Lucia Mutikani - Hunger Stalks US Cities as Poverty Rises: Study

Published on Thursday, December 15, 2011 by Reuters

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/15/us-usa-economy-hunger-idUSTRE7BE19920111215

by Lucia Mutikani

A growing number of families in the United States are struggling to put food on the table as poverty rises in major cities, a new survey showed on Thursday.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors' 2011 hunger and homelessness survey found all but four of the 29 cities surveyed reported an increase in requests for emergency food assistance during the period between September 2010 and August 2011.

Half of those asking for emergency food assistance were people in families, while 26 percent were employed. The elderly accounted for 19 percent, with the homeless making up the remaining 11 percent.

This is the latest survey to underscore the magnitude of the damage inflicted by the 2007-09 recession.

Though the downturn ended 2-1/2 years ago, the recovery has been very slow by historical standards as households struggle to repair their balance sheets and unemployment is at an uncomfortably high 8.6 percent.

About 24.4 million Americans are either out of work or underemployed and employment remains 6.3 million jobs below its level in December 2007 when the recession started.

According to government data, a record 49.1 million Americans were living in poverty in 2010.

During that period, the number of households depending on food stamps - subsidies that help people cover the costs of groceries - soared 16 percent to 13.6 million.

The mayors' survey attributed unemployment, poverty, low wages and high housing costs as the main reasons behind the surge in demand for food assistance.

It found there was a 10 percent average increase in the amount of food being distributed by the cities and just over two-thirds of the cities reported a rise in the quantities they were handing out.

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Sandra Siagian - The Incoherent Imperialist: Deconstructing Tom Friedman's Work

By Sandra Siagian, Inter Press Service

Posted on December 9, 2011, Printed on December 10, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153388/the_incoherent_imperialist%3A_deconstructing_tom_friedman%27s_work

A new book on the influential New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman sets out to debunk his hawkish, neo-liberal views, accusing him of overt racism, factual errors and skewed judgments on issues ranging from the United States invasion of Iraq to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Deconstructing one of the country's highest-paid journalists, Belen Fernandez's The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work presents a comprehensive overview of the man - and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner - she describes as "characterized by reduction of complex international phenomena to simplistic rhetoric and theorems that rarely withstand the test of reality".

Fernandez, 29, admits that prior to 2009 she wasn't too familiar with the work of the foreign affairs columnist. It wasn't until that summer she decided to analyze Friedman's work after reading "a sequence of ridiculous articles".

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Ralph Nader - Not Made in America

Published on Wednesday, November 30, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/30-7

by Ralph Nader

"Here, look at this handsome L.L. Bean catalog and tell me what you want for Christmas," said a relative over Thanksgiving weekend. I started leafing through the 88 page cornucopia with hundreds of clothing and household products, garnished by free gift cards and guaranteed free shipping. I wasn't perusing it for any suggested gifts; instead, I was going through every offering to see whether they were made in the U.S.A. or in other countries.

This is what I found: over 97 percent of all the items pictured and priced were noted "imported" by L.L. Bean. The only ones manufactured in the U.S. were fireplace gloves, an L.L. Bean jean belt, a dress chino belt, quilted faux-shearling-lined L.L. Bean boots (made in Maine), a personalized web collar and leash (for your pet), and symbolically enough, the "made in Maine using American-made cotton canvas are the Original Boat and Tote Bags" to carry all those goodies coming in from China and elsewhere.

That was it for the products that were "Made in America." The former fountainhead of global manufacturing has been largely deflated by the flight of U.S. companies to fascist or communist regimes noted for holding down their repressed workers.

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Radiological Society of North America - Violent video games alter brain function in young men

30-Nov-2011
Radiological Society of North America

CHICAGO – A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analysis of long-term effects of violent video game play on the brain has found changes in brain regions associated with cognitive function and emotional control in young adult men after one week of game play. The results of the study were presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).

The controversy over whether or not violent video games are potentially harmful to users has raged for many years, making it as far as the Supreme Court in 2010. But there has been little scientific evidence demonstrating that the games have a prolonged negative neurological effect.

"For the first time, we have found that a sample of randomly assigned young adults showed less activation in certain frontal brain regions following a week of playing violent video games at home," said Yang Wang, M.D., assistant research professor in the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis. "These brain regions are important for controlling emotion and aggressive behavior."

For the study, 22 healthy adult males, age 18 to 29, with low past exposure to violent video games were randomly assigned to two groups of 11. Members of the first group were instructed to play a shooting video game for 10 hours at home for one week and refrain from playing the following week. The second group did not play a violent video game at all during the two-week period.

Each of the 22 men underwent fMRI at the beginning of the study, with follow-up exams at one and two weeks. During fMRI, the participants completed an emotional interference task, pressing buttons according to the color of visually presented words. Words indicating violent actions were interspersed among nonviolent action words. In addition, the participants completed a cognitive inhibition counting task.

The results showed that after one week of violent game play, the video game group members showed less activation in the left inferior frontal lobe during the emotional task and less activation in the anterior cingulate cortex during the counting task, compared to their baseline results and the results of the control group after one week. After the second week without game play, the changes to the executive regions of the brain were diminished.

"These findings indicate that violent video game play has a long-term effect on brain functioning," Dr. Wang said.

Rania Khalek - The Shocking Ways the Corporate Prison Industry Games the System

By Rania Khalek, AlterNet

Posted on November 29, 2011, Printed on November 30, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153212/the_shocking_ways_the_corporate_prison_industry_games_the_system

The United States, with just 5 percent of the world’s population, currently holds 25 percent of the world's prisoners, and for the last 30 years America’s business entrepreneurs have found a lucrative way to cash in on the incarceration surplus: private for-profit prisons.

While the implications of an industry that locks human beings in cages for profit is an old story, there is an important part of the history of private prisons that often goes untold.   

Just a decade ago, private prisons were a dying industry awash in corruption and mired in lawsuits, particularly Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation's largest private prison operator.  Today, these companies are booming once again, yet the lawsuits and scandals continue to pile up.  Meanwhile, more and more evidence shows that compared to publicly run prisons, private jails are filthier, more violent, less accountable, and contrary to what privatization advocates peddle as truth, do not save money.  In fact, more recent findings suggest that private prisons could be more costly. 

So why are they still in business?

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Eric Boehlert - 7 Things Fox Viewers Are Wildly Misinformed About

By Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America

Posted on November 25, 2011, Printed on November 26, 2011
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201111220020?frontpage 

The release this week of yet another survey indicating the more you watch Fox News the less they know, has once again shone a spotlight on one of the unique features that defines Rupert Murdoch's cable news outlet - it is very, very good at misinforming people. And it's very bad at reporting the news. In other words: Propaganda? Yes. News? Not so much.

It's true that the most recent survey, conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University, only polled adults in New Jersey and doesn't represent national indictment against Fox. Nonetheless, the findings created amedia stir because they reinforce what pollsters and academics previously discovered; that one of the country's all-news channels consistently leaves viewers less informed. 

What's stunning is how many different areas of the news and public policy Fox viewers are misinformed about. For instance, the Fairleigh Dickinson survey asked viewers about recent grassroots uprisings in Arab nations [emphasis added]: 

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Robert Scheer - Thanks for What?

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/thanks_for_what_20111124/

Posted on Nov 24, 2011

By Robert Scheer

I love Thanksgiving for its illusion of abundance. It brings back early childhood memories of the one day each year during the Depression when the food on my family’s table was not the leftover produce that my Uncle Leon could no longer sell at his stall, or the nearly spoiled organ meats that our local butcher offered at a steep discount. 

But Thanksgiving day was quite the opposite, and while I obviously can’t recall what was served in 1936, the year I was born, the holiday was soon seared into my childhood memory as the day when the good times looked upon us in the form of charity gift baskets from philanthropists of various religious and political orders, much like the needy will be served today in volunteer kitchens across America and just as soon will be forgotten.

It did not take long before I was old enough to realize that the largesse of Thanksgiving was the rare exception, and that “just getting by,” as my mother’s brave optimism would have it, was the norm. Getting by, thanks to Mom’s piecework in the downtown sweatshops and my mechanic father’s signing on to one of the New Deal’s public jobs programs.

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David Holthouse - How White Supremacists Are Trying to Make an American Town a Model for Right-Wing Extremism

By David Holthouse, Media Matters for America

Posted on November 22, 2011, Printed on November 23, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153162/how_white_supremacists_are_trying_to_make_an_american_town_a_model_for_right-wing_extremism

At first glance the Pioneer Little Europe website seems like it could be the work of the Montana Office of Tourism. Photographs depict the rugged beauty of the Flathead Valley region near Glacier National Park in northwest Montana.

One image shows a young blond-haired girl playing in a meadow overlooking Kalispell, the largest town in the area, with a population around 20,000.

The site also features short news items about the Northwest Montana State Fair and a wildflower beautification program along with Kalispell job postings.

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Henry Giroux - Occupy Colleges Now -- Students as the New Public Intellectuals

Monday 21 November 2011

by: Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | News Analysis

http://www.truth-out.org/occupy-colleges-now-students-new-public-intellectuals/1321891418

The police violence that has taken place at the University of California campuses at Berkeley and Davis does more than border on pure thuggery; it also reveals a display of force that is as unnecessary as it is brutal, and it is impossible to justify. These young people are being beaten on their campuses for simply displaying the courage to protest a system that has robbed them of both a quality education and a viable future.

Finding our way to a more humane future demands a new politics, a new set of values, and a renewed sense of the fragile nature of democracy. In part, this means educating a new generation of intellectuals who not only defend higher education as a democratic public sphere, but also frame their own agency as intellectuals willing to connect their research, teaching, knowledge, and service with broader democratic concerns over equality, justice, and an alternative vision of what the university might be and what society could become. Under the present circumstances, it is time to remind ourselves that academe may be one of the few public spheres available that can provide the educational conditions for students, faculty, administrators, and community members to embrace pedagogy as a space of dialogue and unmitigated questioning, imagine different futures, become border-crossers, and embrace a language of critique and possibility that makes visible the urgency of a politics necessary to address important social issues and contribute to the quality of public life and the common good.  

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Christine Dobby - Love your job? You might be Canadian

Christine Dobby, FINANCIAL POST Nov 17, 2011

http://business.financialpost.com/2011/11/17/love-your-job-you-might-be-canadian/

As with so many things, Canada comes in a rather unremarkable third place in a LinkedIn survey on global worker happiness.

But the fact that 69% of Canadians surveyed were either “happy” or “very happy” with their current job, is worth noting.

Only respondents from the Netherlands and Sweden are more content with their careers, with 80% and 71% of respondents from those countries, respectively, saying they were happy.

At the other end of the scale was Japan, where only 31% of those polled said they were content, well below the global average of 63%.

LinkedIn surveyed 12,548 professionals in 16 countries, including 797 workers in Canada, for its research on job happiness released Thursday.  (Not everyone polled responded to every question asked.)

Nicole Williams, connection director at the online professional network company, speculated that a tough economy might mean those with jobs appreciate them more than they would otherwise.

“Perhaps you didn’t get the raise you wanted this year, but you are appreciative of an amazing supportive manager who keeps an eye out for opportunities that will help you grow in your career,” she said.

Canadians were also fairly optimistic on the prospect of getting ahead in their career, with 53% of respondents saying they agree or strongly agree that there is a good chance of advancement “If I work hard and demonstrate results.”

This was above the global average of 52% who thought they would get ahead through hard work and good results.

But beyond getting promoted, Canadians’ professional aspirations seem a bit modest.

Out of options that included working abroad, starting a business and changing industries or careers, the top career ambitions for Canadian professionals were:

1. Get promoted
2. I’m happy where I am
3. Retire early

Frida Berrigan - Civil Disobedience, Do You Pay to Play or Do the Time?

Published on Sunday, November 20, 2011 by Waging Nonviolence

http://wagingnonviolence.org/2011/11/do-you-pay-to-play-or-do-the-time/

Reflections on Extending Direct Action by Not Paying Fines, Going to Court and Maybe Even to Jail

by Frida Berrigan

Standing in front of a judge is intimidating (to me anyway). It seems a whole lot easier to cross a line, refuse to move, or lie down in the middle of the street, than stand before a judge. I would rather be trussed up in handcuffs and crammed into a crowded police wagon than stand before a judge. They are often world-weary and judgmental (I guess it comes with the territory). I would rather stay in the grubby holding cell and drink the water that comes out of the little fountain on top of the stainless steel (seat-less) toilet than stand before a judge. They don’t really appear to be listening to what the people standing before them are saying. They often look out from heavy eye lids and one gets the sense that they think they have heard it all before. It is easier to hold a big sign or wear an orange jumpsuit or participate in street theater or leaflet the tourists or engage in conversation with an angry and alienated guy, than try and explain my motivations and thinking to a judge who I assume doesn’t have the time or interest to care.

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