Robert Reich: Why Americans Are Fucked and Europeans Are Not

The U.S. economy is picking up steam but most Americans aren’t feeling it.

By Robert Reich / Robert Reich's Blog

March 15, 2015

 

The U.S. economy is picking up steam but most Americans aren’t feeling it. By contrast, most European economies are still in bad shape, but most Europeans are doing relatively well.

What’s behind this? Two big facts.

First, American corporations exert far more political influence in the United States than their counterparts exert in their own countries.

In fact, most Americans have no influence at all. That’s the conclusion of Professors Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, who analyzed 1,799 policy issues — and found that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

Instead, American lawmakers respond to the demands of wealthy individuals (typically corporate executives and Wall Street moguls) and of big corporations – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns.

The second fact is most big American corporations have no particular allegiance to America. They don’t want Americans to have better wages. Their only allegiance and responsibility to their shareholders — which often requires lower wages  to fuel larger profits and higher share prices.

When GM went public again in 2010, it boasted of making 43 percent of its cars in place where labor is less than $15 an hour, while in North America it could now pay “lower-tiered” wages and benefits for new employees.

American corporations shift their profits around the world wherever they pay the lowest taxes. Some are even morphing into foreign corporations.

As an Apple executive told The New York Times, “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems.”

I’m not blaming American corporations. They’re in business to make profits and maximize their share prices, not to serve America.

But because of these two basic facts – their dominance on American politics, and their interest in share prices instead of the wellbeing of Americans – it’s folly to count on them to create good American jobs or improve American competitiveness, or represent the interests of the United States in global commerce.

By contrast, big corporations headquartered in other rich nations are more responsible for the wellbeing of the people who live in those nations.

That’s because labor unions there are typically stronger than they are here — able to exert pressure both at the company level and nationally.

VW’s labor unions, for example, have a voice in governing the company, as they do in other big German corporations. Not long ago, VW even welcomed the UAW to its auto plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. (Tennessee’s own politicians nixed it.)

Governments in other rich nations often devise laws through tri-partite bargains involving big corporations and organized labor. This process further binds their corporations to their nations.

Meanwhile, American corporations distribute a smaller share of their earnings to their workers than do European or Canadian-based corporations. 

And top U.S. corporate executives make far more money than their counterparts in other wealthy countries.
The typical American worker puts in more hours than Canadians and Europeans, and gets little or no paid vacation or paid family leave. In Europe, the norm is five weeks paid vacation per year and more than three months paid family leave.

And because of the overwhelming clout of American firms on U.S. politics, Americans don’t get nearly as good a deal from their governments as do Canadians and Europeans.

Governments there impose higher taxes on the wealthy and redistribute more of it to middle and lower income households. Most of their citizens receive essentially free health care and more generous unemployment benefits than do Americans.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that even though U.S. economy is "doing better," most Americans are not.

The U.S. middle class is no longer the world’s richest. After considering taxes and transfer payments, middle-class incomes in Canada and much of Western Europe are higher than in U.S. The poor in Western Europe earn more than do poor Americans.

Finally, when at global negotiating tables – such as the secretive process devising the “Trans Pacific Partnership” trade deal — American corporations don’t represent the interests of Americans. They represent the interests of their executives and shareholders, who are not only wealthier than most Americans but also reside all over the world.

Which is why the pending Partnership protects the intellectual property of American corporations — but not American workers’ health, safety, or wages, and not the environment.

The Obama administration is casting the Partnership as way to contain Chinese influence in the Pacific region. The agents of America’s interests in the area are assumed to be American corporations.

But that assumption is incorrect. American corporations aren’t set up to represent America’s interests in the Pacific region or anywhere else.

Either we lessen the dominance of big American corporations over American politics. Or we increase their allegiance and responsibility to America.

What’s the answer to this basic conundrum? Either we lessen the dominance of big American corporations over American politics. Or we increase their allegiance and responsibility to America.

It has to be one or the other. Americans can’t thrive within a political system run largely by big American corporations — organized to boost their share prices but not boost America.

4 Numbers That Prove America Is a Deeply Messed Up Place

And no matter which party is in control, they sell their fuzzy bullshit numbers like they are real, meanwhile in this "resurgent" economy, more and more people are suffering while the wealthy increase their wealth in obscene amounts.

The mainstream media rarely publishes facts like this.

By Paul Buchheit / AlterNet

March 15, 2015

There's something perversely wrong with a society that creates $30 trillion in new wealth while putting six million more children on food stamps.
The mainstream media rarely publishes facts like this. The super-rich keep building up their own numbers, as quietly as possible. And our leading members of Congress have little need for numbers, except for budget cuts and the strings of zeros at the end of their campaign contributions.

But numbers have the power to reveal the dramatic fall of the middle class over the past 35 years.


1. 138,000 Kids Were Homeless while 115,000 Households Were Each Making $10 Million Per Year

Recent data has shown that the richest .1% (115,000 households) have each increased their wealth by an astonishing $10 million per year. As they counted their money on a frigid night in January, 138,000 children, according to the U.S. Department of Housing, were without a place to call home.


2. The Average U.S. Household Pays $400 to Feed and Clothe Walmart, McDonalds, and Other Low-Wage Workers

The Economic Policy Institute reports that $45 billion per year in federal, state, and other safety net support is paid to workers earning less than $10.10 an hour. Thus the average U.S. household is paying about $400 to employees in low-wage industries such as food service, retail, and personal care.

Walmart's well-advertised $1 raise will cost the company about $1 billion a year. Its profits last year were about $25 billion.

The sordid tale gets even worse, as told by a PBS report: Walmart has spent about $6.5 billion per year on stock buybacks to enrich investors, approximately the same total annual amount billed to taxpayers for food stamps, Medicaid, housing, and other safety net programs for the company's underpaid employees.


3. As $30 Trillion in New Wealth was being Created, the Number of Kids on Food Stamps Increased 70%

Before the recession, 12 out of every 100 American children got food stamps. After the recession, 20 out of every 100 American children got food stamps.
That's nearly a 70 percent increase, from 9.5 million kids in 2007 to 16 million kids in 2014, at the same time that U.S. wealth was growing by over $30 trillion. Even with that incomprehensible increase in wealth our nation was not able to ensure food security for millions of its most vulnerable citizens.


4. Despite the Decline in Food Security, the Food Stamp Program was Cut by $8.6 Billion and the Money Paid to Corporate Agriculture

As more and more children go hungry, the largest agricultural firms continue to take taxpayer money to supplement their billions in profits. The 2014 farm bill cut $8.6 billion (over the next ten years) from the food stamp program, of which nearly half of all participants are children. Meanwhile, $14 billion is annually paid out to the largest 10 percent of farm operators.


Beaten Up, Broken Down

The mainstream media highlights the "resurgent economy," the booming stock market, and the drop in unemployment. But the stock market has enriched only about ten percent of America, handing them millions of dollars since the recession, while the newly available jobs are well below the skill levels of college-trained adults and often without health care and retirement benefits.

Too many once-prosperous Americans are beaten up and broken down, waiting in vain for our elected leaders to stop the redistribution of our national wealth.

SCOTUS vs the ACA

Coca-Cola's 'Simply Orange' Juice Is Anything But...

Julia Weeman - The Chicagoist 

Many people choose Simply Orange juice because they believe it is a less processed, more natural choice than other brands. However, a new investigation by Bloomberg Businessweek shows that it is a "hyper-engineered and dauntingly industrial product." Coca-Cola owns Simply Orange, which is made using a process they call Black Book. Since juice production is full of variables, including a peak growing season of only 3 months, this methodology was created to produce consistent orange juice year round. They won't tell anyone how exactly the Black Book formula works, but the consultant who designed it, Bob Cross of Revenue Analytics, shared it with Bloomberg Businessweek.

Black Book is an algorithm that includes data about consumer preferences and the 600 flavors that make up an orange. Coke matches this data to a profile detailing acidity, sweetness, etc. so that they can blend batches to replicate the same taste and consistency. Black Book also incorporates external factors, such as weather patterns, anticipated crop yields, and cost pressures to allow Coke to plan ahead and ensure they have supplies on hand.

Coca-Cola's Brazilian partner, Cutrale, processes the oranges, which are grown to Coke specifications. Satellite imaging allows them to order growers to pick their fruit at the best time, as determined by Black Book. The fresh-squeezed juice is stored in Cutrale's silos and transported via a 1.2 mile underground pipeline to Coke's packaging plant, where it is flash-pasteurized. It is then piped to storage tanks where it is slowly agitated and covered with a nitrogen gas blanked to keep out oxygen, which has been sucked out of the juice, as it will cause it to spoil.

The batches from different crops and seasons are separated, based on orange type, sweetness, and acidity. Blend technicians follow Black Book instructions, adding natural flavors and fragrances captured during squeezing back into the juice to make up for the flavor lost in processing. "When the juice is stripped of oxygen it is also stripped of flavor providing chemicals. Juice companies therefore hire flavor and fragrance companies, the same ones that formulate perfumes for Dior and Calvin Klein, to engineer flavor packs to add back to the juice to make it taste fresh. Flavor packs aren’t listed as an ingredient on the label because technically they are derived from orange essence and oil. Yet those in the industry will tell you that the flavor packs, whether made for reconstituted or pasteurized orange juice, resemble nothing found in nature," explains Alissa Hamilton, author of Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice.

If you're looking for an all-natural orange juice experience, free of algorithms and flavor packs, your best bet is to juice it yourself, go to a juice bar, or take Hamilton's suggestion and enjoy a whole Valencia orange instead.

Your Internet Friends Are Real

Let’s Really Be Friends
A defense of online intimacy

By Kyle Chayka The New Republic

In 1997, a writer and web developer named Paul Ford walked into a sushi restaurant in midtown Manhattan to meet a group of strangers. These were bloggers—a term not yet widely in use—who, along with Ford, formed a tight-knit vanguard of individuals publishing personal writing online. Ford had been building experimental personal websites since 1993, and had made a name for himself online with his lyrical missives on programming esoterica and New York dating mishaps. He’d never met the other bloggers IRL (In Real Life, a phrase that likely had even less currency then than blogger). He was excited to finally get the chance to do so.

When Ford arrived at the restaurant, however, he froze with anxiety. “I was 22 and the Internet was new and everyone was sitting around a table chatting and laughing,” Ford told me. “Who went to parties where no one knew each other?” He stood just inside the door and surreptitiously watched the group clustered around a table. “I left after ten minutes.”

This incident remains as strikingly plausible today as it did two decades ago. Relationships that travel from the Internet to the nondigital world, or navigate a space somewhere in between, have retained that same patina of weirdness. The stigma associated with online friendship, that persistent doubt that “real” intimacy can only be created via physical encounter, has not faded. Even in this, the Age of Social Media, when virtual interaction populates almost every facet of daily existence, online friendships are still viewed with suspicion. But they shouldn’t be. The time has come to obliterate the false distinctions between digital ties and the ones that bind us in the physical world. Our lives on Twitter and Tumblr are today a real part of our real lives. Everyone is an Internet friend.

John Suler, in his 2000 book The Psychology of Cyberspace, wrote that people “tend to separate their online lives from their offline lives.” But this is far less true today. With the launch of Friendster (2002); MySpace (2003); and, in 2004, the global behemoth Facebook, distinctions between friendship online and off grew more ambiguous. People had to decide which of their friends and acquaintances—many of whom they had not been motivated to see in years—they should befriend digitally. Facebook in particular, with its early reliance on college e-mail accounts for membership, has tied digital identity more firmly to the IRL iteration.

The perception that online relationships are somehow less real than their physical counterparts exemplifies what Nathan Jurgenson, a New York-based sociologist and researcher for the messaging platform Snapchat, calls “digital dualism.” Contemporary identities and relationships are no more or less authentic in either space. “We’re coming to terms with there being just one reality and digital is part of it, not any less real or true,” Jurgenson said. “What you do online and what you do face-to-face are completely interwoven.”

The first mainstream internet communities—and thus some of the earliest virtual friendships—didn’t emerge until the late ’80s, when commercial traffic was allowed online via private Internet service providers like The World, which launched in Massachusetts in 1989. Early online social groups were largely restricted to specific-interest cliques that hewed to the medium’s nerd origins. Usenet, an e-mail and file-sharing client created to sort news by subject, first launched in 1980; the WELL, a dial-up bulletin-board system co-founded in 1985 by hippie futurist and editor of the utopian Whole Earth Catalog Stewart Brand, became a popular gathering point for Grateful Dead fans. IRC, or Internet Relay Chats, were likewise segregated along topical channels, like #anime or #hardware or #geek. The platform peaked in the 1990s with Eris Free Network, and today is largely reserved for illicit hacker groups with a need for anonymity.

In this early period, crossover from the digital world and into the real one remained rare, in part due to suspicion of the semi-anonymous nature of the Internet itself. “You don’t tend to find deep relationships online,” Douglas Rushkoff, the tech writer and thinker, told me. “And if you look for them you could easily get catfished,” Rushkoff said. (Catfish [noun]: “Someone who pretends to be someone they’re not using Facebook or other social media to create false identities, particularly to pursue deceptive online romances.” See Urban Dictionary.) For those who have grown up on the Internet, the expectations of honesty in response to the existential chat query “A/S/L?” (Age/Sex/Location) might be low. But this may not remain the case.

Online traffic in the United States increased by more than 1,000 percent between 1999 and 2003. A by-product of this growth was a narrowing of the digital divide. Enough people were online that your real friends might well know your online-only ones, who could then be mentally reclassified simply friends-of-friends. IRL meetings became less suspect. Web communities, meanwhile, began to leave the vertical depths of niche interest and join the mainstream. In 1999, a web designer named Matthew Haughey launched MetaFilter, a general-interest online forum that is still active today. MetaFilter was designed to help users share links of compelling posts (cat videos!) from across the wider Internet. It also became known for its then-unique penchant for physical meetups. “The meetups were half shy nerds and half relatively normal people,” said Rusty Foster, a developer who founded a contemporaneous (and now largely defunct) community called Kuro5hin, which skewed toward a nerdier audience. Foster has since referred to his site as a “gated dysfunctional community.”

The first MetaFilter meetup happened in 2001, after an earthquake in Seattle. Discussion of the natural phenomenon as it happened caused the members to notice that they lived in close proximity to each other. Once it was safe to go out, they decided to gather at a bar. It went so well that Haughey soon devoted a section of his site to planning such events. Haughey attended his first meetup at a Belgian frites spot in San Francisco in 2002. “I was incredibly nervous, because I didn’t know anyone,” he said. But his fears proved misplaced. “It was really a great experience. One of the guys had the greatest username: Fishfucker. 

Fishfucker turned out to be a really nice dude.” Meetups eventually became big business. In 2002, a start-up called Meetup was launched that managed online social circles with an IRL component, charging group organizers for added features. The site now boasts over 180,000 Meetups with focuses ranging from New Age philosophy to “geek physique.” (The Internet’s ability to convene niche cultures has never flagged.)

The anxiety still lingering around Internet friendship is a legacy of a particular antiquated conception of online life—a sense that “the Net,” like jetpacks and the Segway, was going to be a lot cooler than it has proven to be. The 1980s-era techno-utopian vision of “cyberspace” as a separate, and perhaps even pure, Matrix-style realm of glowing tubes and binary code was a false one. “At no point was there ever a cyberspace,” Jurgenson said. “It was always deeply about this one reality.” The Internet is shopping for knitted caps and sharing coupons for bad meals and enduring comments from sexist strangers. It has always included an element of real life difficulty, and the primordial web denizens knew it. Now, the rest of us do, too. We once fetishized cyberspace as sexy and revolutionary. Today it’s just normal.

Online friendships make it clear—and forgive the debt to Facebook—that the way we friend now has changed. Intimacy now develops in both digital and physical realms, often crossing freely between the two. If we accept the equal value of virtual friendships to their IRL analogues (perhaps even doing away with the pejorative acronym), we open ourselves up to a range of new possibilities for connection.

“The Internet represents a broadening of the spectrum of relationships we can have,” Jenna Wortham, a New York Times Magazine writer known for the prolificacy of her online social life, told me. “I have lots of online-, Gchat-only friendships and I love them. I’m very comfortable with the fact that I don’t know [these people] in real life and I don’t have any plans to.” The merit of these friendships lies in their mutability—in your pocket, on your screen, in your living room. Discarding the distinction between real and virtual friendship does not doom us to a society in which tweets, chat, and e-mail are our only points of contact. It just means that the stranger we meet every day on the other side of our screens will no longer be a stranger, but someone that we know and trust.

Glorp

Since the City of Denton Banned Fracking, Texas GOP Moves to Pre-empt Local Control

Sunday, 08 March 2015By Candice Bernd, Truthout | Report 

Carol Soph, a board member of the Denton Drilling Awareness Group, the driving force behind Denton's fracking ban, speaks with Rep. Phil King about her concerns regarding a bill he introduced in response to the Denton ban that would gut cities' ability to introduce similar measures or regulations. King is this year's national chair of the American Legislative Exchange Council.
"I do feel very strongly that air-quality measures and the engineering and scientific issues of oil and gas should be regulated at the state level, where the expertise is," Texas Rep. Phil King (R-Weatherford) told a group of North Texans Monday, March 2, during a meeting in his Capitol office about a bill he introduced that would create barriers to a city's ability to regulate the oil and gas industry.

The room was largely filled with people from Denton, which passed Texas' first ban on hydraulic fracturing (fracking) within city limits. Since the ban passed last fall in a landslide victory, state lawmakers connected to the oil and gas industry and to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have introduced a number of bills aimed at undermining local democracy, ostensibly to prevent other cities from following Denton's lead.

Activists, however, says these bills would effectively kill local democracy so that citizens would lose the ability to introduce ballot referendums, and local governments would be unable to regulate industry to protect the health and safety of residents.

"The reason that we're here is because the state did a terrible job. That's why the opposition [to oil and gas drilling] is growing," said Sharon Wilson, a Gulf coast organizer with Earthworks, in response to King's assessment.

King continued to assert his confidence in state oil and gas regulators and told the group he plans to move forward with his bills. One of the bills would allow the state to reject a municipal ordinance and the other would require a city to assess the tax revenue cost of any attempt to regulate oil and gas.

At the March 2 meeting, about 40 residents from Denton, Dallas, Arlington, Mansfield, Grand Prairie and Pantego expressed concerns about the state-level regulatory lapses that brought Denton to the point of banning fracking. These lapses are driving many other cities across the state to make their local oil and gas regulations stronger.

As a resident of Denton myself, I watched the city struggle for more than five years to regulate the oil and gas industry's activities within city limits. Yet oil and gas companies refused to follow many of the rules the city adopted when it revised its gas drilling ordinance in 2013, claiming instead that their drilling activities were grandfathered under old rules. Finally, Denton was left with no other option but to ban fracking entirely in 2014, delivering a blow to the industry in a city on the same shale where the drilling technique was pioneered in the '90s.

Years earlier, Denton City Council members had instructed residents to take their concerns about gas drilling to Austin, telling many of my neighbors that their hands were simply tied at the local level. Residents took their advice and traveled to Austin multiple times, but rather than finding the help they were seeking, Austin lawmakers at the time sent representatives of the Denton Drilling Awareness Group (DAG) back to Denton, telling them explicitly that it was a local issue. Now, as it turns out, they seem to be changing their minds.

"We did work on [regulating drilling] at the state level, and Phil King and Myra Crownover and Tan Parker did everything they could to undermine getting anything passed at the state level," said former Fort Worth Rep. Lon Burnam, who now works for Public Citizen, referring to Denton County representatives. "So they've kind of reaped what they sowed."

King's bills are part of a wider strategy emerging in Republican-dominated state legislatures this year to curtail municipalities' regulatory authority, including their ability to pass local ordinances and citizen-led ballot referendums. The legislation often comes at the behest of industries that stand to lose money because of regulations initiated in the municipalities where they operate.

According to The New York Times, eight states led by Republicans have prohibited municipalities from passing paid sick day legislation in just the past two years. Other such pre-emption laws have barred cities from raising the minimum wage and regulating the activities of landlords. This year, Arkansas passed a law that blocks a city's ability to pass anti-discrimination laws that would protect LGBT people, and bills introduced in six states this session would follow Arkansas' lead.

Many industries, including, most prominently, the restaurant industry and oil and gas interests, are working together this year through ALEC, which generates "model" legislation that advances the interests of its corporate members throughout state legislatures. Rep. King is serving as ALEC's national chair this year and introduced his two pre-emption bills with Denton's fracking ban in mind.

King denied that his role in ALEC had anything to do with the introduction of his pre-emption bills and said the bills were not model legislation created by ALEC. The organization's corporate funders have contributed tens of thousands of dollars to King over the years.

Two other bills filed in Austin this session would go even further than King's in gutting local regulatory power: One would prevent any city or county in Texas from banning fracking, and another would effectively kill home rule authority (a city's ability to pass laws to govern itself) so that cities cannot pass local ordinances.

State lawmakers and the oil and gas industry isn't just responding to the blow delivered to fracking interests in Texas, but also hoping to beat back frack bans nationally. Bans on hydraulic fracturing passed in local municipalities across the nation during midterms elections. Those bans, and in particular, Denton's ban - have created a backlash from the oil and gas industry and conservative statehouses in the United States.

Last month, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that only the state - not cities or counties - has the authority to regulate oil and gas drilling, effectively killing a municipality's ability to ban the drilling practice. But in other states, judges have ruled exactly the opposite, such as in New York's Supreme Court, which in July decided that local governments did have the authority to ban fracking. In another case in Pennsylvania, a court ruled that cities have the authority to regulate fracking, but not to outlaw it.

"The reason all these [pre-emption] bills are being filed is [state legislators are] in a state of shock, because the people of Denton conducted an electoral revolution and passed this [fracking ban], and now they are reeling from it," Burnam said.

Dentonites and other North Texans living on top of the Barnett Shale formation are fighting a state and industry attack on their right to determine what's best for their communities. They point out the hypocrisy of conservative lawmakers in Austin who rail against so-called "Big Government" at the federal level while simultaneously attempting to strip small municipal governments of their power.

The grassroots activists have also been quick to point out conservative lawmakers' duplicity when it comes to property rights. They have largely framed their arguments at the state Capitol in those terms because state representatives often ignore other valuable environmental and health concerns.

"The whole ALEC team, led by Phil King, is more considerate of the property rights of corporations than they are the property rights of homeowners and individuals, and this is what this battle is really about, because in Texas, the overriding law is deferential treatment to the subsurface mineral right owners over the surface homeowners," Burnam said.

This contradiction was front-and-center during anti-fracking activists' meeting with Sen. Craig Estes about the bill he introduced, which mandates that cities compensate mineral owners if they pass regulations that cut into potential mineral profits.

The activist group argued that mineral owners' rights to extract minerals and earn profits from them conflicts with the property rights of homeowners, because the industrial process of fracking can create property damage and decrease property values, as well as prevent homeowners from enjoying their property due to light, noise and air pollution created by fracking.

Dentonites are also continuing efforts to defend their city's fracking ban at the local level. DAG members, with the help of Earthworks, are intervening in two court cases brought against the city by the Texas Oil and Gas Association and Texas' General Land Office, which argue the city's ban violates the Texas Constitution. The Denton groups asked that the cases be moved to Denton County from Travis County, and the court agreed.

Meanwhile, Dentonites continue to testify at City Council meetings as council members once again work to revise the city's drilling ordinance, which will become the last word on drilling regulations if the city's ban is overturned in court.

This Modern World

Smoking marijuana is 114 times safer than drinking alcohol – study

"safer" being a relative term...

Reuters/Marcos Brindicci

As the debate over marijuana legalization continues in the United States, a new study suggests that smoking the controversial plant is about 114 times safer than drinking alcohol.

In fact, alcohol was found to be the deadliest drug on an individual level, at least when it comes to the likelihood of a person dying due to consuming a lethal dose. Heroin and cocaine were the next most deadly substances, followed by tobacco, ecstasy, and meth. Trailing up the rear was marijuana.




 According to the team of international researchers behind the study, published in the journal 'Scientific Reports,' the findings suggest that marijuana risks – at least those related to mortality – are trumped when compared to substances like alcohol.

“The results confirm that the risk of cannabis may have been overestimated in the past,” the report reads. “At least for the endpoint of mortality, the [margin of exposure] for THC/cannabis in both individual and population-based assessments would be above safety thresholds (e.g. 100 for data based on animal experiments). In contrast, the risk of alcohol may have been commonly underestimated.”

 
As reported by the Washington Post, the study’s results aren’t exactly new, though they do confirm similar findings first reported a decade ago. In a separate story last year, the Post noted that Wayne Hall of the World Health Organization said it’s nearly impossible for even those who smoke large amounts of cannabis to overdose on the drug.

"The estimated fatal dose [of THC, the primary active compound in marijuana] in humans derived from animal studies is between 15 and 70 grams. This is a far greater amount of cannabis that even a very heavy cannabis user could use in a day," Hall wrote last year. 

Even alcohol’s unsafe margin of exposure (MOE) ratio isn’t all that surprising since, unlike heroin and cocaine, it is legal and much more readily available and accepted.

 

Marijuana legalization advocates are welcoming the new study, using it to suggest that America’s current ban on the drug is wrong and misguided, considering the mortality rates associated with alcohol and tobacco – both of which are legal and easily accessible to those of age. Marijuana, meanwhile, is still illegal on the federal level and largely illegal on the state level – except in Colorado, Oregon, Alaska, and the District of Columbia.

Even the researchers noted that compared to other drugs, their findings support regulating pot as a legal substance instead of a banned one.

“Currently, the MOE results point to risk management prioritization towards alcohol and tobacco rather than illicit drugs,” the report reads. “The high MOE values of cannabis, which are in a low-risk range, suggest a strict legal regulatory approach rather than the current prohibition approach.”

 
Despite the new study, the American Academy of Pediatrics cautions that pot should not be smoked by children or teenagers, as there have been studies suggesting a link between youth smoking and impaired child development.

What We Are Not Being Told About Suicide And Depression

Shouldn’t researchers examine societal and cultural variables that are making us depressed and suicidal?

By Bruce E. Levine / AlterNet

February 15, 2015

For nearly two decades, Big Pharma commercials have falsely told Americans that mental illness is associated with a chemical brain imbalance, but the truth is that mental illness and suicidality are associated with poverty, unemployment, and mass incarceration. And the truth is that American society has now become so especially oppressive for young people that an embarrassingly large number of American teenagers and young adults are suicidal and depressed.

In November of 2014, the U.S. government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) issued a press release titled “Nearly One in Five Adult Americans Experienced Mental Illness in 2013.” This brief press release provides a snapshot of the number of Americans who are suicidal, depressed, and mentally ill, and it bemoans how many Americans are not in treatment. However, excluded from SAMHSA’s press release—yet included in the lengthy results of SAMHSA’s national survey—are economic, age, gender, and other demographic correlates of serious mental illness, depression, and suicidality (serious suicidal thoughts, plans, or attempts). It is these demographic correlates that have political implications.

These lengthy results, for example, include extensive evidence that involvement in the criminal justice system (such as being on parole or probation) is highly correlated with suicidality, depression, and serious mental illness. Yet Americans are not told that preventing unnecessary involvement with the criminal justice system—for example, marijuana legalization and drug use decriminalization—could well prove to be a more powerful antidote to suicidality, depression, and serious mental illness than medical treatment.

Also, the survey results provide extensive evidence that unemployment and poverty are highly associated with suicidality, depression, and serious mental illness. While correlation is not the equivalent of causation, it makes more sense to be further examining variables that actually are associated with suicidality, depression, and serious mental illness rather than focusing on variables such as chemical imbalances which are not even correlates (see AlterNet January 2015). These results beg questions such as: Does unemployment and poverty cause depression, or does depression make it more likely for unemployment and poverty, or are both true?

And the survey results also provide extensive evidence that younger Americans are more depressed than older Americans, that women are more likely to be depressed than men, and that Native Americans and biracial Americans are more likely to be depressed than other ethnic/racial groups. Again, while correlation is not the equivalent of causation, depression obviously cannot cause one to become young, female, or Native American. More rationally, researchers should be asking what is it about American society that is so depressing, especially for young people, women, and Native Americans?

These recent SAMHSA survey results provide a golden opportunity for a scientific and societal shift to reconsider what about American society and culture is resulting in emotional suffering and self-destructive behaviors, especially for certain groups. Below is a summary of some of the key statistics in these buried SAMHSA survey results.

Summary of Buried SAMHSA Survey Results
Involvement with the Criminal Justice System: In 2013, the percentage of American adults with serious suicidal thoughts: 10.7 percent for those on parole or a supervised release from jail in the past 12 months, 9.2 percent among those who were on probation, and 3.9 percent for those not involved in the criminal justice system. The percentage for adults with any mental illness: if on probation was 32.3 percent, if on parole or supervised release, 36.5 percent, double the percentage of adults not involved in the criminal justice system (18.3 percent). The percentage of adults with serious mental illness: if on probation was 9.4 percent, if on parole or supervised release was 13.9 percent, more than triple for those not involved in the criminal justice system (4.1 percent).

Unemployment: Among American adults in 2013, the unemployed were more likely than those who were employed full time: to have serious thoughts of suicide (7.0 vs. 3.0 percent), make suicide plans (2.3 vs. 0.7 percent), or attempt suicide (1.4 vs. 0.3 percent). The percentage of adults with any mental illness: for the unemployed was 22.8 percent, for part-time employed was 20.3 percent, and for full-time employed was 15.4 percent. Among adults with serious mental illness: the percentage for the unemployed was 6.6 percent, for part-time employed was 4.8 percent, and for those full-time employed was 2.7 percent. Among those adults having a major depression episode: the percentage for the unemployed was 9.5 percent, for part-time employed was 7.8 percent, and for full-time employed was 5.3 percent.

Family Income: Among American adults in 2013, serious suicidal thoughts occurred in: 6.6 percent of those from family incomes below the Federal poverty level, 4.7 percent of those with family incomes between 100 and 199 percent of the Federal poverty level, and 3.1 percent of those with annual family incomes at 200 percent or more of the Federal poverty level. Among American adults, the percentage with serious mental illness: for those with a family income that was below the Federal poverty level was 7.7 percent, for those with a family income at 100 to 199 percent of the Federal poverty level was 5.1 percent, and for those with a family income at 200 percent or more of the Federal poverty level was 3.2 percent.

Age: No suicidality results were reported for Americans under 18, however, among American adults having serious suicidal thoughts, the percentage: for those aged 18 to 25 was 7.4 percent, for those aged 26 to 49 was 4.0 percent, and for those aged 50 or older was 2.7 percent. And among adults who made suicide plans in the past year: the percentage for those aged 18 to 25 was 2.5 percent, for those aged 26 to 49 was 1.3 percent, and for those aged 50 or older was 0.6 percent. The percentage of Americans having a major depressive episode in 2013: for those aged 12 to 17 was 10.7 percent, for those aged 18 to 25 was 8.7 percent, for those aged 26 to 49 was 7.6 percent, and for those aged 50 or older was 5.1 percent.

Gender: In 2013, adult women were more likely than adult men to have: any mental illness (22.3 vs. 14.4 percent), a serious mental illness (4.9 vs. 3.5 percent), a major depressive episode (8.1 vs. 5.1 percent), and suicidal thoughts (4.0 vs. 3.8 percent). Among American ages 12 to 17, females were more likely than males to have a major depressive episode (16.2 vs. 5.3 percent) and a major depressive episode with severe impairment (12.0 vs. 3.5 percent).

Ethnicity/Race: In 2013, the percentages of adults aged 18 or older having serious thoughts of suicide in the past year were: 2.9 percent among blacks, 3.3 percent among Asians, 3.6 percent among Hispanics, 4.1 percent among whites, 4.6 percent among Native Hawaiians or Other Pacific Islanders, 4.8 percent among American Indians or Alaska Natives, and 7.9 percent among adults reporting two or more races. The percentages of adults with a major depressive episode: were 1.6 percent among Native Hawaiians or Other Pacific Islanders, 4.0 percent among Asians, 4.6 percent among blacks, 5.8 percent among Hispanics, 7.3 percent among whites, 8.9 percent among American Indians or Alaska Natives, and 11.4 percent among adults reporting two or more races.

Conclusions
The SAMHSA press release states that among American adults in 2013: 10 million American adults (4.2 percent) experienced a serious mental illness, 15.7 million adults (6.7 percent) experienced a major depressive episode, and states that “major depressive episodes affected approximately one in ten (2.6 million) youth between the ages of 12 to 17.” The press release then laments how many Americans with mental illnesses are not receiving treatment.

While these statistics in the SAMHSA press release are troubling, the devil is in the details of the actual lengthy SAMHSA survey results. These results make clear that suicidality, depression, and mental illness are highly correlated with involvement in the criminal justice system, unemployment, and poverty, and occur in greater frequency among young people, women, and Native Americans.

Shouldn’t researchers be examining American societal and cultural variables that are making so many of us depressed and suicidal? At the very least, don’t we as a society want to know what exactly is making physically healthier teenagers and young adults more depressed than senior citizens?

5 Facts That Show Half of America Is Seriously Struggling

The media celebrates "economic growth," while new data shows most Americans are barely surviving.

By Paul Buchheit / AlterNet

February 8, 2015

Happy Monday! S&P 500 now up 10% for year --CNN Money
Third-quarter U.S. economic growth strongest in 11 years --Reuters
The U.S. economy is on a tear --Wall Street Journal 

Half of our nation, by all reasonable estimates of human need, is in poverty. The jubilant headlines above speak for people whose view is distorted by growing financial wealth. The argument for a barely surviving half of America has been made before, but important new data is available to strengthen the case.

1. No Money for Unexpected Bills 

A recent Bankrate poll found that almost two-thirds of Americans didn't have savings available to cover a $500 repair bill or a $1,000 emergency room visit.

A related Pew survey concluded that over half of U.S. households have less than one month's income in readily available savings, and that ALL their savings -- including retirement funds -- amounted to only about four months of income.

And young adults? A negative savings rate, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. Before the recession their savings rate was a reasonably healthy 5 percent.

2. 40 Percent Collapse in Household Wealth 

Over half of Americans have good reason to feel poor. Between 2007 and 2013 median wealth dropped a shocking 40 percent, leaving the poorest half with negative wealth (because of debt), and a full 60% of households owning, in total, about as much as the nation's 94 richest individuals.

People of color fare the worst, with half of black households owning less than $11,000 in total wealth, and Hispanic households less than $14,000. The median net worth for white households is about $142,000.

3. Cost of Living Surges as Income Falls 

Official poverty measures are based largely on the food costs of the 1950s. But food costs have doubledsince 1978, housing has more than tripled, and college tuition is eleven times higher. The cost of raising a child increased by 40 percent between 2000 and 2010. And despite the gains from Obamacare, health care expenses continue to grow.

As all these essential costs have been going up, median household income has been going down since 2000, with the greatest drop occurring since 2009, as 95 percent of the post-recession income gains have gone to the richest 1%.

4. Lots of New Jobs (Below Living Wage) 

'Amazing' jobs report, apart from wages --Marketwatch 

Amazing at the top and at the bottom. According to the Federal Reserve Bank, there have been job gains at the highest paid level -- engineering, finance, computer analysis; and there have been job gains at thelowest paid level -- personal health care, retail, and food preparation.

But the jobs that kept the middle class out of poverty -- education, construction, social services, transportation, administration -- have seen a decline since the recession, especially in the northeast. At a national level jobs gained are paying 23 percent less than jobs lost.

Worse yet, the lowest paid workers, those in housekeeping and home health care and food service, haveseen their wages drop 6 to 8 percent (although wages overall rose about 2 percent in 2014).

5. Our Greatest Shame: Half of the Children Feeling Poverty 

Over half of public school students are poor enough to qualify for lunch subsidies. There's been a stunning70 percent increase since the recession in the number of children on food stamps. State of Working America reported that almost half of black children under the age of six are living in poverty.

The celebratory quotes about a booming economy seem so far away.

Did Grassroots Power Push FCC in Right Direction on Net Neutrality?

No, internet giants like Google and Facebook did. People with as much money than the telecom giants did it~jef.

 

Monday, February 02, 2015

by Common Dreams

Wheeler likely to support strict net neutrality protections after backing off from pro-industry initiatives

by Nadia Prupis, staff writer

 

 

Following a months-long campaign by consumer advocacy groups that pushed for strict protection of the internet, Federal Communications Commissioner Tom Wheeler appears to be ready to introduce some of the strongest regulations possible on Thursday ahead of the FCC's final net neutrality vote on February 26, according to reports.

Those regulations include redefining broadband as a public utility under Title II of the Communications Act, a policy change that has been touted by internet watchdog groups as one of the most important net neutrality protections available.

Once a lobbyist for the cable and telecommunications industries, Wheeler initially supported lax regulations that critics said would open the door to controversial paid-prioritization policies, known as "fast lanes," allowing internet service providers to charge higher fees for speedier website loading times.

According to reporting by Politico on Monday, "interviews with FCC officials, industry executives and representatives of public interest groups reveal the origins of his dramatic pivot on this issue: an intense and relatively brief grass-roots lobbying campaign that targeted two people — him and President Barack Obama."

Pressure from digital rights groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Free Press, which galvanized support from consumers and progressive media figures, saw Wheeler steadily backpedaling on his initiatives last year. His shift appeared near-complete after President Barack Obama spoke out in favor of strict net neutrality regulations on November 10.

Wheeler proposed in April new rules that would allow ISPs to create fast lane deals with internet companies as long as they were "commercially reasonable."

In response, a coalition of internet watchdogs and consumer advocacy groups launched a months-long series of campaigns against the chairman's proposals, while protesters camped out in front of FCC headquarters.

On June 1, Last Week Tonight host John Oliver ridiculed Wheeler and his proposed rules in a segment that quickly went viral, sending hundreds of thousands of consumers to the FCC website to comment in favor of stronger net neutrality regulations. Within months, four million emails and comments had come in, breaking FCC records.

Wheeler then moved towards a hybrid proposal that would impose Title II rules on parts of the internet, but not all of it. That, too, was met with disapproval by watchdogs and tech companies alike.

Meanwhile, Obama had also been under pressure from internet advocacy groups, who urged him to speak out in favor of stricter regulations. On November 10, he did just that, issuing a statement that called for using a Title II reclassification to safeguard the internet, "one of the most significant democratizing influences the world has ever known."

Earlier this month, Wheeler indicated support for reclassification of the internet as a public utility under Title II, bringing praise from Free Press president and CEO Craig Aaron who said, "Chairman Wheeler appears to have heard the demands of the millions of Internet users who have called for real net neutrality protections."

The Police State Is Upon Us

Paul Craig Roberts 

Anyone paying attention knows that 9/11 has been used to create a police/warfare state. Years ago NSA official William Binney warned Americans about the universal spying by the National Security Agency, to little effect. Recently Edward Snowden proved the all-inclusive NSA spying by releasing spy documents, enough of which have been made available by Glenn Greenwald to establish the fact of NSA illegal and unconstitutional spying, spying that has no legal, constitutional, or “national security” reasons.Yet Americans are not up in arms. Americans have accepted the government’s offenses against them as necessary protection against “terrorists.”

Neither Congress, the White House, or the Judiciary has done anything about the wrongful spying, because the spying serves the government. Law and the Constitution are expendable when the few who control the government have their “more important agendas.”

Bradley Manning warned us of the militarization of US foreign policy and the murderous consequences, and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks posted leaked documents proving it.

Were these whistleblowers and honest journalists, who alerted us to the determined attack on our civil liberty, rewarded with invitations to the White House and given medals of honor in recognition of their service to American liberty?

No. Bradley Manning is in federal prison, and so would be Julian Assange and Edward Snowden if Washington could get its hands on them.

Binney escaped the Police State’s clutches, because he did not take any documents with which to prove his allegations, and thus could be dismissed as “disgruntled” and as a “conspiracy kook,” but not arrested as a “spy” who stole “national secrets.”

Greenwald, so far, is too prominent to be hung for reporting the truth. But he is in the crosshairs, and the Police State is using other cases to close in on him.

These are only five of the many people who have provided absolute total proof that the Bill of Rights has been overthrown. Washington continues to present itself to the world as the “home of the free,” the owner of the White Hat, while Washington demonstrates its lack of mercy by invading or bombing seven countries on false pretenses during the past 14 years, displacing, killing, and maiming millions of Muslims who never raised a fist against the US.

Many commentators have written articles and given interviews about government’s ever expanding police powers. The totality of the American Police State is demonstrated by its monument in Utah, where an enormous complex has been constructed in which to store every communication of every American.

Somehow a son or daughter checking on an aged parent, a working mother checking on her children’s child care, a family ordering a pizza, and sweethearts planning a date are important matters of national security.
Some educated and intelligent people understand the consequences, but most Americans perceive no threat as they “have nothing to hide.”

The Founding Fathers who wrote the Bill of Rights and attached it to the US Constitution did not have anything to hide, but they clearly understood, unlike modern day Americans, that freedom depended completely on strictly limiting the ability of government to intrude upon the person.

Those limits provided by the Founding Fathers are gone. The hoax “war on terror” demolished them.
Today not even the relationships between husband and wife and parents and children have any protection from arbitrary intrusions by the state.

Essentially, government has destroyed the family along with civil liberty.

Those insouciant Americans who do not fear the police state because they “have nothing to hide” desperately need to read: Home-schooled Children Seized By Authorities Still In State Custody.

In Police State America, authorities can enter your home on the basis of an anonymous “tip” that you are, or might be, somehow, abusing your children, or exposing them to medicines that are not in containers with child-proof caps or to household bleach that is not under lock and key, and seize your children into state custody on the grounds that you present a danger to your children.

The government does not have to tell you who your accuser is. It can be your worst enemy or a disgruntled employee, but the tipster is protected. However, you and your family are not.

The authorities who receive these tips treat them as if they are valid. A multi-member goon squad shows up at your house. This is when the utterly stupid “I have nothing to hide” Americans discover that they have no rights, regardless of whether they have anything to hide.

We owe this police power over parents and children to “child advocates” who lobbied for laws based on their fantasies that all parents are serial rapists of children, and if not, are medieval torturers, trained by the CIA, who physically and psychologically abuse their children.

In the opinion of “child advocates,” children are brought into the world in order to be abused by parents. Dogs and cats and the fish in the fishbowl are not enough. Parents need children to abuse, too, just as the Police and the Police State need people to abuse.

Of course, sometimes real child abuse occurs. But it is not the routine event that the Child Protective Services Police assume. A sincere investigation, such as was missing in the report on the home-schooled children, would have had one polite person appear at the door to explain to the parents that there had been a complaint that their children were being exposed to a poisonous substance in the home. The person should have listened to the parents, had a look at the children, and if there was any doubt about the water purifier, ask that its use be discontinued until its safety could be verified.

But nothing sensible happened, because the Police State does not have to be sensible.

Instead, a half dozen goon thugs show up. The parents are put outside in the snow for 5 hours while the children are scared to death with questions and then carried away from their home, mother, and father.
In Police State America, this is called Protecting Children. We owe this tyranny to the idiot “child advocates.”

It is no longer important to protect children from homosexuals, unless the homosexuals are Catholic child pedophiles. But it is absolutely necessary to protect children from their parents.

So, yes, dear insouciant American fool, whether you have anything to hide or not, you are in grave danger, and so are your children, in Police State America.

You can no longer rely on the Constitution to protect you.

This is the only way that you can protect yourself: grovel before your neighbors, your co-workers, your employees and employers, and, most definitely, before “public authority” and your children, as your children can report you. Don’t complain about anything. Do not get involved in protests. Don’t make critical comments on the Internet or on your telephone calls. Don’t homeschool. Don’t resist vaccines. Turn your backs to leaders who could liberate you as it is too dangerous to risk the failure of liberation. Be an abject, cowardly, obedient, servile member of the enserfed, enslaved American population. Above all, be thankful to Big Brother who protects you from terrorists and Russians.

You, dear insouciant, stupid, American are back on the Plantation. Perhaps that is your natural home. In his masterful A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn documents that despite their best efforts the exploited and abused American people have never been able to prevail against the powerful private interests that control the government. Whenever in American history the people rise up they are struck down by brute force.

Zinn makes totally clear that “American freedom, democracy, liberty, blah-blah” are nothing but a disguise for the rule over America by money.

Wave the flag, sing patriot songs, see enemies where the government tells you to see them, and above all, never think. Just listen. The government and its presstitute media will tell you what you must believe.

More evidence of Police State America.

Offensive Cartoons or Freedom of Expression

Sorry for the down time. I got divorced and moved to another town...

Shielded from Justice: The High Cost of Living in a Police State

By John W. Whitehead
October 14, 2014

“It’s been over five months since the night a SWAT team broke into the house in which we were staying…We were staying with relatives and my whole family was sleeping in one room. My husband and I, our three daughters and our baby (nicknamed “Baby Bou Bou”) in his crib. Dressed like soldiers, they broke down the door. The SWAT officers tossed a flashbang grenade into the room. It landed in Baby Bou Bou’s crib, blowing a hole in his face and chest that took months to heal and covering his entire body with scars.

“Doctors tell us that my son will have to have double reconstructive surgeries twice a year, every year for the next 20 years… [I]n five short months our family has taken on nearly $900,000 in medical bills, some of which have now gone into collections… After initially offering to cover the medical expenses, the county has since refused to cover any of our medical costs, all of which would never have happened if the SWAT team hadn’t broken into the home.”—Alecia Phonesavanh

Who pays the price for the police shootings that leave unarmed citizens dead or injured, for the SWAT team raids that leave doors splintered, homes trashed, pets murdered, and family members traumatized and injured, if not dead?

I’m not just talking about the price that must be paid in hard-earned dollars, whether by taxpayers or the victims, in attempting to restore what was vandalized and broken by police. It’s also the things that can’t be so easily calculated to a decimal point: the broken bones that will never quite heal right, the children’s nightmares at night, the uneasy sleep, the broken family heirlooms, the loss of faith in a system that was supposed to serve and protect you, the grief for loved ones whose lives were cut short.

Baby Bou Bou may have survived the misdirected SWAT team raid that left him with a hole in his face and extensive scars on his body, but he will be the one to pay the price for the rest of his life for the SWAT team’s blunder in launching a flashbang grenade into his crib. And even though the SWAT team was wrong about the person they were after, even though they failed to find any drugs in the home they’d raided, and even though they may have regretted the fact that Baby Bou Bou got hurt, it will still be the Phonesavanh family who will pay and pay and pay for the endless surgeries every year to reconstruct their son’s face as he grows from toddler to boy to teenager to man. Already, they have racked up more than $900,000 in medical bills. Incredibly, government officials refused to cover the family’s medical expenses.

That is just one family’s experience, the price they must pay for living in a police state. Tally their pain, their loss and their medical bills, and add it to that of the hundreds of other families in cities and towns across the nation who are similarly reeling from the blows inflicted by the government’s standing armies, and you will find yourself reeling. For many of these individuals, there can never be any amount of reparation sufficient to make up for the lives lost or shattered.

As for those who do get “paid back,” at least in monetary terms for their heartache and loss, it’s the taxpayers who are footing the bill to the tune of millions of dollars. Incredibly, these cases hardly impact the police department’s budget. As journalist Aviva Shen points out, “individual officers are rarely held accountable for their abuses, either by the police department or in court… Internally, police departments rarely investigate complaints of misconduct, let alone punish the accused officers. Because cities insulate police officers and departments from the financial consequences for their actions, police on the street have little incentive to avoid unnecessary force, and their departments may not feel the need to crack down on repeat offenders. And so the bill for taxpayers keeps growing.”

For example, Baltimore taxpayers have paid roughly $5.7 million since 2011 over lawsuits stemming from police abuses, with an additional $5.8 million going towards legal fees. That’s money that could have been spent on a state-of-the-art recreation center or renovations at more than 30 playgrounds. As the Baltimore Sun reports: “Victims include a 15-year-old boy riding a dirt bike, a 26-year-old pregnant accountant who had witnessed a beating, a 50-year-old woman selling church raffle tickets, a 65-year-old church deacon rolling a cigarette and an 87-year-old grandmother aiding her wounded grandson… Officers have battered dozens of residents who suffered broken bones — jaws, noses, arms, legs, ankles — head trauma, organ failure, and even death, coming during questionable arrests. Some residents were beaten while handcuffed; others were thrown to the pavement.”

New York taxpayers have shelled out almost $1,130 per year per police officer (there are 34,500 officers in the NYPD) to address charges of misconduct. That translates to $38 million every year just to clean up after these so-called public servants. Over a 10-year-period, Oakland, Calif., taxpayers were made to cough up more than $57 million (curiously enough, the same amount as the city’s deficit back in 2011) in order to settle accounts with alleged victims of police abuse.

Chicago taxpayers were asked to pay out nearly $33 million on one day alone to victims of police misconduct, with one person slated to receive $22.5 million, potentially the largest single amount settled on any one victim. The City has paid more than half a billion dollars to victims over the course of a decade. The Chicago City Council actually had to borrow $100 million just to pay off lawsuits arising over police misconduct in 2013. The city’s payout for 2014 should be in the same ballpark, especially with cases pending such as the one involving the man who was reportedly sodomized by a police officer’s gun in order to force him to “cooperate.”

Over 78% of the funds paid out by Denver taxpayers over the course of a decade arose as a result of alleged abuse or excessive use of force by the Denver police and sheriff departments. Meanwhile, taxpayers in Ferguson, Missouri, are being asked to pay $40 million in compensation—more than the city’s entire budget—for police officers treating them “‘as if they were war combatants,’ using tactics like beating, rubber bullets, pepper spray, and stun grenades, while the plaintiffs were peacefully protesting, sitting in a McDonalds, and in one case walking down the street to visit relatives.”

That’s just a small sampling of the most egregious payouts, but just about every community—large and small—feels the pinch when it comes to compensating victims who have been subjected to deadly or excessive force by police. The ones who rarely ever feel the pinch are the officers accused or convicted of wrongdoing, “even if they are disciplined or terminated by their department, criminally prosecuted, or even imprisoned.”

Indeed, a study published in the NYU Law Review reveals that 99.8% of the monies paid in settlements and judgments in police misconduct cases never come out of the officers’ own pockets, even when state laws require them to be held liable. Moreover, these officers rarely ever have to pay for their own legal defense. As law professor Joanna C. Schwartz notes, police officers are more likely to be struck by lightning than be made financially liable for their actions.

Schwartz references a case in which three Denver police officers chased and then beat a 16-year-old boy, stomping “on the boy’s back while using a fence for leverage, breaking his ribs and causing him to suffer kidney damage and a lacerated liver.” The cost to Denver taxpayers to settle the lawsuit: $885,000. The amount the officers contributed: 0.

Kathryn Johnston, 92 years old, was shot and killed during a SWAT team raid that went awry. Attempting to cover their backs, the officers falsely claimed Johnston’s home was the site of a cocaine sale and went so far as to plant marijuana in the house to support their claim. The cost to Atlanta taxpayers to settle the lawsuit: $4.9 million. The amount the officers contributed: 0.

Meanwhile, in Albuquerque, a police officer was convicted of raping a woman in his police car, in addition to sexually assaulting four other women and girls, physically abusing two additional women, and kidnapping or falsely imprisoning five men and boys. The cost to the Albuquerque taxpayers to settle the lawsuit: $1,000,000. The amount the officer contributed: 0.

In its report on police brutality and accountability in the United States, Human Rights Watch notes that taxpayers actually pay three times for officers who repeatedly commit abuses: “once to cover their salaries while they commit abuses; next to pay settlements or civil jury awards against officers; and a third time through payments into police ‘defense’ funds provided by the cities.”

A large part of the problem can be chalked up to influential police unions and laws providing for qualified immunity, which invariably allow officers to walk away without paying a dime for their wrongdoing. Conveniently, those deciding whether a police officer should be immune from having to personally pay for misbehavior on the job all belong to the same system, all cronies with a vested interest in protecting the police and their infamous code of silence: city and county attorneys, police commissioners, city councils and judges.

In a nutshell, the U.S. Supreme Court’s reasoning when it comes to qualified immunity for government officials (not just police officers) is essentially that these officials might be too cautious in carrying out their duties if there was a risk that they might be held personally liable for wrongdoing on the job. Frankly, we’d be far better off if government officials operated under the constant fear that there would be ramifications for wrongdoing on the job. As it now stands, we’ve got way too many lawbreakers, scoundrels, cheats and thugs on the government’s payroll, (many of whom are actually elected to office).

So what’s the solution, if any, to a system so clearly rigged that it allows rogue cops who engage in excessive force to wreak havoc with no fear of financial consequences? As HRW concludes:

The excessive use of force by police officers, including unjustified shootings, severe beatings, fatal chokings, and rough treatment, persists because overwhelming barriers to accountability make it possible for officers who commit human rights violations to escape due punishment and often to repeat their offenses…. Officers with long records of abuse, policies that are overly vague, training that is substandard, and screening that is inadequate all create opportunities for abuse. Perhaps most important, and consistently lacking, is a system of oversight in which supervisors hold their charges accountable for mistreatment and are themselves reviewed and evaluated, in part, by how they deal with subordinate officers who commit human rights violations. Those who claim that each high-profile case of abuse by a “rogue” officer is an aberration are missing the point: problem officers frequently persist because the accountability systems are so seriously flawed.

Unfortunately, we’re so far gone as a nation in terms of cronyism, corruption and unequal justice that there’s little hope of reformation working from the top down. As I point out in A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, if any change is to be made, if any hope for accountability is to be realized it must begin, as always, at the local level, with local police departments and governing bodies, where the average citizen can still, with sufficient reinforcements, make his voice heard.

So the next time you hear of a police shooting in your town of an unarmed citizen, don’t just shrug helplessly and turn the page or switch the channel. Form a coalition of concerned citizens and call your prosecutor’s office, email the police department, speak out at your city council meeting, urge your local paper to cover the story from both sides, blog about it, stage a protest, demand transparency and accountability—whatever you do, make sure you send the message loud and clear that you do not want your taxpayer dollars supporting illegal and abusive behavior.

Unprecedented catastrophe underway at Fukushima… Radioactive material will keep coming across to North America for centuries

 

Oct. 20, 2014 Chronic and long-lasting radioactive releases are [ongoing]… Fukushima continues to bleed into the ocean, because those nuclear cores have melted down and are in direct contact with the groundwater. It will bleed for centuries perhaps, and certainly decades to come. So when you compare these nuclear accidents… [Chernobyl] didn’t hit groundwater… The bottom line is that accidents are getting worse… Chernobyl contaminated all of Europe – 





Fukushima is contaminating the entire Pacific. >> Watch presentation here Kevin Kamps, nuclear waste watchdog, Oct. 21, 2014 (at 46:00 in): It shows what’s really been expected, that the massive releases of radioactivity — both atmospheric, that fell out on the ocean, and liquid, that are still on a daily basis pouring into the ocean — are slowly, or not so slowly, making their way to the North American coastline… This is going to keep going on for years, decades, even centuries into the future… Everyday, it’s 300 tons of radioactive groundwater that flows into the sea – every single day for the past nearly 4 years now — 300 tons of radioactive groundwater, containing a toxic alphabet soup of radioactive poisons, cesium… strontium-90, plutonium isotopes. That’s each and every day, so it is an unprecedented catastrophe for the oceans… The significance is — that is open ocean sea water. The bioaccumulation, biomagnification — we’re talking about orders of magnitude concentration of these radioactive poisons. First plankton, then go up the food chain — we are at the top of that food chain. So that’s just going to get worse the further up the food chain you go. It’s a very significant issue that the US federal government and the state governments are not paying attention to.

The Most Distrusted New Sources

This Modern World