Revised formula puts number of poor people at 47.4 million — 7 million more than official rate
A revised formula for calculating medical costs and geographic variations show that approximately 47.4 million Americans last year lived in poverty, 7 million more than the government's official figure.
The disparity occurs because of differing formulas the Census Bureau and the National Academy of Science use for calculating the poverty rate. The NAS formula shows the poverty rate to be at 15.8 percent, or nearly 1 in 6 Americans, according to calculations released this week. That's higher than the 13.2 percent, or 39.8 million, figure made available recently under the original government formula. . . . . . . .
Food stamp assistance currently is at an all-time high of about 36 million.
According to several recent articles – “Senate Panel to Examine Sale of Diebold Voting Machine Division” http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/diebold-antitrust-2/ and “Your electronic vote in the 2010 election has just been bought” http://www.truthout.org/092509I – the largest voting machine company in the country, Election Systems and Software (ES&S), has just bought out its most infamous competitor – Diebold's e-voting division, Premier Election Solutions. This leaves ES&S in control of a significant majority of the voting machines (68%) and potential votes (about 80%) in the United States. This is an extraordinary concentration of power.
This is not, by far, the only problem with the U.S. electoral system, but it is one of the most dangerous and most readily addressed. It is dangerous because it increases the possibilities for direct and untraceable manipulation of the votes in the vast majority of states. Such election fraud is accomplished by electronically changing a voter's vote, adding imaginary voters, or tweaking the total tally, real possibilities demonstrated by, among others, scientists at Princeton and Stanford ( http://bit.ly/m4uXo ) . And in recent U.S. elections, there were some non-random, inexplicable and unprecedented divergences between exit polls and election results. (Exit polls are often used by international observers to monitor fair elections.)
Phi Beta Iota: If democracy is to survive, local control of paper ballots with strong public oversight is a non-negotiable first step. The two-party tyranny is corrupt to the core; benefit of the doubt must be given to public concerns over validity rather than political claims of efficiency. Click on title above for complete discourse and all links.
STOCKHOLM – Americans Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson won the Nobel economics prize on Monday for their work in economic governance.
Ostrom was the first woman to win the prize since it was founded in 1968, and the fifth woman to win a Nobel award this year — a Nobel record.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited Ostrom “for her analysis of economic governance,” saying her work had demonstrated how common property can be successfully managed by groups using it.
Williamson, the academy said, developed a theory where business firms serve as structures for conflict resolution.
“Over the last three decades, these seminal contributions have advanced economic governance research from the fringe to the forefront of scientific attention,” the academy said.
The economics prize was the last Nobel award to be announced this year. It's not one of the original Nobel Prizes, but was created by the Swedish central bank in Alfred Nobel's memory.
Phi Beta Iota: The Nobel gang got this one right. What the media is not stating with enough emphasis is that she is a pioneer in collective governance of common resources. Below are direct links to some of her notable works.
The State Department recently unveiled a pilot program that will award up to $5 million in grants to expand the use of social networking technologies in the Middle East with the goal of increasing citizen engagement and civic participation.
In an announcement released on Sept. 25, the department said it will award five organizations between $500,000 and $2.5 million to expand the availability of social networking and new media capabilities in the Middle East and North Africa. The program is sponsored by the Middle East Partnership Initiative, part of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the State Department.
Phi Beta Iota: On balance, positive. More positive would be a global initiative to give away cell phones and free connectivity to the five billion poor starting in India and China.
NEW YORK — A self-described New York City anarchist has been accused of tweeting the location of police officers to protesters trying to evade them during the Group of 20 economic summit in Pittsburgh.
Pennsylvania State Police arrested Elliot Madison alleging he used Twitter to direct the movement of protesters and inform them about law enforcement actions at last month's summit.
Phi Beta Iota: We are–as usual–NOT making this up. Coming as it does with repeated rumors of on-going preparations to federalize all state and local police forces “as necessary” and the long-standing concerns about the internment camps for use in the event of “civil unrest,” we have to ask ourselves, can this be for real? According to the Huffington Post, it most assuredly is.
The State of the Ummah is both a re-mixed Internet film for which a non-US citizen has been held at Guantanamo for years, and a concept of community that explicitly includes Jews and pagans.
Wiki Simplified View
The main graphic shows relative distribution. This smaller graphic to the right shows the “divide” between East and West in starker terms.
Text reports are available–an Executive Summary and a Full Report. What they do not properly address are three facts:
1. Sunnis everywhere, Shi'ites in the minority and severely persecuted to the point of genocide. Note: the rough estimate of Shi'ites is 10-13% of the total, the bulk of them in Iran and southern Iraq.
2. Vulernability of Southeast Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Myanmar) to encroachment.
3. The lack of religious counterintelligence and security campaign plans in any country, not just in relation to Muslims, but also dual Israeli citizens, Opus Dei, Mormons, etcetera. As states fail, so do loyalties. In our view, the terrorist-criminal nexus will be followed by the religious-criminal nexus. This makes poverty in predominantly Muslim areas the number one flash point for the future of global stability, in our view.
Why Do We Want To Be Famous? Fame promises an escape from ghettos, both real and imagined.
Like liberty, we're often unaware of dignity until we lose it. A hint of disrespect may be a test of our resistance to subservience, or a reminder of our place in the hierarchy. A slight is often a precursor to pigeon-holing us as a nobody.
Rankism and its counterpart–the miasma of malrecognition–lie at the source of much of the social dysfunction that now vexes human societies worldwide. Effective policies to overcome school failure, poverty, chronic disease, criminality, discrimination against women, terrorism, and war require a redistribution of recognition and the de-legitimization of rankism.
