The United States Congress is really concerned about boosting the economy here. They proved that by totally disbanding the American Job Bank---a national service designed to assist the unemployed in finding jobs.
Instead, people are being directed to a website--and the millions and millions of unemployed who either don't use computers, or have no internet service? Sh*t outta' luck.
However, Congress just approved billions of more dollars to help continue the war in Iraq--nearly a quarter of which is earmarked to go to the Vice-President's company, Haliburton, for oil and other business "development" in Iraq.
Gee, it's so nice knowing the government's priorities. Killing thousands of innocent people and grabbing up billions in oil.
Oh, and at a time when personal debt is escalating at a record-setting pace, the politicians have repeatedly reduced--and even removed, debt protections for American citizens, favouring big business by making it harder for the people of the US to file for bankruptcy--and in some cases, totally eliminating debt protections altogheter--as a student loan recipient--if I default, I have no protection from my lenders, they can now, thanks to Bush and his regime, rip me to financial shreds--and short of going completely blind, or becoming a teacher or health professional, I have no protection. My lenders can do anything they want to me, to get their money--including stripping me of my wages, tax refunds, etc.
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting shoved more and more, down the ol' shaft--and now the middle class is being dragged down alongside them, as well.
Karl Marx, I'm sorry to say, was all too correct about extreme capitalism. Everything he predicted is very much coming to pass, here in the states.
Civil war---it's a real possibility, if things don't start to drastically change in the next five to ten years.
But...that's just my opinion. Sometimes I don't know why Congress and Bush don't just send America's poor to concentration camps--might be kinder, in the long run. The suffering in this country is getting so out of hand, and the upper classes--and much of the rest of the world-- are utterly, totally oblivious to it. Someday soon, their carelessness and ignorance is going to come back to bite them in the arse. I just hope I'm not around when it happens.
After a drop in homicide/crime rates during the Clinton and very early Bush years, crime is once again escalating in certain areas of the USA. Here are excepts from a recent Associated Press article:
Homicides soar in some East Coast cities
By MARYCLAIRE DALE, Associated Press WriterFri Jun 29, 3:43 PM ET
Baltimore, Philadelphia and other cities in a bloodstained corridor along the East Coast are seeing a surge in killings, and one of the most provocative explanations offered by criminal-justice experts is this: not enough new immigrants.
The theory holds that waves of hardworking, ambitious immigrants reinvigorate desperately poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods and help keep crime down.
It is a theory that runs counter to the widely held notion that immigrants are a source of crime and disorder.
"New York, Los Angeles, they're seeing massive immigration — the transformation, really, of their cities from populations around the world," said Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson. "These are people selecting to go into a country to get ahead, so they're likely to be working hard and stay out of trouble."
It is only a partial explanation for the bloodshed over the past few years in a corridor that also includes Newark, N.J., and Boston, but not New York City.
In interviews with The Associated Press, homicide detectives, criminal justice experts and community activists point to a confluence of other possible factors.
Among them: a failure to adopt some of the innovative practices that have reduced violence in bigger cities; the availability of powerful guns; and a shift in emphasis toward preventing terrorism instead of ordinary street crime.
Philadelphia is losing one resident a day to violence, recording 196 homicides through the third week of June. That is slightly ahead of the total at this point in 2006, a year that ended with 406 homicides, the most in almost a decade. On the first day of summer alone, six people were killed in Philadelphia in three street shootings.
In Newark, the homicide toll has soared 50 percent in four years, from 68 in 2002 to 106 in 2006. Baltimore had 140 slayings as of June 10, up from 122 the same time last year. Boston had 75 homicides in 2005, a 10-year high, and 75 in 2006. So far this year, there have been at least 30 slayings.
Some cities "never bothered to institute the reforms, policies and programs that impacted violent crime because they felt immune from what they saw as big-city issues," said Jack Levin, director of the Brudnick Center on Violence at Northeastern University in Boston. "Now they're paying the price."
These efforts include limiting gun purchases, suing rogue dealers and deploying officers more strategically, based on crime data analysis.
he vast majority of U.S. homicides — nearly 90 percent in Newark last year — involve guns. And they are more powerful than ever. The weapons of choice are semiautomatics that can spray dozens of bullets within seconds.
"We're seeing 40, 45 shots," said Richard Ross, Philadelphia's deputy police commissioner. In one recent killing, "I think they fired 20 shots into him. That's remarkable." He added: "For some of these young people, it's the glamour of it. They want to carry on their block."
Some cite a drop in federal aid for ordinary law enforcement in favor of homeland security spending. According to Ross, federal grants used mostly for police overtime in Philadelphia fell from more than $4 million in 2002 to about $1 million last year.
The number of police officers per capita has fallen 10 percent since 2000 in cities of more than 225,000, according to Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox. Yet post-Sept. 11 fears, especially in Boston, have forced police to monitor government buildings and transportation hubs while also watching for street crime, he said.
"We've shifted our resources from hometown security to homeland security," Fox said. "We have left relatively unattended the poor and powerless who face violence every day and hear gunshots every night."
