Used to be less than the top 20% or so paid more than 80% of the taxes.

Ayn Rand said it best when she called such people "Socialist Looters"...

Bank of America said it has $193 million in exposure to Greece’s government-backed debt, although it has $205 million in credit default protection -- a form of insurance -- on that debt.

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/05/07/93763/bank-of-america-hit-with-465-million.html#ixzz0nJChH39o

My cousin says Greece is controlled by unions and socialists who have basically bled the system dry.

Let us look at some facts. According to Eurostat, Greek workers work on average longer hours than the rest of Europeans. They work a 42-hour week, while the average working week in the 27 member states of the EU is 40.3 hours and within in the “Eurozone” it is 40 hours. So that is myth number one dispelled.

Again, according to Eurostat, Greece also has the most underpaid private sector employees compared to the rest of the “Eurozone”. In Greece, the average gross monthly wage, including social security and taxes, is 803 euros [about £700 or US$1063], while the lowest gross salary in, for example, Ireland is 1300 euros, in France 1250 euros and in the Netherlands 1400 euros.

The average age of retirement in Greece is 61.4 years, a little higher than the European average of 61.1 years.

According to the GSEE Labour Institution, the average pension in Greece is 750 euros per months [£650 pounds or US$990], while in Spain this figure reaches 950 euros, in Ireland 1700 euros, in Belgium 2800 euros and in the Netherlands 3200 euros. Moreover, this figure was calculated before the implementation of the new government measures, which increase the age of retirement from 65 to 67 years while at the same time cutting pensions by 30 to 50%.

of the current four and a half million labour force, more than a million work without any social security or other forms of legal protection. According to the report of the Commission for Social Security, established by the Greek Ministry of Labour, this figure reaches 30% of the overall workforce, while in the rest of the EU the percentage of workers in these conditions are only between 5 and 10% of the total.

That's charisma and manipulation. Narcissists know how to get inside people's heads and relate to them on their own level, mirroring their own sentiments, and we're naturally drawn to people who 'understand' us, who we feel we can relate to. What does he have to offer in the joint? You think Mr. Madoff hasn't retained enough cash flow to surround himself with luxury, special priveleges, etc. Besides, in the criminal world, the man is a rock star. Who wouldn't love the opportunity to cozy up to someone they idolize?

The reason Bernie Madoff was able to swindle so much from so many is because he is an absolute master of deciet and manipulation. Is it really so shocking to learn that someone so charasmatic, so cunning, so adept at being able to figure out what people want to hear, and tell them that, would have the ability to garner some support within the prison population?

Glenn Beck has lost 1/3 of its TV audience since January
April 28, 2010 8:31 am ET by Eric Boehlert

Should we blame it on the Massa Moment?

Will that Hindenburg performance soon be seen as the turning point for Glenn Beck: the pivotal moment when the Fox News show began to permanently leak viewers?

Who can forget the March day that will live in cable news infamy, when Beck invited embattled Democratic Congressman Eric Massa onto his show, for an entire hour, to blow the whistle on Democratic Party corruption? Or so Beck thought. Instead, Massa went on and on about tickle fights, and Beck became a laughing stock -- the butt of endless Geraldo-opens-Al-Capone's-vault jokes.

Prior to the Massa Moment, Glenn Beck was averaging 2.6 million viewers each week, and the show was still flying high. And in the short term, the wildly hyped Massa episode produced ratings gold, generating 3.4 million viewers that night, thank you very much. Long-term though, the effects have proven to be disastrous.

As I noted two weeks ago, Glenn Beck's ratings are down this spring. Now it's clear those declines are accelerating and there are no signs of a rebound. So what does that mean for Beck, Fox News, and the Tea Party movement?

First, the latest Nielsen low: Glenn Beck just posted another ratings low for this year. The new mark was set last Thursday when the show attracted 1.82 million viewers. The host's previous, non-vacation low for 2010 had been 1.97 million viewers. That low-ebb mark was set on April 9.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/201004280008

2007, Arizona enacted the Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA).....LAWA requires all Arizona employers to use E-Verify to verify the employment eligibility of new hires. Proof of verifying the employment authorization of an employee through E-Verify creates a rebuttable presumption that an employer did not intentionally or knowingly employ an unauthorized alien.

Establishes a class 3 felony for failing to:
a) verify employment eligibility through E-Verify or
b) keep records of verifications

Kosher Plant Manager Who Faced Immigration Raid Faces Could Spend Life In Prison On Fraud Charges

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa -- A former manger of a kosher Iowa slaughterhouse who was convicted of financial fraud admitted he committed the fraud and that he knew illegal immigrants worked at the plant, a psychiatrist said during the executive's sentencing hearing.

The psychiatrist was hired by the defense for former Agriprocessors Inc. manager Sholom Rubashkin, who faces a possible life sentence after being convicted on 86 counts of financial fraud in November. The Postville plant he managed was the site of a massive immigration raid in May 2008.

Prosecutors originally leveled 163 immigration and financial fraud counts against Rubashkin, but they dropped the immigration charges after Rubashkin was convicted on the fraud charges. Still, the allegations have been an issue at the sentencing hearing.

Rubashkin acknowledged during his trial that he made mistakes as a manager, but he testified that he never intentionally violated immigration or federal fraud laws.

"Did he admit to the crimes?" Assistant U.S. Attorney C.J. Williams asked Dr. Susan Fiester of Bethesda, Md., under cross-examination on Wednesday.

"Yes, essentially," Fiester replied.

Williams asked Fiester if Rubashkin's statement to her was "inconsistent with trial testimony," to which Fiester said it was. But Fiester wouldn't say whether that meant Rubashkin lied under oath.

"I didn't ask him that," Fiester said.

The sentencing hearing was scheduled to resume Thursday morning. U.S. District Court Judge Linda R. Reade has said she will render a judgment "three to four weeks" after the hearing.

Rubashkin was convicted of creating phony invoices to show St. Louis-based First Bank Business Capital that the slaughterhouse had more money flowing in than it did.

The defense tried to show Wednesday that the fraud really wasn't worth $35 million, as prosecutors contend.

Defense attorney F. Montgomery Brown said an original 1999 loan for $20 million was "clear and pristine" and that Rubashkin's bank fraud didn't start until 2007.

Also, several former business partners and family members testified that Rubashkin wasn't ultimately responsible for mistakes made at the plant.

Former Agriprocessors poultry manager Joseph Gourarie said Rubashkin wanted to fire about 200 illegal immigrants at the plant months before the raid but couldn't get permission from his father, former Agriprocessors owner Aaron Rubashkin.



"It was at times difficult to know who was ultimately in charge," Gourarie said. "I'm not sure he could have (fired the workers) with unilateral authority."

A rabbi from Bel Harbor, Fla., testified about how Rubashkin's religious beliefs would affect his prison stay. As a member of the Lubavitch branch of Orthodox Judaism, Rubashkin would require a kosher diet and would wear a head covering that would make him stand out, Rabbi Sholom Lipskar said.

Lipskar also said recreation would be more limited than it is for the average prisoner because Lubavitchers generally don't watch television or work out.

"It's a much more intense experience," Lipskar said. "To a Hasidic Jew, being in prison for a year could be much more severe than for another person."


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/29/sholom-rubashkin-kosher-p_n_556536.html

Different issue?!? How so? It seems you want to push away the issue of gangs and drug dealers who themselves 60% are illegal aliens.

Employers are being investigated and charged occasionally…just not with the frequency or consistency to make much of a difference.

I believe most of the criminals come from the illegal aliens. While some are honest & hard working, others are not. Most of the Mexicans here legally or American citizens, contribute greatly to America.

So it's a good thing this doesn't apply to the present POTUS since he has shown his birth certificate and it's been plastered all over the internet. And inspected by non- partisian fact checkers. It's a good thing that this isn't an issue with anyone who has an IQ higher than their shoe size. Good thing no one buys into this crap anymore. That is except those racists who still can't fathom a black man as president.

““The derivatives legislation moving through Congress was tweaked to benefit Warren Buffett, the Wall Street Journal reports.”

lets get one thing straight...........the VERY FIRST exucitive order that obama signed was to seal his personal records........includeing birth, school and where he managed to find over $1 million to fund said education.........

Here is a novel idea; why not concentrate on getting us out of the economic crises we are in right at this moment!

Why ignore the present while feigning that he has the secret to avoid this crises in the future? This is a diversionary tactic by Obama

GEO Group, Inc.: Despite a Crashing Economy, Private Prison Firm Turns a Handsome Profit

by Erin Rosa, Special to CorpWatch
March 1st, 2009


Cartoon by Khalil Bendib
While the nation’s economy flounders, business is booming for The GEO Group Inc., a private prison firm that is paid millions by the U.S. government to detain undocumented immigrants and other federal inmates. In the last year and a half, GEO announced plans to add a total of at least 3,925 new beds to immigration lockups in five locations. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency and the U.S. Marshals Service, which hire the company, will fill the beds with inmates awaiting court and deportation proceedings.

GEO reported impressive quarterly earnings of $20 million on February 12, 2009, along with an annual income of $61 million for 2008 – up from $38 million the year before. But the company’s share value is not the only thing that’s growing. Behind the financial success and expansion of the for-profit prison firm, there are increasing charges of negligence, civil rights violations, abuse and even death.

Detaining immigrants has become a profitable business, and the niche industry is showing no signs of slowing down. The number of undocumented immigrants the U.S. federal government jails has grown by at least 65 percent in the last six years. In 2002, the average daily population of immigration detainees was 20,838 people, according to ICE records. By 2008, the average daily population had grown to 31,345.

Since 2003, more than a million people have been processed through federal immigration lockups, which are part of a network of at least 300 local, state and federal lockups, including seven contracted detention facilities. GEO operates four of those seven for-profit prisons.

Numerous investigations and reports have documented problems at GEO’s immigration detention facilities.

At the company’s Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, federal prosecutors charged a GEO prison administrator in September 2008 with “knowingly and willfully making materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statements to senior special agents” with ICE, according to court filings. A February 2008 audit found that over a period of more than two years ending in November 2005, GEO hired nearly 100 guards without performing the required criminal background checks. The GEO employee responsible, Sylvia Wong, pleaded guilty. In the plea agreement the federal government stated that Wong falsified documents “because of the pressure she felt” while working at the GEO lockup to get security personnel hired at the detention center “as quickly as possible.”

Two months before the fraud charges, a study by the Seattle University School of Law and the nonprofit group OneAmerica reported that conditions at the Tacoma facility violated both international and domestic laws that grant detained immigrants the right to food, due process and humane treatment.

Federal immigration officials have the authority to incarcerate undocumented immigrants, asylum-seekers, and even lawful permanent residents while they await hearings with immigration judges or appeal decisions. ICE reports the average length of stay is 30 days, but detentions can last years, according to a November 2008 ICE fact sheet.

Pramila Jayapal, executive director with OneAmerica, took part in interviewing a random sample of more than 40 immigrants detained at the Northwest Detention Center, which holds approximately 1,000 immigrants at any given time.

“It’s a very giant concrete box. It’s just like a jail,” said Jayapal. “You’re only supposed to meet in the client area, which is only a few rooms.”

One inmate from Mexico, Hector Pena-Ortiz, told interviewers that guards had interrogated and handcuffed him twice, demanding that he sign immediate deportation papers despite the fact that he had a pending appeal. Under federal law, immigrants cannot be deported from the United States if their immigration legal cases are still pending. During one of the incidents, guards admitted to having a file on the wrong inmate, Pena-Ortiz said.

In addition to violations of legal rights, inmates cited food as a major concern. The vast majority of the 40 prisoners interviewed at the facility said rations were inadequate and sometimes rotten. Inmates with financial resources depended on food bought from the lockup’s commissary. Others went hungry. A man identified in the study as “Ricardo” said he had lost 50 pounds of his original 190-pound weight since arriving at the detention center.

ICE officially denied the claims in the report, but in 2005, annual agency inspections at the Northwest Detention Center documented problems with the quality and quantity of food and found that some meals were so poor, guards had to collect and replace them.

Looking for Opportunities

The Tacoma lockup, site of the most recent GEO controversy, is located on top of a former toxic waste dump that borders coastal wetlands near the Port of Tacoma, Washington. In August 2008, the firm announced plans to expand its 1,030-bed Northwest Detention Center to 1,575 beds, “to help meet the increased demand for detention bed space by federal, state, and local government agencies around the country.”

Just four months after GEO’s announcement, ICE notified government contractors that the agency was looking for a contractor-owned and -operated detention facility. According to federal procurement data, the new facility should be capable of providing 1,575 beds – the same number GEO was set to build – to be completed no later than September 2009 – the same date GEO had set for the completion of its own construction project.

Lorie Dankers, ICE spokeswoman in Washington state, implied that the similarity in numbers and date was a coincidence. “I would never comment, nor have I in the past, on what GEO is doing and why they’re doing it. That’s a business decision that GEO made,” said Dankers. “To insinuate that there was some kind of connection, or that they has some inside information as to the request, that would be incorrect.”

Dankers added that ICE’s request for more space is still in the “pre-solicitation” phase, meaning that there is no guarantee a contract will be offered, and the agency is simply requesting information from contractors to “guage interest.”

“I don’t have any information one way or the other as to what would happen,” Dankers said. “I think often times, if I had to speculate, they see where there’s a need. I think they’re always looking for opportunities.”

Canceled Contracts

And opportunities, like prisoners, abound. GEO owns more than 62,000 prison beds in the United States, with approximately 3,000 beds used for detained immigrants. The company also claims a global market share of 25 percent of the private corrections industry. Currently, the Northwest Detention Center incarcerates immigrants mainly from Oregon, Washington and Alaska, according to Dankers.

In the last five years, criminal immigration prosecutions have surged by 388 percent according to federal court data obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University in New York. The most recently available court information shows that there were 11,454 prosecutions in September 2008 alone. Adding to GEO’s profitability and prospects are immigration laws introduced in the 1990s, the expanding use of immigration detention without bond, and a greater emphasis on prosecutions after 9/11.

The company’s relationship with government officials has also proven valuable in winning corrections contracts.

In 2006, while on the state payroll as director of prisons at the Colorado Department of Corrections, Nolin Renfrow helped GEO obtain a $14 million-per-year contract to detain 1,500 inmates in a proposed state prison project in the northern part of the state. Renfrow was moonlighting for GEO –with an expected compensation of $1 million – when a 2007 state audit and news reports uncovered the public servant’s business deal.

The audit found that Renfrow’s actions could “arguably present a conflict of interest and result in a breach of ... the public trust,” because state law prohibited an “employee from assisting any person for a fee or other compensation in obtaining any contract.”

The county district attorney with jurisdiction over Renfrow declined to press criminal charges, but in the wake of the scandal, officials with the state’s corrections department rescinded the contract.

Prisons as Money Makers

Immigrant facilities are not the only GEO lockups that have sparked claims of negligence and abuse.

In 2007, the firm settled a lawsuit with the family of an inmate for $200,000. LeTisha Tapia, a 23-year-old woman incarcerated at the GE0-owned Val Verde Correction Facility in southern Texas, told her family in July 2004 that she had been raped and beaten after being locked in the same cell block with male inmates. Shortly after, she had hung herself in her cell. The nonprofit Texas Civil Rights Project sued GEO on behalf of Tapia’s family.

“The jail drove this young woman to kill herself,” charged the family’s attorney, Scott Medlock, in a February 15, 2006 press release from the Texas Civil Rights Project. “GEO cuts corners by hiring poorly trained guards, providing inmates with cut rate medical care, and running their facility in a grossly unprofessional manner.” Citing confidentially provisions in the settlement, Medlock refused further comment.

More recently, in 2008, civil liberties attorneys sued the company for failing to provide adequate medical attention to inmates outsourced from Washington, DC, to the Rivers Correctional Institute, located in North Carolina and overseen by GEO through a contract with the federal Bureau of Prisons. That same year, Idaho state authorities removed 125 inmates from a GEO prison after an investigation – spurred by the suicide of a detainee at the facility – revealed poor staff training and health care.

“Pretty immediately when people started going to Rivers we started to get letters about how bad the health care was, and just how people were really scared of dying there,” said Deborah Golden, an attorney with the DC Prisoners Project, a group that is representing inmates in the legal case against GEO. One inmate named in the report, Keith Mathis, claims he was denied medical treatment for a cavity until the tooth became infected and caused an open ulcer on his face that eventually “burst open,” requiring surgery and three days hospitalization.

“The more we looked into the situation the more we realized it was a systemic problem,” said Golden. “I suspect that it’s a pattern all over. When you try to run prisons as money makers what you do is cut back on the most expensive thing you can, which is medication and medical care.”

GEO has said it will not publicly comment on pending legal cases or abuse claims by third parties, including nonprofit groups. Company spokesman Pablo Paez says that on the subject of business plans, “we have no comment beyond what’s in our public disclosures.”

Despite a wide array grievances and tragedies, GEO has accrued contracts worth more than $588 million in federal tax dollars since 1997, according to available federal procurement data. And as long as federal officials continue to remand a growing number of inmates and immigrants over to private businesses, without imposing strict oversight, GEO will likely remain profitable.

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15308'&printsafe=1

Immigration laws need to be enforced..but I think Arizona just took a step in the WRONG direction.

But really what would be the threat of having a second national language, or a second most common national language?? Many countries have that situation. It's (again, just *IMO*) rooted in very old attitudes of Anglo superiority and what followed it, which basically has been (Anglo-)American exceptionalism and ethnocentrism.

Our investigation in Arizona discovered the real intent of the show-me-your-papers law.

by Greg Palast

[Phoenix, AZ.] Don't be fooled. The way the media plays the story, it was a wave of racist, anti-immigrant hysteria that moved Arizona Republicans to pass a sick little law, signed last week, requiring every person in the state to carry papers proving they are US citizens.

I don't buy it. Anti-Hispanic hysteria has always been as much a part of Arizona as the Saguaro cactus and excessive air-conditioning.

What's new here is not the politicians' fear of a xenophobic "Teabag" uprising.

What moved GOP Governor Jan Brewer to sign the Soviet-style show-me-your-papers law is the exploding number of legal Hispanics, US citizens all, who are daring to vote -- and daring to vote Democratic by more than two-to-one. Unless this demographic locomotive is halted, Arizona Republicans know their party will soon be electoral toast. Or, if you like, tortillas.

In 2008, working for Rolling Stone with civil rights attorney Bobby Kennedy, our team flew to Arizona to investigate what smelled like an electoral pogrom against Chicano voters ... directed by one Jan Brewer.

Brewer, then Secretary of State, had organized a racially loaded purge of the voter rolls that would have made Katherine Harris blush. Beginning after the 2004 election, under Brewer's command, no less than 100,000 voters, overwhelming Hispanics, were blocked from registering to vote. In 2005, the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected.

That statistic caught my attention. Voting or registering to vote if you're not a citizen is a felony, a big-time jail-time crime. And arresting such criminal voters is easy: after all, they give their names and addresses.

So I asked Brewer's office, had she busted a single one of these thousands of allegedly illegal voters? Did she turn over even one name to the feds for prosecution?

No, not one.

Which raises the question: were these disenfranchised voters the criminal, non-citizens Brewer tagged them, or just not-quite-white voters given the José Crow treatment, entrapped in document-chase trickery?

The answer was provided by a federal prosecutor who was sent on a crazy hunt all over the Western mesas looking for these illegal voters. "We took over 100 complaints, we investigated for almost 2 years, I didn’t find one prosecutable voter fraud case."

This prosecutor, David Iglesias, is a prosecutor no more. When he refused to fabricate charges of illegal voting among immigrants, his firing was personally ordered by the President of the United States, George W. Bush, under orders from his boss, Karl Rove.

....more

http://www.gregpalast.com/behind-the-arizona-immigration-lawgop-game-to-swipe-the-november-election/#more-3592

So for the third time, where is the evidence for a warming trend over the past decade?

2009: Second Warmest Year on Record; End of Warmest Decade

2009 was tied for the second warmest year in the modern record, a new NASA analysis of global surface temperature shows. The analysis, conducted by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City, also shows that in the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 was the warmest year since modern records began in 1880.

Although 2008 was the coolest year of the decade -- due to strong cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean -- 2009 saw a return to near-record global temperatures. The past year was only a fraction of a degree cooler than 2005, the warmest year on record, and tied with a cluster of other years -- 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007 -- as the second warmest year since recordkeeping began.

“There’s always an interest in the annual temperature numbers and on a given year’s ranking, but usually that misses the point,” said James Hansen, the director of GISS. “There's substantial year-to-year variability of global temperature caused by the tropical El Niño-La Niña cycle. But when we average temperature over five or ten years to minimize that variability, we find that global warming is continuing unabated."

January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest decade on record. Throughout the last three decades, the GISS surface temperature record shows an upward trend of about 0.2°C (0.36°F) per decade. Since 1880, the year that modern scientific instrumentation became available to monitor temperatures precisely, a clear warming trend is present, though there was a leveling off between the 1940s and 1970s.

The near-record temperatures of 2009 occurred despite an unseasonably cool December in much of North America. High air pressures in the Arctic decreased the east-west flow of the jet stream, while also increasing its tendency to blow from north to south and draw cold air southward from the Arctic. This resulted in an unusual effect that caused frigid air from the Arctic to rush into North America and warmer mid-latitude air to shift toward the north.

"Of course, the contiguous 48 states cover only 1.5 percent of the world area, so the U.S. temperature does not affect the global temperature much,' said Hansen.

In total, average global temperatures have increased by about 0.8°C (1.4°F) since 1880.
...more

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/temp-analysis-2009.html

demoghraphics for the soda/pop verbage

The BEST ! tasting Coke there ever was, was the old 8oz. small bottles you used to get out of the machines for 5 cents. But, that hasn't been available since at least 1967 that I can remember.

A far more practical law would be to fine and imprison anyone found knowingly employing an illegal immigrant to the maximum extent permissible by law - no exceptions made. A few well publicized perp walks of some corrupt business men and women in handcuffs - and the resulting cases and penalties would do far more to reduce illegal immigration overall. If there are no jobs there, then there will be less interest - and more jobs for legal Americans.

"Monckton said he had "never believed heterosexual HIV is a myth," but insisted that the correct policy at start of any epidemic is to "isolate all carriers immediately," a position he advocated in the 1980s on HIV/AIDS. Unprompted, Monckton told us he is now "working on what may prove to be a cure for HIV,"
"The environmental extremists, who have already killed 50 million children through malaria by their now-canceled ban on the use of DDT, the only effective agent against the anopheles mosquito that spreads the infective parasite, are already eagerly killing millions more through their latest scientifically-baseless scare -- the "global warming" panic pandemic
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/09/monckton_demands_that_mann_bra.php

Previously, after drinking 21 litres, I was capable of vibrating into an alternate dimension.
Now, I can barely vibrate across the room even after drinking 29 litres of the stuffz