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The US: The World’s Premiere Oligarchy?

Posted on April 18, 2014 in Articles

Reagan Ford Bush

The Article: Major Study Finds The US Is An Oligarchy by Zachary Davies Boren in Business Insider.

The Text: The US government does not represent the interests of the majority of the country’s citizens, but is instead ruled by those of the rich and powerful, a new study from Princeton and Northwestern Universities has concluded.

The report, entitled Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens, used extensive policy data collected from between the years of 1981 and 2002 to empirically determine the state of the US political system.

After sifting through nearly 1,800 US policies enacted in that period and comparing them to the expressed preferences of average Americans (50th percentile of income), affluent Americans (90th percentile) and large special interests groups, researchers concluded that the United States is dominated by its economic elite.

The 1%: Ban Sleeping In Cars Because It Harms Our “Quality Of Life”

Posted on April 17, 2014 in Articles

Homelessness

The Article: The 1% wants to ban sleeping in cars – because it hurts their ‘quality of life’ by Gary Blasi in The Guardian.

The Text: Across the United States, many local governments are responding to skyrocketing levels of inequality and the now decades-long crisis of homelessness among the very poor … by passing laws making it a crime to sleep in a parked car.

This happened most recently in Palo Alto, in California’s Silicon Valley, where new billionaires are seemingly minted every month – and where 92% of homeless people lack shelter of any kind. Dozens of cities have passed similar anti-homeless laws. The largest of them is Los Angeles, the longtime unofficial “homeless capital of America”, where lawyers are currently defending a similar vehicle-sleeping law before a skeptical federal appellate court. Laws against sleeping on sidewalks or in cars are called “quality of life” laws. But they certainly don’t protect the quality of life of the poor.

To be sure, people living in cars cannot be the best neighbors. Some people are able to acquire old and ugly – but still functioning – recreational vehicles with bathrooms; others do the best they can. These same cities have resisted efforts to provide more public toilet facilities, often on the grounds that this will make their city a “magnet” for homeless people from other cities. As a result, anti-homeless ordinances often spread to adjacent cities, leaving entire regions without public facilities of any kind.

Will Today’s Hispanics Be Tomorrow’s Whites?

Posted on April 16, 2014 in Articles

Hispanics White

The Article: Will Today’s Hispanics Be Tomorrow’s Whites? by Jamelle Bouie in Slate.

The Text: The Trayvon Martin shooting was hardly in the national consciousness before fault lines emerged around the case. Was Martin as innocent as he seemed? Did Zimmerman fear for his life? Did Martin provoke the incident? Was Zimmerman a racist?

Perhaps most controversial among all of these was the question of identity. Yes, Trayvon Martin was black, but is Zimmerman white? For Martin’s sympathizers, the answer was yes. For Zimmerman’s, the answers ranged from “it doesn’t matter” to he “is actually a Hispanic nonracist person who acted in self-defense.”

In their early reports on the case, both CNN and the New York Times labeled him “white Hispanic,” sparking thunderous condemnation from right-wing critics. At Fox News, contributor Bernard Goldberg accused the Times of race-baiting. “I guarantee you that if George Zimmerman did something good—if he finished first in his high school graduating class when he was younger—they wouldn’t refer to him as a white Hispanic, he’d just be a Hispanic,” he wrote. Likewise, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg blasted several news outlets for “playing the race card” with the term. And in typical paranoid style, Breitbart’s Ben Shapiro accused CNN of “labeling Zimmerman a ‘white Hispanic’ in order to maintain the false narrative that the killing was race-based.”

To Mike Huckabee, Parts Of North Korea Are “More Free” Than The US

Posted on April 15, 2014 in Articles

Mike Huckabee

The Article: Mike Huckabee: North Korea Sometimes Has ‘More Freedom’ Than The US by Paul Zsoldra in Yahoo! Finance.

The Text: Speaking at the conservative “Freedom Summit” in New Hampshire on Saturday, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said he’s beginning to believe that there’s “more freedom in North Korea sometimes than there is in the United States.”

The quote — which the audience did not laugh at and didn’t appear to be a joke — was in reference to TSA patdowns and security procedures at the airport.

“When I go to the airport, I have to get in the surrender position,” Huckabee said while holding up his hands. “People put hands all over me. And I have to provide photo ID in a couple of different forms and prove that I really am not going to terrorize the airplane.”

At Least 22 Veterans Kill Themselves Every Day And No One Gives A Shit

Posted on April 14, 2014 in Articles

Veterans Suicide

The Article: No One Cares About Suicidal Vets by Alice Speri in VICE News.

The Text: That’s 1,892 former soldiers who have killed themselves since the beginning of 2014, according the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America organization (IAVA). But even that is a conservative number, some say, as there is no centralized system to track veteran suicides.

A recent poll found that more than half of post-9/11 veterans know at least one colleague who attempted or managed to kill themselves. For many, the list of friends lost to suicide is much longer.

Mental health is one of the greatest challenges facing returning soldiers, but a deadly combination of indifference, stigma, red tape, and government dysfunction are to blame for the sobering numbers. Citing Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) statistics, the IAVA claims that 22 ex-service members die by suicide every single day.