Category: Social Issues
The analysis published under this category are as follows.Monday, December 02, 2013
Record Number of Homeless U.S. Students in 2013 / Politics / Social Issues
Isabelle Belanger writes: A record 1.1 million students attending public schools in the United States are homeless in 2013. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the number of homeless students has increased by 10 percent in 2013, from 1,065,794 in 2012, to 1,168,354. Forty-three states have reported increases from last year, with 10 states reporting increases of 20 percent or more. The number of homeless children has grown 24 percent over the past three years.
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Sunday, December 01, 2013
Will Work for Food, Please Help! Hunger in America / Politics / Social Issues
It’s hard giving thanks when you’re hungry. It’s harder living in the world’s richest country. It’s harder still knowing government officials don’t care. It’s hardest of all wondering how you’ll get by.
More below on growing hunger and deprivation. It’s increasing in America at a time trillions of dollars go for warmaking, corporate handouts, and other benefits for rich elites.
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Thursday, November 28, 2013
A Thanksgiving Reality / Politics / Social Issues
Segued into a 10-second afterthought, smothered by 60-second Christmas commercials, is the media acknowledgement of Thanksgiving, which nudges us into a realization of all we are thankful for.
But the usual litany, even with the omnipresent pictures of the less fortunate being fed by the more fortunate, doesn’t list well this year. Our thanks seem to be at best half-hearted or at least insensitive and shallow.
Sunday, November 24, 2013
Social Security - The Most Successful Ponzi Scheme in History / Politics / Social Issues
Gary Galles writes: “We paid our Social Security and Medicare taxes; we earned our benefits.” It is that belief among senior citizens that President Obama was pandering to when, in his second inaugural address, he claimed that those programs “strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers.”
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Saturday, November 23, 2013
Terrorism, Starvation And The Global Economic Crisis: Counter Strategies / Personal_Finance / Social Issues
Every major problem affecting the humanity has become a part of several other problems, as the peoples and the nations are getting more and more interconnected for the forces of globalization and Information Technology,. There is no single solution for any problem without taking into account the solutions for the other problems. Faith, ideology, technology, poverty or starvation, inter-regional and inter-sector imbalances, terrorism or fundamentalism and the global economic crisis are getting inseparable and mutually interconnected.
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Thursday, November 21, 2013
No Alternative World And The Post-Crash Revolt / Politics / Social Issues
JP MORGAN AND THE STATISTS
The “monster fine” to be paid by JP Morgan for what Eric Holder, the US Attorney General said himself, in an interview with NBC News, was the bank's direct role in the biggest world financial crisis since the Great Depression had little or no impact on investor sentiment. News of the fine produced a small uptick in JP Morgan shares as investors shrugged off the news of the bank's headline $13 billion settlement with the raft of lawsuits by the Federal Justice Department, State justice departments, and other federal agencies. Barry Grey http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article43212.html cited a report from Reuters explaining the penalty is tax deductible. The news agency quoted Gregg Polsky, a law professor at the University of North Carolina, as saying what the bank will actually pay as fines would effectively be reduced by $4 billion.
Tuesday, November 05, 2013
Top Reasons Why Everyone Needs a Second Passport / Politics / Social Issues
By Nick Giambruno, Editor, International Man: Doug Casey has said over and over that spreading your political risk beyond one jurisdiction is the single most important thing he can recommend today.Obtaining a second passport and citizenship in another country is a critical part in heeding Doug's advice.
This is because it's a fundamental step towards minimizing the political risk of being subjected to the whims of any single government.
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Monday, October 28, 2013
America's Culture of Ignorance / Politics / Social Issues
“Five percent of the people think; ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.” - Thomas Edison
The kabuki theater that passes for governance in Washington D.C. reveals the profound level of ignorance shrouding this Empire of Debt in its prolonged death throes. Ignorance of facts; ignorance of math; ignorance of history; ignorance of reality; and ignorance of how ignorant we’ve become as a nation, have set us up for an epic fall. It’s almost as if we relish wallowing in our ignorance like a fat lazy sow in a mud hole. The lords of the manor are able to retain their power, control and huge ill-gotten riches because the government educated serfs are too ignorant to recognize the self-evident contradictions in the propaganda they are inundated with by state controlled media on a daily basis.
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Tuesday, October 22, 2013
The Selfish Gene, Social Darwinism, and Human Cooperation / Politics / Social Issues
Toby Baxendale writes: It took me until my 43rd year to read The Selfish Gene, written in 1976 by Richard Dawkins. In many respects, it is a testament to its success that I felt no compelling desire to read it. What I perceived to be its central message had been absorbed into the very fabric of our culture. I thought the message was simply put. To summarize: we are driven to survive by our genes and via competitive and selfish natural selection; we follow our own self-interest in order to survive and procreate; genes that adapt more quickly and better to the competitive world survive at the expense of the others, and so forth. The state of nature is a Hobbesian nightmare of there being “no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” It is survival of the fittest for most, but armed with this knowledge, we could overcome some of these rough edges of life.
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Saturday, October 19, 2013
Winter In America Gets Colder : Why We Choose Poverty / Politics / Social Issues
Broadly speaking, if we look at what has happened to the world's rich economies from 1945 to today, we can say that in the first 30 years, 1945-1975, real wealth - as expressed in standard of living - across the board, for the vast majority of people, increased.
Over the next 30 years, 1975-2005, the standard of living still seemed to rise, but if we look behind the numbers and between the lines, we see that much of the wealth increase over that period is illusional, because it was increasingly based on credit, i.e. it was borrowed from the future, while at the same time, the costs of "really big ticket" items such as education and health care were moved away from governments and towards citizens, where they began an unstoppable ascent (and we paid for them with credit).
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Thursday, October 17, 2013
What is a Dictator? / Politics / Social Issues
Robert D. Kaplan writes: What is a dictator, or an authoritarian? I'll bet you think you know. But perhaps you don't. Sure, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong were dictators. So were Saddam Hussein and both Hafez and Bashar al Assad. But in many cases the situation is not that simple and stark. In many cases the reality -- and the morality -- of the situation is far more complex.
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Thursday, October 17, 2013
Peak Evolution - Benefits Culture, Shrinking Brains, Are Human's De-Evolving? / News_Letter / Social Issues
The Market Oracle NewsletterAugust 5th , 2013 Issue # 15 Vol. 7
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Monday, October 14, 2013
The Illusion of Freedom - Democracy, Religion, Science and Propaganda / Politics / Social Issues
This is my latest article in the housing bull markets series which directly seeks to continue on from analysis of August 2013 (Peak Evolution - Benefits Culture, Shrinking Brains, Are Human's De-Evolving? ) which examined the change in humans from 10,000 years from hunter gathers to farmers, during which time humans have been on a de-evolving trend trajectory as evidenced by shrinking brain size, physical and genetic robustness as a consequence of the end of natural selection amongst many other indicators which in recent times has accelerated as a consequence of both technological advances and welfare state systems which favour survival of the weakest in every capacity over that of the strongest as today the least successful genes are encouraged to out reproduce the more successful / productive genes into a population of humans that is more subservient and less adapted to survival than that which proceeded it, which as I touched upon in my earlier article that just as the past 10,000 years seen the domestication of many animals such as cattle, sheep and chickens, so have human's effectively been domesticated by the various ruling elite's at the time into highly docile and compliant population's in the service of the ruling elite's of each society which enables a small ruling elite to relatively easily manage an every increasing mass of slaves to their advantage.
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Friday, September 27, 2013
Reasons for U.S. Income Inequality / Politics / Social Issues
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston says the incomes of the bottom 90 percent of Americans, after being adjusted for inflation, grew by only $59 on average between 1966 and 2011, over the same period the average income of the top 10 percent of Americans grew by $116,071.
A 2011 study from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported incomes for the bottom fifth of Americans grew 20 percent between 1979 and 2007. Members of the top one percent saw their incomes grow by 275 percent during the same period,
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Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Are The Police More Dangerous Than Criminals? / Politics / Social Issues
The goon thug psychopaths no longer only brutalize minorities–it is open season on all of us –the latest victim is a petite young white mother of two small children
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article36211.htm
The worse threat every American faces comes from his/her own government.
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Despite all our rage, we are still just Debt Slaves in a mental cage / Politics / Social Issues
It’s been two years since years of hard work, dedication and frustration finally erupted into mass protests that swept across the globe on an unprecedented scale, and briefly awakened the propagandized masses. Our unjust economic system and the corrupt forces on Wall Street and in Washington were exposed in grand fashion. For once, the people became too powerful to ignore. We finally crashed through the corporate gates of the colossus mainstream media. We penetrated the very leviathan that had divided, isolated and enslaved us. Those robotic, teleprompter reading, paid off propagandist talking heads had no choice, they finally had to acknowledge us. A contagious sense of empowerment, legitimate community and true freedom rose up from the ashes. An inspiring people-powered uprising had begun. Then, all too quickly, the burst of life, freedom and reality that momentarily flashed in and out of people’s living rooms and throughout cities everywhere, was extinguished by brutal police state force.
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Friday, September 13, 2013
Democracy Hypocrisy And The Economic Growth Illusion / Politics / Social Issues
GROWTH BLIP, DEMOCRACY BLIP
Hypocrisy democracy is the rule in what are called the “consumer democracies” - consuming less and less as the economy slows or stagnates and unemployment mushrooms – but consuming more and more illusion and hypocrisy. Some ask if globalism and democracy has now reached its “event horizon”, beyond which it gets sucked into its own black hole of political hype and economic myth.
Friday, September 13, 2013
Record 20% of Americans Struggle to Afford Food and Basic Necessities, Who's to Blame? / Politics / Social Issues
The latest Gallup survey shows Near-Record Number of Americans Struggle to Afford Food.
Read full article... Read full article...More Americans are struggling to afford food -- nearly as many as did during the recent recession. The 20.0% who reported in August that they have, at times, lacked enough money to buy the food that they or their families needed during the past year, is up from 17.7% in June, and is the highest percentage recorded since October 2011. The percentage who struggle to afford food now is close to the peak of 20.4% measured in November 2008, as the global economic crisis unfolded.
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
At World's End - The Five Stages of Collapse / Politics / Social Issues
In the first three parts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) of this disheartening look back at a century of central banking, income taxing, military warring, energy depleting and political corrupting, I made a case for why we are in the midst of a financial, commercial, political, social and cultural collapse. In this final installment I’ll give my best estimate as to what happens next and it has a 100% probability of being wrong. There are so many variables involved that it is impossible to predict the exact path to our world’s end. Many people don’t want to hear about the intractable issues or the true reasons for our predicament. They want easy button solutions. They want someone or something to fix their problems. They pray for a technological miracle to save them from decades of irrational myopic decisions. As the domino-like collapse worsens, the feeble minded populace becomes more susceptible to the false promises of tyrants and psychopaths. There are a myriad of thugs, criminals, and autocrats in positions of power who are willing to exploit any means necessary to retain their wealth, power and control. The revelations of governmental malfeasance, un-Constitutional mass espionage of all citizens, and expansion of the Orwellian welfare/warfare surveillance state, from patriots like Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden has proven beyond a doubt the corrupt establishment are zealously anxious to discard and stomp on the U.S. Constitution in their desire for authoritarian control over our society.
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Tuesday, September 10, 2013
You Don't Have to Stay Poor, the Lesson from Black Millionaires / Politics / Social Issues
Walter E. Williams writes: No one can blame you if you start out in life poor, because how you start is not your fault. If you stay poor, you’re to blame because it is your fault. Nowhere has this been made clearer than in Dennis Kimbro’s new book, “The Wealth Choice: Success Secrets of Black Millionaires.”
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