Pussy Riot - Refugees In (at Banksy's Dismaland)

Is shrinking the middle class a good thing? by Lynn Stuart Parramore @LynnParramore

Opinion

Michele Palazzo / EyeEm / Getty Images

The middle class, after enjoying a great run as the majority economic group in the U.S. for four decades, appears to have sputtered, according to a recent report from Pew Research. Michele Palazzo / EyeEm / Getty Images

Is shrinking the middle class a good thing?

Why some conservatives reject concerns about economic inequality

December 24, 2015 2:00AM ET

by Lynn Stuart Parramore @LynnParramore

A recent report from Pew Research, “The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground,” isn’t exactly conducive to holiday cheer for most of us. Middle-income households, defined as those earning $42,000 to $126,000 a year, are capturing a smaller share of the American pie; the middle class, after enjoying a great run as the country’s majority economic group for four decades, appears to have sputtered. In terms of income share, this group is now matched in size by the economic tiers above and below it.

But to many laissez-faire conservatives, this news is far from gloomy. Writer-provocateur and Adam Smith Institute fellow Tim Worstall, writing at Forbes, complains (after warning that people often read statistics to justify their political biases) that the report will send folks “bleating away about the death of the American middle class” and collapsing into “shrieks of egalitarian horror” when we should be cheering. He argues that the “bleaters” have got it wrong. The real story is not that the middle class is shrinking but that the upper middle class is expanding and, most important, the ranks of the poor are decreasing.
In Worstall’s mind, the poor appear to be “movin’ on up,” just like George Jefferson of sitcom fame, catapulting into higher echelons to join the rich. Hooray for unbridled capitalism! How could everyone have gotten the story wrong?
Actually, Worstall gets it almost all wrong. He admits, in a note appended to his column, that he misread the Pew chart, which shows quite clearly that the ranks of the poor are, in fact, growing rather than shrinking. The theme song of this chart not “Movin’ On Up” but “Slip-Slidin’ Away.”

The Pew numbers indicate that in 1971, 16 percent of Americans were in the lowest income tier and 9 percent were in the second-lowest tier (the two groups below the middle class). That’s 25 percent of us, or 1 in 4, living below the middle-income level. Fast-forward to 2015: Now we’ve got 20 percent in the lowest tier and 9 percent in the second lowest, for a total of 29 percent below the middle class. A bigger percentage of us is badly off.

The Pew report further states that the middle-income tier shrank during this period, from 61 percent of Americans in 1971 to 50 percent in 2015. Worstall grumpily acknowledges that he screwed up in claiming that “we’ve got fewer poor people” today and explains that he suffered from “brain spasms that had me reading the left hand side of the chart chronologically downwards and the right hand side upwards.”
Yet even after realizing his mistake, he asserts, quite unembarrassed, that the substance of his argument that the shrinking middle class is not a problem holds true. Why? Because, he says, more people have gotten richer than have gotten poorer, so even if the middle class is proportionally shrinking, things are still looking good.
It is a near-religious belief among free market fundamentalists that having more rich people is good for society; it’s the essence of trickle-down economics. Many insist that inequality itself is good for society because it drives people to succeed and, besides, the market should decide who makes it. Former Sen. Rick Santorum notably made this claim in 2012, saying, “There is income inequality in America. There always has been, and hopefully — and I do say that — there always will be.” 

There may be a few more people joining the ranks of the rich, but the real news is that those who are already rich are getting much, much richer.

To abandon such notions is to admit that policy choices in the last few decades have been detrimental to the American way of life, if by that you mean increased opportunity and mobility for the many rather than the few. Thus the brain spasms working their way through the conservative punditry in the wake of the Pew report: Over at The National Review, Scott Winship argues that too many analysts are “hung up on inequality,” that a “modest increase in polarization” of incomes is nothing to worry about and that, anyway, the Pew definition of middle income is arbitrary. He also trots out the familiar claim that the poor are better off than they used to be, a view shared by Rep. Darrell Issa, the wealthiest member of Congress, who has cited such amenities as coffeemakers and cable TV accessible to America’s poor, as opposed to those living in the developing world. No doubt Ebenezer Scrooge would agree.

Free market champions reading the Pew chart see percentages rise more sharply in the very richest category and jump to the conclusion that the chances of becoming rich are increasing. But the reason for that sharp rise is that there are fewer rich people than poor people in absolute numbers. There are about 46 million Americans living below the poverty line. In contrast, there are some 10 million folks in the U.S. living in millionaire households.
According to Pew, there are 120.8 million adults living in middle-income households, compared with 121.3 million who are in upper- or lower-income households; 9 percent are in the highest quintile, and 20 percent are in the lowest. It’s clear from the Pew report that the people who have the biggest incomes have been pulling away from the pack in terms of their share of wealth — a trend that shows no sign of slowing.
“The share of U.S. aggregate household income held by upper-income households climbed sharply, from 29 percent in 1970 to 49 percent in 2014,” Pew states. “More recently, upper-income families, which had three times as much wealth as middle-income families in 1983, more than doubled the wealth gap; by 2013, they had seven times as much wealth as middle-income families.”
There may be a few more people joining the ranks of the rich, but the real news is that those who are already rich are getting much, much richer.
Worstall is right about one thing: Our political biases influence the story we attach to numbers. The laissez-faire defenders want so badly to erase the problem of inequality and reduced prosperity for the bulk of Americans that their brains fail to read simple charts and employ elementary logic.
They do not want to believe that more Americans are becoming worse off, because this development flies in the face of the big free market promises made by Milton Friedman and his followers — that unfettered capitalism will deliver the best outcomes to society. But if you take off the ideological blinders, it’s easy to read the plain numbers on the wall. A giant chunk of Americans is sinking economically, and we need to focus on policies that aid the drowning and make room for ordinary people among all the mega-yachts.

14 disturbing facts about 911.....must READ !!

First published in August 2015
In the context of the 14th anniversary of 9/11, it’s important to remind people that we still don’t know what happened that day.
What is known about 9/11 is that there are many incredible facts that continue to be ignored by the government and the mainstream media. Here are fourteen.

1. An outline of what was to become the 9/11 Commission Report was produced before the investigation began. The outline was kept secret from the
   Commission’s staff and appears to have determined the outcome of the investigation.
2. The 9/11 Commission claimed sixty-three (63) times in its Report that itcould find “no evidence” related to important aspects of the crimes.
3. One person, Shayna Steiger, issued 12 visas to the alleged hijackers in Saudi Arabia. Steiger issued some of the visas without interviewing the applicants and fought with another employee at the embassy who tried to prevent her lax approach.
4. Before 9/11, the nation’s leading counter-terrorism expert repeatedly notified his friends in the United Arab Emirates of top-secret U.S. plans to capture Osama bin Laden. These treasonous leaks prevented Bin Laden’s capture on at least two separate occasions.
5. Former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger was caught stealing documents from the National Archives that had been requested by the 9/11 Commission. The Commission had previously been denied access to the documents but the White House reluctantly agreed to turn them over just as Berger was trying to steal them..
6. The official story of the failed air defenses on 9/11 was changed several times and, in the end, paradoxically exonerated the military by saying that the military had lied many times about its response. The man who was behind several of the changing accounts was a specialist in political warfare (i.e. propaganda).
7. Military exercises being conducted on the day of 9/11 mimicked the attacks as they were occurring and obstructed the response to the attacks. NORAD commander Ralph Eberhart sponsored those exercises, failed to do his job that day, and later lied to Congress about it (if the 9/11 Commission account is true).
8. A third skyscraper collapsed late in the afternoon on 9/11. This was WTC 7, a 47-story building that the government’s final report says fell into its own footprint due to office fires. The building’s tenants included U.S. intelligence agencies and a company led in part by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.Meetings were scheduled there to discuss terrorism and explosives on the morning of 9/11.
9. News agencies, including BBC and CNN, announced the destruction of WTC 7 long before it happened. One BBC reporter announced the collapse while viewers could see the still-standing building right behind her in the video. Years later, after claiming that it had lost the tapes and then found them again, BBC’s answer to this astonishing report was that everything was just “confusing and chaotic” that day. Of course, one problem with this is that the news agencies predicted the exact building, of the many damaged in the area, that would collapse. Another big problem is that no one could have possibly predicted the collapse of WTC 7 given the unprecedented and unbelievable official account for how that happened.
10. Construction of the new, 52-story WTC 7 was completed two years before the government knew what happened to the first WTC 7. In fact, when the new building was completed in 2006, the spokesman for the government investigation said, “We’ve had trouble getting a handle on building No. 7.” The construction of the new building, without regard for how the first one was destroyed, indicates that building construction professionals in New York City did not believe it could ever happen again.
11. Ultimately, building construction codes were not changed as a result of the root causes cited by the National Institute for Standards and Technology for destruction of the World Trade Center (WTC) buildings. This fact shows that the international building construction community does not believe that the WTC buildings were destroyed as stated in the official account.
12. AMEC, the company that just finished rebuilding the exact spot where Flight 77 was said to hit, was put in charge of cleanup at the WTC and the Pentagon. The man who ran the company, Peter Janson, was a long-time business associate of Donald Rumsfeld.
13. The response of the U.S. Secret Service to the 9/11 attacks suggests foreknowledge of the events in that the agency failed to protect the presidentfrom the obvious danger posed by terrorists.
14. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission notified the FBI of suspected 9/11 insider trading transactions. That evidence was ignored and the suspects were not even questioned by the FBI or the 9/11 Commission.

There are, of course, many more incredible facts about 9/11 that continue to be ignored by the authorities and much of the media.

Sherman Oaks United Methodist Church - Christmas Cantata 12-13-2015

The Neoconservatives’ Hegemonic Goal Of Making Sovereign Countries Extinct Is Bringing Instead The Extinction Of Planet Earth Paul Craig Roberts

The Neoconservatives’ Hegemonic Goal Of Making Sovereign Countries Extinct Is Bringing Instead The Extinction Of Planet Earth
Paul Craig Roberts
My warning that the neoconservatives have resurrected the threat of nuclear Armageddon, which was removed by Reagan and Gorbachev, is also being given by Noam Chomsky, former US Secretary of Defense William Perry, and other sentient observers of the neoconservatives’ aggressive policies toward Russia and China.
Daily we observe additional aggressive actions taken by Washington and its vassals against Russia and China. For example, Washington is pressuring Kiev not to implement the Minsk agreements designed to end the conflict between the puppet government in Kiev and the break-away Russian republics. https://www.rt.com/news/325687-ukraine-rhetoric-sabotage-churkin/ Washington refuses to cooperate with Russia in the war against ISIS. Washington continues to blame Russia for the destruction of MH-17, while preventing an honest investigation of the attack on the Malaysian airliner. Washington continues to force its European vassals to impose sanctions on Russia based on the false claim that the conflict in Ukraine was caused by a Russian invasion of Ukraine, not by Washington’s coup in overthrowing a democratically elected government and installing a puppet answering to Washington.
The list is long. Even the International Monetary Fund (IMF), allegedly a neutral, non-political world organization, has been suborned into the fight against Russia. Under Washington’s pressure, the IMF has abandoned its policy of refusing to lend to debtors who are in arrears in their loan payments to creditors. In the case of Ukraine’s debt to Russia, this decision removes the enforcement mechanism that prevents countries (such as Greece) from defaulting on their debts. The IMF has announced that it will lend to Ukraine in order to pay the Ukraine’s Western creditors despite the fact that Ukraine has renounced repayment of loans from Russia.
Michael Hudson believes, correctly in my view, that this new IMF policy will also be applied to those countries to whom China has made loans. The IMF’s plan is to leave Russia and China as countries who lack the usual enforcement mechanism to collect from debtors, thus permitting debtors to default on the loans without penalty.
In other words, the IMF is presenting itself, although the financial media will not notice, as a tool of US foreign policy.
What this shows, and what should concern us, is that the institutions of Western civilization are in fact tools of American dominance. The institutions are not there for the noble reasons stated in their founding documents.
The bottom line is that Western Capitalism is simply a looting mechanism that has successfully suborned Western governments and all Western “do-good” institutions.
As in George Orwell’s 1984, the IMF is dividing the world into warring factions — the West vs. the BRICS.
To avoid the coming conflict that the neoconservatives’ pursuit of American hegemony is bringing, the Russians have relied on fact-based, truth-based diplomacy. However, neocon Washington relies on lies and propaganda and has many more and much louder voices. Consequently, it is Washington’s lies, not Russia’s truth, that most of the Western sheeple believe.
In other words, Russia was misled by believing that the West respects and abides by the values that it professes. In fact, these “Western values” are merely a cover for the unbridled evil of which the West consists.
The Western peoples are so dimwitted that they have not yet understand that the “war on terror” is, in fact, a war to create terror that can be exported to Muslim areas of Russia and China in order to destabilize the two countries that serve as a check on Washington’s unilateral, hegemonic power.
The problem for the neocon unilateralists is that Russia and China—although misinformed by their “experts” educated abroad in the neoliberal tradtion, people who are de facto agents of Washington without even knowing it—are powerful military powers, both nuclear and conventional. Unless Russia and China are content to be Washington’s vassal states, for the neoconservatives, who control Washington and, therefy, the West, to press these two powerful countries so hard can only lead to war. As Washington is not a match for Russia and China in conventional warfare, the war will be nuclear, and the result will be the end of life on earth.
Whether ironic or paradoxical, the US is pushing a policy that means the end of life. Yet, the majority of Western governments support it, and the insouciant Western peoples have no clue.
But Putin has caught on. Russia is not going to submit. Soon China will undersand that US dependency on China’s workforce and imports is not a protection from Washington’s aggression. When China looks beyond its MIT and Harvard miseducated neoliberal economists to the writing on the wall, Washington is going to be in deep trouble.
What will Washington do? Confronted with two powerful nuclear forces, will the crazed neocons back off? Or will their confidence in their ideology bring us the final war?
This is a real question. The US government pays Internet trolls to ridicule such quesions and their authors. To see the people who sell out humanity for money, all you have to do is to read the comments on the numerous websites that reproduce this column.
Nevertheless, the question remains, unanswered by the Western presstitute media and unanswered by the bought-and-paid-for stooges in the US Congress and all Western “democracies.”
Indications are that Russia has had enough of Amerian arrogance. The Russian people have elevated a leader as they always do, and which Western countries seldom, if ever, do. The West has triumphed by technology, not by leadership. But Vladimir Putin is Russia’s choice of a leader, and he is one. Russia also has the technology and a sense of itself that no longer exists in the diversified West.
There is nothing like Putin anywhere in the West, over which presides a collection of bought-and-paid-for-puppets who report to private interest groups, such as Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, the Israel Lobby, agribusiness, and the extractive industries (energy, mining, timber).
At the 70th Anniversary of the United Nations (September 28), Putin, backed by the President of China, announced that half of the world no longer accepts American unilateralism. Additionally, Putin said that Russia can no longer tolerate the state of affairs in the world that results from Washington’s pursuit of hegemony.
Two days later Putin took over the fight against ISIS in Syria.
Putin, still relying on agreements with Washington, relied on the agreement that Russia would announce beforehand its attacks on ISIS installations in order to prevent any NATO-Russian air encounters. Washington took advantage of this trust placed in Washington by Russia, and arranged for a Turkish jet fighter to ambush an unsuspecting Russian fighter-bomber. http://sputniknews.com/analysis/20151211/1031591091/us-defense-analyst-su-24-downing.html
This was an act of war, committed by Washington and Turkey, and thereby Washington’s European NATO vassal states against a nuclear power capable of exterminating all life in every one of the countries, including the “superpower US.”
This simple fact should make even the American super-patriots, who wear the flag on their sleeve, wonder about the trust they place in “their” government and in Fox “news,” CNN, NPR, and the rest of the presstitutes who continually lie every minute of every broadcast.
But it won’t. Americans and Europeans are too insouciant. They are locked tightly in The Matrix, where the impotent creatures are content to live without understanding reality.
Realizing that it is pointless to attempt to communicate to the Western sheeple, who have no input into their government’s policy, Putin now sends his message directly to Washington.
Putin’s message is loud and clear in his order directed against any US/NATO operations against Russia in its Syrian operations against ISIS:
“Any targets threatening the Russian groups of forces or land infrastructure must be immediately destroyed.” http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/11/putin-immediately-destroy-target-threatening-russia-syria
Putin followed up this order with another order to the Russian Defense Ministry Board:
“Special attention must be paid to strengthening the combat potential of the strategic nuclear forces and implementing defense space programs. It is necessary, as outlined in our plans, to equip all components of the nuclear triad with new arms.” http://sputniknews.com/russia/20151211/1031582368/putin-air-defense.html
Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reported at the Defense Ministry meeting that 56 percent of Russia’s nuclear forces are new and that more than 95 percent are at a permanent state of readiness. The few Western news sources that report these developments pretend that Russia is ”saber-rattling” without cause.
To make it clear even for the insouciant Western populations, everything that Reagan and Gorbachev worked for has been overthrown by crazed, demented, evil American neoconservatives whose desire for hegemony over the world is driving the world to extinction.
These are the same bloodthirsty war criminals who have destroyed seven countries, murdered, maimed, and displaced millions of Muslim peoples, and sent millions of refugees from the neocon wars into Europe. None of these war criminals are protected from terrorist attack. If the alleged “Muslim threat” was real, every one of the war criminals would be dead by now, not the innocent people sitting in Paris cafes or attending parties in California.
Neocons are the unhumans who created on purpose the “war against terror” in order to gain a weapon against Russia and China. You can witness these unhumans every day on talk TV and read them in the Weekly Standard, National Review, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the British, German, Australian, Canadian, and endless Western newspapers.
In the West lies prevail, and the lies are driving the world to extinction. An expert reminds us that it only takes one mistake and 30 minutes to destroy life on earth. https://www.rt.com/shows/sophieco/324941-nuclear-cold-war-us/ 

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