10/31

Remains Of Ancient Race Of Job Creators Found In Rust Belt:

"It's a complex and intriguing set of rituals we're still trying to fully understand," Mueller added. "But it appears as if their entire society was centered around creating, out of thin air, actual jobs that paid an actual living wage."

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"By today's standards, the job creators' society was highly unusual," anthropologist Carla Delgado of the Smithsonian Institution said. "One of its more bizarre customs involved workers being employed at the same job at the same location day in and day out for their entire adult lives. It was grueling, perhaps, but astonishingly, some of these individuals were able to set aside part of their earnings for the future, slowly saving money with the hope of improving the prospects of their offspring."

"The amazing part is, this bafflingly high level of economic security went on for generations," Delgado added.

On Edge of Paradise, Coachella Workers Live in Grim Conditions:

In the tumbledown warrens of America’s pre-fab favelas – California’s Third World – the 20th century is a dim memory. Basic needs like potable water, safe and reliable electricity, rudimentary sanitation, and clean air can go unmet. Darryl Adams, the Coachella Valley Unified School District superintendent, who took over last year, visited some of his young charges recently in 115-degree heat. “These children were splashing around in little portable pools getting infections from unclean water,” Adams said.

Niall Ferguson, Defender of the One Percent:

Ferguson doesn’t even consider the possibility that Wall Street might be part of the problem. He refers to the traders’ “ill-gotten gains” only in jest. Instead, he tells us, the decline in social mobility comes from a single source: “the stranglehold exerted by the teachers’ unions,” which “makes it almost impossible to raise the quality of education in subprime public schools.”

Wall Street Isn't Winning – It's Cheating:

When you take into consideration all the theft and fraud and market manipulation and other evil shit Wall Street bankers have been guilty of in the last ten-fifteen years, you have to have balls like church bells to trot out a propaganda line that says the protesters are just jealous of their hard-earned money.

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[I]t's so obnoxious when people say the protesters are just sore losers who are jealous of these smart guys in suits who beat them at the game of life. This isn't disappointment at having lost. It's anger because those other guys didn't really win. And people now want the score overturned.

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People don't want handouts. It's not a class uprising and they don't want civil war — they want just the opposite. They want everyone to live in the same country, and live by the same rules. It's amazing that some people think that that's asking a lot.

 

Occupy the No-Spin Zone:

For the past several years, while the mainstream media was dutifully reporting on all things Kardashian or (more recently) a wholly manufactured debt-ceiling crisis, ordinary people were losing their health care, their homes, their jobs, and their savings. Those people have taken that narrative to Facebook and Twitter—just as citizens took to those alternative forms of media throughout the Middle East as part of the Arab Spring. And just to be clear: They aren’t holding up signs that say “I want Bill O’Reilly’s stuff.” They aren’t holding up signs that say “I am animated by toxic levels of envy and entitlement.” They are holding up signs that are perfectly and intrinsically clear: They want accountability for the banks that took their money, they want to end corporate control of government. They want their jobs back. They would like to feed their children. They want—wait, no, we want—to be heard by a media that has devoted four mind-numbing years to channeling and interpreting every word uttered by a member of the Palin family while ignoring the voices of everyone else.