Octafish
Octafish's JournalReport: Walmart Workers Cost Taxpayers $6.2 Billion In Public Assistance
Clare O'Connor
Forbes, April 15, 2014
Walmart’s low-wage workers cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $6.2 billion in public assistance including food stamps, Medicaid and subsidized housing, according to a report published to coincide with Tax Day, April 15.
Americans for Tax Fairness, a coalition of 400 national and state-level progressive groups, made this estimate using data from a 2013 study by Democratic Staff of the U.S. Committee on Education and the Workforce.
“The study estimated the cost to Wisconsin’s taxpayers of Walmart’s low wages and benefits, which often force workers to rely on various public assistance programs,” reads the report, available in full here.
“It found that a single Walmart Supercenter cost taxpayers between $904,542 and $1.75 million per year, or between $3,015 and $5,815 on average for each of 300 workers.”
Americans for Tax Fairness then took the mid-point of that range ($4,415) and multiplied it by Walmart’s approximately 1.4 million workers to come up with an estimate of the overall taxpayers’ bill for the Bentonville, Ark.-based big box giant’s staffers.
CONTINUED...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-walmart-workers-cost-taxpayers-6-2-billion-in-public-assistance/
Getting Walmart on top of the heap was Buy Partisan.
Pluto on the viewscreen, Captain.
New Horizons Sees Features on Pluto!
by Phil Plait
Slate, April 29, 2015
At a press conference on Wednesday astronomers working on the New Horizons space probe revealed new images that show surface features on Pluto for the first time!
The probe was just over 100 million kilometers from Pluto when the images were taken on April 12–18 (the Earth is 150 million km from the Sun, for comparison). Hubble images taken over the years have shown the diminutive world has darker and lighter patches on its surface, and these images match that.
In fact, these images are now at higher resolution than Hubble can produce! And they'll be getting better every day ...
Pluto looks lumpy in the animation, but that’s certainly an illusion; darker spots near the edge make it look like Pluto has chunks taken out of it. It’s expected that Pluto will be quite round; its gravity should compress it enough for it to be mostly spherical. I wonder if it’ll be oblate (slightly flattened) due to tides from its moon Charon. We’ll know pretty soon.
Charon can be seen in the animation as well, orbiting Pluto once every six days or so. Actually, it’s about ¼ the diameter of Pluto, and massive enough that it pulls on its parent pretty hard, hard enough that it’s more correct to say they both orbit their common barycenter, their center of mass.
Great links, more:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2015/04/29/pluto_new_horizons_sees_surface_features_for_the_first_time.html
Imaging promises to get better and better till the July fly-by, and that should be something too, as scientists can use the sun shining through the Plutonic atmosphere to get an idea of its composition.
Democracy's for kids. ''Every One That Doeth Evil Hateth the Light.''
Grown ups know how to make the trains run on time.
They are so right! Silly me! I am a bad man. Bad. Bad. Bad.
Did you read what William K. Black had to say? The guy who should be Attorney General wrote:
Obama & TPP: Every One That Doeth Evil Hateth the Light
Posted on April 25, 2015 by William Black | 9 Comments
By William K. Black
Quito: April 25, 2015
President Obama wants the world to know that he takes it personally that the Democratic Party’s base opposes his latest effort to sell out the people of the world to the worst corporations through the infamous Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal. Obama blurted out at a press conference a number of conservative Republican memes as his sole basis for pushing TPP. He then launched personal attacks on Senator Elizabeth Warren and labor leaders (without naming them). Obama, who is famous for keeping his cool when criticized by the GOP, is thin-skinned when criticized by Democrats. Obama never raged at the Republicans’ “death panel” attacks on him, but he raged at Warren as supposedly making an equivalently openly dishonest attack on TPP’s secret drafting process.
SNIP...
Here is the “money quote” from Warren and Senator Sherrod Brown’s letter responding to Obama’s attack.
“‘Executives of the country’s biggest corporations and their lobbyists already have had significant opportunities not only to read [the TPP text], but to shape its terms,’ the letter reads. ‘The Administration’s 28 trade advisory committees on different aspects of the TPP have a combined 566 members, and 480 of those members, or 85%, are senior corporate executives or industry lobbyists. Many of the advisory committees — including those on chemicals and pharmaceuticals, textiles and clothing, and services and finance — are made up entirely of industry representatives.’”
In sum, Obama stacked the committees to ensure that the CEOs’ lobbyists would completely dominate the secret drafting of TPP. And everyone in America know that the result of that has to be a Faux Trade agreement crafted to allow the CEOs to plunder with impunity.
Obama is demanding an additional reprehensible element – “fast track” – in which the cynical “CEOs’ Christmas in May” deal cannot be amended to remove even the most despicable provisions of the bill placed like land mines by the CEOs’ lobbyists. I don’t think opposing the TPP should be a partisan issue. Republicans should help lead the effort to stop Obama’s latest sell out.
TPP, of course, is being sold through a full court press of the economists who brought us the financial crisis and the Great Recession and the multiple Great Depressions in Spain, Italy, and Greece. Their lie, as always, is that this travesty of special interest deals drafted overwhelmingly by corporate lobbyists represents “free trade.” They first torture the language and truth before they torture the world.
TPP is the opposite of “free trade.” In the jargon of its economic supporters, it is a moldering midden hiding the secretly drafted “rent seeking” provisions designed to help CEOs enrich themselves at the expense of the people of the world. Adam Smith, who supported freer trade, warned over two centuries ago that when CEOs meet secretly it promptly turns into a conspiracy against the public interest and warned that CEOs use their power to aid their own interests at the expense of shareholders and the public. Smith’s warned that it “ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
Similarly, the even more conservative Frédéric Bastiat famously warned:
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
TPP is the legal system designed to authorize plunder with impunity. Economists are the priests that glorifies the CEOs’ plunder. When you allow CEOs’ lobbyists to secretly draft a deal and then make it impossible through “fast track” for the public or our representatives to vote down even the most despicable of these acts of CEO plunder you make it certain that the law will bring plunder rather than “free trade.”
CONTINUED...
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2015/04/obama-tpp-every-one-that-doeth-evil-hateth-the-light.html
Now that is a good man. Good. Good. Good.
Thank you for knowing the diff, bvar22!
The Party of Davos
by Jeff Faux
www.thenation.com/, February 13, 2006/ via ThirdWorldTraveler.com
EXCERPT...
Americans are of course prominent members of this "Party of Davos," which relies on the financial and military might of the US superpower to support its agenda. In exchange, the American members of the Party of Davos get a privileged place for their projects--and themselves. Whether it's at Davos, at NATO headquarters or in the boardroom of the International Monetary Fund, heads turn and people listen more carefully when the American speaks.
"Davos Man," a term coined by nationalist scholar Samuel Huntington, is bipartisan. To be sure, Democrats tend to be more comfortable with the forum's informal seminar-style and big-think topics like global poverty, cultural diversity and executive stress. Bill Clinton goes often, and Al Gore, John Kerry, Robert Rubin, Madeleine Albright, Joe Biden and other prominent Democrats are familiar faces. Republicans generally prefer more private venues. George W. Bush, of course, doesn't do anything unscripted. But people like Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, John McCain and Condoleezza Rice have all worked the Davos circuit.
That the global economy is developing a global ruling class should come as no shock. All markets generate economic class differences. In stable, self-contained national economies, where capital and labor need each other, political bargaining produces a social contract that allows enough wealth to trickle down from the top to keep the majority loyal. "What's good for General Motors is good for America," Dwight Eisenhower's Defense Secretary famously said in the 1950s. The United Auto Workers agreed, which at the time seemed to toss the notion of class warfare into the dustbin of history.
But as domestic markets become global, investors increasingly find workers, customers and business partners almost anywhere. Not surprisingly, they have come to share more economic interests with their peers in other countries than with people who simply have the same nationality. They also share a common interest in escaping the restrictions of their domestic social contracts.
The class politics of this new world economic order is obscured by the confused language that filters the globalization debate from talk radio to Congressional hearings to university seminars. On the one hand, we are told that the flow of money and goods across borders is making nation-states obsolete. On the other, global economic competition is almost always defined as conflict among national interests. Thus, for example, the US press warns us of a dire economic threat from China. Yet much of the "Chinese" menace is a business partnership between China's commissars, who supply the cheap labor, and America's (and Japan's and Europe's) capitalists, who supply the technology and capital. "World poverty" is likewise framed as an issue of the distribution of wealth between rich and poor countries, ignoring the existence of rich people in poor countries and poor people in rich countries.
CONTINUED...
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Ruling_Elites/Party_Davos.html
That was from 2006 -- before the crash and the Great Bankster Bailout. Who got made whole, 100-cents on the dollar? Who got bankrupted and tossed from their homes?
Most importantly: Thank you, Enthusiast. The things I do "for attention."
You misunderstood on purpose then. The facts are there are more to reality than we know.
Crop Circles. UFOs. Other Dimensions. Edge of Reality stuff that scares the Air Force and other members of the armed forces around the world. GOOGLE Frederick Valentich, Felix Moncla and Robert Wilson, or Thomas Mantell for example of brave people who have lost their lives in connection with UFOs.
You help shut down their discussion by ridiculing those who are interested in them. Doing so is un-democratic, Major Nikon.
Yeah. People might learn something.
Here's something from 2004 on BCCI, what Robert Gates and Poppy Bush called the "Bank of Crooks and Criminals International" and related matters with echoes from Dealey Plaza to the present day, 11 long, war-filled years later:
[font color="blue"]Nguyen Hand Bank, the P-2 lodge and Banco Ambrosiano, BCCI, the S&L "failures" and more: the thread through all the scandals is the hand-in-glove financial relationship of Intelligence Agencies, organized crime and terrorist proxies. As one financial corruption is exposed, another begins, and the players remain the same, as do the crimes: money-laundering, drug-smuggling, assassination and staged terrorist acts. [/font color]
More: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x2118878
DUers were unafraid to get their fingernails dirty, lifting up that rock -- 2004, before the Great Bankster Bailout of '08. Nostalgia.
Ask: What have people learned from reading Major Nikon?
Compare.
I also take it personally.
XXX. Money still trumps peace.Neocons and Liberals Together, Again
The neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC) has signaled its intention to continue shaping the government's national security...
Tom Barry, last updated: February 02, 2005
The neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC) has signaled its intention to continue shaping the government's national security strategy with a new public letter stating that the "U.S. military is too small for the responsibilities we are asking it to assume." Rather than reining in the imperial scope of U.S. national security strategy as set forth by the first Bush administration, PNAC and the letter's signatories call for increasing the size of America's global fighting machine.
SNIP...
Liberal Hawks Fly with the Neocons
The recent PNAC letter to Congress was not the first time that PNAC or its associated front groups, such as the Coalition for the Liberation of Iraq, have included hawkish Democrats.
Two PNAC letters in March 2003 played to those Democrats who believed that the invasion was justified at least as much by humanitarian concerns as it was by the purported presence of weapons of mass destruction. PNAC and the neocon camp had managed to translate their military agenda of preemptive and preventive strikes into national security policy. With the invasion underway, they sought to preempt those hardliners and military officials who opted for a quick exit strategy in Iraq. In their March 19th letter, PNAC stated that Washington should plan to stay in Iraq for the long haul: "Everyone-those who have joined the coalition, those who have stood aside, those who opposed military action, and, most of all, the Iraqi people and their neighbors-must understand that we are committed to the rebuilding of Iraq and will provide the necessary resources and will remain for as long as it takes."
Along with such neocon stalwarts as Robert Kagan, Bruce Jackson, Joshua Muravchik, James Woolsey, and Eliot Cohen, a half-dozen Democrats were among the 23 individuals who signed PNAC's first letter on post-war Iraq. Among the Democrats were Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution and a member of Clinton's National Security Council staff; Martin Indyk, Clinton's ambassador to Israel; Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute and Democratic Leadership Council; Dennis Ross, Clinton's top adviser on the Israel-Palestinian negotiations; and James Steinberg, Clinton's deputy national security adviser and head of foreign policy studies at Brookings. A second post-Iraq war letter by PNAC on March 28 called for broader international support for reconstruction, including the involvement of NATO, and brought together the same Democrats with the prominent addition of another Brookings' foreign policy scholar, Michael O'Hanlon.
CONTINUED...
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/articles/display/Neocons_and_Liberals_Together_Again
One name to remember is Victoria Nuland, our woman in Ukraine, who is married to PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan
Robert Kagan's brother is Frederick Kagan. Frederick Kagan's spouse is Kimberly Kagan.
Brilliant people, big ideas, and a lot of PNAC, which spells out the neocon/neolib approach to international relations means more wars without end for profits without cease, among other things detrimental to peace, justice, and democracy.
The Unforgotten
This is stunning. A new installation in Chicago uses mannequins clothed in what the victims of gun violence were wearing when they were shot, where they were shot.
http://the-unforgotten.org/
Exactly. Like Erik Prince.
Freaking Blackwater was a top dog in the Drone Death Team.
Privatized war making via corporate assassins reminds me of when CIA first used professionals, family owned businesses, way back in 1960.
Good thing I didn't bring up Jackson Stephens.
His story goes from BCCI to AQ Khan to the heart of the military industrial complex, Walmart.
Guess his lawyer?
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