BOOK:…..TRAGIC!
THE DEATH GAP: INEQUALITY IS KILLING AMERICA!
CALL IT OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS OR TRUMPERNOMICS FOR THE SUPER RICH!
JOBS ARE GONE. ALL GO
TO "CHEAP" LABOR
ILLEGALS.... THE ECONOMY
IS IN THE HANDS OF
CRIMINAL BANKSTERS.
NOT ONE POL IS NOT ON
THE TAKE and MEXICO IS
FLOODING THE COUNTRY
WITH OPIOIDS.... and
American youth are getting
depressed.
Report: Teenagers are Becoming More ‘Anxious and Depressed’
The Associated Press
According to a report from the Economist published last week, anxiety and depression rates in teenagers have skyrocketed over the past two decades.
Just over the past decade, the number of American children and teenagers who have been admitted to hospitals over suicidal thoughts has more than doubled. The suicide rate for 15-to-19-year-olds increased between 2007 and 2015. This is the subject of a recent reportby the Economist on the consistently increasing amount of American teenagers who are experiences issues with anxiety and depression.
The report suggests that the use of smartphones may be a contributing factor to the rise of such issues. A new study conducted at San Diego State University concluded that young Americans who report higher usage of their smartphones were more likely to hold bleak outlooks about their own future. The study’s author admits herself that the correlation between those factors does not prove causality. However, she argues that teens that use their phone as an escape are more likely to be unhappy than their peers that do not. The report states that millennials look at their phones on average more than 150 times per day.
Another study suggests that the use of social media is connected to a decline in happiness. In 2016, a randomly selected group of participants reported that felt less depressed after not using Facebook for one week.
Nicole Green, the executive director of Counseling and Psychological Services at the University of California, Los Angeles, argues that the uptick in anxiety and depression issues in young Americans may be due to another factor. “A number of things are pretty unique to young people today. They were born around when the Columbine shooting happened, they were kids for 9/11, they were kids during one of the worst recessions in modern history,” she explained.
Despite the bleak outlook, some research suggests that social media can actually make users happier if it is used to engage directly with other users rather than as a window into the more lavish and exciting lives of others.
AMERICA’S SUICIDE:
PATHOLOGICAL
VIOLENCE, OPIOID ADDICTION, STAGGERING POVERTY, SOARING JOBLESSNESS FOR LEGALS
AND POVERTY FOR ALL….. While the rich only get SUPER RICH!
By Warren Duzak
VISUALIZE REVOLUTION!
BOOK:…..TRAGIC!
THE DEATH GAP: INEQUALITY IS KILLING AMERICA!
VISUALIZE REVOLUTION!
CALL IT OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS OR TRUMPERNOMICS FOR THE SUPER RICH!
Tennessee punishes workers who default on student loans, ignores politicians’ fines
By Warren Duzak
28 November 2017
The state of Tennessee punishes the working class in its struggles to secure an education and a decent job, but looks the other way when it comes to election law violators who fail to pay fines.
The New York Times recently pegged Tennessee as the nation’s most aggressive state in penalizing those who default on student loans. Nurses and teachers lose their licenses and their jobs if they fall behind on payments, and the future is anything but bright for those now in school.
More than 44 million Americans hold a total of $1.4 trillion in student debt, a sum greater than total US credit card debt or automobile loans. Student loan debt could soon rival the total debt for home mortgages, with an average payoff time for a student loan approaching 20 years.
As the WSWS observed in a recent perspective, “Today’s recent graduate can look forward to at least half a lifetime of penury as the cost of an undergraduate degree. And for those who can’t afford more than the interest every month, it’s a lifetime.”
Daily more than 3,000 people for many different reasons, including health problems, family troubles or a lack of work, default on their federal student loans.
But while they punish those unable to pay their student loan debt, a forgiving Tennessee state legislature, state election officials and even the state’s attorney general’s office conveniently overlook those owing election violation fines, including those imposed for failing to report all money donated to their campaigns or committees.
The Tennessean reported that the state has allowed election law fines totaling $1 million for 220 individuals and dozens of political action committees to go uncollected for decades. Some of the fines are 26 years old.
Meanwhile struggling workers who borrowed money to go to school and then stumble cannot evade the state apparatus.
“Tennessee is one of the most aggressive states at revoking licenses, the records show,” the Times reported. “From 2012 to 2017, officials reported more than 5,400 people to professional licensing agencies. Many—nobody knows how many—lost their licenses.”
In Tennessee and 19 other states, workers pay back their student loans…. or else.
The Times led its lengthy report with the case of Shannon Otto of Nashville, Tennessee. Otto lost her nursing license when she developed epileptic seizures and was unable to work. With no income, she failed to make her student loan payments. The state responded by suspending her hard-earned nursing license.
When she was able to get treatment, got her seizures under control and was ready to go back to work, she was unable to pay the $1,500 the Tennessee Board of Nursing demanded to reinstate her license.
“I absolutely loved my job, and it seems unbelievable that I can’t do it anymore,” Ms. Otto said.
The Times notes: “Firefighters, nurses, teachers, lawyers, massage therapists, barbers, psychologists and real estate brokers have all had their credentials suspended or revoked.” It added, however, that “determining the number of people who have lost their licenses is impossible because many state agencies and licensing boards don’t track the information.”
According to the publication the licenses of at least 308 nurses and 223 teachers in Kentucky have been revoked or flagged for review. In Louisiana, 87 nurses now face losing their jobs unless they can become current on loan payments.
However, unlike working class students, those who run for office are generally not worried about money nor are they pursued for their refusal to pay off fines. The more well off—lawyers and morticians have been disproportionately represented in the legislature—finance their own campaigns or readily find the businessman or corporate sponsor with deep pockets to underwrite them.
How other states handle election law fines is not apparent, but Tennessee waits years to try to collect fines from the privileged group of Tennesseans who represent the ruling class in the legislature.
Even as the state reluctantly goes after delinquent fines, it does not go after all that they owe, much less demand interest or revocation of professional licenses.
The state’s Attorney General’s office is considering an agreement to cut the fine in half for two legislators, one who owed more than $40,000 and another who owed $10,000.
In a revealing comment, the Tennessean reported: “No one clarified why the attorney general and registry decided to accept such payment agreements…”
While elected officials in Nashville are merciless in their efforts to squeeze money out of former students for creditors, those in Washington D.C. find money for tax cuts for the rich and for corporations by slashing educational benefits for those who need them most.
A tax plan proposed and approved by the House of Representatives, should the Senate approve it and President Trump sign it, would:
· Raise the cost of attending college over the next ten years by $65 billion, according to an estimate by the American Council on Education (ACE).
· Repeal a tax deduction for interest payments on student loans that saves borrowers $625 annually for borrowers making less than $65,000 a year, or for married couples making less than $120,000. In 2015, 12 million people filed for this deduction.
· Require that tuition waivers for 145,000 graduates who work as teaching assistant be taxed as income.
To add insult to injury, President Trump is proposing to abolish subsidized federal loans and institute a single program for all federal lending for students. Such a change would result in a single income-based repayment plan at 12.5 percent of adjusted gross income .
VISUALIZE REVOLUTION!
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERISM destroyed a TRILLION DOLLARS in home equity… and they’re still plundering us!
Barack Obama created more debt for the middle class than any president in US
history, and also had the only huge QE programs: $4.2 Trillion.
OXFAM reported that during Obama’s terms, 95% of the wealth created went to the top 1% of the world’s wealthy.
OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS to serve the
filthy rich
The same period has seen a massive growth of social inequality,
with income and wealth concentrated at the very top of American society to an
extent not seen since the 1920s.
“This study follows
reports released over the past several months documenting rising mortality
rates among US workers due to drug addiction and suicide, high rates of infant
mortality, an overall leveling off of life expectancy, and a growing gap
between the life expectancy of the bottom rung of income earners compared to
those at the top.”
Why Roy Moore Matters
Answer: That Alabama Senate race could determine whether Roe v. Wade is overturned. The lives of millions of unborn may be the stakes.
Republicans now hold 52 Senate seats. If Democrats pick up the Alabama seat, they need only two more to recapture the Senate, and with it the power to kill any conservative court nominee, as they killed Robert Bork.
Today, the GOP, holding Congress and the White House, has a narrow path to capture the Third Branch, the Supreme Court, and to dominate the federal courts for a decade. For this historic opportunity, the party can thank two senators, one retired, the other still sitting.
The first is former Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.
In 2013, Harry exercised the "nuclear option," abolishing the filibuster for President Obama's judicial nominees. The Senate no longer needed 60 votes to confirm judges. Fifty-one Senate votes could cut off debate, and confirm.
Iowa's Chuck Grassley warned Harry against stripping the minority of its filibuster power. Such a move may come back to bite you, he told Harry. Grassley is now judiciary committee chairman.
And this year a GOP Senate voted to use the nuclear option to shut down a filibuster of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, who was then confirmed with 55 votes.
Yet the Democratic minority still had one card to play to block President Trump's nominees -- the "blue slip courtesy."
If a senator from the state where a federal judicial nominee resides asks for a hold on proceedings, by not returning a blue slip, the judiciary committee has traditionally honored that request and not held hearings.
Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota used the blue slip to block the Trump nomination of David Stras of Minnesota to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Franken calls Stras too ideological, too conservative.
But Grassley has now decided to reject the blue slip courtesy for appellate court judges, since their jurisdiction is not just over a single state like Minnesota, but over an entire region.
Thus have the skids been greased for a conservative recapture of the federal judiciary unseen since the early days of FDR.
Eighteen of the 179 seats on the U.S. appellate courts and 119 of the 677 seats on federal district courts are already open. More will be opening up. No president in decades has seen the opportunity Trump has to remake the federal judiciary.
Not only are the federal court vacancies almost unprecedented, a GOP Senate and Trump are working in harness to fill them before January 2019, when a new Congress is sworn in.
If Republicans blow this opportunity, it is unlikely to come again. For the Supreme Court has seemed within Republican grasp before, only to have it slip away because of presidential errors.
Nixon had four nominees to the Supreme Court confirmed and Gerald Ford saw his nominee, John Paul Stevens, unanimously confirmed. But of those five justices confirmed from 1969 to 1976, Stevens and Harry Blackmun joined the liberal bloc, and Chief Justice Warren Burger and Lewis Powell voted for Roe v. Wade.
Of Reagan's three Supreme Court nominees confirmed, Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy cast crucial votes in 5-4 decisions to defeat the strict constructionists led by Antonin Scalia.
George H.W. Bush named Clarence Thomas to the court, but only after he had elevated David Souter, who also joined the liberal bloc.
Hence, both Trump, by whom he nominates, and a Republican Senate, with its power to confirm with 51 votes, are indispensable if we are to end judicial dictatorship in America.
And 2018 is the crucial year.
While Democrats, with 25 Senate seats at risk, would seem to be facing more certain losses than the GOP, with one-third as many seats at stake, history teaches that the first off-year election of Trump could prove a disaster.
Consider. Though Ike ended the Korean War in his first year, he lost both Houses of Congress in his second. Reagan enacted one of the great tax cuts in history in his first year, and then lost 26 seats in the House in his second.
Bill Clinton lost control of both the House and Senate in his first off-year election. Barack Obama in 2010 lost six Senate seats and 54 seats and control of the House. And both presidents were more popular than Trump is today.
If the election in Virginia this year is a harbinger of what is to come, GOP control of Congress could be washed away in a tidal wave in 2018.
Hence, this coming year may be a do-or-die year to recapture the Third Branch of Government for conservatism.
Which is why that Dec. 12 election in Alabama counts.
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