The report of the fact-finding mission of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla released last week shows conclusively, for the first time, that US citizen Furkan Dogan and five Turkish citizens were murdered execution-style by Israeli commandos.
According to the Census Bureau's new report, 46 states and the District of Columbia experienced increased childhood poverty rates over the last year, with an alarming national rate of 1 in 5 kids affected.
Phi Beta Iota: While the Bush and Obama Administrations bailed out Wall Street and enabled the continuation of $10 million dollar bonuses using taxpayer funds, poverty in America sky-rocketed–poverty of adults, and poverty of chidlren. This is a crime against humanity that goes unnoticed because no one is doing the job that the media is supposed to be doing: rendering the public service of public intelligence in the public interest.
Over 50% of youth in shelters and on the streets report that their parents told them to leave or knew they were leaving and did not care.
One IN four homeless youth come from the foster care system
33% of heterosexual homeless youth have been sexually abused
Less than one in four homeless children will graduate from high school
Every day 12 kids die on the streets of America
Why are there more than 1,600,000 homeless youth right here in our own backyard?
As I continued to study the issue I have found there are basically two camps out there. The main camp are the people, myself included at first, who simply have NO CLUE that this is such a huge problem. Most people I talk to have no idea that this is such a major epidemic.
The second camp is the people who feel the statistics are made up. There are a lot of people who don't want to believe this could be happening on the streets of our country. Sure there are homeless kids in Africa, India, Pakistan and a host of other third world countries, but not here!
We can no longer allow this epidemic to continue. The future of our great country is in the hands of our children. How can we comfortably sleep at night when so many of our children are alone, scared and living homeless on the streets?
Even as August saw more Americans lose their homes to foreclosure than in any other month on record, there are growing concerns over the legality of many of those proceedings.
JPMorgan Chase has suspended legal proceedings on 50,000 foreclosures, due to concerns about the validity of the foreclosure documents, a spokesman for the bank told CNBC Wednesday (hat tip to Zero Hedge).
JPMorgan spokesman Tom Kelly confirmed to the AP Wednesday that “employees signed some affidavits about loan documents without personally verifying the files.”
The decision is the latest signal of a potentially massive stall in the nation's foreclosure process. Last week, after GMAC Mortgage halted its foreclosures in 23 states, the Washington Post reported that one of GMAC's employees hadn't read the roughly 10,000 foreclosure documents he approved each month (and now Colorado wants to be added to that list of states). It then turned out that the “robo signer” might not have been alone.
Phi Beta Iota: We called for a freeze on all foreclosures and evictions back in October 2008, instead of bailing out Wall Street where one $10 million bonus could cover an astonishing number of mortgage payments among the poor and lower middle class. The US Government failed to assure justice for all those who have been evicted to date. This move by JP Morgan is a good one, and also reminds us once again how important INTEGRITY is at every stage of every process. The reality is that most final “holders” of aggregated mortgages never had the actual loan note to begin with. The Department of Justice should have known that and should have advised all relevant policymakers and politicians of this fact, but in the rush to bail out Wall Street, the public interest was ignored, demeaned, and betrayed.
The Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability class has launched several internationally known start-ups (including Embrace, Driptech and D.Light.) But main route for student teams to get their life-changing products into the hands of people in the developing world is by working with NGO partner organizations.
Working with partners is the quickest way to market: it eliminates the need to create a business model and distribution infrastructure, so that students can focus on getting the best possible product to people who need it.
Professor Jim Patel, who founded the class, and Erica Estrada, who teaches the class and directs our Social Entrepreneurship Lab, discuss why this is such a critical route-to-market for students in the class:
A splendid and courageous new book, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, by Andrew J. Bacevich of Boston University (and for many years previously, the U.S. Army), describes with lucidity the degree to which the power of the American presidency over war and peace has been weakened in our day, and, in important respects, superseded.
One might call this a silent coup against the presidency, but a coup implies intention: a responsible actor who sets the coup d’etat into action for a defined purpose. The argument Bacevich makes implies that a coup can be institutional or intellectual, and come from outside as well as inside government. Its characteristic is to create a situation in which a president is no longer free to act as he might wish, because all of the doors except one have been closed.
The name of the bureaucratic game, of course, is to remove all realistic alternatives to the Pentagon's preferred decision before that decision is made. Pfaff's discussion is based on Andrew Bacevich's new book “Washington Rules.” I have not read Bacevich's book yet, and will not be able to until I return to the states in November, but I have read several reviews and from that perspective can say that the behaviour Pfaff describes comports well with behavior I witnessed in my years in the Pentagon.
The picture is more subtle and far more complicated than that portrayed by Pfaff, however.
Following editorial appeared in today's Washington Post, commenting on a series of three excerpts of Bob Woodward's new book, “Obama's Wars.” Invite your attention to highlighted portions, particularly the final one, “,,, the president had treated the military as another political constituency that had to be accommodated …” Anybody wanna speculate how that's making the guys on combat outposts in Afghanistan feel today?
Washington Post September 29, 2010 Pg. 20
The War Over The War
Bob Woodward's new book portrays an administration deeply divided over Afghanistan
Phi Beta Iota: The entire piece is below the line. We normally do not do this, but the Post is losing its mind again and demanding registration while also switching headlines and using a mediocre search engine. The President is a failure largely for lack of integrity: 1) he sold out during the campaign to the providers of the $500 million that was not from small donors; 2) he allowed David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel to dictate White House policy; 3) he failed to fix intelligence or get a grip on strategic perspectives of any kind; 4) he did not trust his instincts–this is a smart man afraid of Wall Street and the carpetbaggers. He has blown a historic opportunity for change, but our colleague Harrison Owen would say this was meant to be, for he has done what Dick Cheney could not do: shown the Democratic Party to be the twisted ignorant unethical beast that it is, the lite counterpart to the twisted ignorant unethical Republican Party.
