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| If you have a problem reading this email, please click here to see the web page version You received this email because you signed up for it at OpEdNews. Unsubscribe instructions are at the bottom of this email. Double treat today-- Two Podcasts One with Gary Null, the other with David Swanson-- both talking about psychopaths, sociopaths and predators. And please remember that Opednews depends upon you to pay our bills. Please click here to make a donation today. thanks, rob kall Support Opednews. Make a tax deductible donation to make OEN Strong.  Daily HeadlinesMoney has taken over our political process. For the first time in American history, a majority of lawmakers in the House of Representatives are millionaires, and a startling number -- at both the federal and state level -- are being bankrolled by billionaires like the Koch brothers. This isn't what the founders had in mind when they founded our once-great nation. By Rob Kall David Swanson-- We debate and discuss How to Handle Psychopaths, Sociopaths and Predators  David wrote an article recently which challenged some of my ideas on psychopaths and sociopaths. I invited him on my show to discuss and debate. By Eric Zuesse TAX-DAY NOTE: The Biggest Criminals Aren't in Prisons; They're in Palaces The biggest crooks aren't in prisons; they're in palaces. One must take notice when the NYT published an editorial on April 11 entitled, "Torturing Children at School." One can be certain that the NYT, so squeamish about calling waterboarding "torture," did not choose that word without much debate, making the implications of the editorial that much more damning and gruesome. By William K. Black, J.D., Ph.D. The 11th Lesson We Need to Learn from Charles Keating's Frauds: Bring back Glass-Steagall  One of the subtle aspects of the savings and loan debacle that is that we ran a real world test of the importance of the provisions of the 1933 Banking Act known as the Glass-Steagall Act. Unfortunately, Glass-Steagall was doomed by the combination of politicians eager for campaign contributions from big finance and theoclassical economists who inhabit a fantasy-based world of dogma that ignored the results. By Elayne Clift Corruption, Control and the Pathology of Power The world is full of Bernie Madoffs. Corruption happens across cultures and none of us fully understands why so many people seek personal gain though unsavory behaviors. What does that say about our collective humanity? By Robert Reich Happy Tax Day, and Why The Top 1% Pay a Much Lower Tax Rate Than You The richest 1 percent of Americans are now getting the largest percent of total national income in almost a century. So you might think they'd pay a much higher tax rate than everyone else. But you'd be wrong. Many millionaires pay a lower federal tax rate than many middle-class Americans. Some don't pay any federal taxes at all. Russia is not responsible for the crisis in Ukraine. Hacked phone calls reveal the critical role that Washington played in orchestrating the putsch and selecting the coup's leaders. Moscow was not involved in any of these activities. Putin, whatever one may think of him, has not done anything to fuel the violence and chaos that has spread across the country. If an alien invader with a face were attacking the earth, the difficulties that governments have getting populations to support wars on other humans would be multiplied a thousand fold. Gary Null has written on Psychopaths and sociopaths. I felt an interview would be interesting. It was. Sunday, April 13, after finishing what would be his last, The Lifeboat Hour, radio show, whistle-blower, activist, author, American hero, Michael C. Ruppert, allegedly shot himself, taking his own life. By Frosty Wooldridge Judgment: Higher Frequencies of Human Consciousness In your life, you will refrain from making judgments or comparisons once you understood the universal law of energy that flows out of your mind and back into your mind by your thoughts or words. The universe reciprocates your energy, whether good or otherwise. The first in a series of book review that will include both new and old - sometimes very old - books. Military dive teams worked the dark, cold waters of the Yellow Sea on Wednesday night in a desperate effort to find nearly 300 people who are missing after the ferry they were taking to a South Korean island resort sank with breathtaking speed. Officials said four people were known dead and 164 had been rescued after the sinking of the ferry Sewol off the southwest coast of South Korea. Another 292 people are missing, authorities said. Among the 459 people who were aboard the ship: 325 students and 15 teachers from Seoul's Ansan Danwon High School heading to a four-day trip to Jeju, a resort island considered the Hawaii of Korea. The Connecticut teen who has been in state custody for more than a year after her parents were accused of medical child abuse after disputing a diagnosis has apparently penned a note, giving a look into how she says she's being treated: Happiness and Its Discontents - By DANIEL M. HAYBRON One of the most remarkable findings in social psychology is just how many poor people say they are satisfied with their lives -- very often a majority of them, even in harsh environments like the slums of Calcutta. "The problem is that life satisfaction doesn't really mean what we tend to think it means. For you can reasonably be satisfied with your life even if you think your life is going badly for you, and even if you feel bad. To be satisfied is just to regard your life as going well enough it is satisfactory. Similarly, you might be satisfied with a hard life because you care about things besides avoiding misery". Hayborn suggests that "it is misleading to equate satisfaction with happiness, even if it is perfectly ordinary to talk that way at times... So how else might we define happiness? There is another approach popular among researchers -- one that focuses on feelings.,," White House Pressed to Protect Ailing Monarch Butterflies -By ANDREW C. REVKIN the foliage of milkweed is the only food source on which monarch caterpillars can feed. Without milkweed, there will be no monarchs. "Farmers and ranchers can be engaged and given financial incentives so that they can bring back this iconic butterfly," said Scott Hoffman Black, executive director of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. "Pollinators like monarchs provide essential services that ensure food security and farmland health." The habitat restoration efforts that benefit Monarch butterflies also benefit bees, game birds and other wildlife. he focus of an urgent push for a rescue. The latest step is a letter sent on Monday to President Obama and relevant cabinet members by a group of scientists, educators, farmers, and other concerned citizens organized by the Xerces Society and other conservation groups focused on these butterflies. By Lionel Reynolds As the tanks roll in, the USA/EU/NATO imperialist axis that has almost destroyed the Ukraine plans ever closer union As the tanks roll in, NATO and the EU commit to ever closer union.... By Citizen News Service - CNS Call to stop water privatization and strengthen public water systems call for the World Bank to end its destructive promotion of water privatization under the guise of development. After a week of meetings, including high level events on water, no action has been taken to address the coalition's concerns. Looking at Some Corporate Tax Loopholes Ordinary Citizens May Envy - By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN "While individuals have sought to take advantage of deductions and loopholes, corporations have famously excelled at this game.Companies paid an average effective federal tax rate of 12.6 percent in 2010, the last time the Government Accountability Office measured the rate. That compares with the nominal federal tax rate of 35 percent, so all those accountants appear to have done their jobs in exploiting the loopholes in our tax code. In recognition of Uncle Sam's payday, it's only proper to take note of some of the most egregious corporate tax loopholes and some unexpected beneficiaries. Take the "carried interest" benefit taken by private equity and hedge fund executives. Instead of paying ordinary rates on much of their income -- typically 35 percent for the highest bracket (39.6 percent for this tax year) -- these executives pay the capital gains rate of 15 percent... By Jim McCluskey Scottish Independence: A (Nu)Clear Win-Win Choice Why an independent Scotland is good for both the Scottish and the English people. Mary Fallin Signs Ban On Minimum Wage Increase-by Shadee Ashtari THE GOP KILLS ANYTHING THAT WORKS FOR THE PEOPLE:Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin (R) signed a bill Monday prohibiting cities across the state from establishing mandatory minimum wage and employee benefits, including vacation or sick leave days. Advocates of the new law contend that efforts to increase the minimum wage across various municipalities could potentially harm local business communities. "This bill provides a level playing field for all municipalities in Oklahoma," This is a fair measure for consumers, workers and small business owners."Opponents of the measure view the move by Oklahoma Republicans as retaliation against an initiative underway in Oklahoma City, where organizers have been gathering signatures to raise the The head of NATO pledged on Wednesday to immediately step up military patrols along its vast eastern border in response to mounting evidence of Russian interference in Ukraine. The announcement by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, appeared to be another sign that the confrontation with Russia over Ukraine was becoming more acute. But Mr. Rasmussen emphasized that the move was designed to be a deterrent rather than preparation for conflict. Michigan officials and President Barack Obama's Administration are discussing a plan to free up $100 million in federal money to aid Detroit's retired city workers, the Detroit Free Press reported. iting two people familiar with the talks, the newspaper said the talks were centered around federal money flowing to Michigan for blight removal. Under the plan, $100 million would be earmarked for Detroit, reducing the $500 million the city's emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, plans to use to eliminate blight over the next 10 years. U.S. intelligence, best known for collecting information about people including Americans, did have one agency that gave the public access to its translations of foreign news articles -- until this year when the sharing was shut down, as ex-intelligence analyst Elizabeth Murray explains. The search for Malaysian flight MH370 has gone on for over a month. With false leads and slow starts, is it time to consider other alternatives? A new report supposedly from the Russian FSB suggests it might be. Almost 5 million barrels of oil were spewed into the gulf before the pipe was capped. And countless gallons of the chemical corexant were deliberately dumped to "mitigate" the oil. It's been almost four years since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion killed 11 people and spilled 210 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, but the effects of the disaster are still being felt by Gulf wildlife. Latest ArticlesSyria’s Fallout Comes to Pakistan The central theme remains the divide of Arab peninsula on Syria and its impact on regional partners, like Pakistan. The situation in Ukraine will determine the heart and soul of America. Today the order was given to move in tanks and artillery on innocent people that have no representation in their government. Already, protesters from Maidan are invading and screaming, "To the ovens! Moskal to the knives!" They have no place in their world for those who don't accept their Ultra Nationalist ideology. The news that Texas Gov. Rick Perry has hired a defense lawyer in connection with an inquiry over a budget veto he issued last year may seem a little odd. But the issue isn't so much whether Perry has the power to veto legislation he opposes, it's whether it is legal for him to use the veto to achieve unrelated political goals. Egypt is forming an economic dependence on funds from Saudi Arabia and the UAE that spells economic disaster for the vast majority of ordinary Egyptians who will be left paying the price. Here’s the second in Nick Turse’s latest series on the U.S. military’s “Africa creep.” Today, he explores a new Pentagon scheme to train a force for the Libyan government whose recruits will be drawn from already existing and often notorious militias in that strife-torn land. It’s one of those plans that may sound sensible in Pentagon briefings but has “cockamamie” written all over it.  Best News Links from the WebIn an op-ed published by the Christian Post, Phyllis Schlafly -- a prominent member of the Republican movement further undermined the party’s campaign to appeal to women voters by suggesting that the current pay gap isn’t wide enough. "Women typically choose a mate (husband or boyfriend) who earns more than she does. Men don’t have the same preference for a higher-earning mate... If a higher-earning man is not available, many women are more likely not to marry at all," Schlafly said. Teachers: A Call to Battle for Reluctant Warriors - Living in Dialogue -Anthony Cody The teaching profession is under attack as are pensions and the right to due process!. The policymakers want inexperienced, inexpensive teachers who won't talk back, who won't collect a pension, who will turn over rapidly: "In years past we formed unions and professional organizations to get fair pay. We got due process so we could not be fired at an administrator's whim. We got pensions so we could retire after many years of service. But career teachers are not convenient or necessary any more. We cost too much. We expect our hard-won expertise to be recognized with respect and autonomy. We object when told to follow mindless scripts, and prepare for tests that have little value.No need for teachers to think for themselves, to design unique challenges to engage their students. The educational devices will be the new source of innovation. The tests will measure which devices work best, In Many Cities, Rent Is Rising Out of Reach of Middle Class - By SHAILA DEWAN "For rent and utilities to be considered affordable, they are supposed to take up no more than 30 percent of a household’s income. But that goal is increasingly unattainable for middle-income families as a tightening market pushes up rents ever faster, outrunning modest rises in pay.The strain is not limited to the usual high-cost cities like New York and San Francisco. Money for affordable housing has dried up at a time when it is needed most. Federal housing funds, in a form now known as HOME grants, have been cut in half over the last decade. An analysis by Zillow, the real estate website, found 90 cities where the median rent — not including utilities — was more than 30 percent of the median gross income. For many middle- and lower-income people, high rents choke spending on other goods and services, impeding the economic recovery. Tech Leaps, Job Losses and Rising Inequality - NYTimes.com "Conventional wisdom in economics has long held that technological change affects income inequality by increasing the rewards to skill — through a dynamic called “skill-biased technical change.” Losers are workers whose job can be replaced by machines (textile workers, for example). Those whose skills are enhanced by machines (think Wall Street traders using ultrafast computers) win.It is becoming increasingly apparent, however, that this is not the whole story and that the skills-heavy narrative of inequality is not as straightforward as economists once believed. The persistent decline in the labor share of income suggests another dynamic. Call it “capital-biased technical change” — which encourages replacing decently paid workers with a machine, regardless of their skill.This dynamic opens a new avenue for inequality to widen: the rise in the rewards to inherited wealth,.. Despite Rise in Spills, Hazardous Cargo Rides Rails in Secret - By JAD MOUAWAD "American railroads have long operated under federal laws that shield them from local or state oversight and provide a blanket of secrecy over much of their operations. But now a rapid rise in the number of trains carrying crude oil — along with a series of derailments and explosions — has brought new concern about the risks of transporting dangerous cargo by rail.Local and state officials complain that they receive very little information about when hazardous materials are shipped through their communities or how railroads pick their routes. Federal interstate commerce rules give them little say in the matter and railroads are exempted from federal “right to know” regulations on hazardous material sites... “There is an unwillingness to use any kind of enforcement power at the federal level,”... Ferat-isms: Basic math- by Dan Ferat "when I started teaching 10 years ago (well, just about) the two high schools in my district only had a final exam for each grade. There were quarterly "test days" set aside at the end of each marking period for teachers to use for marking period assessments, but it was left to us to use them as we saw fit. The final exams were designed by each teacher for his or her classes, but had to be "comparable" with the other teachers of the same type of class (e.g., Senior CP English). About five years later, the district added the midterm exam and now required that both exams be EXACTLY the same for all classes in both schools at the same level. This, of course, required us to create generic exams that only covered basic skills or broad subjects because all of us were still teaching texts in whatever order we saw fit according to the syllabi we created. One year later, we had to select ONE text My Ideas, My Boss’s Property - By ORLY LOBEL "increasingly it is corporations, not people, who own inventions. This ownership runs deeper than inventions and artistic works, extending to skills, ideas and professional ties — tacit knowledge and social relations that cannot be subject to patent or copyright under the traditional scope of intellectual property, but which corporations lay claim to at increasing rates through employment agreements. Moreover, unlike other high-patenting countries like Germany, Finland, Japan and China, which require businesses to pay the inventor who assigns an invention to them, American intellectual property law lacks any requirements that employers compensate employees for the fruits of their creative labors above their regular salary. With more corporations demanding that employees pre-assign their intellectual property, there has been a steady decrease in inventor-owned patents. Bernie Sanders Raises Battle Cry Against Citizens United: ‘I Vote for Democracy--John Nichols!’ As right-wingers highlight GOP presidential prospects, the independent senator arrives with an alternative argument. Bernie Sanders is blunt with regard to the crisis.“The disastrous 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United threw out campaign funding laws that limited what wealthy individuals and corporations could spend on elections,” he has argued. “Since that ruling, campaign spending by Adelson, the Koch brothers and a handful of other billionaire families has fundamentally undermined American democracy. If present trends continue, elections will not be decided by one-person, one-vote, but by a small number of very wealthy families who spend huge amounts of money supporting right-wing candidates who protect their interests.” The “Democracy is for the People” amendment, sponsored by Sanders and Congressman Ted Deutch is one of several proposed by members of Not All Investigations Are Alike - NYTimes.com - By PETER J. HENNING . Not all criminal investigations are alike, and there are telltale signs about how serious a threat one may presentJust because the Justice Department has begun a criminal investigation of a company does not mean it will always end in the same way. Investigations can signal different things about the seriousness of the potential consequences, and it is up to the company to read the tea leaves.Sometimes it is not the government that leads the investigation, but the company. This is especially true in Foreign Corrupt Practices Act cases in which federal prosecutors are unable to look inside foreign operations as easily as a corporate counsel. That means the company bears the cost of the investigation, an amount that can grow quickly into the hundreds of millions of dollars. A U.S. Navy underwater drone sent to search for a missing Malaysian jetliner on the floor of the Indian Ocean could take up to two months to scour a 600 sq km area where the plane is believed to have sunk, U.S. search authorities said on Tuesday. The introduction of the undersea drone marks a new slower paced phase in the search for Malaysia Airlines MH370 which disappeared on March 8 and is presumed to have crashed thousands of km (miles) off course with the loss of all 239 people on board. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators will meet on Wednesday to try to extend peace talks beyond an April 29 deadline, the U.S. State Department said on Tuesday. The two sides will meet despite Israeli anger at the killing of an off-duty Israeli policeman in the occupied West Bank on Monday on the eve of the Passover Jewish holiday. The policeman's wife and a child were wounded. "They're going to be meeting again tomorrow," State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said. "The parties are working on determining if there's a path to extend the negotiations for a period of months past April 29th." The Ukrainian government said its forces had repelled an assault by pro-Russian militiamen at a military airfield, hours after announcing the start of a staged counteroffensive Tuesday to reclaim control of the eastern part of the country. Facing mounting pressure to act following the takeover of official buildings by pro-Russian separatists in at least nine cities in the restive east, acting Ukrainian President Oleksandr Turchynov said that a counterterrorism operation began in the northern Donetsk region early Tuesday. David Gamberg: At a Crossroads for Education David Gamberg, superintendent of two neighboring school districts in Long Island--Southold and Greenport--has taken the lead in trying to forge a vision for the renewal of public education. He is one of the brave superintendents who have organized meetings with his peers, with fellow citizens, with other educators, to think about how to improve thehow to improve the public schools. I cannot write a more eloquent description of "where we stand—at a crossroads in education." Don't miss this one..." a powerful vision to promote the core values and practices established by the highest achieving educational systems on earth... Don’t be fooled by the protagonists that stand at the fork in the road waving a false banner of bad business practices trying to lure the public." Matt Taibbi and David Sirota: Why Is Your Pension in Jeopardy? We hear the same refrain across the nation: public sector pensions are destroying our economy. The modest pensions paid to teachers, police officers, firefighters, and social workers are a threat to our future. Matt Taibbi examined these claims in the article in Rolling Stone linked on this Ravitch blog, along with David Sirota’s report “The Plot Against Pension," and his "exposé of the PBS deal to take $3.5 million," and how Sirota discovered that the Arnold Foundation underwrote a Brookings report on public pensions. Ravitch ponders: The puzzle: why would a multi-billionaire devote so much effort to stripping people of modest pensions that they earned for working 25-30 or more years? What is it that he finds so troubling about a man or woman receiving $40,000, 50,000, or 60,000 a year in retirement? Would he prefer penury for pensioners? Read it and weep or rage or get active" Jack Schneider: Teachers Are Not the Problem Jack Schneider, a historian of education, deconstructs the claim that the biggest problem in education is the quality of teachers. " Contrary to the conventional wisdom of the Status Quo, that we have a good corps of teachers: If assertions about the poor academic preparation of American teachers were accurate, the policy fix would be easy. But such hysteria is generally unfounded. Teachers go to legitimate schools, they get decent grades, and the overwhelming majority of them possess degrees in the subject they teach. More than half possess graduate degrees. Consequently, there’s very little low-hanging fruit to pick.”The biggest problem in teaching today is that the profession has been demeaned for years. The Status Quo crowd is determined to prove that first-year and second-year teachers are best and to drive away experienced educators, to save on salaries or pensions |
