National Intelligence Council Study: China will outstrip the United States as the leading economic power before 2030

(New York Times) WASHINGTON — A new intelligence assessment of global trends projects that China will outstrip the United States as the leading economic power before 2030, but that America will remain an indispensable world leader, bolstered in part by an era of energy independence.

Russia’s clout will wane, as will the economic strength of other countries reliant on oil for revenues, the assessment says.

The product of four years of intelligence-gathering and analysis, the study, by the National Intelligence Council, presents grounds for optimism and pessimism in nearly equal measure. The council reports to the director of national intelligence and has responsibilities for long-term strategic analysis.

One remarkable development it anticipates is a spreading affluence that leads to a larger global middle class that is better educated and has wider access to health care and communications technologies like the Internet and smartphones. The report assesses global trends until 2030.

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Your individual rights are what give you the right to practice your own religion.

Your individual rights, the ones that have been granted to you in this country, just like everyone else that lives in the United States. We are all (supposedly) granted the same rights.

When your practicing of your religion starts infringing on the individual rights of others, the same individual rights that give you the right to practice your religion, you are making where your religion is taking precedence over other’s individual rights.

What makes you so important that other people should live by your belief? Why do you think you have the right to say “You don’t have the same freedom I do.”?

Think about it. Even inside the Christian religion you guys can’t decide the details of exactly how to be religious. There’s all different sects of Christianity. What if suddenly one day, that choice was taken away from you. What if yourhad to be Catholic or you had to be Baptist, or you had to be Mormon. 

Say you were Catholic but you were told you had to live by Evangelical rules. You wouldn’t like it, you wouldn’t like it if they outlawed any number of thing that you had personal choices about, so why do you think it’s okay to push your choices on other people.

Don’t think your religious choices are so sacred that other people have to follow them. There are a lot of things I don’t like from how some people dress, to lifestyle choices I think are unwise, but I remember, if it’s that person’s personal choice, and it doesn’t infringe on anyone else, then it’s not my right to tell them what they can and can not do.

So yes, it basically comes down to not getting what you want. Not being able to push your beliefs on other people. Not being able to take choices away from others and replace them with your own.

There is no war on religion, it’s something politicians do to whip their base into a frenzy. It’s something religious leaders say to make their followers think that it’s okay to take away other people’s choices and replace them with their own.

It’s not okay. Your rights are not more important than anyone else’s no matter what your church or political leaders say.

Census data: Half of U.S. poor or low income

By HOPE YEN | Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income.

The latest census data depict a middle class that’s shrinking as unemployment stays high and the government’s safety net frays. The new numbers follow years of stagnating wages for the middle class that have hurt millions of workers and families.

“Safety net programs such as food stamps and tax credits kept poverty from rising even higher in 2010, but for many low-income families with work-related and medical expenses, they are considered too ‘rich’ to qualify,” said Sheldon Danziger, a University of Michigan public policy professor who specializes in poverty.

“The reality is that prospects for the poor and the near poor are dismal,” he said. “If Congress and the states make further cuts, we can expect the number of poor and low-income families to rise for the next several years.”

[FULL STORY]

Democracy in America is a sick joke and the masses aren’t laughing anymore.

by Steven Van Zandt | Huffington Post

There Is Only One Issue In America…

I was obsessed with politics in the ’80s. I’ve recovered and I’m feeling much better now thank you.

By the time I realized, as interesting as it was, I’d better stop this stuff and try to earn a living, I had discovered many of our social problems and quality of life issues could be traced to the same political source: our corrupt-by-definition electoral system. The solution to the problem was as easy to discover as the cause: The elimination of all private finance in the electoral process.

I was working doing most of my research in the area of our foreign policy since WWll, whatever fell under the umbrella of international liberation politics, but I examined and analyzed a fair amount of local issues as well.

I wanted to know how things work? Where’s the power? Who’s pulling the strings?

The economy of the world came down to the unholy trinity of guns, drugs and gasoline — military industry, drugs (legal and illegal), and energy — and now I would add agribusiness as the fourth controlling commodity, and always with the enabling bankers never too far out of sight making their profits far too often from wars and slave labor.

While that readily explained the suffering of the Third World, it didn’t immediately answer why in America it was possible for so many people to be unhappy with our government’s decisions, both foreign and domestic, when we’re supposedly living in a democracy.

A quick analysis of our electoral process revealed the obvious answer. The simple fact is we do not live in a democracy. Certainly not the kind our Founding Fathers intended. We live in a corporate dictatorship represented by, and beholden to, no single human being you can reason with or hold responsible for anything.

The corporation has but one obligation, which is to increase profits for it’s shareholders by any legal means necessary by the next fiscal quarter.

They have no moral, patriotic, social, environmental, generational or even sustainable responsibility. They have only a short-term economic mandate and their only responsibility to society is to stay within the law to accomplish it.

[FULL STORY]

Why all this talk in the GOP that taxing the rich, the “job creators” will hurt the economy is pure bullshit.

Yesterday, the GOP filibustered a vote to extend the middle class tax holiday again, that is, they didn’t even let the issue come up for debate.

The extension of the tax cut was to be paid for by a small, temporary surtax on the top 0.2 percent of income earners. 

What I hear repeated by the GOP and by people I know “in real life” who swing conservative is that when you raise taxes on the rich, they no longer have the income available to hire more people. This is the “job creators” argument, that is repeated like a mantra over and over again by conservatives.

On the surface, this argument seems to make sense, if business owners are paying less taxes, they have more income to hire and pay more employees, thus more people have jobs.

The problem with this is, tax rates for the highest earners are at the lowest they have been since the late 80’s/early 90’s, so if this were the case, why aren’t the job creators hiring? 

This is because what drives business, is demand. Why would someone hire more employees if business is flat, that is, what need to you have to expand the number of people working for you if the amount of business you are doing is not going up.

Look at it this way, before I got laid off of my old job (and after I had left my ex wife) I was doing pretty good for myself. I was still making around 60k, a year, and I had disposable income.

I went out a lot to local bars and restaurants, went to the movies fairly often, I bought video games and electronic gadgets a lot, I spent a lot more money on groceries because I was buying “higher quality” food.

Another example I like to use is I used to go the car wash once a week and get the “premium wash” which was about $15.

After getting laid off I was able to find another job after about eight months on unemployment, during which time I depleted all my savings. The new job paid only about 30k a year and I had to cut back on unnecessary spending. This included all the going to the movies, going out to eat, video games, electronic gadgets and getting my car washed. I had to adjust my spending on groceries as well.

I managed to find another job making just over 40k a year, but that’s still 20k less than I was making previously.

Now days, I rarely get my car washed, maybe once a month, and when I do, I get the lower cost “budget” car wash. I bring this up not because I’m upset that I can’t afford a premium car wash every week, but because I have seen three car washes in my neighborhood go out of business in the last few years. People have less disposable income, and those things that are not absolutely necessary are the first things to be cut out of a household budget.

If you look at the trends in income recently you’ll see that poverty is rising and median income is shrinking.

Now, another thing to look at is the percentages of income increase over time.

The middle class’s income over the years has shown a change of about +25% over time since 1979, the next highest percent tracked would be the top five percent of US income earners, who have seen a +95% increase in income. The top 1% has seen an astonishing 281% increase in income since 1979.

If those in the higher percentile are job creators, and their income has raised so much, then why aren’t they hiring? 

The answer is there are no demand for jobs, if the middle class isn’t spending money, then there is no incentive to hire.

This is not the time to raise taxes on people already struggling to make ends meet, in fact if you look at the data, that’s only going to make things worse.

The middle class needs to be spending money in order for there to be demand for more jobs, there needs to be a middle class in order for them to be spending money and going by recent trends this is a demographic that is shrinking.

This is proof that “trickle down” economics do not work, and the GOP really needs to stop clinging on to this idea.

We’re beginning to look a lot like a police state, and they did it not through force, but by winning hearts and minds, by taking a marketable message and feeding it to the masses.

By Aaron Baldwin | Activate the Mechanism!

It seems like these guys (the extreme right, the heads of big business, the ultra wealthy, fundamentalist) have just progressively gotten more and more brazen over the years. They are at a point now where it’s like they seriously don’t give a fuck any more, they just do what ever the fuck they want and half of the US just looks the other way because they live in the Fox News universe and think that everyone is picking on the rich people and want free handouts.

Meanwhile the ones who don’t live in Fox’s alternate reality are labeled socialists, terrorists, hippies, or what ever other scary buzzword is popular at the time. They have managed to damn near completely divide the public with this bullshit and now get away with damn near anything they want because everyone is too busy arguing about wedge issues or religious “moral” bullshit.

Stories like this one (The AIG CEO who is suing the government for more taxpayer money) aren’t even widely or accurately reported in the media, it’s the type of stuff you have to go hunting for, shit like this happens and everyone is too busy screaming about how taxing the rich at a higher rate is some kind of class warfare. 

An uninformed public is VERY easy to control, as evident by all the posts around the internet I’ve seen lately either cheering the police for using excessive force on the protesters or telling the people getting the excessive force used on them that it’s their own damn fault for protesting.

They’ve actually managed to instill in a lot of Americans that any kind of dissent is grounds to get you ass kicked, pepper-sprayed, or shot with rubber bullets, like the government is supposed to be our authoritarian daddy, that sure as hell doesn’t sound like freedom to me.

We’re beginning to look a lot like a police state, and they did it not through force, but by winning hearts and minds, by taking a marketable message and feeding it to the masses.

“When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and waving a cross” 

Given the comic failure of abstinence-only – 95% of Americans have premarital sex – isn’t it time the US got over its hangup?

By Daniel Denvir | guardian.co.uk

Though most American youth continue to learn about sex most everywhere but in school, there is some good news: according to a recent report from the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), the Obama administration and Congress in 2010 eliminated two thirds of federal funding for abstinence-only-until-marriage education, and, in a historic shift, allocated close to $190m for comprehensive sex education.

At the local level, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the implementation of a comprehensive citywide sex ed program this spring. Previously, whether a child received science-based sex ed or nothing at all was an enrollment roll of the dice: some principals ran good programs; others did not.

The proposed curriculum has sparked a rightwing backlash (flames fanned, in part, by the New York Post). Some parents are apparently angry that one approved website discusses pornography, swinger clubs and (dear Jesus) foot fetishes.

Bloomberg, for good policy and for ill, is a steamroller. But other cities lag far behind, including school districts that don’t preach abstinence-only.

[FULL STORY]

Thirty large and profitable U.S. corporations paid no income taxes in 2008 through 2010

By Kevin Drawbaugh | Reuters

(Reuters) - Thirty large and profitable U.S. corporations paid no income taxes in 2008 through 2010, said a study released on Thursday that arrives as Congress faces rising demands for tax reform, but seems unable or unwilling to act.

Pepco Holdings Inc, a Washington, D.C.-area power company, had the lowest effective tax rate, at negative 57.6 percent, among the 280 Fortune 500 companies studied.

The statutory U.S. corporate income tax rate is 35 percent, one of the highest in the world, but over the 2008-2010 period, very few of the companies studied paid it, said the report.

The average effective tax rate for the companies over the period was 18.5 percent, said Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, both think tanks.

Their report also listed General Electric Co, Paccar Inc, PG&E Corp, Computer Sciences Corp and NiSource Inc as among the 30 that paid no taxes.

Corporations will say rightly the loopholes that let them slash their taxes were perfectly legal, the report said.

“But that does not mean that low-tax corporations bear no responsibility … The laws were not enacted in a vacuum; they were adopted in response to relentless corporate lobbying, threats and campaign support,” the report said.

[FULL STORY]