assault by laws that say it is morally wrong to assault people out of hatred? The reasons always offered are religious ones, but certainly they are not based on the love all religions proclaim.

There is a strong argument to be made on behalf of women -- Christian or not -- taking control of their bodies and making choices that are right for them.

About one-third of the people living in the national's capital are functionally illiterate, compared with about one-fifth nationally, according to a report on the District of Columbia. Adults are considered functionally illiterate if they have trouble doing such things as comprehending bus schedules, reading maps and filling out job applications.

Last year, I began to research and write on the case of Pat Tillman. One of the central characters in the Tillman story was Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, who was the regimental executive officer for 75th Ranger Regiment in Afghanistan in 2004 when Tillman was killed by friendly fire. He was also a key figure in the Pentagon’s attempts to first cover up and then spin the fratricide. Kauzlarich was the officer assigned to conduct a second investigation of the circumstances of Tillman’s death. The first investigation—conducted by Capt. Richard Scott—had found criminal negligence and professional incompetence, so a higher-ranking officer was required by law to follow up in the event that a general court-martial would become necessary. Not surprisingly, no one was charged with either crime, though some minor administrative actions were taken, including reassignments out of the Rangers and “letters of reprimand” for two officers. But that is not what this commentary is about. This is about Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, a Washington Post writer and the power of cultural myths.

While politicians fight this war from the comfort of their air conditioned offices, law enforcement officers see things from another perspective. An organization of police officers who oppose the drug war known as Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), conducted a national survey among police officers. The survey found that 95% believe America is losing the drug war. Over 90% believe that treatment and prevention is more effective than incarceration. When asked what would happen if drugs were discriminations or legalized, 30% of the police officers believed there would be no effect or that usage would go down (McNamara, 1995). Based on these statistics, one could imagine the frustration these police officers are dealing with and the morale for fighting on cannot be very high. Retired narcotics officer and LEAP board member, Jack Cole put it this way:

SUPPOSE YOU LEARN that a New England manufacturer is exploiting its employees, many of them illegal immigrants, with wretched working conditions. It fines them for talking on the job, refuses to pay overtime, and penalizes them for bathroom breaks of more than two minutes, all in addition to low wages, long hours, and squalid facilities. What do you do? Well, if you're the United States government, you send armed agents to haul the workers off in shackles to a military base 100 miles away, then fly scores of them more than 2,000 miles to a holding pen in Texas. You provide the frightened detainees with little information and no access to lawyers. You act so rashly that many of those you seize are separated from their children and can't get word to spouses or babysitters. You display such ineptitude, in fact, that babies end up in the hospital, dehydrated, after their nursing mothers are taken away.

Then, our lying got out of control. It was almost as if we started to glorify lying. Joe Millionaire was a likeable guy despite his steady stream of lies to potential new wives. The biggest and most skilled liar won a million dollars on ‘Survivor’ or earned a position working for Donald Trump. A greedy woman lied about being raped in order to sue a basketball star and escaped punishment when she was found out. Our very own president of the United States chose to perjure himself in a court of law rather than simply say, “Fuck off, it’s none of your damn business.” So how does one explain to a child that lying is wrong when it’s so obviously in vogue?

The plight of the severely poor is a distressing sidebar to an unusual economic expansion. Worker productivity has increased dramatically since the brief recession of 2001, but wages and job growth have lagged behind. At the same time, the share of national income going to corporate profits has dwarfed the amount going to wages and salaries. That helps explain why the median household income of working-age families, adjusted for inflation, has fallen for five straight years. These and other factors have helped push 43 percent of the nation's 37 million poor people into deep poverty - the highest rate since at least 1975. The share of poor Americans in deep poverty has climbed slowly but steadily over the last three decades. But since 2000, the number of severely poor has grown "more than any other segment of the population," according to a recent study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Ms. Readling, a 50-year-old real estate agent, is one of nearly 47 million people in America with no health insurance. Increasingly, the problem affects middle-class people like Ms. Readling, who said she made about $60,000 last year. As an independent contractor, like many real estate agents, Ms. Readling does not receive health benefits from an employer. She tried to buy a policy in the individual insurance market, but — having had cancer — could not obtain coverage, except at a price exceeding $27,000 a year, which was more than she could pay. “I don’t know which was worse, being told that I had cancer or finding that I could not get insurance,” Ms. Readling (pronounced RED-ling) said in an interview in her office, near the tree-lined streets and stately old homes of this city in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. It is well known that the ranks of the uninsured have been swelling; federal figures show an increase of 6.8 million since 2000. But the surprise is that the uninsured are not necessarily the poor, the unemployed and the undocumented. Solidly middle-class people like Ms. Readling are one of the fastest growing subgroups.

"Research shows [narcissists] are aggressive when they have been insulted or threatened," says Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and lead author of the report, called "Egos Inflating Over Time." "They tend to have problems with impulse control, so that means they're more likely to, for example, be pathological gamblers [or] commit white-collar crimes." For some, the study validates their suspicions of educational and parenting techniques that put undue emphasis on the positive: tot-level self-esteem boosterism, luxury-as-necessity entitlement, and what one calls "instant fame-ification."

Emotional isolation is one of the hallmarks of post-combat mental health problems. The National Guard didn't conduct follow-up mental health screening or evaluations of the men in my husband's company until they had been home for almost eight months. Nearly a year later, in August of 2006, my husband was informed of his results: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). It was obvious that he was suffering, but when I brought it up, he parroted what the military told him: "Give it time." Time wasn't a panacea for Jeffrey Lucey, Doug Barber, or the dozens of other Guard members and Reservists who have committed suicide after serving in Iraq. Time hasn't helped the hundreds of homeless Iraq War veterans wandering lost in the streets of what military families are assured is a deeply grateful nation. Time is most definitely not on our side.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) estimated there were 754,000 homeless people in 2005, including those living in shelters, transitional housing and on the street. That's about 300,000 more people than available beds in shelters and transitional housing. The report is the government's latest attempt to count people who are notoriously difficult to track. The estimate is similar to one by an advocacy group in January.

The newest fashion among schoolgirls is getting knocked up, according to one pregnant 14-year-old whose four friends are also expecting.

About 59 million workers nationwide do not have paid sick days, according to a 2004 analysis by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. That means that like Wolfram, they go to work sick, coughing, nauseous and miserable – and often contagious. Eighty-six million workers cannot take a paid day off to care for a sick child or other family member, and must scramble to find friends or relatives to step in. Some people are simply forced to take off work without pay and risk being disciplined or losing their jobs.

On the same day that Britney was shaving her head, a guy I know who works in the office of Senator Bernie Sanders sent me an email. He was trying very hard to get news organizations interested in some research his office had done about George Bush's proposed 2008 budget, which was unveiled two weeks ago and received relatively little press, mainly because of the controversy over the Iraq war resolution. All the same, the Bush budget is an amazing document. It would be hard to imagine a document that more clearly articulates the priorities of our current political elite.

The US prison population ballooned eight-fold between 1970 and 2005 and will grow by an additional 192,000 convicts by 2011, according to a new study. The report by the Pew Charitable Trusts said one in 178 US residents will live in prison by 2011 and the increase could cost American taxpayers another 27.5 billion dollars over the next five years in jail spending.

The United States and Britain ranked at the bottom of a UN survey of child welfare in 21 wealthy countries that assessed everything from infant mortality to whether children ate dinner with their parents. The Netherlands, followed by Sweden, Denmark and Finland, finished at the top; the United States was 20th, and Britain was 21st, the report released Wednesday by UNICEF said.

At least 565 women and girls in Pakistan died in so-called honor killings in 2006, the country's main rights organization said Thursday, nearly double the number it recorded the year before. The sharp increase from 287 in 2005 was due "at least in part" to expanded data collection, the privately funded Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said in its annual report. However, it said many more cases may have gone unreported and has estimated in the past that the annual total may be about 1,000.

"I can't think of anything colder than that," said LAPD Det. Russ Long, who called the case the most egregious of its kind that he has seen in his career. "There was no mission around, no services. It's the worst area of skid row."

I remembered that day after my exchange with Claire and I remembered how easy it was for me to confuse my sexual identity with my self worth. I remember standing in front of my boyfriend’s best friend and letting him judge my body, my face, and my hair like I was nothing more than a piece of meat. I remember that instead of being horrified by this, I was proud. It didn’t occur to me back then that I was selling myself short or that a man’s willingness to have sex with me was not the highest possible praise I could receive.

The American occupation forces imposed strict censorship on Japan, prohibiting anything "that might, directly or by inference, disturb public tranquility" and used it to prohibit all pictures of the bombed cities. The pictures remained classified 'top secret' for many years. Some of the images have been published later by different means, but it's not usual to see them all together. This is the horror they didn't want us to see, and that we must NEVER forget.

The welfare state has also created an incentive for people to have a higher rate of time preference. Unemployment insurance and welfare benefits reduce the necessity of people to save. This results in a change in the habits and outlook of people. Compounding this mindset is the Federal Reserve’s inflationary monetary policy and artificially reduced interest rates, incentivizing the "I want it now" mentality that has resulted in America’s culture of debt.

Above all, respect the role that competition plays in our personal relationships. If you slack off during a race, you’ll likely lose that race. Likewise, if you slack off with your relationship, that relationship will probably bite the dust.

Alone and racing against death, the Odones persist for three years before finding the clue that leads them not to a cure but to a treatment; oleic acid can destroy the fatty acids that are destroying Lorenzo’s brain. Augusto develops a formula he calls “Lorenzo’s Oil” — a combination of two fats extracted from olive oil and rapeseed oil. The formula proves remarkably effective in presymptomatic boys with the ALD gene because of its ability to halt the body’s production of the specific acids that attack the myelin sheaths.

The regulation of the personal habit of smoking, including new legislative moves in San Francisco to ban cigarettes in private homes, and its enforcement by an eager cadre of state snoops and snitches, represents nothing more than a move on behalf of big brother towards the complete subjugation and shackling of the individual. To this end, smoking is healthier than fascism.

Children and families are the fastest growing segments of the homeless population, according to advocates, who say this serious social problem driven by poverty and a scarcity of affordable housing is not widely recognized by the public.

Children who grow up poor in the United States cost the economy $500 billion a year because they are less productive, earn less money, commit more crimes and have more health-related expenses, according to a new study.

What does this mean? Just over 3,000 Americans have died in Iraq. If the U.S. population is 300 million, then that's just 0.001% of it. Add into this the fact that the American dead come disproportionately from the most forgotten, least attended to parts of our country, from places that often have lost their job bases; consider that many of them were under or unemployed as well as undereducated, that they generally come from struggling, low-income, low-skills areas. Given that we have an all-volunteer military (so that not even the threat of a draft touches other young Americans), you could certainly say that the President's war in Iraq -- and its harm -- has been disproportionately felt. If you live in a rural area, you are simply far more likely to know a casualty of the war than in most major metropolitan areas of the country.

The precise scale of Cambodia's sex trade is difficult to quantify. International organizations - such as UNICEF, ECPAT and Save the Children - say that anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 women and children are involved. An estimated 30 percent of the sex workers in Phnom Penh are under the age of 18, according to the United Nations. The actual figure may be much higher, activists say.

But what about private companies that sell us products with strong nannyistic tendencies? A case in point is Toyota, which is gearing up in this regard with its 2009 models. These cars will come to us replete with steering wheel sensors that can discern, based on the sweat of our hands, whether we have been boozing it up or not. If so, forget about driving; the automobile will shut down forthwith.

Thus did a simple theory of the state – kill the king and all will be well – fail. The Bush administration had the idea that the Iraqi state was somehow artificially imposed on an otherwise stable society. The reality is otherwise. Which raises the question: just how integral is the state to society? Is it the case that we can expect every society that loses its state to fall into chaos such as Iraq is doing today?

Only in America. Only in America do we have to label every vice a ‘disease.’ Only in America are all our hobbies suspiciously probed until we can figure out a way to classify them as an ‘affliction.’ Are Americans so reluctant to admit to any sort of personal responsibility or decision making capability that they can’t even enjoy a glass a wine with dinner without wondering if they should seek treatment? The whole goddamn concept of functioning alcoholism is bullshit. Functioning alcoholic equals NOT A FUCKING ALCHOLIC.

One speaker called for the immediate resignation of the secretary of the economy because prices for many daily needs—corn, eggs, diesel, gasoline--are rising. Demonstrations are happening across the country every day. The PRD is organizing a big protest on February 1. “We are demanding the fall of prices or the fall of Calderón,” said one PRD speaker. “We are demanding food sovereignty. We are not going to eat at McDonald’s or eat the crappy tortillas that Wal-Mart sells.”

The filmmaker's subjects are patriotic young Americans - ordinary men and women who heeded the call for military service in Iraq - as they experience recruitment and training, combat, homecoming, and the struggle to reintegrate with families and communities. The terrible conflict in Iraq, depicted with ferocious honesty in the film, is a prelude for the even more challenging battles fought by the soldiers returning home – with personal demons, an uncomprehending public, and an indifferent government.

While we’re on the subject, we should be outraged that Home Depot CEO Robert Nardelli is getting paid $210 million dollars to not work, money that could be going Home Depot’s workers, some of whom start with hourly salaries around $7.25 an hour. By the way, in 2005, Nardelli received $37,862,312 in total compensation, which works out to about $18,203.03 an hour. Nardelli is cashing in on Home Depot while many of his employees can’t even afford to have a home. Where is our outrage? The list goes on. There were more than 10.2 million cosmetic surgery procedures performed in the United States in 2005---including 324,000 liposuctions, 298,000 nose jobs and 291,000 breast enhancements. In all, wealthy Americans spent over $8.4 billion dollars on plastic surgery last year while over 46 million Americans didn’t even have health insurance and millions more struggled to pay rising premiums. Where is our outrage?

There is money to be made by putting down men in the name of empowering women. As long as it is entertaining to see a pretty woman kicking a man in the balls, or appealing to a frustrated female ego to see a man dominated (and many times I've heard this leveled criticism with the genders reversed), it will be a staple of the entertainment and advertising industries. Portraying women as the perpetual victims of dominating men will always appeal to chivalry in men and the empathy of women. These are long term, and positive, characteristics of our society. (BTW, how often do we think in terms of women being chivalrous or men being empathic?) We don't need any consipracy theory. We don't need to hypothesize the existence of a conscious, controlling force driving this.

Even though Saudi Arabia is, in reality, a close ally of the United States, it's ruling family still finds it necessary, purely for purposes of domestic social control, to adopt an anti-Israel and anti-U.S. stance for domestic consumption. This explains why the official Saudi press, like The Arab News, prints so many anti-Israel and anti-U.S. articles and opinions.

Nevada had the highest share of its population homeless, about 0.68 percent. It was followed by Rhode Island, Colorado, California and Hawaii.

Armstrong left work early Tuesday, forced to pick up her kids from Phalen Lake Elementary School. Her twin girls, 10, and her son, 8, were kicked off their regular school bus. They were told by the bus driver the route is for non-English speaking students only.

Most of all, I wonder if my experiences with men have been mainly positive because I don’t treat them with disgust, suspicion or disdain. True equality cannot exist when one party is constantly being portrayed at superior to the other party. Men will quit being the enemy when you start treating them like friends.

Today, Karolin is my only real girlfriend. We are polar opposites in every way. Karolin is a humanitarian, a liberal, a spiritualist. I could give a flying fuck about my fellow man and I’m pretty sure that God is dead. Karolin is very social and will happily strike up a conversation with a hobo on the subway. I cringe when strangers ask me how my day is going. Karolin sometimes wishes that my toughness will rub off on her and I sometimes hope a little of her heart will rub off on me.

"The Association of Muslim Scholars holds the current Iraqi government and the occupation forces responsible for any injustice against Iraqi people," said the group, which is believed to have links to the Sunni Arab-led insurgency fighting government and U.S.-led forces. A significant portion of the Iraqi national police is believed to be aligned with militias, and U.S. officials have said efforts are under way to weed out corrupt security agents.

Now, people dismiss and belittle anyone more than a decade older than themselves. We worship youth and equate age with senility and stupidity. At least once a week, I get to hear some young twat refer to someone who is her elder as her ‘Sweetheart’ or ‘honey’ or ‘darling.’ As if he’s a child who doesn’t deserve the common courtesy of being called by his name or even just ‘sir.’ Instead, we just condescend to him by talking to him like a rich bimbo would talk to a puppy. This shit drives me crazy.

You can point the finger at many, many people for the tragedy that was Alyssa’s life. But you want to know who I blame? That fucking pro-lifer nurse.

Their silence allows murderers to walk free in the neighborhoods, knowing that if they killed once without legal consequences they're free to kill again. Their silence means that friends of the victim will feel just fine about taking matters into their own hands, leading to more gunplay, more bloodshed, more death. Their silence means that the very kids who fire the guns can't possibly have any measure of self-worth. They know that if they kill or if they die, there's no one on the street or down the block who will act like it's any particularly big deal.

What I hope has been gained in the dark hours of 2006 was an understanding of the preciousness of liberty and our democratic institutions. At the beginning of the year, I was astonished how little MPs understood about so many measures passed by their own house. Knowledge of the Inquiries Act or the Civil Contingencies Act, both of which reduce parliamentary scrutiny, was hard to come by. No more than one in 10 MPs could have told you how, using the Courts Act together with the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act, the government swept away a 400-year-old common law, which guaranteed that an Englishman's home was his castle and that no bailiff could break in to collect civil debts. That kind of ignorance among legislators is not nearly so common now. Labour MPs are beginning to see that many of the laws passed in the last nine years persecute those who are least able to defend themselves, the very people that Labour has traditionally championed.

Americans have curiously mixed attitudes about drug crimes. On the one hand, we blithely elect people to high office who did things that, had they been caught, might have earned them prison time. (In 2000, remember, George W. Bush was careful not to deny ever using cocaine.) On the other, we tend to see the stiff sentences given to those who were caught as fitting punishment for their contemptible behavior. In this realm, ideology has a way of overriding mere facts. We have learned, for example, that marijuana is a comparatively benign drug that has few risks and some apparent benefits. In 1999, a National Academy of Sciences panel said pot has "potential therapeutic value" for "pain relief, control of nausea and vomiting, and appetite stimulation." The New England Journal of Medicine has endorsed medical marijuana. Eleven states have also approved the idea. Yet the Bush administration, like the Clinton administration before it, has spurned the idea. Not only has it actively fought state initiatives to let sick people get relief from cannabis, it has obstructed research to help patients.

The question now facing us is whether global capitalism and Western democracy can follow the Stern report's recommendations, and make the limited economic adjustments necessary to keep global warming within bounds that will allow us to preserve our system in a recognizable form; or whether our system is so dependent on unlimited consumption that it is by its nature incapable of demanding even small sacrifices from its present elites and populations.

Maria Guzman and her family are part of the 10% of U.S. households -- more than 12 million -- that have no relationship with a bank, savings institution, credit union, or other mainstream financial service provider. Being "unbanked," the Guzmans turn to the fringe economy for check cashing, bill payment, short-term pawn or payday loans, furniture and appliance rentals, and a host of other financial services. In each case, they face high user fees and exorbitant interest rates. Without credit, the Guzmans must buy a car either for cash or through a "buy-here/pay-here" (BHPH) used car lot. At a BHPH lot they are saddled with a 28% annual percentage rate (APR) on a high-mileage and grossly overpriced vehicle. They also pay weekly, and one missed payment means a repossession. Since the Guzmans have no checking account, they use a check-casher who charges 2.7% for cashing their monthly $1,500 in payroll checks, which costs them $40.50 a month or $486 a year.

In prison, one learns from peers how to be a better criminal, makes criminal contacts and also acquires a pemanent record that severely inhibits the possibility of future employment. The conservative argument is that the unpleasant experience of prison serves as a useful deterrent and discourages released prisoners from committing more crime. Both of these frameworks would predict that the effects of incarceration would be amplified by harsher, more restrictive prison conditions.

Up to 500 people were burned alive on Tuesday when fuel from a vandalized pipeline exploded in Nigeria's largest city, Lagos, emergency workers said.

The Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) recently issued a frightening report documenting the growing practice of public executions of women by Shia Militia. One of the report's more grisly accounts was a story of a young woman dragged by a wire wound around her neck to a close-by football field and then hung to the goal post. They pierced her body with bullets. Her brother came running trying to defend his sister. He was also shot and killed. Sunni extremists are no better: OWFI members estimate that no less than 30 women are executed monthly for honor related reasons.

In the Simpson case, many whites could not understand why blacks would be so suspicious of the police. They did not grasp how differently people of color experience life in this country. They did not understand the enormous inequalities that characterize the way people of color are often treated by police and courts in the United States.

After reading certain articles on my website, I’ve even seen people comment, “What is she going to do if she says the wrong thing to the wrong person? She’s going to end up getting hurt or killed.” I feel sorry for those people. So paralyzed by fear of what might happen, that they lack the courage to stand up for themselves or for someone weaker. I refuse to live my life afraid to say what I feel or do what is right because there might be some mysterious villain lurking in the shadows who is bigger and stronger. Better to be dead, than to live your life afraid.

Studies conducted in 1948 and 1953, found that 26 percent of women and a whopping 50 percent of men had an extramarital sexual experience. But today, in our sex- and sin-saturated culture, the number of married people who have had an extramarital affair has plummeted to 6 percent of women and 10 percent of men, according to (conservative) Ben Wattenberg in his book The First Measured Century. (Editor's note: Statistics show a wide variation in the percentage of extramarital affairs, as high as 55 percent of women and 60 percent of men.)

Meanwhile, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, with a delicious sense of irony, is going to raze 4500 housing units in the city, making way for private development of the land and far less housing for the poor. It would cost less than a day in Iraq to repair the four largest complexes. Sure, they may have been shitholes, but a shithole to call home is better than no home at all. And it ain't as if the residents were promised fuckin' Valhalla in exchange for the demolition. The poor in New Orleans are like the Indians of old, removed from place to place when it becomes inconvenient to keep them where you put them in the first place.

You want to know what goes on in the much-discussed American detention in Iraq from the inside? Ask an American who was held and treated badly because he was a whistle-blower who didn't like what he saw in the Iraqi security firm he worked for. His reward: 97 days of detention, sleep deprivation, noise, exposure to cold and more.

We must be vigilant about strengthening and protecting the bonds that connect our common humanity. Preserving cultural ecology, just like caring for the physical ecology of our environment, must be given due consideration as a requisite aim of business activity. Such ecological concerns grow out of societal “goods,” e.g., love, empathy, compassion, and understanding. These, in turn, form the structure upon which, ideally at least, economic and legal mechanisms of due process, equal opportunity, fairness and justice for all are built and maintained. As long as the profit incentive is allowed to reign supreme in a business atmosphere characterized by the kind of unbridled corporate capitalism that prevails in today’s global society, transcending our old, status quo consciousness will be a dubious proposition. The true profit to be gained by transforming our consciousness translates into social and natural capital, i.e., a “societal wealth of nations,” (Lloyd, 2004) represented by a stronger and more harmonized society at home and abroad, and a properly stewarded planet.

"The face of hunger and homelessness right now ... is young children, young families," said the conference's president, Douglas Palmer, the mayor of Trenton, New Jersey. The survey of 23 cities found civic and government groups received, on average, 7 percent more requests for food aid in 2006 than in 2005, following a 12 percent jump in 2005. Requests for shelter rose by an average of 9 percent in 2006, with requests from families with children rising by 5 percent. More than half the cities said family members often had to split up to stay in different shelters.

Blaming everything on a handful of people at the top, no matter how destructive and abusive they've been, misses a critical point. Systems tend to self-perpetuate. Remove one player and the next comes in to ensure business as usual. Remove Rumsfeld, a man who helped prop up Hussein in the 80's and skewed intelligence towards war, and who do you get? Robert Gates, a man who helped prop up Hussein in the 80's and skewed intelligence towards war. Replacing those in power won't help if the power structure itself doesn't change. And that means addressing how our own actions maintain this dysfunctional system.

In all our wanderings away from the Divine, humankind has virtually eliminated its most compelling features through misapplication of the logical mind, and through persistent belief in a language of limitation arising out of the vast hierarchy of the external world. Within this external hierarchy, language has often been used to impose a form of structural limitation by those who desire to exert control over others. Though in relative terms their words may appear liberating and empowering, those in power can and have used language as an instrument of entrapment and tyranny.

The present article is dedicated to further expanding this critique of Rummel and Courtois. Here, we go beyond the War to Prevent Southern Secession (1861-1865), and roadway fatalities, to consider a whole host of other governmental causes of death of innocent people.

The suburban poor outnumbered their inner-city counterparts for the first time last year, with more than 12 million suburban residents living in poverty, according to a study of the nation's 100 largest metropolitan areas released Thursday. "Economies are regional now," said Alan Berube, who co-wrote the report for the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. "Where you see increases in city poverty, in almost every metropolitan area, you also see increases in suburban poverty."

Police will not be surprised by this prediction. I have talked with cops about Fourth Generation war, and they “get it” much better than do American soldiers and Marines. Many have told me that they already recognize elements of war in what they are encountering, especially in inner cities. Cops have been killed while just sitting in their cruisers, because they represent the authority of the state. How big a step is it for those cruisers to get hit with IEDs instead of pistol shots? The Bush administration, as usual, has it exactly backwards. The danger is not that the “terrorists” we are fighting in Iraq will come here if we pull out there. Rather, American involvement in 4GW in Iraq will create “terrorism” here from among the people we have sent to fight the war there. Well educated in the ways of successful insurgency, they will come home embittered by a lost war, by friends dead and crippled for life to no purpose. Thanks to America’s de-industrialization, they will return to no jobs, or lousy “service” jobs at minimum wage. Angry, frustrated and futureless, some of them will find new identities and loyalties in gangs and criminal enterprises, where they can put their new talents to work.

From this point forward, microchips will become progressively smaller, less invasive, and easier to deploy. Thus, any realistic barrier to the wholesale "chipping" of Western citizens is not technological but cultural. It relies upon the visceral reaction against the prospect of being personally marked as one component in a massive human inventory. Today we might strongly hold such beliefs, but sensibilities can, and probably will, change. How this remarkable attitudinal transformation is likely to occur is clear to anyone who has paid attention to privacy issues over the past quarter-century. There will be no 3 a.m. knock on the door by storm troopers come to force implants into our bodies. The process will be more subtle and cumulative, couched in the unassailable language of progress and social betterment, and mimicking many of the processes that have contributed to the expansion of closed-circuit television cameras and the corporate market in personal data.

City officials say the projects -- which had never been renovated since their construction a half-century or more ago -- were already in bad shape and Hurricane Katrina rendered them uninhabitable and not worth repairing. They also argue that rehabilitation would restore economic and racial segregation. The city has plans to build mixed-income housing to replace the projects. Any construction must wait for the resolution of a civil rights suit filed in June. At a meeting last week, former residents of the projects opposed demolition.

Although pervasive in its influence today, this consumer identity is a relatively recent invention. It only became a powerful force in U.S. politics in the years after World War II. To a large degree, it was created and propagated by the first generation of chain retailers-companies like A&P, Kroger, and Woolworth-which encountered such strong public opposition in the 1920s and 30s as to call into doubt their continued existence. The chains responded with a massive PR campaign that managed to transform American citizens into consumers-a sharply circumscribed identity that corporations have used to augment their power ever since.

It isn't that Britney Spears's pussy's public appearances aren't in and of themselves interesting. The Rude Pundit supports genital revelation of all sorts. But it's just that, other than being attached to Britney Spears, being the stage curtain for the debut of two kids, and acting as the golden door to the slick caves of presumptive paradise, what exactly has Britney Spears's pussy accomplished? Yes, indeed, it's time to make Britney Spears's pussy earn its place in our networks of news, beyond the Page Sixes and Michael Musto columns (he's so bitchy, you know).

At the end of the one-hour show, rich with arguments on why visual identification of "the threat in our midst" would alleviate the public's fears, Klein revealed that he had staged a hoax. It drew out reactions that are not uncommon in post-9/11 America. "I can't believe any of you are sick enough to have agreed for one second with anything I said," he told his audience on the AM station 630 WMAL (http://www.wmal.com/), which covers Washington, Northern Virginia and Maryland.

A record 7 million people - or one in every 32 American adults - were behind bars, on probation or on parole by the end of last year, according to the Justice Department. Of those, 2.2 million were in prison or jail, an increase of 2.7 percent over the previous year, according to a report released Wednesday. More than 4.1 million people were on probation and 784,208 were on parole at the end of 2005. Prison releases are increasing, but admissions are increasing more.

See, central planners in the government know better than you do what are good uses of your time. It's communism lite. It's the two-years-of-your-life plan. Big Brother will tell you what types of work are worthy and unworthy. Want to work in a hospital for little or no pay? OK! Want to work at your uncle's hardware store for a fair wage instead? Or at your dad's veterinary clinic? Not OK.

We agonize over avian flu, which to date has killed precisely no one in the United States, but have to be cajoled into getting vaccinated for the common flu, which contributes to the deaths of 36,000 Americans each year. We wring our hands over the mad cow pathogen that might be (but almost certainly isn't) in our hamburger and worry far less about the cholesterol that contributes to the heart disease that kills 700,000 of us annually. We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones.

The number of people struggling with hunger in the United States fell in 2005, the first such decline in six years, the Agriculture Department said yesterday.

Among the recipients, the prevailing attitude seems to be the one expressed by Tulare County farmer Charles Fisher: “Whether it’s right or wrong, if they are offering it, you’re foolish to turn it down.” In that single sentence, Fisher has encapsulated the rotten core of the welfare state and concisely expressed how it destroys moral character. The swag is there for the taking. Financial gain trumps moral probity. Don’t be a chump; take the money.

It’s a tricky process to bring fascism to a nation with a tradition of individual rights, and its concomitant, self-motivation. If you live in a nation that combines initiative with orneriness, you may as well save your secret dream for your grandkids. A people who balk when the government tells them what to do, when that "what" is genuinely good for them, leaves little hope for the fascist. Better luck next century. If the people around you are becoming complaisantly obedient, however, things are looking ripe. There’s no more tractable whipped dog than one who asks for regularity in the whipping schedule. If you hear your neighbors seriously wonder who’s going to tell them how to vote, then you’re laughing.

Howard Wooldridge is a member of LEAP – Law Enforcement Against Prohibition – one of more than 500 members of all branches of law enforcement, from cops on the beat to chiefs of police to federal judges and a governor, mostly retired. He contradicted the common wisdom that the war on drugs is a war to protect America's children. He spoke at Lincoln-Bassett School Thursday night at a forum sponsored by People Against Injustice. After his talk, an audience member said she was concerned that legalizing drugs would be approving drug use. He disagreed.

I have been asked about my sexual practices. Whether I'm 'monogamous' or 'in a relationship' if I'm married, if I have kids, how many kids I have, if I was raped or 'traumatized' but there wasn’t' ONE question about my health. Not one. The few places that said that they had a doctor who would occasionally write prescriptions for EC told me that I had to ask for that doctor specifically and then they proceeded to tell me that I would be 'interviewed' to see if I meet that doctors 'criteria' and then they proceeded to ask me all the above questions before telling me that I should 'try anyway' and I 'might be able to talk him into it'.

According to a new New York Times/CBS News poll, only 16% of Americans think the government is telling the truth about 9/11

The American Community Survey, released this month by the Census Bureau, found that 49.7 percent, or 55.2 million, of the nation’s 111.1 million households in 2005 were made up of married couples — with and without children — just shy of a majority and down from more than 52 percent five years earlier. The numbers by no means suggests marriage is dead or necessarily that a tipping point has been reached. The total number of married couples is higher than ever, and most Americans eventually marry. But marriage has been facing more competition. A growing number of adults are spending more of their lives single or living unmarried with partners, and the potential social and economic implications are profound.

A man who couldn't find steady work came up with a plan to make it through the next few years until he could collect Social Security: He robbed a bank, then handed the money to a guard and waited for police. On Wednesday, Timothy J. Bowers told a judge a three-year prison sentence would suit him, and the judge obliged.

The education system in America has been carefully eroded over the course of time, altered in such a way as to make creative and curious children barren and submissive adults indifferent to the world around them. The system now in place begins robbing a child’s ability to think for himself or herself from the very start of the education process. The class structure itself eliminates individuality, personality and energetic ability, as one teacher must educate many students competing for attention. It is here when talents that need to be discovered get ambushed instead. Yet with a class structure that has endured for decades, the child must become part of the whole, learning from books laced with government and/or corporate propaganda.

I have been treating, educating and caring for children for more than 30 years, half of that time as a child psychiatrist, and the changes I have seen in the practice of child psychiatry are shocking. Psychiatrists are now misdiagnosing and overmedicating children for ordinary defiance and misbehavior. The temper tantrums of belligerent children are increasingly being characterized as psychiatric illnesses.

The received wisdom informs us that the American public has tired of George Bush and his use of lies and other deceptions to fashion a war-crazed police-state. According to this view, voters will go to the polls this November and exchange a sufficient number of Republican scoundrels for Democratic ones to deprive Bush of a GOP-controlled Congress. Then, we are further led to believe, the sociopathic madness that has metastasized from inside the “beltway” will have come to an end, and – like members of any lynch mob who later reflect on their deed – most Americans will rediscover their lost sense of sanity and decency. I accept none of this foolish thinking. I see no evidence that any greater number of Americans are critical of Mr. Bush’s appetites for tyranny or unprovoked wars than existed at the time of his Afghan/Iraqi attacks. This is not to suggest that many Americans are pleased with Mr. Bush’s performance. Public opinion polls reflect a growing dissatisfaction with his handling of the presidency. But their displeasure does not rise to the level of a moral condemnation of his actions.

A cop is dead, an innocent man may be on death row, and drug warriors keep knocking down doors.

U.S. government representatives may have been behind the attacks, or may have simply lied about their lack of knowledge, or a bit of both. Either way, Locke's social contract (ie. to provide protection to the citizenry) was violated, and the damage of that is incalculable. You could say that the contract is null and void. The citizens are now entitled to rebellion. The alternative would be to lie down and suffer the consequences, which in this case, I suggest, will be to intellectually/emotionally cripple a whole generation.

The nation's prison industry now employs more people than any Fortune 500 corporation except General Motors. Is prison labor rehab or corporate slavery?

With full-time workers earning less, adjusted for inflation, than at any time since 1973, health care costs going up three times as fast as wages, with insurance companies writing our national policies on health care while health care prices are growing exponentially, it would be wise to pay attention to this growing crisis within our own nation rather than continuing to re-establish a feudal society in the Land of the Free. The people in Washington, DC, who make the decisions for us all, are totally oblivious of the hardships which are borne by the working poor, instead having developed the attitude of Marie Antoinette that, having no bread, the poor should just "eat cake". In the long run, the results may be the same.

This summer, a group of teenagers has disrobed near restaurants, bookstores and galleries, igniting a debate about whether this bohemian southern Vermont town should ban a practice that has been tolerated until now. "Brattleboro tends to be a laid-back town and pretty accepting of the unusual, but this is really pushing limits," said Police Chief John Martin. "It's clearly to outrage people, it's clearly rebelliousness," he said.

A Maryland county recently offered $300 million in property tax breaks to a nuclear-energy company to build a reactor, in a move environmentalists say reflects a resurgence of the nuclear industry.

What many Americans fail to understand is that it is entirely possible to have democracy and dictatorship at the same time. Democracy entails the use of elections to place people into positions of power. Dictatorship entails the extent of the powers that the ruler is able to exercise after he assumes office.

Kevin himself has always been at the forefront of the struggle not only for truth and justice in his case, but against the death penalty system as a whole. This page contains background information on his case and links to groups fighting the death penalty in California and across the U.S. Kevin is a prolific writer, and his essays are also posted here.

Christopher Ruhm, an economist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, attributes the relatively poor performance of the US in many social areas to a matter of choice

Not a single dollar of federal housing repair or home reconstruction money has made it to New Orleans yet. Tens of thousands are waiting. Many wait because a full third of homeowners in the New Orleans area had no flood insurance. Others wait because the levees surrounding New Orleans are not yet as strong as they were before Katrina and fear re-building until flood protection is more likely. Fights over the federal housing money still loom because Louisiana refuses to clearly state a commitment to direct 50 percent of the billions to low and moderate income families.

We reported that about half of all bankruptcies occurred in the financial aftermath of a medical problem. What really chapped the insurance industry, however, was our finding that about three-quarters of these families had some form of health insurance at the onset of their illnesses or accidents. We concluded that not even the insured were safe in America.

A very good news recap.

Wage slaves and sweat shop laborers have supplanted serfs and chattel slaves. Five major corporations comprise 90% of the mass media in the United States. What are their specialties? Shaping public opinion to maintain the illusion that one of the world’s most rapacious and bellicose nations is a “benevolent superpower” and enticing those who fall prey to their charms to experience a virtually insatiable desire to acquire more material possessions. A brain-washed complacent citizenry perpetually ready to go on a buying binge is a wet dream for the ruling elite.

The irony is that coverage of poverty has dropped even as poverty itself has been on the rise. "Not only are more people poor, people are living in deeper poverty than they have in decades," notes Avis Jones-DeWeever of the Institute for Women's Policy Research, who has studied Katrina and its aftermath.

An excellent expose by The Boston Globe of the predatory tactics used by the debt collection machinery in Massachusetts. Reads like a frontline report from the war on the poor.

Yet very little attention was given to the one possible motive which the media has barely focused on: Michael Ford, the killer, was apparently “teased” and "harassed" by coworkers for being Muslim.

Though heat stroke and nonfatal heat-related ailments happen to homeless people everywhere, the problem seems to be particularly acute and publicized in Phoenix, Arizona, where 32 homeless people died last summer.

If you're rich, you might want to stay that way. It's a whole lot cheaper than being poor.

Those were just two examples among several cited in a report Tuesday showing that poor urban residents frequently pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars a year in extra costs for everyday necessities. The study said some of the disparities were due to real differences in the cost of doing business in poor areas, some to predatory financial practices and some to consumer ignorance.