Rolling Stone’s Advice to Millennials: Embrace Communism

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Photo Credit: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Photo Credit: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For

It’s a new year, but one thing hasn’t changed: The economy still blows. Five years after Wall Street crashed, America’s banker-gamblers have only gotten richer, while huge swaths of the country are still drowning in personal debt, tens of millions of Americans remain unemployed – and the new jobs being created are largely low-wage, sub-contracted, part-time grunt work.

Millennials have been especially hard-hit by the downturn, which is probably why so many people in this generation (like myself) regard capitalism with a level of suspicion that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. But that egalitarian impulse isn’t often accompanied by concrete proposals about how to get out of this catastrophe. Here are a few things we might want to start fighting for, pronto, if we want to grow old in a just, fair society, rather than the economic hellhole our parents have handed us.

1. Guaranteed Work for Everybody

Unemployment blows. The easiest and most direct solution is for the government to guarantee that everyone who wants to contribute productively to society is able to earn a decent living in the public sector. There are millions of people who want to work, and there’s tons of work that needs doing – it’s a no-brainer. And this idea isn’t as radical as it might sound: It’s similar to what the federal Works Progress Administration made possible during Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. vocally supported a public-sector job guarantee in the 1960s.

A job guarantee that paid a living wage would anchor prices, drive up conditions for workers at megacorporations like Walmart and McDonald’s, and target employment for the poor and long-term unemployed – people to whom conventional stimulus money rarely trickles all the way down. The program would automatically expand during private-sector downturns and contract during private-sector upswings, balancing out the business cycle and sending people from job to job, rather than job to unemployment, when times got tough.

Read more from this story HERE.

5 Ways the Liberal Obsession With Income Inequality Hurts the Poor

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Photo Credit: Townhall

Photo Credit: Townhall

After the last century, it shouldn’t even be controversial to assert that the more a nation focuses on income inequality, the more it hurts the poor. After all, there have been whole societies formed around the slogan Marx popularized, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” — and they’ve universally been lousy places to be poor. Would you rather be poor in America or Cuba, Vietnam or the old Soviet Union? If the question doesn’t answer itself, P.J. O’Rourke’s quotation about traveling to the Soviet Union with a gang of Communists should answer it for you, “These were people who believed everything about the Soviet Union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper.” Meanwhile, we live in a world where China has seen tremendous economic growth by embracing some of the capitalistic policies that made America a superpower while the Democrats are embracing some of the policies that led to hundreds of millions of Chinese living in huts on less than a dollar a day…

What liberals don’t realize or alternately, just don’t care about, is that their obsession with income inequality may make them feel good, but it actually hurts the poor in a number of ways.

1) The higher the government mandated minimum wage/living wage, the more people it prices out of jobs: When you force businesses to pay people more than they can return in value with their work, companies tend to respond either by hiring better quality people, replacing the jobs with automation, moving the posts overseas or by looking for opportunities to get rid of the positions entirely. The higher the wages and benefits the government insists on, the more stagnant it makes the labor market for the people who need to build their skills the most. If your goal were to deliberately put as many young, unskilled single mothers out of work as possible, the best politically feasible way to do it would be to jack the minimum wage up into the stratosphere.

2) It emphasizes making people more comfortable, not helping them succeed: There is no shame in taking any honest job, but you’re not supposed to make a living pressing the button that drops the fries into the grease at McDonald’s. If you work long enough at an entry level job to worry about raising the minimum wage, you’re failing your family, your society and yourself. Instead of encouraging minimum skill workers to demand that the government force businesses to give them more money than they’re currently worth, we should be encouraging people to build their skills and move up, move on or start their own business. Want poor people to be eligible for more education or training? Want to give them micro-loans? Want to make it easier for them to create small businesses? Those are policies that make poor Americans more valuable. That’s good for them and the country. On the other hand, trying to redistribute income ultimately brings everyone down, especially the poor Americans who lose their drive after becoming dependent on it.

Read more from this story HERE.

Ask People to Imagine American Life in 2050, You’ll Get Some Dreary Visions

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Photo Credit: Jay Westcott/POLITICO

Photo Credit: Jay Westcott/POLITICO

Whether they foresee runaway technology or runaway government, rampant poverty or vanishing morality, a majority of Americans predict a future worse than today.

Whites are particularly gloomy: Only 1 in 6 expects better times over the next four decades. Also notably pessimistic are middle-age and older people, those who earn midlevel incomes and Protestants, a new national poll finds.

“I really worry about my grandchildren, I do,” says 74-year-old Penny Trusty of Rockville, Md., a retired software designer and grandmother of five. “I worry about the lowering of morals and the corruption and the confusion that’s just raining down on them.”

Even groups with comparatively sunny outlooks — racial and ethnic minorities, the young and the nonreligious — are much more likely to say things will be the same or get worse than to predict a brighter future.

Read more from this story HERE.

Facebook Charged with Mining, Selling User Data in Class-Action Suit

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/dapd, Timur Emek

Photo Credit: AP Photo/dapd, Timur Emek

Facebook has been named in a class-action suit over allegations the social media site takes users’ private messages and scans them for potential advertising purposes.

The suit was filed by in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California this week.

Among the allegations, ZDNet reported: Facebook scans and monitors user messages that are supposed to be private, and then takes select content to generate profiles about online activity — which is then sold for profit to marketers and advertisers. Those advertisers then allegedly use the information to build and target ads specific to those users.

Read more from this story HERE.

NSA Won’t Say Whether it Spies On Congress

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Photo Credit: CNN

Photo Credit: CNN

Congress is just like everyone else. That’s the message the National Security Agency has for Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The independent senator from Vermont sent a letter to the agency Friday, asking whether it has or is “spying” on members of Congress and other elected American officials.

The NSA provided a preliminary response Saturday that said Congress has “the same privacy protections as all U.S. persons.”

“NSA’s authorities to collect signals intelligence data include procedures that protect the privacy of U.S. persons. Such protections are built into and cut across the entire process. Members of Congress have the same privacy protections as all U.S. persons,” said the agency in a statement obtained by CNN.

The response goes on to promise the agency will continue to work with Congress on the issues – without ever addressing the senator’s real question.

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Economist Richard Vedder: Federal Student Loans ‘Fuel Academic Arms Race’

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Photo Credit;: Mike Poresky /flickr

Photo Credit;: Mike Poresky /flickr

As combined student loan debts balloon to over $1 trillion, one economist believes enough is enough — the “tremendously explosive” student loan programs offered by the federal government need to go.

Ohio University economist and chair of Center for College Affordability and Productive Richard Vedder recommends that President Barack Obama and Congress work together to dismantle or greatly shrink the student loan programs that let young Americans rack up debt.

“I would go so far as to say that I think the federal government is more the problem rather than the solution,” Vedder told the Carolina Journal Radio during a Friday interview. “A lot of our problems… come from these tremendously explosive student loan programs and grant programs that the federal government provides.”

Giving 18-year-olds fresh from high school with no financial skills free reign to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars may not be the best course forward, Vedder said. Colleges flush with easy money spend it on administrative pay and luxury fitness centers, increasing tuition all the while.

Read more from this story HERE.

Britain’s Version of Tea Party Rocks Political System Across the Pond

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

The often stale British political system is being rocked by its very own Tea Party.

The UK Independence Party (UKIP), formed in 1993 opposing Britain’s entry into the European Union, failed to make an electoral dent for a long time. However UKIP has built up steam in recent years and is spearheading a seismic shift in the British political spectrum.

In this year’s local elections – the British version of midterms — UKIP took a stunning 23 percent of the vote, up from the 3.1 percent they won in the 2010 national election. Their leader, Nigel Farage, is buoyed by their recent success.

“We want to take back our country, we want to take back our government, and we want to take back our birthright,” Farage told FoxNews.com in forthright language rarely seen in British politics.

Farage has good reason to be confident of UKIP’s potential. Since he took the party’s helm for a second time in 2010, the party has been revitalized, capitalizing on dissatisfaction with the Conservative Party’s shift to the center under current Prime Minister David Cameron.

Read more from this story about Britain’s version of the tea party HERE.

‘Boomtown’ Lobbyists Want Amnesty in 2014 to Pad Profit Margins

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Photo Credit: Breitbart

Photo Credit: Breitbart

The lobbyists that make up Washington’s permanent political class in the country’s “Boomtown” are banking on comprehensive immigration reform in 2014 to pad their profit margins even during a time when the country is revolting against them.

According to a report in Politico, “Washington Inc.” continues to “hum along even as Congress failed to pass the kind of bills that lobbyists are paid top dollar by corporate clients and other special interests to influence.”

That is a testament to the “to the resilience of Washington — and the firms that have thrived in the economy around it” even as the country is still trying to pull itself out of a recession. Indeed, as Breitbart News has reported, 8 of the 13 wealthiest counties in the nation are in the Washington region.

And one of the biggest reasons for that is the money lobbyists are making on comprehensive immigration reform.

“Downtowners continue to point to immigration reform as an area where there will be a lot of K Street spending,” Politico writes. “The issue touches virtually every industry — and many of the biggest spenders are wealthy individuals like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and outgoing New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who rely on their personal fortunes and whose commitment to Washington is less affected by short-term economic projections.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Famed Moroccan Flutist Gets Rare Musical Instruments Destroyed by US Customs for Being ‘Ecological Threat’

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Photo Credit: Breitbart/Creative Commons

Photo Credit: Breitbart/Creative Commons

Boujemaa Razgui, a famed Moroccan flutist who regularly performs in Boston, was passing through New York’s John F. Kennedy airport on his way elsewhere packing eleven of his handmade Berber flutes he uses to perform. Mistaking them for bamboo, US Customs destroyed them.

Razgui’s flutes were in his luggage, which was taken out of his sight while he was transferring flights. He continued on his way to Boston from New York, and did not discover his flutes missing until he went home. When he called his airline, he was told to speak to Customs, who matter-of-factly notified him that all his flutes – which he was bringing to Boston to perform with – were destroyed. At no point during his time in New York was Razgui asked about the flutes or notified that they might be problematic.

According to Foreign Policy, which contacted US Customs, the agency will not apologize and believes that the flutes were destroyed for good reason – namely, that they were “an ecological threat.” “The fresh bamboo canes were seized and destroyed in accordance with established protocols to prevent the introduction of plant pathogens into the United States,” one official told the magazine, without indicating that the Customs officials knew what the flutes were when they were destroyed.

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Obama Administration Prohibited Veterans from Hearing Christmas Carols, Receiving Gifts

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Photo Credit: Daily Caller

The Obama administration’s Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) prohibited veterans from hearing Christmas carols or receiving gifts wrapped in Christmas-themed wrapping paper, prompting outrage from a congressional committee.

VA officials in Iowa City, Iowa told representatives of the American Legion that they could not hand out gifts to veterans wrapped in wrapping paper that featured the term “Merry Christmas.”

Additionally, the VA Medical Center in Augusta, Georgia — which treats veterans — banned Christmas carolers from singing Christmas songs with religious references in public areas.

Read more from this story HERE.