EFTA01207162.pdf

From: Gregory Brown To: undisclosed-recipients:; Bce: jeevacation@gmail.com Subject: Greg Brown's Weekend Reading and Other Things.. 07/05/2015 Date: Sun, 05 Jul 2015 09:44:45 +0000 Attachments: 1.5 Million Missing_Black Men_JUSTIN WOLFERS,DAVID LEONHARDT_&_ICEVI NJTJEAL17 NYT_APR_2(1„2015.docx; hieltdown_Part_2_-_Weeekly_Readings_- _July_5,2015.docx; Study_Finds Frozen Shrimp_Are Totally_Disgusting_July_5„2015.docx; The Class of_20153s_In_For_CRude_Awakening_On_Pay_Emily_Peck_Huff_Post_Ma y_1Z_2013.docx; The_Truth_About_the_Greek_Loan_Default_Dustin_Mineau_Daily_Kos_June_l ,2015.doc x; These_Economists Are_Calling_For An_End_To_Greece's_Austerity_Nightmare_Charolet _Alfred_TheWorldiostiune_2„2013.docx Inline-Images: image.png; image(1).png; image(2).png; image(3).png; image(4).png; image(5).png; image(6).png; image(7).png; image(8).png; image(9).png; image(10).png; image(11).png; image(12).png; image(13).png; image(14).png; image(15).png; image(16).png; image(17).png; image(18).png; image(19).png; image(20).png; image(21).png; image(22).png; image(23).png; image(24).png; image(25).png; image(26).png; image(27).png DEAR FRIEND WHAT DOES GUN VIOLENCE REALLY COST? A SPECIAL lintSTICATIOI BY MAAS MIK JULIA LURIE. JAtim LEE. AND JAMES WEST. USED ON SEARCH BY IN MIL ER I recently read an Article in the May/June issue of Mother Jones by Carlos Javier Ortiz — What Does Gun Violence Really Cost? - and the costs are austounding. The article said that total cost to American taxpayers is $229 billion a year. And the price of one muder is extimated to be $441, 000 or more than $700 for every man, woman and chid in the country and there are 32 homicides every EFTA01207162 day. But none of these numbers include the personal cost and tradgy of the victims of gun violence which include the collateral damage of broken homes, drug addiction, poverty and dispare and as one vicim explained said, "being disabled is expensive." Jennifer Longdon: $40,000 for wheelchair-related modifications to her home Antonius Wiriadjaja; $169,000 for medical care, physical therapy, and counseling Kamari Ridgle: $1.5 million for medical care, including a $25,000 medevac ride Philip Russo: $83,000 in lost household income Pamela Bosley: $23,500 in medical care and counseling for family BJ Ayers: $35,000 in state-funded emergency care Caheri Gutierrez: $120,000 for hospitalization and reconstructive surgeries Paris Brown: $10,000 for a year of grief counseling The story follows the shoot of Jennifer Longdon and her fiance, David Rueckert on a mild, crystal clear desert evening on November 15, 2004, headed out to grab some carnitas tortas from a nearby taqueria. They were joking and chatting about wedding plans — the local Japanese garden seemed perfect — as Rueckert turned their pickup into the parking lot of a strip mall in suburban north Phoenix. A red truck with oversize tires and tinted windows sideswiped theirs, and as they stopped to get out, Rueckert's window exploded. He told Longdon to get down and reached for the handgun he had inside a cooler on the cab floor. As he threw the truck into gear, there were two more shots. His words turned to gibberish and he slumped forward, his foot on the gas. A bullet hit Longdon's back like a bolt of lightning, her whole body a live wire as they accelerated toward the row of palm trees in the concrete divider. Half of her ribs were shattered. Her lungs had collapsed and were filling with blood. As the ambulance screamed toward the hospital, Longdon, an avid scuba diver, clawed at the oxygen mask. She kept trying to tell them: "My regulator isn't working. My regulator isn't working." The EMT held her hand as she faded in and out. She was barely hanging on as the ER doctor prepared to insert a tube through her rib cage. "I'm reallyfast," he assured her, "and I'm going to do this as quickly as I can." As the nursing staff held her down, Longdon heard a dog wailing in the corner of the room. How could they allow a dog into this sterile place and let it howl like that? "The last thing I remember was realizing EFTA01207163 that it wasn't a dog," she recalls. "It was me." A couple of days into what would become her five- month hospital stay, Longdon was lying with her back to the door when a doctor came in. She didn't see his face when he calmly told her the news: She was a T-4 paraplegic, no longer able to move her body from the middle of her chest down. Rueckert had also survived, but a bullet through his brain left him profoundly cognitively impaired and in need of permanent round-the-clock care. Longdon didn't know it yet, but she was also facing financial ruin. Shortly after the shooting, her health insurance provider found a way to drop her coverage based on a preexisting condition. She would be hospitalized three more times in quick succession, twice for infections and once for a broken bone; all told, the bills would approach $i million in the first year alone. Longdon was forced to file for personal bankruptcy — a stinging humiliation for someone who had earned about $80,000 a year working in the software industry and building a massage therapy practice on the side. "I'd never not paid a bill on time before that," Longdon told Ortiz. Longdon didn't know it yet, but she was also facing financial ruin. Shortly after the shooting, her health insurance provider found a way to drop her coverage based on a preexisting condition. She would be hospitalized three more times in quick succession, twice for infections and once for a broken bone; all told, the bills would approach $1 million in the first year alone. Longdon was forced to file for personal bankruptcy — a stinging humiliation for someone who had earned about $80,000 a year working in the software industry and building a massage therapy practice on the side. When asked to try to add it all up — the hospital bills, the countless hours of physical therapy, the trauma counseling, the in-home care, the wheelchairs, the customized van, her lost income—she let out a sharp laugh. Longdon's tearful' response was, "Please don't make me cry." She pondered the numbers for a long moment. "I don't know, maybe $5 million?" She started the engine and used a lever next to the steering wheel to accelerate back toward the main road. Most of Longdon's medical bills have been covered through a combination of Medicaid and Medicare. Her income since the shooting has been primarily from Social Security Disability Insurance, which pays her about $2,000 a month. It has amounted to about a quarter million dollars over the past 10 years, though that's barely been enough to keep her in her small house, which required extensive EFTA01207164 modifications just so she could wheel herself through the front door, take a shower, or make a bowl of ramen for dinner. HOW MUCH DOES gun violence cost our country? It's a question that Mother Jones says it has been looking at ever since the 2012 mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, left 58 injured and 12 dead. How much care would the survivors and the victims' families need? What would be the effects on the broader community, and how far out would those costs ripple? As we've continued to investigate gun violence, one of our more startling discoveries is that nobody really knows. Gun violence costs more than $700 per American a year. We spend more on it than on obesity, and almost as much as we spend on Medicaid. C12 / ceeetednI alSer. li denim iima i. " .. *ammo Ittaiblies MOS= Jennifer Longdon was one of at least 750,000 Americans injured by gunshots over the last decade, and she was lucky not to be one of the more than 320,000 killed. Each year more than 11,000 people are murdered with a firearm, and more than 20,000 others commit suicide using one. Hundreds of children die annually in gun homicides, and each week seems to bring news of another toddler accidentally shooting himself or a sibling with an unsecured gun. And perhaps most disturbingly, even as violent crime overall has declined steadily in recent years, rates of gun injury and death are climbing (up la and 4 percent since 2011) and mass shootings have been on the rise. Yet, there is no definitive assessment of the costs for victims, their families, their employers, and the rest of us — including the major sums associated with criminal justice, long-term health care, and security and prevention. Our media is saturated with gun carnage practically 24/7. So why is the question of what we all pay for it barely part of the conversation? A top public health expert describes the chill this way: "Do you want to do gun research? Because you're going to get attacked. No one is attacking us when we do heart disease." Nobody, save perhaps for the hardcore gun lobby, doubts that gun violence is a serious problem. In an editorial in the April 7 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, a team of doctors wrote: "It does not matter whether we believe that guns kill people or that people kill people with guns—the result is the same: a public health crisis." EFTA01207165 Solving a crisis, as any expert will tell you, begins with data. That's why the US government over the years has assessed the broad economic toll of a variety of major problems. Motor vehicle crashes: Using statistical models to estimate a range of costs both tangible and more abstract—from property damage and traffic congestion to physical pain and lost quality of life — the Department of Transportation (DOT) published a 3oo-page study estimating the "total value of societal harm" from this problem in 2010 at $871 billion. Similar research has been produced by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on the impact of air pollution, by the Department of Health and Human Services on the costs of domestic violence, and so on. But the government has mostly been mute on the economic toll of gun violence. HHS has assessed firearm-related hospitalizations, but its data is incomplete because some states don't require hospitals to track gunshot injuries among the larger pool of patients treated for open wounds. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has also periodically made estimates using hospital data, but based on narrow sample sizes and covering only the medical and lost-work costs of gun victims. Why the lack of solid data? A prime reason is that the National Rifle Association and other influential gun rights advocates have long pressured political leaders to shut down research related to firearms. The Annals of Internal Medicine editorial detailed this "suppression of science": Two years ago, we called on physicians to focus on the public health threat of guns. The profession's relative silence was disturbing but in part explicable by our inability to study the problem. Political forces had effectively banned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other scientific agencies from funding research on gun-related injury and death. The ban worked: A recent systematic review of studies evaluating access to guns and its association with suicide and homicide identified no relevant studies published since 2005. An executive order in 2013 from President Obama sought to free up the CDC via a new budget, but the purse strings remain in the grip of Congress, many of whose members have seen their campaigns backed by six- and even seven-figure sums from the NRA. "Compounding the lack of research funding," the doctors added, "is the fear among some researchers that studying guns will make them political targets and threaten their future funding even for unrelated topics." To begin to get a grasp on the economic toll, Mother Jones turned to Ted Miller at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, an independent nonprofit that studies public health, education, and safety issues. Miller has been one of the few researchers to delve deeply into guns, going back to the late 1980s when he began analyzing societal costs from violence, injury, and substance abuse, as well as the savings from prevention. Most of his 3o-plus years of research has been funded by government grants and contracts; his work on guns in recent years has either been tucked into broader projects or done on the side. "I never take positions on legislation," he notes. "Instead, I provide numbers to inform decision making." EFTA01207166  GUN CASUALTIES, 2012 ■ Death., Homicide and assault Suicide and attempted suicide PI= Accidental Police shootings 10,000 20,000 30,000 40,000 50,000 60,000 70,000 Miller's approach looks at two categories of costs. The first is direct: Every time a bullet hits somebody, expenses can include emergency services, police investigations, and long-term medical and mental- health care, as well as court and prison costs. About 87 percent of these costs fall on taxpayers. The second category consists of indirect costs: Factors here include lost income, losses to employers, and impact on quality of life, which Miller bases on amounts that juries award for pain and suffering to victims of wrongful injury and death. In collaboration with Miller, Mother Jones crunched data from 2012 and found that the annual cost of gun violence in America exceeds $229 billion. Direct costs account for $8.6 billion—including long- term prison costs for people who commit assault and homicide using guns, which at $5.2 billion a year is the largest direct expense. Even before accounting for the more intangible costs of the violence, in other words, the average cost to taxpayers for a single gun homicide in America is nearly $400,000. And we pay for 32 of them every single day. Indirect costs amount to at least $221 billion, about $169 billion of which comes from what researchers consider to be the impact on victims' quality of life. Victims' lost wages, which account for $49 billion annually, are the other major factor. Miller's calculation for indirect costs, based on jury awards, values the average "statistical life" harmed by gun violence at about $6.2 million. That's toward the lower end of the range for this analytical method, which is used widely by industry and government. (The EPA, for example, currently values a statistical life at $7.9 million, and the DOT uses $9.2 million.) Then there are the costs that the available research doesn't capture at all. What about the trauma to entire communities, whether from mass shootings or chronic street violence? What about the steep societal cost of fear, which stunts economic development and provokes major spending on security and prevention? "This is what big-city mayors worry about," says Duke University economist Philip Cook, who coauthored a study 16 years ago that asked people how much they'd be willing to pay to reduce gun violence where they live. "How can Camden get out of the profound slump it's in? The first answer has to be, We've got to do something about the gun violence."' EFTA01207167  Morethan JI 80% Guns are used In 70% of homicides and more than of suicide attempts in the United States. with a gun are successful. Each gun death averages about S6 MILLION In total costs. Each gun Injury requiring hospitalization costs about $583,000. The fallout from mass shootings, which have been on the rise in recent years, includes outsize financial impact. Legal proceedings for the Aurora movie theater killer, for example, reached $5.5 million before the trial even got underway this spring, including expenses related to the pool of 9,000 prospective jurors called for the case. Most Americans probably don't even recall a less lethal rampage that took place just a few months after the Aurora tragedy, at the Clackamas Town Center near Portland, Oregon. When a gunman killed two people, wounded another, and took his own life at the shopping complex in December 2O12, more than 150 officers from at least 13 local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies responded — an investigation that lasted more than three months and culminated in a report nearly 1,000 pages long. To calm the public, make repairs, and beef up security, the 1.5-million-square-foot mall shut down for three days during the height of the holiday shopping season, depriving 188 retail businesses of revenue. Since the mass shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, the federal government has doled out at least $811 million to help school districts hire security guards, including $45 million since 2O first- graders and six adults were massacred at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. That sum doesn't account for spending at the state and local level; according to the trade magazine Campus Safety, approximately 90 percent of American school systems have made security enhancements since Sandy Hook. Many have worked with law enforcement agencies to conduct active- shooter drills. Companies are marketing "bulletproof' backpacks and other defensive gear for children. A Massachusetts school recently tested an "active-shooter detection system" that costs as much as $100,000 and uses technology also deployed in war zones. One research company recently projected that by 2017, school security systems will be a $5-billion-a-year industry. Today there is a epidemic of gun violence and something has to be done. We live in a coutry where less than ten American contracted Ebola and only two deaths, yet there was a public outcry by both our political leaders and the media. So why after 750,000 people injured by gun violence and more than 32,000 deaths over the past decade, costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars a year and there is no public outcry or serious efforts by our political leaders? I don't care about emails and who said what about Libya, especially when we have an epidemic here in America and no one seems to care. All based on an article in Mother Jones which I invite you to download and read. How Can People Really Afford This EFTA01207168 Like almost every major metropolitan area, the city of Washington, D.C. and surrounding suburbs housing is becoming almost unaffordable for the Poor and a challenge for many Middle Class families. Nowhere is this more evident than the Nation's Capital where the District's supply of low-cost rental apartments has continued to plummet in recent years, putting housing out of reach for a greater share of low-wage earners, according to a study by a D.C. think tank. The number of apartments renting for less than $800 fell about 42 percent, from more than 57,700 in 2002 to 33,40o in 2013, according to an analysis of census data by the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, which advocates for low- and moderate- income city residents. And remember a one-bedroom apartment is sort of a starter home for a single person or couple. A 2012 study by the institute found a 51 percent drop in low-cost units in the decade that ended in 2010. The institute's 2012 report had a profound effect on politics in the District, contributing to a new focus on affordable housing under then-Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D). The issue also resonated in last year's mayoral race, with Muriel E. Bowser (D), the eventual winner, contending that the findings showed that Gray had been too slow to respond to rising income inequality. Now, the institute's latest findings appear to present challenges for Bowser. The report concludes that the nation's capital has almost no apartments left on the open market that rent for less than $800 a month. The number of such units nearly matches the city's stock of public and heavily subsidized housing, the institute found, meaning that, in effect, only those receiving public assistance are renting for less than $800 a month. EFTA01207169  Renter-Occupied Housing Units by Gross Rent (constant 2012 5) Stitelle Mei IIII $1.000 to $1.499 $930 to $999 • $700 to $799 SSW to 3699 Under $500 175k 15C4 1255 102k 75k 5.2k 25k 04 200$ 2006 2007 203G 2009 2010 2011 2012 Svc. Ana enCe•sseTlwr, 4. • uteAmemf himetWaiteh OC The $800-a-month figure represents about 4o percent of the income of a family of four at the poverty line — $23,800 annually. The lack of available housing extends into higher brackets, with the stock of units renting for between $800 and $1,OOO a month also dropping precipitously, the institute found. "There is virtually no inexpensive housing left in D.C.'s private market,"said Wes Rivers, a policy analyst at the institute. "Without housing assistance, manyfamilies have no choke but to devote most of their incomefor rent." The report may help explain the District's sharp rise in family homelessness over the past two years. More than boo families are living in the District's dilapidated shelter on the former D.C. General Hospital campus in Southeast Washington or in motel rooms paid for by the city. The majority are headed by young, single mothers. Some hold part-time or full-time jobs but have told city officials of living for months or years with friends or relatives before wearing out their welcome. Last year, Gray's administration estimated that about 5,OOO families in similar situations teeter on the edge of homelessness in the District. Median rent for one-bedroom apartment San Francisco 3,060 New York 3 000 Boston 2.300 D.0 2 000 Oakland 1.980 San Jose 1.900 Los Angeles 1.760 Miami 1.750 Chicago 1.670 Seattle 1,630 The institute concluded that a large part of the problem is attributable to income stagnation in low- wage jobs over the past decade. As rents rose, average incomes for the bottom 4o percent of renters did not increase at all. The report warned that the trend would continue to produce poor outcomes for the EFTA01207170 city's most vulnerable residents. "Unstable and unhealthy housing puts stress on families that makes it hard for children to focus at school and for parents to keep a job," Rivers said. Bowser has pledged to spend $100 million a year on affordable housing. But turning the trend around, she has warned, will take years. And although $2,000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment may seem expensive to most Americans it is cheap compared to the $3,000 in New York or $3,460 per month which is the median rent for a comparable apartment in San Francisco. In Los Angeles where I live there is a building boom with landlords charging from $2,200 to $3,600 per month for a newly built one-bedroom in Downtown LA, West Hollywood and Santa Monica. And in New York where I use to live a two-bedroom apartment can run anywhere from $5,000 to $12,000 and more for an apartment. As a result the people who least can afford have to move further and further out of town and it's not unusual for them to have 90 minute commutes each way to work. We need affordable housing for these people and if the private sector can't supply it, then we need the government to step in. The good news is that in certain cities like Washington, D.C. the market for "guppy housing" is softening. Hopefully this will slow down the destruction of low-end cost housing by developers who envision replacing them higher rentals and condo properties. ****** PASSPORT INDEX Web Link: http://www.passportindex.org/index.php Passport Index is an interactive tool, which collects, displays and ranks the passports of the world. The above site allows you to explore the world's passports on a map, by country name, by Passport Power Rank and even by the color of their cover. Visa Free Score Passports accumulate points for each visa free country that their holders can visit without a visa, or they can obtain a visa on arrival. Passport Power Rank EFTA01207171 Passports are ranked based on their Visa Free Score. The higher the Visa Free Score, the better the Passport Power Rank. Methodology The country list is based on the 193 UN member countries and 6 territories (Macao, Kosovo, etc.) for a total of 199. Territories annexed to other countries such as Norfolk Island, French Polynesia, etc. are excluded. Data is based on IATA's Timaticweb platform as well as other sources. Please feel free to explore and when you do most of you will understand how valuable and convenient it is to have one of the passports that score #1 or dose. ****** The Class Of 2015 Is In For A Rude Awakening On Pay Only 15% of this year's 2015 grads expect to earn $25,000 a year or less In their first Job, while that Is the amount that almost three times as many recent 2013/2014 grads (41%) earn 2015 Grads: What annual salary do you expect to WOWS In your first ;oh after graduation? 2013/2014 Grads: What is your currant annual salary? Current Annual Salary 2 Salary Exotstatkill si • $10.00) 26% $19.001 12000) 9x 1514 /. 125 C01 $20.CCO Sam. 13% ODOM • $35.070 1211 $35001 • $40.050 er m l 12% S40201 440003 r .0% $4,001-130.c, a. trey swisroisse) $50001.$71.00 • r% •201Y2014 0.0110) S $00001 • $03.0.70 II 4e $90.0), S.25.0:0 !IA 3.4 025.031 . owe*, l i r % owlet elan $250.0:0 11 U70.4 kt$0, 55.0 a vccer.ew .0* MN I, Sate* /00,01..re2015 Cape Gradate Encben•re Sony Seas. MI 2110/2014 Oracle Limp U/Weafined Stbee orldtlilliOn and M 2015U.S rola, COPr(f. C 2015 Attenlin Mpt MS'S, 2 Leaving college for the "real world" can be a jarring experience for any new graduate. And if a new survey is any indication, a particularly unpleasant surprise awaits the bright-eyed, fresh-faced class of 2015 when they get those first paychecks. What new graduates expect to earn in their first job is pretty different from what grads of 2014 and 2013 have actually been making, according to a survey released Tuesday by the consulting firm Accenture. The survey found that while just 15 percent of the class of 2015 expects to make $25,000 or less after graduation, a stunning 41 percent of the classes of 2014 and 2013 is earning in that range. Nearly half EFTA01207172 of the class of 2015 said they expect to make $40,000 or more annually in their first job, according to the survey. Only a quarter of the classes of 2014 and 2013 earns that much. "They believe they've better prepared themselves and that they should command a higher salary," said Katherine LaVelle, a managing director at Accenture Strategy who worked on the study. LaVelle notes that 21 percent of the classes of 2013/14 work part-time either by choice or because those are the jobs they could find. "So I would expect that the average salary for those working full- time is likely higher. It's too early to tell where this class might fall in terms of salary." Accenture polled 1,002 U.S. students graduating college in 2015 and 1,001 graduates from 2013 and 2014. The survey was conducted online in March; and this is the third year Accenture has done it. The good news is that class of 2015 is better prepared for the job market compared to its predecessors, said LaVelle. Accenture's study found that 72 percent of the class of 2015 held internships while in school, up from 65 percent of the graduating class the year before. Eighty-two percent of this year's graduates said they considered the availability of jobs before deciding on a major, up from 75 percent of the class of 2014 and 69 percent of the class of 2013. And there was a slight uptick in graduates who majored in science, tech, engineering and math -- the so-called STEM fields -- degrees that are known to earn graduates a premium on pay. Twenty-eight percent of the class of 2015 majored in STEM, up from 26 percent for the classes of 2013/2014. These are young adults who grew up amid the financial crisis and entered college as the recovery kicked into gear. "It makes perfect sense that they did their homework," said LaVelle. Job prospects for college graduates have been pretty terrible for a long time, said Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. The average young college graduate, between the ages of 21 and 24, makes just under $18/hour, or $36,000 a year, according to new data that EPI is set to release later this month. As an average, that figure is probably skewed a little high, said Bivens. Since 2000, grads have actually seen their pay fall from $18.41 an hour to $17.94, according to the new EPI data. A lot of college graduates wind up "underemployed" in jobs that don't require a degree, said Bivens. The unemployment rate for young college graduates was 8.5 percent, according to a 2014 report from EPI, but the underemployment rate was nearly double that. "There's a reason there's a stereotype of college grads working as baristas in coffee shops," he said. Indeed, 49 percent of graduates from 2013 and 2014 consider themselves "underemployed," according to Accenture's latest study. Meanwhile, the class of 2015 has the highest-ever levels of student loan debt, according to data published in the Wall Street Journal last week. The average amount a 2015 grad will have to pay back is $35,000. More than 70 percent of this crop of grads took out loans to pay for school. ****** Why Isn't Anyone Blaming The Bankers? EFTA01207173  By the time that you have read this, Greeks will have voted on a national referendum the latest proposed bailout deal with the International Monetary Fund. Creditors are insisting that Greece implement spending cuts and tax increases in order to seal a new agreement on bailout funds. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras says these demands, along with the dire warnings about Greece's future in the eurozone, constitute "blackmail" against his government, which was elected in January on an anti-austerity platform. As the drama plays out, economists and political analysts are trading theories about what went wrong and who is to blame. For some, Greece's government has presided for too long over irresponsible economic policies, and is now playing a game of political brinkmanship to avoid the day of reckoning for its huge debts. Others say the international creditors are placing unreasonable demands on Greece after it has endured years of painful austerity as a condition for international loans. The events surrounding Greece's default is the culmination of everything wrong with the world order today: An incorrect view of how modem currency works; a cultish adherence to debt repayment, a political order that puts the interests of international creditors ahead of ordinary workers, and a complete inability for the international power elite to admit they are wrong. Of all the things that are wrong, I think the most perverse is the cultish attitude towards debt repayment. Greece has no ability to pay back its debt. For the last 5 years, it has agreed to almost every cut in government spending the E.U. and IMF have insisted on. It has raised its retirement age by over a decade to 67. It has continually increased taxes. And yet, when none of these worked, the elite demanded more, more, and more. Never considering that it's time to declare bankruptcy and start over. Despite 5 years of making things worse, The IMF, E.U. and World Bank continue to hold to their same old prescriptions: Cut government services to the poor, cut health care spending, raise taxes on labor, and cut taxes on capital. That's right, you read that last part correctly. As they insist on raising sales taxes - they call it VAT or Value-added-tax(the most regressive tax in modem democracies), they have insisted on Greece cutting corporate taxes. The elite adhere to the idea of neoliberalism. That if the country quits taxing capital and investment and moves taxes to a sales tax, at the same time they cut welfare then the country will prosper, tax revenues will go up, and the budget will be balanced. EFTA01207174  105 Real gross domestic product UK (1 02008=100) *Appal 70 2000 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 The Greek economy has been battered by years of recession. The country's gross domestic product dropped nearly 3o percent, from $354 billion in 2008 to $242 billion in 2013, according to the World Bank data. The economic downturn caused a huge retraction in employment. Entrepreneurship group Endeavor Greece estimates that Greece lost 1 million jobs in six years, primarily in construction, manufacturing and retail. As CNBC points out, this is a staggering number in a country whose entire population is just 11 million. Greece now has the highest unemployment rate in the European Union. The latest figures from the EU statistics agency put the rate at 25.6 percent, more than double the average eurozone unemployment rate of 11.1 percent. These staggering levels of joblessness developed in just a few years. In 2008, before the recession hit, Greece's unemployment rate was 7.8 percent. Greece also has the second-highest youth unemployment rate in the European Union, just under that of Spain. Latest EU statistics show 49.7 percent of Greeks ages 15 to 24 are unemployed. In 2008, the figure was 21.9 percent. The dire economic situation has created a massive brain drain, with many young, educated Greeks seeking employment abroad. Over 200,000 people have left Greece -- mainly for the UK and Germany -- over the past five years, according to Endeavor Greece. "Greece doesn't allow you to progress," 34-year-old Greek aesthetician Cannella Kontou told The Guardian. "You can't even begin to think of having a family or achieving things that elsewhere in Europe would be considered totally natural." Greece is the only European country where the minimum wage has dropped. As part of the bailout deal, the Greek government in 2012 slashed the minimum wage by around 20 percent and froze public sector salaries. Greece is the only European country where the minimum wage has decreased since 2008, according to the EU statistics agency. Syriza campaigned for election on a pledge to bring the monthly wage back up to pre-austerity levels, around 750 euros ($835), but had to postpone the move under pressure from international creditors. As Greece tried to dramatically cut down its public sector, tens of thousands of Greeks took up offers of early retirement, adding more pressure to Greece's overwhelmed pension system. Greece was already struggling to pay pensions to its large older population -- some 20 percent of Greece is over 65 years old. Meanwhile, Greece's pension funds lost billions of euros when the country restructured its debt in 2012. Some pensions have been cut down by as much as 48 percent, the New York Times reported. Finally homelessness is soaring as one non-profit estimated that homelessness in Greece increased by EFTA01207175 25 percent in just 2009. One Greek minister called them the "new homeless" -- people who sleep on the streets because of financial ruin rather than social problems, the Daily Beast reported. Today's Greece national debt is C 342 billion ($379 billion), more than double what it was 15 years ago and more than 10 times what is was in 1990. The deal that the referendum is actually a restructuring of payments, whereby the IMF, European Central Bank and European Commission will give Greece money to bail out its international creditors who have been giving money to Greece and other counties like heron dealers building a customer base. And Greece is not alone as the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico has the population of Oklahoma and a gross domestic product smaller than Kansas, has more debt, $72 billion, than any U.S. state government except California and New York. Like consumers using one credit card to pay off another, Puerto Rico and Greece have been borrowing to pay their debts as they came due. And like Greece newly elected Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, last month Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla said the jig was up: The island commonwealth's debt could not be paid. Padilla said the island would develop a debt-restructuring plan to delay payments by "a number of years" by Aug. 30. Market reaction was swift — prices on Puerto Rico's newest general obligation bonds sank to record lows. As Puerto Rico's credit ratings have eroded, it has turned to hedge funds, distressed-debt firms and corporate high-yield funds to lend it money. Mounting Debt Puerto Rico's gross public debt $80 billion 11 60 40 20 0 2003 2004 2005 2008 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 Puerto Rico's plight also affects most people with a mutual fund invested in the municipal bond market. Unlike the bonds of most states and municipalities, Puerto Rico's are exempt from local, state and federal taxes everywhere in the U.S. As a result, they are held by 52 percent of open-end muni funds, according to Morningstar Inc. The competitive advantage made it easy for Puerto Rico to double its debt in 10 years by selling bonds to plug annual budget deficits and pay for operating expenses — the combination that brought New York City to the brink of bankruptcy in the 1970s. Unable to pay off its debts last year creditors gave Puerto Rico $2 billion more. Why.... But back to Greece because many people over simplify the problem by suggesting that the country has "lived beyond its means" - you see that attitude in many non-partisan business reports on the issue. Thus trying to frame the whole thing as a morality play and those lazy-ass Greeks are getting what's coming to them. This is a complete misunderstanding of currency and a reduction of a complex issue into willful ignorance. They think that well if Greece is in debt, they just need to do what everyone else does: increase revenue and cut spending. EFTA01207176 First of all they can't. Believing that austerity increases revenue is wishful thinking. Also by doing so it raises unemployment, and often puts the entire country's economy into a tailspin... which results in lower, not higher revenue. Countries who accumulate too much debt that they can't pay it, default. A country cannot default without causing an entire economic shit-storm. In addition, the E.U., IMF, and World Bank make it as hard as possible on countries that consider default by trying to cut all future financial ties. Rather than default, the usual way for a nation to deal with a debt problem is to devalue its currency. What this means is that their currency is worth less vs other currencies(like U.S. dollars vs Mexican Peso) Either "naturally" by letting the currency exchanges happen naturally(this is what most countries do) or they do it explicitly if they have a "fixed exchange". (Few countries have a "fixed exchange" where they declare something like they'll trade 7 lira for 1 American dollar or .oi oz of gold, but if they do and they have a debt deficit issue, the can just decrease the exchange) Unfortunately, Greece cannot do that. Greece doesn't control their own currency the way other nations do. They use the Euro. Therefore, bankruptcy or accepting the terms of their new lender masters (IMF, World Bank, and E.U.) are their only options. And since 5 years of being at their mercy hasn't resolved the issue, you can now understand why they chose default. With 25% unemployment, a welfare state that has been gutted in 5 years, and taxes higher than ever, what choice did they have? And as things have gotten worse there has been a brain drain with the young best and brightest leaving for opportunities elsewhere. There is plenty of blame to go around on all sides. Europe's politicians probably should not have allowed Greece to enter the euro in 2001, two years after the currency was created. Greek governments should not have used the state as an instrument of patronage, should not have spent wildly in the years before 2008, and — like Ireland, Portugal and Cyprus — should have used the opportunity of a bail-out to execute deep-seated structural reforms. The euro zone has been guilty of imposing far too much austerity on a battered economy, of loading up Greece with unpayable debt and of a tin-eared approach to the increasing desperation of ordinary Greeks. Europe's politicians should not have been surprised that voters looked for a radical alternative, and they should have found more imaginative ways of dealing with it when it arrived. Finally why aren't the bankers who issued these bad loans being asked to pay a price — because if they are not, they will continue to issue reckless loans which will be left to others to dean up again? The Nobility of Forgiveness EFTA01207177 Like everyone else, I sat in front of the television stun and in amazement as one after another of the relatives and love ones of the nine people murdered in Charleston by Dylann Roof offered their forgiveness. And although I understood the nobility of the gesture, I knew in my heart that if the victims had been one of my relatives or love ones, there was no way that I could have been that forgiving. Stacey Patton wrote an interesting op-ed last month in The Washington Post - Black America should stopforgiving white racists - because quick absolution does not lead to justice. And although I understand what Stacey Patton said, the `Mandela moment" in Charleston was one of the strongest acts of nobility I have ever witnessed. I remember back in the 1994 when Nelson Mandela was elected President of South Africa asking a white friend in Johannesburg what was their biggest surprise, his response was "his generosity." Mandela forgave everyone, the judge who jailed him, his jailors and those hated him just because of his color. But the forgiveness came with the responsibility of the abusers to acknowledge and repent no matter how egregious the acts. In many ways America needs to come clean. And it starts with acknowledging we are a racist society and stop embracing the myths of the past. It has been one hundred and fifty years since the Civil War ended when Robert E. Lee surrendered the last Confederate army to Ulysses S, Grant at the Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, yet its echoes are still felt across the United States in lingering divisions between North and South, in debates over the flying of the Confederate flag, and even in arguments over the basic causes of the conflict. One of the major reasons is that this has continued is due the myths of war. It is time to lay these myths about the Deep South and the Civil War to rest. The idea that somehow The Civil War was a noble fight between brothers based on principle is as ludicrous. There is nothing noble about the institution of slavery. There was nothing noble about declaration of secession by the South Carolina on December 20, 1860 or the ten Southern States that followed its leads. A