Texas Not Only Frozen But Also Wrecked And Parched...,

nbcnews |  As large parts of Texas woke up Thursday to another day of a power crisis amid extreme winter weather, issues with water systems added to the misery for much of the state's population.

Texans were under notice to boil tap water before drinking it after days of record low temperatures damaged infrastructure, caused blackouts and froze water pipes.

Millions across the U.S. were left without electricity or heat in the aftermath of the deadly winter storm as utility crews rushed to restore power before another blast of snow and ice this week.

• Out of more than a million people in the U.S. who did not have electricity, Texas accounted for nearly half with 511,421, according to the tracking site poweroutage.us. The state dropped below 1 million power outages for the first time Thursday.
• In Texas, the extreme weather disrupted water service for more than 12 million residents, forcing many of the more than 680 water systems in the state to issue boil water notices.
• Other parts of the country are bracing for snow. Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York City and the tristate area are expected to see 6 inches of snow, while Washington, D.C., is expected to get 2 to 4 inches.
• At least 37 people have died because of weather-related fatalities since Thursday, the majority in Texas.

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Another major winter storm is expected to track from the Lower Mississippi Valley into the mid-Atlantic and Northeast through Friday, the National Weather Service said, bringing more heavy snow, sleet and freezing rain to further complicate recovery efforts.

Travel remains paralyzed across much of the United States, with roadways treacherous and thousands of flights canceled. Many school systems also delayed or canceled face-to-face classes.

However, staying home also carried risks in places without power.

The winter weather has caused blackouts in Texas that affected 1.8 million customers Wednesday night, according to the tracking website poweroutage.us. That number was down to just over 511,000 as of 11:28 a.m. local time, the site said.

Without power or heat, some Texans posted videos on social media of them burning old furniture to stay warm. Others shared images of flooding caused by burst pipes and collapsed ceilings.

The extreme winter weather this week and accompanying problems — water facilities without power and lines that broke after freezing — disrupted service for more than 12 million Texans, forcing nearly 680 water systems to issue boil water notices, according to a spokesperson for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Nearly 264,000 Texans live in areas where water systems are completely nonoperational.

The Governance Paradigm When Human Interaction Is Fundamentally Suspicious And Politically Contagious

strategic-culture |  In Tempetes Microbiennes, Patrick Zylberman, a professor of History of Health in Paris, detailed the complex process through which health security, so far at the margins of political strategies, was sneaking into center stage in the early 2000s. The WHO had already set the precedent in 2005, warning about “50 million deaths” around the world caused by the incoming swine flu. In the worst-case scenario projected for a pandemic, Zylberman predicted that “sanitary terror” would be used as an instrument of governance.

That worst-case scenario has been revamped as we speak. The notion of a generalized obligatory confinement is not warranted by any medical justification, or leading epidemiological research, when it comes to fighting a pandemic. Still, that was enshrined as the hegemonic policy – with the inevitable corollary of countless masses plunged into unemployment. All that based on failed, delirious mathematical models of the Imperial College kind, imposed by powerful pressure groups ranging from the World Economic Forum (WEF) to the Munich Security Conference.

Enter Dr. Richard Hatchett, a former member of the National Security Council during the first Bush Jr. administration, who was already recommending obligatory confinement of the whole population way back in 2001. Hatchett now directs the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), a very powerful entity coordinating global vaccine investment, and very cozy with Big Pharma. CEPI happens to be a brainchild of the WEF in conjunction with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Crucially, Hatchett regards the fight against Covid-19 as a “war”. The terminology – adopted by everyone from President Trump to President Macron – gives away the game. It harks back to – what else – the global war on terror (GWOT), as solemnly announced in September 2001 by Donald “Known Unknowns” Rumsfeld himself.

Rumsfeld, crucially, had been the chairman of biotech giant Gilead. After 9/11, at the Pentagon, he got busy aiming to blur the distinction between civilians and the military when it came to GWOT. That’s when “generalized obligatory confinement” was conceptualized, with Hatchett among the key players.

As much as this was a militarized Big Pharma spin-off concept, it had nothing to do with public health. What mattered was the militarization of American society to be adopted in response to bioterror – at the time automatically attributed to a squalid, tech-deprived al-Qaeda.

The current version of this project – we are at “war” and every civilian must stay at home – takes the form of what Alexander Dugin has defined as a medical-military dictatorship.

Hatchett is very much part of the group, alongside ubiquitous Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), very close to WHO, WEF and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Robert Redfield, director of the U.S. chapter of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Further applications inbuilt in the project will include all-around digital surveillance, sold as health monitoring. Already implemented in the current narrative is the non-stop demonization of China, “guilty” of all things Covid-19-related. That is inherited from another tried and tested war game – the Red Dawn scheme.

Bout To Be Showtime In Kansas City

guardian |  In Kansas City’s poorest neighbourhoods, they wait and they watch.

The city’s most vulnerable residents wait for coronavirus to reveal itself as they watch its daily progression from the edges of the country to the heartland. But they face another wait too. For the money to run out, uncertain which of these two potential calamities will arrive first but dreading the day the two collide.

Chris Brown lost his job as a waiter as soon as Kansas City’s mayor ordered the closure of restaurants and bars. “I was lucky that I had a little money in my pocket when this happened. Not a lot. Maybe $100. But that’s more than a lot of people, especially in my industry. I know a lot of my comrades out there only had $20 in their pocket when the restaurant closed. I don’t know what they’re doing,” he said.

Until the end of last week, Brown and his wife, Alex Smith, still had a lifeline. Smith worked as a bartender at a hotel which remained open in a neighbouring county. But that closed on Friday and now the couple, both in their mid-40s, are down to the cash in their pockets with no savings and no health insurance.

“We took the little money we have and came down to get groceries so we at least had some food for the next few weeks,” said Brown outside the Save A Lot discount food store on Kansas City’s east side, one of the poorest parts of the city.

Coronavirus has been relatively slow to reach the sprawling plains of Missouri and Kansas, although deaths have been creeping up. But its impact is already felt among the hardest-up residents of Kansas City, which straddles the Missouri River dividing the two states. Both are reporting a spike in unemployment claims and they’re likely to go on rising with the Kansas City metro area under a stay-at-home order from Tuesday and more businesses closing.

Even when they were working, Brown and Smith earned only $2.15 an hour, the federal minimum wage for servers, plus tips.

resistance will not be futile at all....,

economist |  THE “hell cannons” of Aleppo pack a deadly punch. Cobbled together in Syria by militant groups fighting to overthrow the autocratic regime of Bashar al-Assad, they use an explosive charge at the bottom of a pipe to hurl a propane cylinder crammed with 40kg or more of explosives and shrapnel. A finned tail welded to the cylinder shields it from the launch blast and provides stability in flight. The Ahrar al-Sham brigade reckon the cannons can hit targets 1.5km away. Fuses detonate the cylinder upon impact or, using a timer, after it punches into a building. This is all the better to demolish several floors with a single strike.

The use of improvised weapons in conflict has a long and bloody history: from the Irish shillelagh, a walking stick that doubles as a club—especially effective when the knob at the top is loaded with lead—to the Molotov cocktail, as the glass petrol bombs the Finnish army hurled at Russian tanks during the second world war came to be known.

The modern equivalents are more high-tech and, like Aleppo’s hell cannons, far deadlier. This comes from a combination of more sophisticated and easily available “off-the-shelf” equipment, and the internet providing a ready medium to spread new weapon-making ideas. The upshot is a reshuffling of the cards in modern warfare, says Yiftah Shapir, a weapons expert at Tel Aviv University and a former lieutenant colonel in Israel’s air force. Any side that begins with a technological advantage will see it erode quickly as the underdogs improve their improvisation capabilities.

The ominous consequences have led America’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an arm of the Pentagon, to try to keep up with developments by soliciting worldwide for new ways to make weapons using commercially available materials and technologies. More than 20 experts are now reviewing hundreds of submissions. To better assess the risks, some of the most promising designs will be built as prototypes and tested. This could earn their inventors awards of up to $130,000.

hundreds of thousands to lose SNAP benefits...,

cbpp |  Across the country, food banks and other organizations that serve the needy are preparing for long lines as childless adults begin losing SNAP (formerly food stamps) benefits due to the return in over 20 states of a three-month time limit for able-bodied adults.  Federal law limits adults aged 18-49 who aren’t raising minor children to three months of SNAP out of every three years unless they’re working at least 20 hours a week or participating in a job training program at least 20 hours a week.  More than half a million people will lose SNAP over the course of the year due to the time limit.

The time limit is “going to increase hunger among some of the most vulnerable Mississippians,” says Matt Williams of the Mississippi Center for Justice.  “I think it will further stress service providers who are already trying to fill a gap in the available food assistance programs, and I think we will see their resources stretched to the max with increased demand.”  In Mississippi alone, 50,000 people may lose benefits this year due to the time limit, the state estimates.

In New York State, Erica Santiago of the Food Bank for Westchester predicts, “We're not going to run out of food, but it may mean that people get three days’ worth instead of seven days’ worth. . . .  This will also impact people who aren't losing their benefits — there's a trickle down effect.”

Under the time limit, people can lose benefits even if they are looking for and can’t find work, or if no spots are available in a job training program.  The time limit “was based on the assumption that there are work programs to help these people and there are no programs. They cost too much,” Lucy Potter of Greater Hartford Legal Aid in Connecticut says.

The time limit is especially difficult for people with barriers to work, such as limited education and skills.  Most childless adults aren’t eligible for other forms of government assistance, and their incomes while receiving SNAP average less than one-third of the poverty line.

it's the poverty stupid!!!

medicalexpress |  A six-year study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has added to the mounting evidence that growing up in severe poverty affects how children's brains develop, potentially putting them at a lifelong disadvantage.

"A lot of brain science data isn't really saying anything all that different than the behavioral and social science data that we've had for 20 to 30 years," Luby said. "But when you can show tangible brain change, it has a different impact on people and a different meaning. It just provides a level of tangible evidence."

That, too, is Pollak's take on the study.

"What this is doing is reframing the problem," he said. "Since President Johnson declared the War on Poverty, Americans have tended to look at poverty as a policy issue. ... But it also looks like it is a biomedical issue."

He likens the potential effect of poverty on children to lead paint - an environmental hazard that damaged children's brains.

"Now we certainly can begin looking at poverty that way, too," he said.

Research shows that early interventions, such as home visitation programs for families and preschool for children, are effective and have the potential to change lives.

That's because the brain has more "plasticity" early in life - it responds more quickly to changes in environment.

The studies on how poverty affects the development of children's brains are relatively new. Few existed a decade ago. But now more studies exist, and they are getting more attention in policy circles.

They suggest the need to invest in children, Wolfe said.

If society doesn't, she said, "they are worse off, and we are all worse off."

Pollak, too, stressed the potential long-term costs.

"Americans tend to really like to believe in this narrative that everyone here has a chance," he said. This kind of research suggests that we have some kids entering kindergarten at totally not a level playing field - with environments that are so impoverished and under-stimulated and nonconducive to healthy growth, we've got little 4-year-olds, 5-year-olds starting kindergarten already at an extreme disadvantage.

"So the data really runs counter to the fact that everyone in this country has a fair shot."

but I bet they got some clipboards though....,

WaPo |  Attention in the United States is squarely focused on containing the spread of the Ebola virus from the Dallas hospital ward where a patient with the disease died last week.

But across the Atlantic, the devastating effects of the outbreak continue. Liberia, one of the three West African countries at the heart of the Ebola epidemic, has been tragically ill-prepared to deal with the spread of the deadly virus. An inventory released by the country's health ministry this week shows how stark the situation is, beginning with Liberia's acute shortage of body bags.

vice news: the fight against ebola

The current Ebola outbreak in West Africa began in Guinea in December 2013. From there, it quickly spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone. Cases also appeared in Senegal and Nigeria, and a separate outbreak appeared in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Today, Liberia lies is at the center of the epidemic, with more than 3,000 cases of infection. About half of them have been fatal.

As President Barack Obama announced that he would be sending American military personnel to West Africa to help combat the epidemic, VICE News traveled to the Liberian capital of Monrovia to spend time with those on the front lines of the outbreak.

In Part 1, we meet confused and distressed people trying to receive treatment in the increasingly chaotic city, and speak to an ambulance driver doing his best to aid the sick.

Watch Part 2: 

the real price of a cup of tetley tea...,

guardian |  This article is the subject of a legal complaint made on behalf of Tata Global Beverages Limited.

Poverty pay on tea estates in Assam fuels a modern slave trade ensnaring thousands of young girls. A Guardian/Observer investigation follows the slave route from an estate owned by a consortium, including the owners of the best-selling Tetley brand, through to the homes of Delhi's booming middle classes, exposing the reality of the 21st-century slave trade

the kafala system

guardian |  A foreign worker can only come in to the Arab Gulf states through a kafeel (sponsor). However, the essence of the kafala system is the relationship binding employee to the employer, which has often been criticised as "slave-like".

The kafala directly contradicts the labour law. The raison d'être of the law is to bring about a balance, in terms of rights and obligations, between the employer and the employee, but the kafala puts far too much power in the hands of the employer/sponsor. The employer can dictate the recruitment process and working conditions. The paradox is that the kafala is not a law but a tradition that seems to have precedence over the labour law. This is at the root of abuses of workers' rights.

The sponsorship system has become a lucrative business. In its early incarnation in the 1930s, it was in the best tradition of Arab hospitality, but now unscrupulous kafeels exploit the system.

The main issue is that kafala restricts labour mobility. In fact, one could argue that it prohibits any mobility on part of the worker unless approved by the kafeel. If the kafeels are unwilling to let them go, workers cannot leave them for better employment. In fact, workers can even be victims of blackmail by kafeels: if they protest or question their terms of employment, kafeels can have them deported. Being in a precarious situation forces them to accept whatever terms and conditions are given to them.

The kafeel can also shift the financial burden on to the worker. The law says the kafeel is expected to pay for medical insurance and fees for employment and residence permits and the like. Workers, on the other hand, are not supposed to bear any of these expenses. However, kafeels and intermediaries such as recruitment agencies often charge such fees to foreign workers. Indemnities for delays in registration are also often billed to workers. Similarly, some kafeels partially withhold final payments to foreign workers to recover some of the recruitment costs. Also, many kafeels exploit the workers by only leasing their sponsorship against payments. Although kafeels behaving in this way remain a minority, their victims are in the tens of thousands.

The retention of passports and identity documents has, in many instances, led to forced labour situations. Under such conditions migrants can be forced to work in arduous conditions for longer hours than envisaged by the law, without overtime payments. They are often deprived of weekly rests, annual leaves or home leave. Many have even complained of harassment.

18 million u.s. households struggling to feed themselves

yahoo | Almost 18 million American homes struggled to find enough to eat in 2011, including 3.9 million homes with children, or 10 percent of all families with children, according to numbers released on Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Even worse off were single mothers and black and Latino households, the survey found.

As NPR notes, "People went hungry."

The survey tracked families who had some issues with finding enough food, dubbed "food insecure," and those deemed "very very food insecure," who lacked basic nutrition at some point during the year. The latter category includes some 6.8 million households nationwide in which adults skipped meals, couldn't afford balanced meals, and worried about having enough money to buy food several months out of the year.

In all, the "food insecure" represented 5.7 percent of American households. It's not much of a change compared with 2010, but it's 2 percent more—thousands of people more—since 1998.

europe's voters say NO to economic reality

whiskeyandgunpowder | “Europe fights back against austerity” was how The Daily Telegraph headlined its weekend election coverage. “Anti-austerity movements are gathering pace across Europe following political earthquakes in France and Greece. A total of 12 European governments have now been dismissed in three years.”

As the European welfare state is officially in its death-throes none of us should be surprised if political strife gets cranked up to eleven. I firmly expect that we will see much more of this in the future. While I can understand the anger of the electorate and sympathize with the sense of desperation and foreboding, I cannot, however, consider the electoral choices of the weekend particularly enlightened. They do not reflect a coherent, let alone intelligent strategy as the Daily Telegraph headline seems to imply.

If those who ‘won’ the election deliver on their promises, economic disintegration will only accelerate. What is being offered in terms of ‘solutions’ is a dangerous assortment of economic poisons, more suitable to describe the European disease than provide a recipe for stronger growth.

Recovery through early retirement and infrastructure spending? – C’mon. Nobody can take that seriously.

But it seems that just because this heap of economic stupidity can neatly be swept under the wide tent of ‘anti-austerity’, the commentariat seems somehow willing to believe in the wisdom of the crowds and look for some deeper insights here.

I guess the reason for this is that the economic ideologies that are now being strenuously interpreted into the election results rhyme with the economic prejudices of most commentators. They, too, believe that state bankruptcy is best to be ignored or not to be taken too seriously so that we can spend our way out of this mess.

For a long time media pundits have treated us to the perceived wisdom that economic growth can only come from the actions of the government. Only devaluation through euro-exit, inflation through more money printing and more government deficit-spending, preferably by the still credit-worthy Germans and then fiscally-transferred to the maxed-out Greeks, can revive the economy because only this can lift aggregate demand, which is the magic cure-all of economic problems.

What is lost on these commentators is that the European mess is nothing but the inevitable result of government-stipulated aggregate demand. Easy money funded the Spanish and Irish real estate booms and bankrupted their banks and by extension their governments. Easy money allowed Greece’s political class to go on a borrowing binge that has now bankrupted the country and lured large parts of the population into zero-productivity, soon-to-be-eliminated public sector jobs.

Do you still want the state to ‘stimulate’ the economy? Be careful what you wish for.

poverty and families in the victorian era

HiddenLives | The nineteenth century saw a huge growth in the population of Great Britain.

The reason for this increase is not altogether clear. Various ideas have been put forward; larger families; more children surviving infancy; people living longer; immigration, especially large numbers of immigrants coming from Ireland fleeing the potato famine and the unemployment situation in their own country.

By the end of the century there were three times more people living in Great Britain than at the beginning.

Growth of the cities
Although the population of the country as a whole was rising at an unprecedented rate, that of the towns and cities was increasing by leaps and bounds. This was due to the effects of the industrial revolution; people were flocking into the towns and cities in search of employment. For some it was also the call of the unknown, adventure and a better way of life.
The search for employment

Therefore all these factors – population explosion, immigration both foreign and domestic – added up and resulted in a scramble for any job available.

Large numbers of both skilled and unskilled people were looking for work, so wages were low, barely above subsistence level. If work dried up, or was seasonal, men were laid off, and because they had hardly enough to live on when they were in work, they had no savings to fall back on.

Child labour
Children were expected to help towards the family budget. They often worked long hours in dangerous jobs and in difficult situations for a very little wage.

For example, there were the climbing boys employed by the chimney sweeps; the little children who could scramble under machinery to retrieve cotton bobbins; boys and girls working down the coal mines, crawling through tunnels too narrow and low to take an adult. Some children worked as errand boys, crossing sweepers, shoe blacks, and they sold matches, flowers and other cheap goods.

The housing shortage
Low wages and the scramble for jobs meant that people needed to live near to where work was available. Time taken walking to and from work would extend an already long day beyond endurance.

Consequently available housing became scarce and therefore expensive, resulting in extremely overcrowded conditions.

Slum housing
All these problems were magnified in London where the population grew at a record rate. Large houses were turned into flats and tenements and the landlords who owned them, were not concerned about the upkeep or the condition of these dwellings.

In his book The Victorian underworld, Kellow Chesney gives a graphic description of the conditions in which many were living:

‘Hideous slums, some of them acres wide, some no more than crannies of obscure misery, make up a substantial part of the, metropolis … In big, once handsome houses, thirty or more people of all ages may inhabit a single room.

Overcrowding
Many people could not afford the rents that were being charged and so they rented out space in their room to one or two lodgers who paid between twopence and fourpence a day.

Great wealth and extreme poverty lived side by side because the tenements, slums, rookeries were only a stones throw from the large elegant houses of the rich.

The name ‘rookeries’ was given to these dwellings because of the way people lived without separate living accommodation for each family. The analogy being that whereas other birds appear to live in separate families, rooks do not. Neither did the very poor in the tenements of London.

working man's death

the rise of the adult student

The Atlantic | The quintessential American college student leaves home at 18 to live on a college campus for four years. We've historically defined "nontraditional" students as those over the age of twenty-four, those enrolled part time, and those who are financially independent. But today, the "typical" student is the exception.

There are currently 17.6 million undergraduates enrolled in American higher education. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that just fifteen percent of them attend four-year colleges and live on campus. Forty-three percent of them attend two-year institutions. Thirty-seven percent of undergraduates are enrolled part-time and thirty-two percent work full-time. Of those students enrolled in four-year institutions, just thirty-six percent actually graduate in four years.

The most significant shift is probably the massive growth in the adult student population in higher education. Thirty-eight percent of those enrolled in higher education are over the age of 25 and one-fourth are over the age of 30. The share of all students who are over age 25 is projected to increase another twenty-three percent by 2019.

The demands for degrees reflect this changed population. Slightly over half of today's students are seeking a "subbacalaureate" credential (i.e. a certificate, credential, or associate's degree). In 2008-09, postsecondary institutions conferred 806,000 certificates and 787,000 associate's degrees, or a total of about 1.59 million, as compared to 1.6 million bachelor's degrees. In 2008, more than half a million students were enrolled in a health sciences certificate program, making it the largest certificate program area. Another 173,000 students sought a certificate in manufacturing, construction, repair, and transportation. While public discourse often focuses on four-year degrees, these other credentials matter, a lot.

There are plenty of good jobs that don't require a four-year degree. After all, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that two-thirds of the labor force has less than a four-year degree, including nearly half of those in professional occupations and one-third of those in management roles. It pays for workers to earn these credentials; according to the BLS, that workers with an associate's degree earned $141 more per week, on average, than those whose highest degree is a high school diploma.

But subbacalaureate programs continue to be regarded as marginal in the press and the higher education mainstream. Universities turn their nose up at them. Policies and norms remain oriented towards "traditional" students. Rankings, awards, and honors go to institutions with great sports teams, prize-winning researchers, or elite student bodies--never to those that are helping nontraditional students master new skills and so that they can reenter the workforce, get promoted, or change careers.

roubini: karl marx was right

Video - Nouriel Roubini mainstreams a bit of the old doomerism.

IBT | There's an old axiom that goes "wise is the person who appreciates candor almost as much as good news" and with that as a guide, place the forthcoming decidedly in the category of candor.

Economist Nouriel "Dr. Doom" Roubini, the New York University professor who four years ago accurately predicted the global financial crisis, said one of economist Karl Marx's critiques of capitalism is playing itself out in the current global financial crisis.

Sees Marx's Critique Playing Itself Out Now
Marx, among other theories, argued that capitalism had an internal contradiction that would cyclically lead to crises, and that, at minimum, would place pressure on the economic system.

Companies, Roubini said, are motivated to minimize costs, to save and stockpile cash, but this leads to less money in the hands of employees, which means they have less money to spend and flow back to companies.

Now, in the current financial crisis, consumers, in addition to having less money to spend due to the above, are also motivated to minimize costs, to save and stockpile cash, magnifying the effect of less money flowing back to companies.

"Karl Marx had it right," Roubini said in an interview with wsj.com. "At some point capitalism can self-destroy itself. That's because you can not keep on shifting income from labor to capital without not having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand. We thought that markets work. They are not working. What's individually rational...is a self-destructive process."

Roubini also argues that the social uprisings in Egypt and in other Arab world countries, in Greece, and now in the United Kingdom, are economic in origin (primarily unemployment, but also, in the case of Egypt, due to the rising cost of living).

Further, the view from here argues that while no one should expect an 'imminent collapse' of capitalism, or even a collapse of the American version, corporate capitalism -- capitalism and free markets are much too nimble and capable of adapting for that -- to say that the current economic order is not experiencing a crisis would not be accurate.

the richer you are, the more 'right' decisions are made for you

TechnologyReview | Around 865 million people worldwide live on the daily equivalent of what 99 cents buys in the United States. To create effective aid programs for these people, it helps to grasp the nuances of life in extreme poverty. For instance, hunger does not necessarily drive the poor to obtain more food whenever they can; in India, they allot about 50 percent of their income to food and will resist spending more if it only means consuming larger quantities of the same bland grains they usually eat.

In financial matters, the poor often use microcredit in unexpected ways: some women in Hyderabad, India, take out small loans at 24 percent, then put the money into savings accounts that pay 4 percent. Receiving the high-interest loan compels them to cut costs enough to make this dubious transaction worthwhile.

"We are not rational, fully informed people," says Esther Duflo, PhD '99, professor of poverty alleviation and development economics. "That's true for us, and that's true for the poor."

Now, Duflo and economics professor Abhijit Banerjee have distilled their insights about global poverty into their first book together, Poor Economics.

As directors of MIT's Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), which they helped found in 2003, Banerjee and Duflo have become highly influential in development economics, which studies the world's poorest countries and recommends ways to spur growth. They are leading exponents of running randomized trials—field experiments—to see which programs are most effective and affordable. J-PAL brings the results to governments and nonprofit organizations.

One reason well-designed aid programs matter, the authors believe, is that the poor are often faced with an overwhelming number of difficult decisions—far more than the well-off must contend with. "The richer you are, the more 'right' decisions are made for you," Banerjee and Duflo write. Many of these decisions involve essentials we take for granted, such as the quality of drinking water. J-PAL-backed research has, among other things, laid the foundations for efforts that have inexpensively treated millions of African children for intestinal worms, improving their school attendance in the process.

Surprisingly, Banerjee never deeply explored development economics until he was an assistant professor at Harvard in the early 1990s. After designing a course on the subject there, he moved to MIT, where interest in development economics was soon on the rise. "That was very fortuitous," says Banerjee. One of his students was Duflo. "You could see that she had the ability to get a huge amount done and done right, very quickly," he says.

Since 2003, economists affiliated with J-PAL have conducted 267 research projects in 42 countries, and the lab now has offices on five continents. "It's exceeding expectations," Duflo says of the lab. "Our objective for J-PAL is to serve as a flagship for a larger global movement toward development economics projects."

another one of america's cities of broken dreams in the woods...,

DailyMail | In scenes reminiscent of the Great Depression these are the ramshackle homes of the desperate and destitute U.S. families who have set up their own 'Tent City' only an hour from Manhattan.

More than 50 homeless people have joined the community within New Jersey's forests as the economic crisis has wrecked their American dream.

And as politicians in Washington trade blows over their country's £8.8 trillion debt, the prospect of more souls joining this rag tag group grows by the day.

Building their own tarpaulin tents, Native American teepees and makeshift balsa wood homes, every one of the Tent City residents has lost their job.

These people have been reduced to living on handouts from the local church and friendly restaurants and the community is a sad look at troubles caused as the world's most powerful country struggles with its finances.

'We have been in and out of the camp for a year,' said ex-hotel worker Burt Haut, 43, who lives with his wife, ex-teacher Barbara, 48 in a tent styled like a teepee from the Old West.

'Our financial difficulties since the credit crisis three years ago have caused us to camp on public ground, at the back of churches and down the backs of closed down stores.

'We have had help from our friends and family, but we have run that well dry.

'We are trying to get back on our feet and with help from the camp leadership we hope to get back onto a social security scheme or help with some assisted housing.'

Ravaged by the loss of their jobs and their homes, the residents of Tent City struggle to get by without day-to-day luxuries that we take for granted such as food on the table and a roof over their heads.

Ex-minister Steve Brigham, 50, runs Tent City, which consists of a dirt road running through a two-acre encampment which has flowerpots laid out front of proud tents and homes.

Functioning as near to a normal town as possible, Tent City is governed by democratic rules agreed by all the residents.

They all must agree to no fighting, to clean the camp, to volunteer their time when they have it, and to most importantly keep the noise down after 10pm.

libya and the holy triumvirate

Video - Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich seek to defund Libya intervention.

KillingHope | Libya is engaged in a civil war. The United States and the European Union and NATO — The Holy Triumvirate — are intervening, bloodily, in a civil war. To overthrow Moammar Gaddafi. First The Holy Triumvirate spoke only of imposing a no-fly zone. After getting support from international bodies on that understanding they immediately began to wage war against Libyan military forces, and whoever was nearby, on a daily basis. In the world of commerce this is called "bait and switch".

Gaddafi's crime? He was never respectful enough of The Holy Triumvirate, which recognizes no higher power, and maneuvers the United Nations for its own purposes, depending on China and Russia to be as spineless and hypocritical as Barack Obama. The man the Triumvirate allows to replace Gaddafi will be more respectful.

So who are the good guys? The Libyan rebels, we're told. The ones who go around murdering and raping African blacks on the supposition that they're all mercenaries for Gaddafi. One or more of the victims may indeed have been members of a Libyan government military battalion; or may not have been. During the 1990s, in the name of pan-African unity, Gaddafi opened the borders to tens of thousands of sub-Saharan Africans to live and work in Libya. That, along with his earlier pan-Arab vision, did not win him points with The Holy Triumvirate. Corporate bosses have the same problem about their employees forming unions. Oh, and did I mention that Gaddafi is strongly anti-Zionist?

Does anyone know what kind of government the rebels would create? The Triumvirate has no idea. To what extent will the new government embody an Islamic influence as opposed to the present secular government? What jihadi forces might they unleash? (And these forces do indeed exist in eastern Libya, where the rebels are concentrated.) Will they do away with much of the welfare state that Gaddafi used his oil money to create? Will the state-dominated economy be privatized? Who will wind up owning Libya's oil? Will the new regime continue to invest Libyan oil revenues in sub-Saharan African development projects? Will they allow a US military base and NATO exercises? Will we find out before long that the "rebels" were instigated and armed by Holy Triumvirate intelligence services?

In the 1990s, Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia was guilty of "crimes" similar to Gaddafi's. His country was commonly referred to as "the last communists of Europe". The Holy Triumvirate bombed him, arrested him, and let him die in prison. The Libyan government, it should be noted, refers to itself as the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. American foreign policy is never far removed from the Cold War.

We must look closely at the no-fly zone set up for Iraq by the US and the UK (falsely claimed by them as being authorized by the United Nations) beginning in the early 1990s and lasting more than a decade. It was in actuality a license for very frequent bombing and killing of Iraqi citizens; softening up the country for the coming invasion. The no-fly zone-cum invasion force in Libya is killing people every day with no end in sight, softening up the country for regime change. Who in the universe can stand up to The Holy Triumvirate? Has the entire history of the world ever seen such power and such arrogance?

the right to economic development in the arab world

RWER | At this juncture in Arab history, there is an opportunity to be grasped. Unless there is a successful transition from the political to the social revolution in the Arab world, the sacrifice made by the Arab working classes will be betrayed. The following is a proposal to expose some of the previous aspects of development and economic performance in the Arab world with the aim to infuse the development debate with the idea of development as a human right. It need not be said, the present struggle is a struggle for rights. The idea of rights empowers people; it gives them a sense of self-affirmation. The language of rights establishes a framework for the allocation of resources. Without the rights rhetoric we will end up with a totally uncaring market system that will not solve our problems.

In the Arab world, economic policies are concentrated in the competence of the state. It is the efficiency and practicality of public policies that should be accountable and come under independent public scrutiny. The role of economic policy and, more specifically, fiscal and monetary policy is to find the appropriate regime that mediates disparate developments and puts interest back in the national and regional economies. Under the right to development rubric, economic growth should meet basic needs and not be a trickle down arrangement. Also, the Arab world is a world that is so interlocked with the global economy, such that, it would not be possible to lock in resources for development without international cooperation. The international community, comprising countries and institutions at the international level, has the responsibility to create a global environment conducive for development.

By virtue of their acceptance and commitment to the legal instruments, the members of the international community have the obligation to support effectively the efforts of Arab States that set for themselves the goal of realizing human rights, including the right to development, through trade, investment, financial assistance and technology transfer. Without this rudimentary cornerstone of an economic strategy designed to reduce poverty and unemployment, it is unlikely that any economic program of action can meet the basics of human rights, compensate working people for their suffering under the combined assault of neoliberalism and Arab autocracy and, generally, to secure the right to development.