US jobs gap between young and old is widest ever

Squeezed by a tight job market, young Americans are especially struggling. They have suffered bigger income losses than other age groups and are less likely to be employed than at any time since World War II.

An analysis by the Pew Research Center, released Thursday, details the impact of the recent recession on the attitudes of a generation of mostly 20- and 30-somethings.

With government data showing record gaps in employment between young and old, a Pew survey found that 41 percent of Americans believe that younger adults have been hit harder than any other group, compared with 29 percent who say middle-aged Americans and 24 percent who point to seniors 65 and older. A wide majority of the public — at least 69 percent — also said it’s more difficult for today’s young adults than their parents’ generation to pay for college, find a job, buy a home or save for the future.

http://tinyurl.com/7ep9j3v

Occupy the Human Rights Campaign

Goldman Sachs is unworthy of the Corporate Equality award because it has produced and perpetuated economic, gender, and racial inequality through irresponsible financial practices. But why should economic, gender, racial, and economic inequality matter at all to the Human Rights Campaign? The simplest reason is that there are LGBT people of all races, genders, and classes, and the HRC cannot expect support from people whom it liberates in some ways but oppresses in others.

http://tinyurl.com/79ls4hm

CPAC [Conservative Political Action Conference] Set to Host White Nationalist Leader

Following speeches from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Rep. Michele Bachmann, CPAC is hosting the panel “The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the pursuit of diversity is weakening the American Identity” with Peter Brimelow, the founder and head of VDARE.com.

VDARE is a White Nationalist website, run by Brimelow, which frequently publishes the works of anti-Semitic and racist writers and is named after Virginia Dare, who is believed to be the first child of English parents born in the Americas. Brimelow, an immigrant from Great Britain, expresses his fear of the loss of America’s white majority, blames non-white immigrants for social and economic problems and urges the Republican Party to give up on minority voters and focus on winning the white vote. He also said that a New York City subway is the same as an Immigration and Naturalization Service waiting room, “an underworld that is not just teeming but also almost entirely colored.”

VDARE has published the work of people like Robert Weissberg, who says that black and Hispanic students are responsible for problems in the American education system, Marcus Epstein, the Youth for Western Civilization leader who karate-chopped a black woman after calling her a “n****r” (he later pled guilty to assault), and J. Philippe Rushton of the eugenicist Pioneer Fund.

http://tinyurl.com/7z6l9rk

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 2/9/12” »

Somerville among suburbs where Occupy movement goes grass-roots

”We need to build a mass movement in order to change things,” said Rob Talbot, who regularly holds an Occupy Salem sign in downtown Salem on weekends. ”People in the suburbs are realizing that they have to be involved, too. Right now, the corporate influence over politics is extreme and human needs are not being met, and they won’t be until the people stand up together and say we need a change of course.”

http://tinyurl.com/6umlps8

UK austerity movement succeeds in cutting disability benefits with a hate campaign

The government’s focus on alleged fraud and overclaiming to justify cuts in disability benefits has caused an increase in resentment and abuse directed at disabled people, as they find themselves being labelled as scroungers, six of the country’s biggest disability groups have warned.

Some of the charities say they are now regularly contacted by people who have been taunted on the street about supposedly faking their disability and are concerned the climate of suspicion could spill over into violence or other hate crimes.
. . .

Scope’s regular polling of people with disabilities shows that in September two-thirds said they had experienced recent hostility or taunts, up from 41% four months before. In the last poll almost half said attitudes towards them had deteriorated in the past year.

Some disabled people say the climate is so hostile they avoid going out, or avoid using facilities such as designated parking bays if they “don’t look disabled”.

http://tinyurl.com/7et2stv

What the Boomers economic war against the Millenials has wrought

Way back in 1892, Friedrich Engels knew that success was the real curse of the USA. And that a powerful, anti-capitalist left could never take off in this country until the game stopped paying out: “Only when there is a generation of native-born workers that cannot expect anything from speculation any more will we have a solid foothold in America.”

Sound familiar? That’s what Occupy is for most of us-a guttural roar that capitalism will not do. The Boomers are right that it all smacks of entitlement. We are entitled. The world, and this country in particular, is awash in capital. With the billions floating in and out of this city every day, it’s amazing that you can walk around Manhattan and not end up with at least a grand worth of cash sifting around in your shoes like beach sand. The big lie is that the coffers are empty and budgets must be balanced. What a fucking joke. American workers have spent hundreds of years building this country and amassing this wealth, and it’s about time we claimed the vast majority of it.

But batten down the hatches, because if there’s one thing they’ve made abundantly clear, the Boomers are going to cling to life and power until the very last EKG blip, fleecing us all the while. Conservative apostate David Frum recently characterized the contemporary GOP’s platform as “a going-out-of-business sale for the Baby Boomer generation.” Which is pretty much the Democrats’ platform too. They just have better table manners.

http://tinyurl.com/7h697wu

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 2/8/12” »

Occupy Boston gears up for Spring revival

Although officials ended Occupy Boston’s Dewey Square encampment in December, protester Dennis Jackson said he wants to “keep up the fight.” About 30 people attended a General Assembly at Emmanuel Church on Thursday night to discuss upcoming plans.

“Keep up the fight, this is the beginning of the second American Revolution,” Jackson said to the group. “What started in Egypt is going to spread to D.C. over this upcoming election.”

http://tinyurl.com/83yrr9y

Letter to the Editor: Homeless ignored

At Occupy Boston we fed hundreds of people – many of them homeless – daily for free. Lots of the food was organic and vegetarian. The way of the future is going to be “we the people” getting together and doing it ourselves in public places like the parks. We can’t rely on government.

No matter what got these people in their position – circumstance or choice – they’re still human beings (Feb. 2). The cost of having your homeless population warm and fed is still lower than having them starving, stealing or being brought to the ER.

http://tinyurl.com/826mp58

Elite economics articulated: ‘You deserve to suffer, and suffering is good for you anyway’

[It is] the belief that recessions, and particularly tight money, represent some sort of bracing, morally essential “purging” of evil spirits in the American psyche, reminding the great unwashed that they’d better keep their heads down and not get too irrationally exuberant. This attitude keeps popping up in the pronouncements of inflation fighters, some of them powerful players in our monetary system.
. . .

It’s a habit that actually predates [Andrew] Mellon and [Herbert] Hoover, going back at least to the monetary policy battles of the late nineteenth century, during which farmers starved for credit and suffering from chronically low prices were regularly accused of moral laxity.

The flip side of this syndrome, of course, is the tendency to believe that economic success and the ability to be a creditor instead of a debtor is a sign of strong moral fiber. Today’s conservative lionization of “job creators” is an example; as is the constant baiting of relatively comfortable elderly people to resent younger and poorer people as parasites seeking to rob them of the resources their virtue has earned them.

http://tinyurl.com/7wjufra

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 2/7/12” »

Tents gone, students turn to Occupy 2.0

Since students have returned from winter break, Occupy Harvard has held two meetings each week to plan the movement’s next phase: Occupy 2.0, Korn explained. “The idea behind Occupy 2.0 is transitioning from our physical encampment to more cohesive, disruptive, interesting, fun, targeted actions,” she said.

Among these actions, Occupy Harvard has begun working on the No Layoffs Campaign with SLAM (Student Labor Action Movement). The No Layoffs Campaign gained considerable attention in 2008 when students participated in a wave of demonstrations as the university laid off several staff workers. This year the campaign aims to protest on behalf of the library staff, many of whom will be laid off due to a restructuring of the library system, according to university administration.

Occupy Harvard has also joined with the Occupy UMass Boston movement only established more than a week ago. Occupy Harvard has lent tents, solidarity signs and other resources to the students at UMass in an effort to show “we are all students fighting the same fight,” Korn said.

http://tinyurl.com/6un3hys

Tipped workers – 72.9 percent of whom are women – hope for hike in sub-minimum wage this year

“Thanks to the Occupy movement, more voters are aware of inequality and the terrible toll it takes on low-wage workers and their families,” says Amy Hanauer, executive director of Policy Matters Ohio. “Support is growing for increasing the minimum wage of tipped workers who work hard, but have fallen farther and farther behind because their wages don’t cover their basic needs.”
The pay of tipped workers has languished because an obscure federal provision, called the tip credit, has established a sub-minimum wage for tipped workers: $2.15 per hour or $4,333 a year for a full-time worker. The federal full minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, or about $15,000 a year for a 40-hour workweek.
Raising the minimum wage may alleviate what researcher Sylvia A. Allegretto calls an under-appreciated factor in the poverty of women.
“The sub-minimum wage hits women hard because 72.9 percent of tipped workers are women compared to less than half the overall labor force,” says Allegretto, co-chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment of the University of California, Berkeley.

http://tinyurl.com/6lv6z3n

The United States: First Country To Report More Male Rape Victims Than Female

In January, prodded in part by outrage over a series of articles in the New York Review of Books, the Justice Department finally released an estimate of the prevalence of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year.

The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.

As sites of governmental authority, prisons destabilize Weber’s definition of the state as the monopolist of violence. In prisons, the monopoly is suspended: anybody is free to commit rape and be reasonably assured that no state official will notice or care (barring those instances when the management knowingly encourages rape, unleashing favored inmates on troublemakers as a strategy for administrative control). The prison staff is above the law; the prison inmates, below it.

Far from embodying the model of Bentham/Foucault’s panopticon- that is, one of total surveillance-America’s prisons are its blind spots, places where complaints cannot be heard and abuses cannot be seen. Though important symbols of bureaucratic authority, they are spaces that lie beyond our system of bureaucratic oversight. As far as the outside world is concerned, every American prison functions as a black site.

http://tinyurl.com/7rnw3hv

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 2/6/12” »

Tea party, Occupy groups find common ground in Worcester

More than 100 people who don’t agree on much agreed yesterday that a Congress that passes a law permitting the indefinite detention of Americans without charge diminishes the country.

Among them were Sheila, a 68-year-old tea party member from Worcester who brought her sign “What-cha gonna do when They come for you,” and Occupy Worcester’s Sam Capogrossi. They and a dozen others banged on a 5-gallon plastic container, trying to persuade the drivers in rush-hour traffic on Main Street that the National Defense Authorization Act that passed in December is a threat to their civil liberties. The law permits indefinite detention for terrorism suspects, American or not.

They read in unison the Bill of Rights in the plaza in front of the federal courthouse, under the watchful eyes on three Worcester police officers and two members of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service. There were no incidents, save for a citation written for defacing public property when an Occupy Worcester member wrote in chalk “Occupy Everywhere” on a column in Federal Plaza.

http://tinyurl.com/7muj6ow

The ‘Unworthy Poor’

Remember that “Look, these so-called ‘poor’ have refrigerators” thing? The new model conservative is a Victorian gent who would pity the poor, but has seen them dicing and drinking instead of acting out pathetic scenes from melodramas, and so cuffs them whenever they ask for change. Or a job.

http://tinyurl.com/86htahl

Corporate Rate Is Lowest in Decades – 12.1 Percent

U.S. companies are booking higher profits than ever. But the number crunchers in Washington are puzzling over a phenomenon that has just come into view: Corporate tax receipts as a share of profits are at their lowest level in at least 40 years.

Total corporate federal taxes paid fell to 12.1% of profits earned from activities within the U.S. in fiscal 2011, which ended Sept. 30, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That’s the lowest level since at least 1972. And well below the 25.6% companies paid on average from 1987 to 2008.

http://tinyurl.com/83ka7hb

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 2/5/12” »