Tag Archives: program

Caribbean Coral Reefs “Will Be Lost Within 20 Years” Without Protection

by JeanneMinaya Posted on July 6, 2014

Mother Jones

This story originally appeared in the Guardian and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Most Caribbean coral reefs will disappear within the next 20 years unless action is taken to protect them, primarily due to the decline of grazers such as sea urchins and parrotfish, a new report has warned.

A comprehensive analysis by 90 experts of more than 35,000 surveys conducted at nearly 100 Caribbean locations since 1970 shows that the region’s corals have declined by more than 50 percent.

But restoring key fish populations and improving protection from overfishing and pollution could help the reefs recover and make them more resilient to the impacts of climate change, according to the study from the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the United Nations Environment Program.

While climate change and the resulting ocean acidification and coral bleaching does pose a major threat to the region, the report—Status and Trends of Caribbean Coral Reefs: 1970-2012—found that local pressures such as tourism, overfishing and pollution posed the biggest problems.

And these factors have made the loss of the two main grazer species, the parrotfish and sea urchin, the key driver of coral decline in the Caribbean.

Grazers are important fish in the marine ecosystem as they eat the algae that can smother corals. An unidentified disease led to a mass mortality of the sea urchin in 1983 and overfishing throughout the 20th century has brought the parrotfish population to the brink of extinction in some regions, according to the report.

Reefs where parrotfish are not protected have suffered significant declines, including Jamaica, the entire Florida reef tract from Miami to Key West, and the US Virgin Islands. At the same time, the report showed that some of the healthiest Caribbean coral reefs are those that are home to big populations of grazing parrotfish. These include the US Flower Garden Banks national marine sanctuary in the northern Gulf of Mexico, Bermuda and Bonaire—all of which have restricted or banned fishing practices that harm parrotfish.

The Caribbean is home to 9 percent of the world’s coral reefs, but only around one-sixth of the original coral cover remains. The reefs, which span 38 countries, are vital to the region’s economy and support the more than 43 million people, generating more than $3 billion annually from tourism and fisheries and much more in other goods and services.

According to the authors, restoring parrotfish populations and improving other management strategies could help the reefs recover. “The rate at which the Caribbean corals have been declining is truly alarming,” said Carl Gustaf Lundin, director of IUCN’s global marine and polar program. “But this study brings some very encouraging news: the fate of Caribbean corals is not beyond our control and there are some very concrete steps that we can take to help them recover.”

Reefs that are protected from overfishing, as well as other threats such as excessive coastal pollution, tourism and coastal development, are more resilient to pressures from climate change, according to the authors.

“Even if we could somehow make climate change disappear tomorrow, these reefs would continue their decline,” said Jeremy Jackson, lead author of the report and IUCN’s senior adviser on coral reefs. “We must immediately address the grazing problem for the reefs to stand any chance of surviving future climate shifts.”

Originally posted here: 

Caribbean Coral Reefs “Will Be Lost Within 20 Years” Without Protection

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Caribbean Coral Reefs “Will Be Lost Within 20 Years” Without Protection

All About Blackshades, the Malware That Lets Hackers Watch You Through Your Webcam

by EUNMadiezhk Posted on May 21, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On Monday, US officials announced the arrest of more than 90 people allegedly connected to an organization called Blackshades, which sold software that allows hackers to easily take over a Microsoft Windows computer remotely. Last year, a college student used the tool to take nude photos of Miss Teen USA via her personal computer’s webcam. According to the FBI and law enforcement officials, the program has been sold and distributed to “thousands” of people in more than 100 countries since 2010, affecting some 700,000 victims. Here’s why you might want to update your anti-virus software, or, if you’re prone to dancing around your room naked, at least put a piece of tape over your webcam.

What is Blackshades?
Blackshades is the name of an organization allegedly owned by a Swedish 24-year-old named Alex Yücel. According to government officials, Yücel and Michael Hogueâ&#128;&#139;, a 23-year-old US citizen who was arrested in 2012 as part of the feds’ tangential investigation into Blackshades, codeveloped the Blackshades remote access tool (RAT). This tool, which sold for as little as $40 at bshades.eu and other sites, essentially allowed buyers to act as peeping Toms on strangers’ computers. The organization made more than $350,000 between September 2010 and April 2014, according to the FBI.

How does the Blackshades Remote Access Tool (RAT) work?
The Blackshades RAT isn’t any different than what your IT person at work uses to get remote access to your computer, explains Runa Sandvik, staff technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT). But if your IT department were accessing your computer, “you’d have a heads up,” she says. “In this case you won’t even know the hacker is on your computer.”

After buying a copy of the RAT software, a hacker has to install the program on a target’s computer, by, say, deceiving a person into clicking on a malicious link. Then, once the hacker has access to a computer, he or she can then use the RAT software to easily record a person’s keystrokes or passwords, take screenshots, rummage through computer files, or turn on the person’s web camera, according to the feds. Anything you can do on your computer, the hacker can do, too. And the software makes it all super easy. In fact, it’s “marketed principally for buyers who wouldn’t know how to hack their way out of a paper bag,” writes Krebson Security. Here’s what the command and control panel looks like:

Symantec

The program also includes “spreaders,” which help hackers send out malicious links from peoples’ social-media accounts, and a file hijacker tool. That tool, according to the FBI press release, allows users “to encrypt, or lock, a victim’s files and demand a ‘ransom’ payment to unlock them. The RAT even came with a prepared script demanding such a ransom.”

What do hackers use remote access tools for?
The FBI says the Blackshades RAT has been used to exploit credit cards, bank accounts, and personal information. But perhaps the creepiest way people can use remote accessing tools is to take photos and video via webcam. In November of last year, a college student pleaded guilty to hacking the webcam of Miss Teen USA Cassidy Wolf with the Blackshades software, and attempting to blackmail her. He allegedly said he had up to 40 other “slave computers,” according to the original criminal complaint.

Last year, Ars Technica wrote about a thread on a hacker forum that was more than 134 pages long and filled with images captured through unsuspecting women’s webcams. Hackers wielding remote accessing tools—it’s unknown whether they were using Blackshades or other software—called the women their “slaves” and wrote about picking out “the ‘good’ sexual stuff” and categorizing it using names and passwords, according to the news outlet. And last year, a 17-year-old boy in Detroit paid hackers in the Philippines more than $1,000 in blackmail money after they collected video of him via webcam. This tool has been used for political purposes as well. In 2012, the software was sent by alleged pro-government attackers to try and infect the computers of anti-government Syrian activists.

Now that people have been arrested in connection with Blackshades, does this mean I’m in the clear?
Nope. While the sale of Blackshades software, whose main website has now been shut down, was already on the decline (there were more than 1,300 infections last spring, but fewer than 400 in April 2014, according to Symantec), there are other remote accessing tools out there. “Even if there are just 100 people using Blackshades, there are another 100 using a tool with a different name that works exactly the same way,” says CDT’s Sandvik. Additionally, it’s not clear that the FBI will be able to get the Blackshades charges to stick. As the Daily Beast notes, it may be hard for prosecutors to prove whether the defendants who possessed the software used it for illegal activity.

What should I do to keep my computer private?
Follow best security practices. The FBI and security experts recommend that you update your software, including anti-virus software, install a good firewall, don’t open suspicious email attachments or URLs—even if they come from people on your contact list—and create strong passwords. The FBI has also published a list of files that you can search for on your hard drive to see if your computer has been infected. “Regardless of the specific kind, if you get malware on your system, it’s bad,” says Christopher Budd, a spokesman for Trend Micro, a Japanese security software company. “But people shouldn’t worry about malware, they should take concrete steps.” And if you put tape over your webcam, too, no one will judge you. “I do,” says Sandvik.

Link:

All About Blackshades, the Malware That Lets Hackers Watch You Through Your Webcam

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Pines, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on All About Blackshades, the Malware That Lets Hackers Watch You Through Your Webcam

Big-Bank Insider: Obama’s “Operation Choke Point” Isn’t Forcing Us to Close Porn Stars’ Accounts

by MarthaMunson Posted on May 8, 2014

Mother Jones

If this were a Hardy Boys book, it would be The Hardy Boys and the Mystery of the Porn Stars’ Disappearing Bank Accounts.

Last month, porn star Teagan Presley told Vice that JPMorgan Chase & Co. closed her account because the bank considered her “high-risk.” Then, on Wednesday, porn director David Lord told the Daily Beast that Chase sent him a letter notifying him that the bank was going to close his account on May 11. The Beast and Vice suggested that a secretive Justice Department program, “Operation Choke Point,” was behind the account closures. But a Chase insider familiar with the matter says that the initiative has nothing to do with the termination of these accounts.

“This has nothing to do with Operation Choke Point,” the source told Mother Jones. “There’s not a targeted effort to exit consumers’ accounts because of an affiliation with an industry and we have no policy that would prohibit a consumer from having a checking account because of an affiliation with this industry. We routinely exit consumers for a variety of reasons. For privacy reasons we can’t get into why.”

The porn stars’ allegations play into a narrative—pushed by banks and congressional Republicans—that the Obama administration is overstretching its authority by forcing banks to police the free market. Here’s the real story:

What is Operation Choke Point? Operation Choke Point is a federal initiative that aims to crack down on fraud by honing in on banks and payment processors—the companies that serve as middlemen between merchants and banks on credit card transactions. Financial institutions are not supposed to do business with companies they believe might be breaking the law. But Justice Department officials suspect that some payment processors ignore signs of fraud—like high percentages of transactions being rejected as unauthorized—in transactions they process, and banks go along for the ride, earning massive profits.

The Justice Department has already filed one lawsuit under the program. In January, the government sued Four Oaks Bank in North Carolina, charging that it “knew or was deliberately ignorant” that it was working with a company that processed payments for merchants who were breaking the law. According to the lawsuit, Four Oaks worked with a Texas-based payment processor that processed about $2.4 billion in transactions on behalf of fraudulent payday lenders, internet gambling entities, and a Ponzi fraud scheme. The processor then allegedly paid Four Oaks more than $850,000 in fees. (In April, Four Oaks reached a $1.2 million settlement with the government, but did not admit wrongdoing.)

President Obama’s Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, headed by the Department of Justice, is behind the program. Michael Bresnick, who runs the task force, made the program public last March. He says that the aim is to “close the access to the banking system that mass marketing fraudsters enjoy—effectively putting a chokehold on it.”

Is this the first time that feds have asked banks to keep an eye on their customers? No. The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 requires financial institutions to assist the feds in preventing money laundering, which includes scrutinizing customers. However, banks argue that Operation Choke Point goes further than that law.

Does Operation Choke Point include a “blacklist” of businesses or individuals the government is requiring banks to target? Not exactly. Last September, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation issued updated regulatory guidelines noting that “facilitating payment processing for merchant customers engaged in higher-risk activities can pose risks to financial institutions.” A footnote in the guidelines linked to a list of products and services, published in 2011, that the feds say have been associated with high-risk activity, including get-rich products, drug paraphernalia, escort services, firearm sales, pornography, escort services, and racist materials. But the September guidance makes clear that financial institutions that “properly manage these relationships and risks are neither prohibited nor discouraged from providing payment processing services to customers operating in compliance with applicable law.” In other words, the guidance requires banks to perform due diligence to prevent fraud, but does not require banks to go on a porn-star witch hunt.

Why are some people saying Operation Choke Point discriminates against low-income Americans? As part of the program, the feds are scrutinizing payday lenders, which offer short-term loans at high interest rates. Critics of these lenders say they take advantage of low-income Americans, while defenders note that they’re often the only option for Americans unable to get loans elsewhere. Some states restrict or ban payday loans. But as payday lenders move online, they’ve been able to skirt state rules, according to the Justice Department. The feds hope to crack down on payday lenders that are not complying with state and federal regulations. “This effort is focusing on ensuring that lenders are not using electronic payment networks to commit fraud or offer products that would not otherwise be permitted,” says Tom Feltner, director of financial services at the Consumer Federation of America, a national association of nonprofit consumer advocacy groups.

Who opposes the program? Banks, payday lenders, gun owners, conservatives, and some Democrats have expressed opposition to the program. Frank Keating, president and CEO of the American Bankers Association, wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last month accusing the Justice Department of “forcing banks to make judgments about criminal behavior and then holding them accountable for the possible wrongdoing of others.” Jason Oxman, chief executive of the Electronic Transaction Association, which recently released guidelines for payment processors, told the Washington Post that Operation Choke Point shouldn’t target entire industries, and should instead focus on specific bad actors. A new lobbying group, the Third Party Payment Processors Association, opposes Operation Choke Point, and an activist group called “StopTheChoke.com” is running an online campaign against the program. The NRA, after receiving concerns from gun owners that the DOJ is using the program to take away their guns, said last week that “it will continue to monitor developments concerning Operation Choke Point.”

On January 8, Reps. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) sent a letter to the Justice Department arguing that “the extraordinary breadth of the Department’s dragnet prompts concerns that the true goal of Operation Choke Point is not to cut off actual fraudsters’ access to the financial system, but rather to eliminate legal financial services to which the Department objects.”

Who supports it? Quite a few Democrats support the program. On February 26, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) sent a letter to the Justice Department recommending that the program continue. The letter, cosigned by 11 other Democrats, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), said: “The Department plays a critical role in ensuring system-wide compliance with anti-fraud, anti-money-laundering, and related laws, especially as they apply to the unique risks associated with our payments system, and we urge the Department to continue its vigorous oversight.”

Diane Standaert, senior legislative counsel for the Center for Responsible Lending, notes that eradicating fraud is also a win for consumers. “Banks should have a vested interest in making sure their own customers accounts aren’t being abused or unnecessarily drained,” she says. “By complying with this existing guidance, it’s a win-win.”

Originally posted here:  

Big-Bank Insider: Obama’s “Operation Choke Point” Isn’t Forcing Us to Close Porn Stars’ Accounts

Posted in alo, Anchor, Anker, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Big-Bank Insider: Obama’s “Operation Choke Point” Isn’t Forcing Us to Close Porn Stars’ Accounts

There’s an Award for Comprehensible Writing in Government. Guess Who Won.

by MahaliaCooke Posted on April 23, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

It’s like the Oscars, but for paperwork.

The Clearmark Awards, sponsored by the DC-based Center for Plain Language, are handed out annually to the government agencies, corporations, and nonprofits that produce the most coherent literature. On Tuesday, for the 11th-consecutive year, the nominees gathered at the National Press Club in downtown Washington to nibble on chocolate mousse and celebrate their colleagues for making bureaucratic copy comprehensible. Up for awards were the Social Security Administration, for its redesigned website; the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, for its revision of its rules of procedure; and the National Diabetes Education Program, for its pamphlet on taking care of your feet. In a year in which a broken website became a symbol of bureaucratic ineptitude, these were the heroes the media never told you about.

Continue Reading »

See original article: 

There’s an Award for Comprehensible Writing in Government. Guess Who Won.

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on There’s an Award for Comprehensible Writing in Government. Guess Who Won.

Medicaid Expansion Now an Even Better Deal For States

by LuciaUmbagai Posted on April 23, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Need some more good news on Obamacare? How about some mixed news instead? Here it is:

Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates released last week show that health reform’s Medicaid expansion, which many opponents wrongly claim will cripple state budgets, is an even better deal for states than previously thought….CBO now estimates that the federal government will, on average, pick up more than 95 percent of the total cost of the Medicaid expansion and other health reform-related costs in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) over the next ten years (2015-2024).

The good news is obvious: the Medicaid expansion is an even better deal for states than we thought. The federal government will pick up nearly the entire cost of expansion, and when you account for money that states will save from reduced amounts of indigent care and greater help with mental health costs, the net cost of expansion gets very close to zero.

The mixed nature of this seemingly good news comes from the reason for CBO’s more optimistic budget projection: it’s because they think the program will cover fewer people than they previously projected. There had always been a fear among states that lots of people who were already eligible for Medicaid—but had never bothered applying for it—would hear the Obamacare hoopla and “come out of the woodwork” to claim benefits. Since these folks weren’t technically part of the expansion, states would be on the hook to cover the bulk of their costs.

CBO now believes this fear was overblown. Apparently most people who didn’t bother with Medicaid before Obamacare took effect aren’t going to bother with it now either. That’s good for state budgets, but obviously not so good for all the people who could be getting medical care but aren’t.

For what it’s worth, this is a tradeoff we’re going to see a lot of. Unless the actual cost of medical care comes down, the budget impact of Obamacare is always going to depend on how many people benefit from it. If lots of people sign up, that’s good for public health but costly for taxpayers. If fewer people sign up, then government spending goes down but fewer people receive medical care. There aren’t very many ways around this iron law.

More here:  

Medicaid Expansion Now an Even Better Deal For States

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Medicaid Expansion Now an Even Better Deal For States

Recyclebank Rewards Schools for Innovative Green Initiatives

by AbdulEncarnacio Posted on April 10, 2014

Photo: Recyclebank

Recyclebank‘s eighth annual Green Schools Program is moving along at full force.

In case you aren’t familiar with the program, it awards grant money to schools for unique projects that will green their classroom and community.

Since 2007, the Green Schools program has granted close to $450,000 that helped more than 150 schools across the country bring their sustainable ideas to life.

From now until March 16, Recyclebank members are encouraged to donate points to schools of their choice participating in the program to help them reach their target funding goals.

Members can learn about the schools’ project ideas, donate their points and track each school’s progress online. For every 250 member points donated, Recyclebank awards schools $1 that can be used toward their green project.

Twenty-nine schools are participating in the program this year, with projects ranging from school gardens and recycling programs to upcycled art projects. Each school can request up to $2,500 in grant money for their project.

“The whole reason we feel so strongly about the Green Schools Program is that we want to empower youth to be thinking about the environment, thinking about what they can do–in their school, in their community, in their home–to make an impact,” Karen Bray, vice president of marketing at Recyclebank, told Earth911.

In addition to member donations, Domtar Corp. is supporting the Green Schools Program for the second year in a row and will contribute additional donation dollars as well as a year’s supply of its EarthChoice Office Paper to the school with the most innovative project.

So far, Burton Elementary School in Huntington Woods, Mich. has already achieved its $2,500 goal to fund a lunchroom waste reduction program. Keith Elementary in Cypress, Texas also met its $850 target to construct an on-site greenhouse for environmental education, while Central High School in Philadelphia crossed the finish line for its $2,000 goal to restore patio boxes for urban gardening.

Two other Philadelphia schools, Springside Chestnut Hill Academy and Philadelphia Performing Arts Charter School, are also tantalizingly close their funding goals to construct birdhouses and launch a recycling program. Other leading projects so far include a horticultural project and a school-wide art installation.

For Recyclebank, these projects represent small changes that carry potentially big impacts for the future of our planet.

“A lot of the conversations around being a little greener center around the next generation,” Bray noted “So what better way to start to build that awareness and that passion than going directly to the students and giving back a little bit?”

To view a full list of participating schools, donate to your favorite and track their progress, visit the Green Schools Program online.

earth911

Source: 

Recyclebank Rewards Schools for Innovative Green Initiatives

Posted in alo, FF, GE, green energy, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Recyclebank Rewards Schools for Innovative Green Initiatives

Sen. Feinstein: The CIA Scandal Began Because the Agency Misled Congress About Torture

by Felipa6408 Posted on March 12, 2014

Mother Jones

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chair of the Senate intelligence committee, kicked off a Washington kerfuffle with significant constitutional implications when she took to the Senate floor on Tuesday to accuse the CIA of spying on her committee’s investigation into its controversial interrogation and detention program. As pro-CIA partisans and the agency’s overseers on Capitol Hill squared off for a DC turf battle—with finger-pointing in both directions—lost in the hubbub was a basic and troubling fact: Feinstein had contended that this all began because, years ago, the spies of Langley had severely misled the legislators responsible for overseeing the intelligence agencies.

At the start of her speech, Feinstein laid out the back story, and her account is a tale of a major CIA abuse. The CIA’s detention and interrogation (a.k.a. torture) program began in 2002. For its first four years, the CIA only told the chairman and vice-chairman of the Senate intelligence committee about the program, keeping the rest of the panel in the dark. In September 2006, hours before President George W. Bush was to disclose the program to the public, then CIA Director Michael Hayden informed the rest of the committee. This piece of history shows the limits of congressional oversight. If only two members of the committee were informed, it meant that the panel could not provide full oversight of this program. But keeping secrets from legislators—even members of the intelligence committee—is not that unusual, and the story gets worse.

In December 2007, the New York Times reported that the CIA had destroyed two videotapes of the CIA’s interrogation (or torture) sessions. After this disclosure, Hayden told the Senate intelligence committee that eradicating the videos was not as worrisome as it seemed. According to Feinstein, he noted that CIA cables had detailed the interrogations and detention conditions and were “a more than adequate representation” of what had happened. He offered Sen. Jay Rockefeller, who was then chairing the committee, the opportunity to review these thousands of cables. Rockefeller dispatched two staffers to peruse these records.

It took the pair about a year to sift through all the material and produce a report for the intelligence committee. That report, Feinstein noted, was “chilling.” The review, she said, showed that the “interrogations and the conditions of confinement at the CIA detention sites were far different and far more harsh than the way the CIA had described them to us.”

That is, the CIA had misled the Capitol Hill watchdogs.

After reading the staff report, Feinstein, now chairing the committee, and Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), then the senior Republican on the committee, decided a far more expansive investigation was called for. On March 5, 2009, the committee voted 14 to 1 to initiate a full-fledged review of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.

It is that inquiry that has caused the recent fuss, with Feinstein claiming that the CIA (possibly illegally) penetrated computers used by committee investigators and removed documents indicating a CIA internal review of this program had concluded it was poorly managed, went too far, and did not produce decent intelligence. The committee’s more comprehensive review eventually produced a 6,300-page report slamming CIA that has yet to be made public, despite Feinstein pushing the CIA to declassify it.

So while this week’s focus is on whether the CIA improperly—or illegally—spied on the folks who have the constitutional obligation to monitor CIA actions in order to ensure the agency acts appropriately and within US law, Feinstein’s big reveal also presented a highly troubling charge: The CIA lied to Congress about what might be its most controversial program in decades. This in and of itself should be big news.

At the conclusion of her speech, Feinstein, referring to the present controversy, said, “How this will be resolved will show whether the intelligence committee can be effective in monitoring and investigating our nation’s intelligence activities or whether our work can be thwarted by those we oversee.” That is true. And if there cannot be effective oversight of intelligence operations, then the foundation of the national security state is in question. Yet Feinstein’s remarks provide evidence that oversight was not working prior to the current face-off. If the CIA did not tell the Senate intelligence committee the truth about its interrogation and detention program, much more needs to be resolved than whether the spies hacked the gumshoes of Capitol Hill.

More here: 

Sen. Feinstein: The CIA Scandal Began Because the Agency Misled Congress About Torture

Posted in Anchor, Cyber, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Sen. Feinstein: The CIA Scandal Began Because the Agency Misled Congress About Torture

Why Is Paul Ryan Attacking Poverty Programs? He Needs to Tell Us Loud and Clear.

by ValentinBunbury Posted on March 5, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Paul Ryan released a thick report on federal poverty programs earlier this week, and liberals were none too pleased with it. Over at CBPP, Sharon Parrott explains why: “It’s replete with misleading and selective presentations of data and research, which it uses to portray the safety net in a negative light. It also omits key research and data that point in more positive directions.” In fact, it’s so bad that quite a few of the researchers who are name checked in Ryan’s report have spoken out publicly to complain about how badly their work was misrepresented.

But we should rein in the criticism a bit, says the Economist’s John Prideaux. He believes that Ryan’s report really is useful and really could represent a change of direction for conservatives:

In fact there is not a single proposal to cut spending on federal anti-poverty programmes in there. What the report does do is document how fragmented the federal government’s poverty programmes are….Take the federal schemes to expand the supply of housing for people with low incomes. There is Public Housing, Moving to Work, Hope VI, Choice Neighborhoods, Rental Assistance Demonstration, Rental Housing Assistance, Rental Assistance Payment, the Housing Trust Fund, the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, the Private Activity Bond Interest Exclusion, the HOME Investment Partnerships Program and the Self-Help Homeownership Opportunity Program. The programmes on the demand side, in other words that help people pay their rent, are almost as numerous.

….Most of the commentary on the budget committee’s report suggests that it is filled with the same stuff that Republicans have been peddling for ages. And to be sure it includes plenty of studies that are critical of food stamps, Head Start and Pell grants. But read the whole thing and you get the impression that there are House Republicans who understand that there is more to poverty reduction than getting the government out of the way. They should be braver about saying this.

I think this gets to the heart of the matter. Even conservatives—the more honest variety, anyway—will concede that liberals have plenty of reasons to be skeptical of Ryan’s goals. His annual budget roadmaps have consistently relied on slashing spending for the poor, and Republicans in general have been consumed with cutting safety net spending for decades. It’s perfectly natural to view a report that lambastes federal poverty programs as merely the first step in an effort to build support for cutting spending on those programs.

So how about if we see some of Prideaux’s bravery before we bite on Ryan’s proposals? Liberals should certainly be open to making safety net programs more efficient, and if that’s Ryan’s goal he’ll find plenty of Democrats willing to work with him. But that all depends on knowing that this isn’t just a Trojan Horse for deep cuts to spending on the poor.

So how about if we hear this from Ryan? How about if he says, plainly and clearly, that he wants to improve the efficiency of safety net programs, but wants to use the savings to help more people—or to help people in smarter ways—not as an excuse to slash spending or to fund more tax cuts for the wealthy? Really, that’s the bare minimum necessary for liberals to suspend their skepticism, given Ryan’s long history of trying to balance the budget on the backs of the poor.

This would require a genuine turnabout from Ryan, and it would require him to genuinely confront his tea party base with things they don’t want to hear. And it would demonstrate that helping the poor really is his goal. But if he’s not willing to do that, why should anyone on the left believe this report is anything other than the same old attack on the poor as moochers and idlers that’s become practically a Republican mantra over the past few years?

Read this article: 

Why Is Paul Ryan Attacking Poverty Programs? He Needs to Tell Us Loud and Clear.

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why Is Paul Ryan Attacking Poverty Programs? He Needs to Tell Us Loud and Clear.

Paul Ryan’s Superficial Critique of Federal Poverty Programs

by DorethaMoo Posted on March 3, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), chairman of the House budget committee, has apparently decided that by pretending to volunteer in a soup kitchen during the 2012 presidential campaign he didn’t do enough to prove he’s serious about anti-poverty policy. So he and his aides spent about a year examining federal anti-poverty programs and the congressman issued a report on their findings. The study, heralded in the Washington Post as a document likely to inform the GOP budget proposal expected later this month, is hefty, weighing in at more than 200 pages. It seems designed to bolster Ryan, a possible contender for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, as his party’s top dog on policy. But as any student who’s padded a paper knows, length doesn’t equal depth. And in this case, Ryan’s report is essentially an overview of existing federal poverty policies, itemized with a few citations to some research indicating how well they may or may not work. It’s a little like Federal Poverty Programs for Dummies, without any policy alternatives to be found. Instead, the report relies on cherry-picked data points to justify slashing entitlements.

Take the report’s description of the Child Care and Development Fund, a federal program that provides a miniscule amount of money to help low-income people afford child care so they can go to work. On the work part, Ryan seems to approve. He notes that data show that single mothers who get a childcare subsidy are—surprise!—more likely to go to work or go back to school. However, the data show that the childcare subsidy also encourages married women to go to work, and here, it’s clear, the GOP does not approve. The report suggests that when poor, married women get jobs thanks to the childcare benefit, their kids get totally neglected. Not only that, it asserts that such programs can cause “lower-quality parental relationships.” Of course, the the kids of single moms are also supposedly harmed by the subsidy, according to the report, which warns that childcare subsidies are related to increased health and behavioral problems in children, poor school performance—and it makes them fat.

It’s hardly a sophisticated analysis of the impact of childcare subsidies on poor families that might come from a real investigation of a federal poverty program—there are no voices from actual program users—but given the source, that’s no surprise. Ryan has been trying to convince the public for a while now that he really cares about the poor, and that, driven by his Catholic faith, he’s genuinely interested in trying to tackle entrenched poverty. But the proposals he’s offered up in the past—big budget cuts to poverty programs, block-granting Medicaid—have almost universally promised to make the suffering of the poor much worse, not better. His anti-poverty proposals have been so severe that he even earned the wrath of the conservative US Conference of Catholic Bishops, which found his ideas in direct conflict with the church’s teachings on social justice.

In his latest offering on the subject of poverty, Ryan does champion a few federal programs, namely the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. That’s the modern version of the old cash entitlement system for low-income single moms that was “reformed” in 1996 by turning federal assistance money over to the states to administer. The welfare reform bill made it much more difficult for low-income families to access the safety net by putting sharp limits on benefits and imposing stiff work requirements as a condition of receiving help. The Ryan report credits the 1996 welfare reform bill with bringing down child poverty rates and increasing workforce participation rates of single mothers, at least up until 2001, when poverty rates started to spike again. But again, he’s writing in a vacuum: The report fails to mention that the main reason for the big drop in poverty and employment rates during that time was a major economic boom that by 2000 had brought the unemployment rate down to 4.0 percent, one of the lowest rates in recorded history, which made it a lot easier for welfare moms to find work.

In addition, even as Ryan champions welfare reform as a poverty killer, he fails to mention that though some measures of poverty went down after the welfare reform law was passed in 1996, the number of households living in deep poverty—on less than $2 per day—has more than doubled since then. So has welfare reform really alleviated poverty? It’s complicated. One thing it did do, however, was slash the amount of federal money spent on the program. The welfare budget hasn’t increased since 1996, meaning that the $16 billion program has lost a third of its value thanks to inflation.

Meanwhile, the report blames Supplemental Security Income (SSI), the federal disability program that’s recently become a favorite target of GOP budget hawks, for preventing people from joining the workforce. It cites a decade-old report suggesting that the program reduces the labor supply—but only of people between the ages of 60 and 64. The Ryan report contends that the program is full of scammers, particularly the parents of disabled children who have an incentive to keep them out of the workforce to keep the disability checks flowing. It claims that SSI permanently prevents children who receive disability payments from joining the workforce after they hit 18, without considering the possibility that these people are on SSI because they’re actually disabled and can’t work, even if they want to. And critically, Ryan doesn’t explain how anyone gets by on $535 a month, the average monthly SSI payment, or how that teeny bit of government money would be preferable to taking even a minimum-wage job.

These are fairly small oversights compared to the report’s biggest and most obvious omission, namely any discussion of the current economy and its relationship to poverty. Even as it knocks various poverty programs for discouraging labor force participation, Ryan’s study fails to mention the single biggest reason people don’t work: not enough jobs. Today, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (which Ryan cites with some regularity in his report), if every last job available in this country were filled tomorrow with an unemployed worker, three out of every five unemployed people would still be out of work.

Without acknowledging this basic economic fact, Ryan’s superficial review of federal poverty programs looks suspiciously like a move to help his party justify big cuts to social welfare programs. It doesn’t offer any new ideas that might improve programs to help the poor. It’s a cheat sheet for GOP budget cutters looking for easy targets.

More: 

Paul Ryan’s Superficial Critique of Federal Poverty Programs

Posted in Anchor, FF, For Dummies, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Paul Ryan’s Superficial Critique of Federal Poverty Programs

Healing ADD Revised Edition – Daniel G. Amen

by Myrna Posted on February 5, 2014

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Healing ADD Revised Edition

The Breakthrough Program that Allows You to See and Heal the 7 Types of ADD

Daniel G. Amen

Genre: Psychology

Price: $9.99

Publish Date: December 3, 2013

Publisher: Penguin Group US

Seller: Penguin Group (USA) Inc.


All-New Revised Edition Attention deficit disorder (ADD) is a national health crisis that continues to grow—yet it remains one of the most misunderstood and incorrectly treated illnesses today. Neuropsychiatrist Daniel G. Amen, MD was one of the first to identify that there are multiple types beyond just purely hyperactive or inattentive ADD, each requiring a different treatment. Now, in this all-new, revised edition, Dr. Amen again employs the latest medical advances in the field, including the largest brain imaging study ever completed on patients with ADD, to identify, examine, and demystify the 7 distinct types of ADD and their specific treatments. With updated recommendations for nutraceuticals and/or medications targeted to brain type, diet, exercise, lifestyle interventions, cognitive reprogramming, parenting and educational strategies, neurofeedback, and more, Dr. Amen’s revolutionary approach provides a treatment program that can lead sufferers of ADD to a normal, peaceful, and fully functional life. Sufferers from ADD often say, “The harder I try, the worse it gets.” Dr. Amen tells them, for the first time, why, and more importantly how to heal ADD. See Dr. Amen's Public Television Special on ADD!

Source:  

Healing ADD Revised Edition – Daniel G. Amen

Posted in alo, FF, GE, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Healing ADD Revised Edition – Daniel G. Amen