for the 99% .... these banks have gotten there fangs into federal, state, and local governments and now other corporate entities which the 99% rely upon for there very existence ....

I was looking forward to my new job when I started working at a McDonald’s location in Pennsylvania in April, but I was disappointed to find out that in order to be paid, I would have to activate a JP Morgan Chase debit card with heavy fees attached.

I’m a young single mom. When I started my job at McDonald’s, I knew that I would only be making slightly more than minimum wage. I didn’t expect that the only way I would be paid would be on a debit card that would dock pay that I earned through lots of different fees. When I asked if McDonald’s could pay me through direct deposit to my local credit union, which doesn’t charge withdrawal fees, I was told that the debit card was the only option.

These cards come with a lot of fees: from fees for cash withdrawals to balance inquiries to lost or stolen cards to overdrafts and even inactivity fees. The federal government has helped reduce fees on credit and debit cards that most consumers use, but those protections don’t apply to the kinds of cards companies like McDonald's are using to pay employees. In the end, I feared that once all of the fees from getting my own hard-earned wages through this card were taken out, my pay would go below minimum wage.

https://www.change.org/petitions/mcdonald-s-stop-paying-employees-with-debit-cards-loaded-with-fees

his position in British society, Wofgang was a professor and wrote essays on law and social change....BFD

You sound like a blathering baboon with nothing other than Pollyanna type ideals encased in libertarian ideals...

Now, go out and feed someone this week and give them a job big boy ....

What will they not try to smear with there trashy media outlets ....?

President Clinton Refutes NY Times Errors In Foundation Story, But Will It Silence Right-Wing Smears?

A New York Times story on the philanthropic Clinton Foundation contained flawed details about the Foundation's finances, former President Bill Clinton clarified today. As a result of its errors, the story provided predictable fodder for attacks from right-wing media -- rabid for new opportunities to smear former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in anticipation of a yet-unannounced 2016 presidential campaign.

The Clinton Foundation, recently renamed the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, was the subject of an August 13 Times report which speculated the non-profit was experiencing "unease" over financial and management issues. The paper noted that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her staff will soon move into the Foundation's Manhattan headquarters, and questioned the capabilities of senior Foundation employees. The Times also asserted that the Foundation "ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in." As purported evidence, the paper claimed the charity ran a $40 million deficit in 2007 and 2008 and an $8 million deficit in 2012, citing tax returns.

But the Foundation corrected the record today in a letter from former President Bill Clinton. He explained that the Times failed to provide the context and facts essential to its story and misconstrued the Foundation's basic accounting according to the law, casting a shadow based on a false premise. That is because the IRS requires tax-exempt organizations such as the Foundation to report multi-year financial commitments occurring in the year the commitment was made. So in 2005 and 2006, the Foundation reported a surplus exceeding one hundred million dollars. In subsequent years, that money is reported as spending, but not cash inflow. Clinton also pointed out the difficult reality all non-profits face fundraising during a recession.

The Times was also incorrect in its assessment of 2012 deficits, Clinton stated. The paper relied on unaudited numbers from the 2012 annual report, but audited financials will reveal a surplus.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/08/16/president-clinton-refutes-ny-times-errors-in-fo/195451

Modern American capitalism is a story of continued inequality and hardship. Even a modest increase in the minimum wage faces opposition from those who seem to show allegiance first and foremost to America's wealthy and powerful. Yet some aren't just wringing their hands about our economic crisis; they're fighting back.

In an encore broadcast, Economist Richard Wolff joins Bill to shine light on the disaster left behind in capitalism's wake, and to discuss the fight for economic justice, including a fair minimum wage. A Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, and currently Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School, Wolff has written many books on the effects of rampant capitalism, including Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It.

"We have this disparity getting wider and wider between those for whom capitalism continues to deliver the goods by all means, [and] a growing majority in this society facing harder and harder times," Wolff tells Bill. "And that's what provokes some of us to say it's a systemic problem."

http://truth-out.org/video/item/18121-taming-capitalism-run-wild

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Like pushing a monsters head underwater = the last gasps of capitalism ....

to making a patently false statement about retrievable energy in sun and wind....

"If you took the amount of sunlight that hits the Earth in one second and converted it into matter, how much would it weigh? How much energy is this in practical terms?
This is an excellent question, which puts the energy balance on Earth into perspective. Let me answer this question in two steps, and then let me compare the amount of energy from the Sun to the amount humankind is using right now.

The energy per time put out by the Sun is its luminosity, 3.8 x 1026 Joules per second (or Watts). Using Einstein's renowned formula that describes how much mass is transformed into energy, when energy is being produced, E = M * c2 (or: Energy = Mass * (Speed of Light)2), as 1 Joule = 1 kg m2/s2 and c = 300,000,000 m/s, the mass the Sun burns into energy every second is:


Mass/Time = 3.8 x 1026/(3 x 108)2 kg/s = 4.4 x 109 kg/s

or roughly 4 million tons per second.
At its distance of 1 Astronomical Unit (150 million km), the Earth is hit by the Sun's energy flux F = 1400 Joules/s/m2. We call this quantity the "solar constant", as this value averaged over each year is constant within better than 1% over time. With an Earth radius of approx 6400 km, the area, which is (pi * Earth's radius)2, with which the Earth intercepts sunlight is (pi * Earth's radius)2 = 1.3 x 1014 m2 making the amount of energy captured by the Earth each second:


F * (pi * Earth's radius)2 = 1.8 x 1017 Joules/s
According to the same procedure as above this makes the mass to produce this amount of energy per second:


Mass captured as sunlight per second = 1.8 x 1017 / (3 x 108)2 kg/s = 2 kg/s

This is about 4.5 lbs/s or close to 5 lbs/s.

To put these numbers into a perspective with highly practical relevance, on average, humankind is only using about 1/10,000 of that amount for its total energy consumption. In other words, sunlight seems to be a viable option for our energy needs, at least from the perspective of the total amount needed. Or from the point of view of mass, we are transforming about 20 kg of mass per day into energy for our energy consumption.

If we were to use much more energy, say a sizeable fraction of the amount that the Earth gets from the Sun, the Earth would have to heat up considerably in order to get rid of the waste heat. Every power plant needs a cooler to get rid of its heat; the Earth as a whole can only do this by getting hotter."

Dr. Eberhard Moebius
(January 2005)

where I can see my discussion threads, I am talking about all my comments in other peoples threads.

Often, for some reason, when you want to make a simple point, before you know it it mushrooms into something much bigger. Like in this case, blasphemy. All I started out with was the notion that if we put a dollar value on something like an Arctic melt, or the extinction of species, we are making fundamental mistakes. Which invariably show in the way we reach the conclusions, presented as "scientific", that make us put such values on potential or already final events.

It may be getting increasingly hard to accept in our present worldview, but it's still true that not everything can be expressed in dollar terms. We may still find this to be obvious when we talk about losing our loved ones, our children, but other than that, there are hardly any questions raised when some individual or institution reports a $100 billion price tag for the loss of the bumble bee, or, the example that led me here, that a sudden Arctic "methane belch" could cost $60 trillion.

These reports come with such regularity these days that we have come to see them as normal. In reality what they depict is our loss of values, and a tendency towards moral bankruptcy. The problem in all this is that as long as we keep expressing the damage done by climate change, pollution or extinction in dollar terms, we have no chance of turning any of it around. Putting a dollar value on our very own destruction of our very own and sole habitat (which we share with all other species) carries with it an unspoken suggestion that there also must be a dollar value price tag we can put on halting the destruction, as well as undoing and repairing it. Which is, just like the original claim that an arctic melt would cost $60 trillion, the peak of absurdity.

But still, for 99% of people who read a headline with such numbers, their first reaction will be: that's a lot of money. If you are one of those people, you have some thinking to do. It makes no difference whatsoever what the financial cost is of an animal going extinct, or half the arctic melting. The fact that we increasingly tend to describe destruction in monetary terms is precisely why it will continue, since if a dollar value is all you have left, you might as well have no values.

- See more at: http://theautomaticearth.com/Finance/capitalism-a-norwegian-rat-and-some-cockroaches.html#sthash.X2zlFaiJ.dpuf