America – The Grim Truth

[darkbeaver]

You won't like it Smack.

I can however promise a drastic reduction in Offal Office expenses as only booze and hookers will be required.

 

[EagleSmack]

Why wouldn't I like it? Your press conferences and State of the Union addresses would be spectacular.

 

[darkbeaver]

I don't think I could possibly be as funny as the last three jokers ya'll had for president before me. When can I see my new office? Lets not get all hung up on an election. I'll just murder bribe and muscle my way in like the others only better.

I won't work summers and the place has to be painted some other colour and the drapes have to go.

Obama Set to Kill U.S. Jobs Market with 30 Million Workers

By: NotForSale2NWO

Obama Immigration Bill will allow Illegal Workers to Displace 30 Million Legal American Jobs

 

[tay]

I don't think I could possibly be as funny as the last three jokers ya'll had for president before me. When can I see my new office? Lets not get all hung up on an election. I'll just murder bribe and muscle my way in like the others only better.

I won't work summers and the place has to be painted some other colour and the drapes have to go.

Obama Set to Kill U.S. Jobs Market with 30 Million Workers

By: NotForSale2NWO

Obama Immigration Bill will allow Illegal Workers to Displace 30 Million Legal American Jobs

He's, (well okay, the Republican Congress has to approve it first) is indeed goining to pull a Reagan on the amnesty again. Too bad the bushie camp couldn't do the right thing on this when they had both the Congress and Senate, but, they didn't want to..........



How the Temps Who Power Corporate Giants Are Getting Crushed



The Expendables: How the Temps Who Power Corporate Giants Are Getting Crushed - ProPublica



2 girls climb US-Mexico border fence in less than 18 seconds - YouTube

 

[BaalsTears]

...
" Together We Stand...Divided We Fall."

There will always be Ups and Downs.
But Never Count America Out.

Together we stand...divided we fall. I remember that. What a bitter joke that turned out to be.

People like me who are being transformed out of existence by Amerikkkan leftism hate Amerika. Our country is gone and all that remains is scorched earth.

 

[tay]

Joseph Stiglitz makes the case for free trade talks to be based on the public interest rather than the further entrenchment of corporate power and siphoning of wealth to the top.

But there's little reason to expect a meeting of corporate and government figures to produce that result - particularly when (as the New York Times editorial board points out) the main area of agreement between the U.S.' main political parties involves a mutual willingness to make public services and regulatory bodies subservient to the immediate interests of the business sector.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/economics-blog/2013/jul/05/free-trade-talks-public-corporate-interest


and here


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/06/opinion/reining-in-the-regulators.html

 

[tay]

Why are the contents of a major US-led trade deal being deliberately kept from the American people?

Yves Smith “There would be no reason to keep it so secret if it was in the interest of the public.”



The pact, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), is deliberately shrouded in secrecy, a trade deal powerful people, including President Obama, don’t want you to know about. More than 130 members of Congress have asked the White House for greater transparency about the negotiations and were essentially told to go fly a kite. While most of us are in the dark about the contents of the deal, which Obama aims to seal by year end, corporate lobbyists are in the know about what it contains.

And some vigilant independent watchdogs are tracking the negotiations with sources they trust, including Dean Baker and Yves Smith, who join Moyers & Company this week. Both have written extensively about the TPP and tell Bill the pact actually has very little to do with free trade.


more

Yves Smith and Dean Baker on Secrets in Trade | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com

 

[Dixie Cup]

One of the problems that I see of the US is that there's so much money being thrown around at politicians; lots of greed both political and corporate. What is required, and until the citizens demand it, are laws disallowing/limiting union and corporate donations, an end to the PAC system and limiting individual donations to $5,000 or some such. It'll never happen, but that's what is required. As it stands now, money "buys" access that no individual citizen can get. There'd have to be SEVERE and immediate consequences if the law was broken and a checks and balances process.

But I suspect that I'm being an idealist lol.

JMHO

 

[Tecumsehsbones]

One of the problems that I see of the US is that there's so much money being thrown around at politicians; lots of greed both political and corporate. What is required, and until the citizens demand it, are laws disallowing/limiting union and corporate donations, an end to the PAC system and limiting individual donations to $5,000 or some such. It'll never happen, but that's what is required. As it stands now, money "buys" access that no individual citizen can get. There'd have to be SEVERE and immediate consequences if the law was broken and a checks and balances process.

But I suspect that I'm being an idealist lol.

JMHO

My preferred version is not that different from yours. I would allow unlimited donations, but here's the hook: only natural persons would be allowed to donate. No corporations, unions, associations, foundation, &c. My reasoning is that these "legal persons" cannot vote, therefore we have chosen as a country to limit their participation in the political process. So why not limit it a bit more?

I would enforce it by draconian penalties for sham donation schemes.

But as you say, it'll never happen. We've had two rounds of major "campaign finance reform." Neither has slowed the growth of money in campaigns at all, and both have merely made it more difficult to track who is giving how much to whom.

 

[tay]

If your State can get down to a $1.00 a day, yes day, not hour, think of all the jobs..................




Illinois governor candidate Bruce Rauner wants to lower Illinois minimum wage by $1 "to be competitive".



Republican Bruce Rauner is calling for a $1-an-hour rollback in the state’s minimum wage in a move Democrats described as “class warfare” on Illinois’ working poor.

Rauner made the statement in support of moving the state’s minimum wage from its existing $8.25 an hour level to $7.25 an hour last month during a candidates’ forum in the Quad Cities, but the remarks started receiving attention across the state only on Tuesday.

“I will advocate moving the Illinois minimum wage back to the national minimum wage,” Rauner said in a report broadcast by the Illinois Radio Network. “I think we’ve got to be competitive here in Illinois.”

The position puts him at odds with the other three Republicans in the March 18 gubernatorial primary and Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn, who wants to raise the minimum wage to $10 per hour.

“Instead of alleviating poverty, this cruel and backwards proposal would take thousands of dollars from working people who are doing some of the hardest, most difficult jobs in our society,” Quinn spokeswoman Brooke Anderson told the Chicago Sun-Times.

“We’re talking about people who are cleaning and busing tables, people who are caring for our elderly, people who are working in support of people with disabilities. To take $2,000 a year from those who are earning minimum wage is not only cruel and shameful, it also hurts our economy,” she said.

Republican state Treasurer Dan Rutherford; state Sen. Bill Brady, R-Bloomington; and state Sen. Kirk Dillard, R-Hinsdale, all oppose increasing the minimum wage, but none have called for a rollback.

A key House Democrat ridiculed Rauner’s stance Tuesday.

“In my 26 years in the Legislature, I’ve seen many candidates roll out anti-poverty plans, but Bruce Rauner is the only candidate to roll-out a pro-poverty plan,” said state Rep. Lou Lang, D-Skokie.

“He’s delusional if he thinks that the General Assembly would bow to his class warfare on low-income workers. He needs to have his delusion shaken up,” Lang said in a prepared statement.

“Rauner is deeply out-of-touch with working people,” Lang continued. “He needs to come to grips with the fact that the era of robber barons is over, and impoverishing workers is no longer an economic growth strategy.”

Rauner spokesman Mike Schrimpf confirmed the private equity investor made the key policy proposal on the minimum wage to a small Downstate radio audience in December, but it only came to light on Tuesday.

Rauner’s campaign officials took no other actions to make the position public. The candidate himself has not made himself available to the statehouse press corps in Springfield since October.



http://www.suntimes.com/news/elections/24824178-505/republican-rauner-cut-states-hourly-minimum-wage-by-1-to-be-competitive.html

 

[Walter]

Any minimum wage is a job killer.


Thomas Sowell: Minimum wage destroys household jobs | High Point Enterprise

 

[tay]

 

[Ludlow]

Living Overseas

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America – The Grim Truth
By Lance Freeman / Jun 10 • Categorized as Living Overseas


escape from the prison you call home
Americans, I have some bad news for you:

You have the worst quality of life in the developed world – by a wide margin.

If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many parts of Asia, you’d be rioting in the streets calling for a better life. In fact, the average Australian or Singaporean taxi driver has a much better standard of living than the typical American white-collar worker.





I know this because I am an American, and I escaped from the prison you call home.

I have lived all around the world, in wealthy countries and poor ones, and there is only one country I would never consider living in again: The United States of America. The mere thought of it fills me with dread.

Consider this, you are the only people in the developed world without a single-payer health system. Everyone in Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand has a single-payer system. If they get sick, they can devote all their energies to getting well. If you get sick, you have to battle two things at once, your illness and the fear of financial ruin. Millions of Americans go bankrupt every year due to medical bills, and tens of thousands die each year because they have no insurance or insufficient insurance. And don’t believe for a second that rot about America having the world’s best medical care or the shortest waiting lists: I’ve been to hospitals in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Singapore, and Thailand, and every one was better than the “good” hospital I used to go to back home. The waits were shorter, the facilities more comfortable, and the doctors just as good.

This is ironic, because you need a good health system more than anyone else in the world. Why? Because your lifestyle is almost designed to make you sick.

Let’s start with your diet: Much of the beef you eat has been exposed to fecal matter in processing. Your chicken is contaminated with salmonella. Your stock animals and poultry are pumped full of growth hormones and antibiotics. In most other countries, the government would act to protect consumers from this sort of thing; in the United States, the government is bought off by industry to prevent any effective regulations or inspections. In a few years, the majority of all the produce for sale in the United States will be from genetically modified crops, thanks to the cozy relationship between Monsanto Corporation and the United States government. Worse still, due to the vast quantities of high-fructose corn syrup Americans consume, fully one-third of children born in the United States today will be diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes at some point in their lives.

Of course, it’s not just the food that’s killing you, it’s the drugs. If you show any sign of life when you’re young, they’ll put you on Ritalin. Then, when you get old enough to take a good look around, you’ll get depressed, so they’ll give you Prozac. If you’re a man, this will render you chemically impotent, so you’ll need Viagra to get it up. Meanwhile, your steady diet of trans-fat-laden food is guaranteed to give you high cholesterol, so you’ll get a prescription for Lipitor. Finally, at the end of the day, you’ll lay awake at night worrying about losing your health plan, so you’ll need Lunesta to go to sleep.

With a diet guaranteed to make you sick and a health system designed to make sure you stay that way, what you really need is a long vacation somewhere. Unfortunately, you probably can’t take one. I’ll let you in on little secret: if you go to the beaches of Thailand, the mountains of Nepal, or the coral reefs of Australia, you’ll probably be the only American in sight. And you’ll be surrounded crowds of happy Germans, French, Italians, Israelis, Scandinavians and wealthy Asians. Why? Because they’re paid well enough to afford to visit these places AND they can take vacations long enough to do so. Even if you could scrape together enough money to go to one of these incredible places, by the time you recovered from your jetlag, it would time to get on a plane and rush back to your job.

If you think I’m making this up, check the stats on average annual vacation days by country:

Finland: 44
Italy: 42
France: 39
Germany: 35
UK: 25
Japan: 18
USA: 12

The fact is, they work you like dogs in the United States. This should come as no surprise: the United States never got away from the plantation/sweat shop labor model and any real labor movement was brutally suppressed. Unless you happen to be a member of the ownership class, your options are pretty much limited to barely surviving on service-sector wages or playing musical chairs for a spot in a cubicle (a spot that will be outsourced to India next week anyway). The very best you can hope for is to get a professional degree and then milk the system for a slice of the middle-class pie. And even those who claw their way into the middle class are but one illness or job loss away from poverty. Your jobs aren’t secure. Your company has no loyalty to you. They’ll play you off against your coworkers for as long as it suits them, then they’ll get rid of you.

Of course, you don’t have any choice in the matter: the system is designed this way. In most countries in the developed world, higher education is either free or heavily subsidized; in the United States, a university degree can set you back over US$100,000. Thus, you enter the working world with a crushing debt. Forget about taking a year off to travel the world and find yourself – you’ve got to start working or watch your credit rating plummet.

If you’re “lucky,” you might even land a job good enough to qualify you for a home loan. And then you’ll spend half your working life just paying the interest on the loan – welcome to the world of American debt slavery. America has the illusion of great wealth because there’s a lot of “stuff” around, but who really owns it? In real terms, the average American is poorer than the poorest ghetto dweller in Manila, because at least they have no debts. If they want to pack up and leave, they can; if you want to leave, you can’t, because you’ve got debts to pay.

All this begs the question: Why would anyone put up with this? Ask any American and you’ll get the same answer: because America is the freest country on earth. If you believe this, I’ve got some more bad news for you: America is actually among the least free countries on earth. Your piss is tested, your emails and phone calls are monitored, your medical records are gathered, and you are never more than one stray comment away from writhing on the ground with two Taser prongs in your ***.

And that’s just physical freedom. Mentally, you are truly imprisoned. You don’t even know the degree to which you are tormented by fears of medical bankruptcy, job loss, homelessness and violent crime because you’ve never lived in a country where there is no need to worry about such things.

But it goes much deeper than mere surveillance and anxiety. The fact is, you are not free because your country has been taken over and occupied by another government. Fully 70% of your tax dollars go to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon is the real government of the United States. You are required under pain of death to pay taxes to this occupying government. If you’re from the less fortunate classes, you are also required to serve and die in their endless wars, or send your sons and daughters to do so. You have no choice in the matter: there is a socio-economic draft system in the United States that provides a steady stream of cannon fodder for the military.

If you call a life of surveillance, anxiety and ceaseless toil in the service of a government you didn’t elect “freedom,” then you and I have a very different idea of what that word means.

If there was some chance that the country could be changed, there might be reason for hope. But can you honestly look around and conclude that anything is going to change? Where would the change come from? The people? Take a good look at your compatriots: the working class in the United States has been brutally propagandized by jackals like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. Members of the working class have been taught to lick the boots of their masters and then bend over for another kick in the ***. They’ve got these people so well trained that they’ll take up arms against the other half of the working class as soon as their masters give the word.

If the people cannot make a change, how about the media? Not a chance. From Fox News to the New York Times, the mass media in the United States is nothing but the public relations wing of the corporatocracy, primarily the military industrial complex. At least the citizens of the former Soviet Union knew that their news was bull****. In America, you grow up thinking you’ve got a free media, which makes the propaganda doubly effective. If you don’t think American media is mere corporate propaganda, ask yourself the following question: have you ever heard a major American news outlet suggest that the country could fund a single-payer health system by cutting military spending?

If change can’t come from the people or the media, the only other potential source of change would be the politicians. Unfortunately, the American political process is among the most corrupt in the world. In every country on earth, one expects politicians to take bribes from the rich. But this generally happens in secret, behind the closed doors of their elite clubs. In the United States, this sort of political corruption is done in broad daylight, as part of legal, accepted, standard operating procedure. In the United States, they merely call these bribes campaign donations, political action committees and lobbyists. One can no more expect the politicians to change this system than one can expect a man to take an axe and chop his own legs out from underneath him.

No, the United States of America is not going to change for the better. The only change will be for the worse. And when I say worse, I mean much worse. As we speak, the economic system that sustained the country during the post-war years is collapsing. The United States maxed out its “credit card” sometime in 2008 and now its lenders, starting with China, are in the process of laying the foundations for a new monetary system to replace the Anglo-American “petro-dollar” system. As soon as there is a viable alternative to the US dollar, the greenback will sink like a stone.

While the United States was running up crushing levels of debt, it was also busy shipping its manufacturing jobs and white-collar jobs overseas, and letting its infrastructure fall to pieces. Meanwhile, Asian and European countries were investing in education, infrastructure and raw materials. Even if the United States tried to rebuild a real economy (as opposed to a service/financial economy) do think American workers would ever be able to compete with the workers of China or Europe? Have you ever seen a Japanese or German factory? Have you ever met a Singaporean or Chinese worker?

There are only two possible futures facing the United States, and neither one is pretty. The best case is a slow but orderly decline – essentially a continuation of what’s been happening for the last two decades. Wages will drop, unemployment will rise, Medicare and Social Security benefits will be slashed, the currency will decline in value, and the disparity of wealth will spiral out of control until the United States starts to resemble Mexico or the Philippines – tiny islands of wealth surrounded by great poverty (the country is already halfway there).

Equally likely is a sudden collapse, perhaps brought about by a rapid flight from the US dollar by creditor nations like China, Japan, Korea and the OPEC nations. A related possibility would be a default by the United States government on its vast debt. One look at the financial balance sheet of the US government should convince you how likely this is: governmental spending is skyrocketing and tax receipts are plummeting – something has to give. If either of these scenarios plays out, the resulting depression will make the present recession look like a walk in the park.

Whether the collapse is gradual or gut-wrenchingly sudden, the results will be chaos, civil strife and fascism. Let’s face it: the United States is like the former Yugoslavia – a collection of mutually antagonistic cultures united in name only. You’ve got your own version of the Taliban: right-wing Christian fundamentalists who actively loathe the idea of secular Constitutional government. You’ve got a vast intellectual underclass that has spent the last few decades soaking up Fox News and talk radio propaganda, eager to blame the collapse on Democrats, gays and immigrants. You’ve got a ruthless ownership class that will use all the means at its disposal to protect its wealth from the starving masses.

On top of all that you’ve got vast factory farms, sprawling suburbs and a truck-based shipping system, all of it entirely dependent on oil that is about to become completely unaffordable. And you’ve got guns. Lots of guns. In short: the United States is about to become a very unwholesome place to be.

Right now, the government is building fences and walls along its northern and southern borders. Right now, the government is working on a national ID system (soon to be fitted with biometric features). Right now, the government is building a surveillance state so extensive that they will be able to follow your every move, online, in the street and across borders. If you think this is just to protect you from “terrorists,” then you’re sadly mistaken. Once the **** really hits the fan, do you really think you’ll just be able to jump into the old station wagon, drive across the Canadian border and spend the rest of your days fishing and drinking Molson? No, the government is going to lock the place down. They don’t want their tax base escaping. They don’t want their “recruits” escaping. They don’t want YOU escaping.

I am not writing this to scare you. I write this to you as a friend. If you are able to read and understand what I’ve written here, then you are a member of a small minority in the United States. You are a minority in a country that has no place for you.

So what should you do?

You should leave the United States of America.

If you’re young, you’ve got plenty of choices. You can teach English in the Middle East, Asia or Europe. Or you can go to university or graduate school abroad and start building skills that will qualify you for a work visa. If you’ve already got some real work skills, you can apply to emigrate to any number of countries as a skilled immigrant. If you are older and you’ve got some savings, you can retire to a place like Costa Rica or the Philippines. If you can’t qualify for a work, student or retirement visa, don’t let that stop you – travel on a tourist visa to a country that appeals to you and talk to the expats you meet there. Whatever you do, go speak to an immigration lawyer as soon as you can. Find out exactly how to get on a path that will lead to permanent residence and eventually citizenship in the country of your choice.

You will not be alone. There are millions of Americans just like me living outside the United States. Living lives much more fulfilling, peaceful, free and abundant than we ever could have attained back home. Some of us happened upon these lives by accident – we tried a year abroad and found that we liked it – others made a conscious decision to pack up and leave for good. You’ll find us in Canada, all over Europe, in many parts of Asia, in Australia and New Zealand, and in most other countries of the globe. Do we miss our friends and family? Yes. Do we occasionally miss aspects of our former country? Yes. Do we plan on ever living again in the United States? Never. And those of us with permanent residence or citizenship can sponsor family members from back home for long-term visas in our adopted countries.

In closing, I want to remind you of something – unless you are an American Indian or a descendant of slaves, at some point your ancestors chose to leave their homeland in search of a better life. They weren’t traitors and they weren’t bad people, they just wanted a better life for themselves and their families. Isn’t it time that you continue their journey?

____________________________________________________________

I think that Canada is an easier place to live or China or......,right?

so what's yer pernt mayn?

 

[tay]

America is falling apart. Anyone who travels in this great land knows it.

This great city is crumbling. I’m scared to take the underwater tunnels to Long Island or New Jersey. Our local airport, LaGuardia, should be in Zimbabwe.

The American Society of Civil Engineers warns that crumbling roads, rusting bridges, decaying railroads and transit systems are costing the nation $129 billion each year, and that crumbling infrastructure adds $97 billion annually and caused travel delays of $28 billion annually.

I raise this scandalous issue because Switzerland, a tiny nation of only 8.2 million, just opened the remarkable Gothard Base Tunnel, the world’s longest and deepest rail and road tunnel drilled right through the highest Alps.

I was in Switzerland in 1996 when the 151.8 km (94.3 mile) long tunnel project was begun, and I just watched its grand opening this week on TV. The project came in a year ahead of schedule and under budget at $10.1 billion. The Swiss are as skilled at watching their pennies as drilling through granite mountains. Rock amounting to 5 Giza pyramids was excavated.

The new Gothard Tunnel (there are two older, narrower ones)

Cuts almost an hour off the travel time from Zurich to Milan. More important, it will alleviate the frightful congestion and pollution from cars and heavy transport trucks in the narrow Alpine valleys. It creates a direct rail link from Rotterdam in the north to Genoa on the Mediterranean. One day soon, China’s fast-expanding high speed rail network, aka ‘the new Silk Road,’ will tied in to the Alpine network.

Each day, 250 trains will whizz under the Alps. High above the new tunnel are groups of 20th-century Swiss forts whose cannon and machine guns cover the land route over the strategic pass. I’ve inspected the largest at Goschenen, whose 155mm cannon can reach well into Italy. But the Swiss now seem to prefer more trade than old forms of security.

Compared to Switzerland’s excellent roads, beautiful bridges or viaducts, punctual to-the-second trains, the US looks – and perhaps is – a third world nation. Swiss, French, and German trains travel at 230-300km an hour, offering fast, clean, safe, civilized travel (at least when France’s rail workers are not on strike). I just took a French TGV express train from Lorraine on the German border direct to Charles De Gaulle airport in about one hour – what it takes to get from Manhattan to New York’s Kennedy Airport by taxi.

America’s vast highway system was built during the golden era of President Dwight Eisenhower. Today, America’s infrastructure is backwards, primitive, and humiliating for the self-proclaimed ‘greatest country on earth.’

Why is this? Because Americans and their government in Washington has chosen imperialism over taking care of home.

While the US crumbles, it pours billions upon billions into foreign military misadventures. The foolish war in Afghanistan will soon hit $1 trillion. Iraq is on the way to a second trillion. Washington is running little wars in East Africa, Yemen, now West Africa, Pakistan, and the Mideast, while gearing up for possible conflicts with Russia and China.

Invading small, weak Muslim nations may be glamorous and career-enhancing. – and certainly the objective of the neocon fifth column. Fixing sewers, dams and bridges is not – and does not make billions for arms manufacturers.

History is full of empires that ignored their own infrastructure and social well-being in favor of pursuing military glory abroad. All are on the trash-heap of history. America is headed that way, addicted to debt and war. We spend close to $1 trillion annually on the military and nuclear forces. This sum is not for ‘defense,’ but for offense around the globe.


Of course we have no funds to replaced New York’s 1900-vintage water conduits and sewers, or build desperately needed new bridges across the Hudson and East River. That’s because the funds are going to bomb Afghan tribesmen, Iraqi rebels and prop up vile regimes like those of Uzbekistan, Uganda, Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.


WAR AND DEBT IS WHY OUR TRAINS ARE BROKEN « Eric Margolis

 

[Johnnny]

2nd necrosis thread in a day... cool

 

[SLM]

2nd necrosis thread in a day... cool

Tay is the necro champ.

 

[lone wolf]

Before the Forum went beta, we had a lock on necros....

 

[tay]

Before the Forum went beta, we had a lock on necros....

Are multiple threads on the same subject preferred ?

A story from 2004. That was before the financial meltdown of 2007–08, before the bailout of Wall Street, before the recession that only widened the gap between the super-rich and everyone else and before being threatened with the TPP.

Ever since then, the great sucking sound we’ve been hearing is wealth heading upwards. The United States now has a level of income inequality unprecedented in our history and so dramatic it’s almost impossible to wrap one’s mind around.

The movers and shakers—the big winners—keep repeating the mantra that this inequality was inevitable, the result of the globalization of finance and advances in technology in an increasingly complex world. Those are part of the story, but only part.
...
...The winners bought off the gatekeepers, then gamed the system. And when the fix was in, they turned our economy into a feast for the predators, “saddling Americans with greater debt, tearing new holes in the safety net, and imposing broad financial risks on Americans as workers and taxpayers.”

The end result, Hacker and Pierson conclude, is that the United States is looking more and more like the capitalist oligarchies of Brazil, Mexico, and Russia, where most of the wealth is concentrated at the top while the bottom grows larger and larger with everyone in between just barely getting by.

If you open the link to read the article just close the ad and the article will appear...

Ever higher society, ever harder to ascend | The Economist

 

[tay]

 

[Cliffy]

Oliver Stone:
"In the 13 wars we’ve started over the last 30 years and the $14 trillion we’ve spent, and the hundreds of thousands of lives that have perished from this earth, remember that it wasn’t one leader, but a system, both Republican and Democrat... We know we’ve intervened in more than 100 countries with invasion, regime change, economic chaos. Or hired war. It’s war of some kind. In the end, it’s become a system leading to the death of this planet and the extinction of us all." - 19 Feb 2017