by: Porter Standsberry

The numbers tell us America is in decline… if not outright collapse

 I say “the numbers tell us” because I’ve become very sensitive to the impact this kind of statement has on people. When I warned about the impending bankruptcy of General Motors in 2006 and 2007, readers actually blamed me for the company’s problems – as if my warnings to the public were the real problem, rather than GM’s $400 billion in debt..

The claim was absurd. But the resentment my work engendered was real.

So please… before you read this issue, which makes several arresting claims about the future of our country… understand I am only writing about the facts as I find them today. I am only drawing conclusions based on the situation as it stands. I am not saying that these conditions can’t improve. Or that they won’t improve.

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by: Terrance Heath

When 77-year-old Greek pensioner Dimitris Christoulas sat down under a tree in Athens' busiest public square and committed suicide — shooting himself in the head not far from Parliament, and leaving behind a letter blaming the government's austerity policies for driving him to it — his act launched protests in Greece, and became another example of the price  austerity exacts from those least responsible for and least able to pay the debts that austerity policies are intended to help the country pay. Christloulas's story offers a snapshot of austerity's consequences for the elderly, the young, the middle- and working classes, and just about everyone outside of the one percent — and not just in Greece, but right here at home too.
 
Despair
 
He was a retired pharmacist, who left behind a wife and daughter when he died. That one man, whose name no one outside of his family and friends had reason to know, could spark attacks on police and yet another round of protests in Greece speaks to how many Greeks identified with his plight. Perhaps only the location Dimitris Christoulas chose for his final act, and his decision to leave behind a final message set him apart from countless anonymous Greeks for whom austerity yielded nothing but despair.
 
Despair was not Christoulas's first response to austerity. First, he got mad. According to friends, Christoulas joined in protests against the government's austerity policies. He joined a citizens' movement against austerity, called "Den Plirono — which translates to "I won't pay." Yet, Christoulas did pay. The reality life under unyielding austerity took the fight out of him, and he gave up. Christoulas went out with a bang and one last gesture of outrage at Greece's government. But ultimately he decided that life under austerity was not worth living.
 
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by: Dr. Dahlia WasfI

by: Tana Ganeva

For decades, cities all over the country have worked to essentially criminalize homelessness, instituting measures that outlaw holding a sign, sleeping, sitting, lying (or weirdly, telling a lie in Orlando) if you live on the street.

Where the law does not mandate outright harassment, police come up with clever work-arounds, like destroying or confiscating tents, blankets and other property in raids of camps. A veteran I talked to, his eye bloody from when some teenagers beat him up to steal 60 cents, said police routinely extracted the poles from his tent and kept them so he couldn't rebuild it. (Where are all the pissed-off libertarians and conservatives at such flagrant disrespect for private property?)

In the heady '80s, Reagan slashed federal housing subsidies even as a tough economy threw more and more people out on the street. Instead of resolving itself through the magic of the markets, the homelessness problem increasingly fell to local governments.

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by: Brad Jacobson

Ever since the largest offshore oil spill in history spewed into the Gulf of Mexico last year, independent public health experts have questioned the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's efforts to effectively protect Americans from consuming contaminated seafood..

Now a recent study by two of the most tenacious non-government scientists reveals that FDA Gulf seafood "safe levels" allowed 100 to 10,000 times more carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in seafood than what is safe. The overarching issue the report addresses is the failure of the FDA's risk assessment to protect those most vulnerable to the effects of these chemicals, such as young children, pregnant women and high-consumption seafood eaters.

In an effort to pinpoint how the FDA decided to set its acceptable levels for PAH contaminants in Gulf seafood, researchers at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which performed the study -- published in the leading peer-reviewed environmental health journal Environmental Health Perspectives -- also scoured documents wrested from the FDA under the Freedom of Information Act.

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by: OldWarrior

Now this is a story which seriously ticks me off and makes the unit involved lose some of its points with me. Some heads need to roll on this one and I don’t mean one or two. The whole story stinks. It seems like the worst bunch of lies ever told to cover up an incident. There is no way that anyone could even believe any of the lies because they are so incredible but yet no one has been arrested in a case of obvious murder.

SPC McBeth was killed in July in Asad Iraq. She was stabbed to death but no one seemed to question the lame stories given about how she died. The first story given was that she accidentally stabbed herself to death while playing with the knife. The death was ruled accidental at this time even though she made a statement to military police ring customers before she died. She indicated at that time that there had been some sort of struggle which caused her to be stabbed. Now how do you rule accidental in lieu of that information? How in the world does anybody get accidentally stabbed to death? Who was the numb nut that ruled this death an accident? Who was the knuckle head that supervised the numb nut that allowed this foolishness to stand? Have you ever heard such a bunch of bull? I didn’t know that you could stack it that high.

 
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by: Jerome Corsi

Exposed! How government lies with job statistics

The real unemployment rate for January 2012 is closer to 22.5 percent, not the 8.3 percent reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

John Williams, author of the “Shadow Government Statistics” website, argues that the federal government manipulates the reporting of economic data for political purposes.
 
In the Feb. 3 Bureau of Labor Statistics news release, the unemployment rate was reported to have fallen 0.2 percent to 8.3 percent, from 8.5 percent in December 2011.
 
Williams recreates a Shadow Government Statistics alternative unemployment rate reflecting methodology that includes “long-term discouraged workers” who the Bureau of Labor Statistics (in 1994 under the Clinton administration) removed from those considered “unemployed.”


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