Wednesday, November 30th, 2011
RON SCHERER, Staff Writer - The Christian Science Monitor
Stephan: When you're a little kid and you don't know where your next meal is coming from, or where you are going to sleep that night, and you recognize that the adults who are supposed to care for you don't know either how are you supposed to learn? How are you supposed to develop into a person capable of dealing with the challenges of the 21st century? Increasingly I feel like I am living in a Dicken's novel.
NEW YORK — In a troubling snapshot of the declining finances of Americans, considerably more school-age children are living in poverty than in the pre-recession year of 2007, the US Census Bureau reported Tuesday.
Of all 3,142 counties in the US, 653 counties saw significant increases in poverty for children ages 5 to 17, according to the 2010 Census Bureau survey. Only eight counties saw a decrease. Nationally, 19.8 percent of schoolchildren qualify as poor – and one-third of all counties now have child poverty rates above that threshold. About one quarter had child poverty rates significantly lower than the national average.
Among counties with at least 100,000 people, the highest child poverty rates were in Texas’ Cameron County (44.9 percent) and Hidalgo County (44.6), Bronx County in New York (41 percent), Webb County in Texas (38.9), and Missouri’s St. Louis County (38.6). Among all counties no matter their size, Georgia’s Burke County (pop. 23,367) had the highest share of children in poverty, at 47.7 percent.
The Census information has important uses. The Department of Education uses the data in its formula for allocating more than $14 billion a year in federal funds, of which a significant amount is directed to school districts […]
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Wednesday, November 30th, 2011
STEPHEN C. WEBSTER, - The Raw Story
Stephan: Yet another reason why the War on Drugs is a psychotic social response, and the reasons for its continuation are nonsense. Click through and you can download the entire study referenced in this report.
States that have passed initiatives to legalize medical marijuana have also seen a decline in traffic fatalities, according to a new study out this week by the Institute for the Study of Labor.
Opponents of medical marijuana often focus on the social detriment to making America’s most valuable cash crop available to those approved by doctors, arguing that medical marijuana legalization makes it easier for teens to buy pot and that they’ll soon move to more dangerous drugs. They also suggest that legalization would increase the number of vehicle accidents – and that very argument was one of the main reasons why California voters did not approve full legalization in 2010.
But far from marijuana acting as a ‘gateway
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Wednesday, November 30th, 2011
RICHARD TEITELBAUM, - Bloomberg
Stephan: Why Henry Paulson is not in prison I cannot explain, except by saying that special interests and special connections to both Bush and Obama have protected him from accountability. Note carefully the observation that no laws were broken. Why? Because the laws had been written to make sure that didn't happen. If you write the laws, you don't break the laws.
Like Bush, Cheney and the Necons and their complete lack of accountability for the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this carefully researched report demonstrates that for the small elite that influences how Congress writes the laws, and the Justice Department interprets them, accountability is rarely a problem. And everyone who looks closely at either story -- the wars, or the financial collapse -- knows this truth. That realization is what has rotted away the integrity and good character of the United States.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson stepped off the elevator into the Third Avenue offices of hedge fund Eton Park Capital Management LP in Manhattan. It was July 21, 2008, and market fears were mounting. Four months earlier, Bear Stearns Cos. had sold itself for just $10 a share to JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)
Now, amid tumbling home prices and near-record foreclosures, attention was focused on a new source of contagion: Fannie Mae (FNMA) and Freddie Mac, which together had more than $5 trillion in mortgage-backed securities and other debt outstanding, Bloomberg Markets reports in its January issue.
Paulson had been pushing a plan in Congress to open lines of credit to the two struggling firms and to grant authority for the Treasury Department to buy equity in them. Yet he had told reporters on July 13 that the firms must remain shareholder owned and had testified at a Senate hearing two days later that giving the government new power to intervene made actual intervention improbable.
‘If you have a bazooka, and people know you have it, you’re not likely to take it out,
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Wednesday, November 30th, 2011
JEFFREY KAYE, - truthout.org
Stephan: I know it is considered bad form to make ad hominem remarks about people, but the truth is I think we need to recognize that there are people that are evil. Either because they are stupid and viscious, or because they are venal and cruel, or because they are ambitious at whatever cost. In any case, in my view, Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-New Hampshire) is evil. I don't know how people in New Hampshire can vote for someone like this.
An amendment by Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-New Hampshire) to the current Defense Authorization Bill (SA 1068) now before Congress would roll back the 2009 Obama executive order against torture by re-establishing a secret ‘classified’ set of interrogation techniques and then attaching them to the current ‘Army Field Manual’ on human intelligence collection [4]. But whether the amendment passes or not, the existence of certain interrogation techniques as used currently by the US military and intelligence services in the ‘Manual’ do not comply with international norms, such as the Geneva Conventions.
A recent United Kingdom high court ruling on the use of hooding prisoners as a detention or interrogation technique indicated that use of any form of sensory obstruction, such as use of blindfolds, goggles or earmuffs, in place of hooding, which is outlawed, could only be temporary and ‘only for the time and extent necessary to preserve operational security.’ British military and security officers are directed not to work with governments that do not observe these rules.
Yet currently, use of goggles and earmuffs as a form of sensory deprivation used on prisoners is part of ‘Appendix M’ of the ‘Army Field Manual.’ Their use is part of something called ‘Field Expedient […]
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Wednesday, November 30th, 2011
LINDA CARROLL, - TODAY.com
Stephan: Further evidence of the collapse of American food safety. It is becoming dangerous to eat American food, particularly food processed in any way. If you buy food in a market buy organic. It's not a perfect protection, but it is the best you have, short of growing food yourself.
The apple and grape juice your kids are drinking may have arsenic at levels high enough to increase their risk of cancer and other chronic diseases, according to a new study by Consumer Reports.
A full 10 percent of the juices tested by the magazine had arsenic levels higher than what is allowed in water by the Food and Drug Administration.
‘What we’re talking about here is not about acute affects,
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