(LA Times) A woman who pepper-sprayed other shoppers Thursday night at the Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch had armed herself with the caustic spray to gain an advantage in the fight for merchandise at the Black Friday sale, a fire captain said.
Twenty customers, including children, were hurt in the 10:10 p.m. incident. Shoppers complained of minor skin and eye irritation and sore throats, he said.
Wal-Mart employees were taking statements from about eight customers who had been pepper sprayed near the front of the store, Seminario said. “After we paid, we saw five that were in really bad shape,” she said. “They had been sprayed in the face, it looked like, and they had swelling of the face, really extreme swelling of face, redness, coughing.”
via Customers hit by pepper spray at Wal-Mart describe scene of chaos – latimes.com.
By Karin Matz (Reuters) – When it comes to retirement, many middle class Americans said 80 is the new 65 and plan to delay retirement because of worries over money, according to a new survey.
Wells Fargo bank asked 1,500 Americans who earned between $25,000 and $99,999 and ranged in age from 20 into their 70s questions about retirement, savings and Social Security for its seventh annual retirement survey.
Three-fourths of those surveyed said they expect to work in their retirement years. One quarter said they will “need to work until at least age 80″ to live comfortably in retirement.
via 80 is the new 65 when it comes to retirement, survey says – Yahoo! News.
By George Monbiot (The Guardian UK) The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. “The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill.” Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.
Such results have been widely replicated. They show that traders and fund managers throughout Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin.
By Kenneth Rapoza (Reuters) With the economies of the U.S. and Europe sputtering along on fumes, politicians are quick to blame regulation and taxation as the main cause of a lackluster business environment. Yet, according to the World Bank’s 212 page “Doing Business 2012? report, released on Wednesday, there is less red tape for setting up shop in the U.S. than there is in all of Europe, Latin America, Africa and most of Asia.
The World Bank uses indicators such as time spent to set up a business to getting credit, among other things, in benchmarking the 183 countries it ranks in “Doing Business”. The report measures and tracks changes in the regulations applied to domestic companies in 11 areas in their life cycle–such as investors rights, taxation, cross border transactions, legality and enforcement of contracts and bankruptcy law.
Where does the supposed regulation and taxation crippled U.S. stand in the rankings? It is number four, trailing behind New Zealand (3), Hong Kong (2) and Singapore (1).
via US Businesses Not Being Strangled By Regulation And Taxation, World Bank Says – Forbes.
By Walter Brasch Newspaper columnist Ann Coulter, spreading the lies of the extreme right wing, called the Occupy Wall Street protestors, “tattooed, body-pierced, sunken-chested 19-year-olds getting in fights with the police for fun.” She claimed the protestors, now in the thousands in New York, are “directionless losers [who] pose for cameras while uttering random liberal clichés lacking any reason or coherence.”
Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), House majority leader, called the protest nothing more than “growing mobs,” completely oblivious to his myriad statements that he supports “mobs” when they are from the Tea Party. Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, tacking as far right as possible to avoid anyone thinking he was once a moderate, called the protest “dangerous.”
Republican presidential contender Herman Cain, in a moment that demonstrated how out of touch he is with the economic reality of the five-year recession, argued, “Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks; if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself!”
Glenn Beck, too irrational even for Fox News, which terminated him less than two years after it tried to make him a TV superstar, told his radio audience, the protestors “will come for you and drag you into the streets and kill you.”
Lauren Ellis of Mother Jones, at one time a cutting edge magazine for social justice, believed that the protestors have a “lack of focus.” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, wrote, “A protest without an objective is like a party or a picnic of the unemployed and the indolent. Unless you have an objective, what are you doing out there?”
First, let’s see just who these protestors really are. And then, let’s see what they stand for, since the mainstream media, of which Fox News is an entrenched part, don’t seem to be getting the message from the people.
By David Molloy (Irish Times) Traditional chivalry is a subtle form of sexism despite its “seemingly positive” qualities, according to the authors of a new psychological study.
The study, published in the Psychology of Women Quarterly journal, uses examples of “benevolent sexism” that include using “he” to refer to a person of unknown gender, helping a woman by carrying shopping bags, or offering to drive on long-distance journeys.
Such acts imply a woman cannot perform the task without help from a man, the report’s authors argue.
Other examples include paying for dinner, seeing a woman safely home and “paternalistic treatment” that they describe as “a woman being cherished or protected by men”
via Chivalry is ‘benevolent sexism’ – The Irish Times – Wed, Jun 15, 2011.
By Daniel B. Wood (Christian Science Monitor) California and Arizona farmers — producers of half the nation’s citrus and 90 percent of its vegetables and nuts — are struggling with an acute labor shortage. The situation, worsened by crackdowns on illegal immigration since 9/11, also extends to other states and is no longer just a matter of possible price increases on lettuce, oranges, or almonds, farmers say. Rather, it is a turning point in the nation’s ability to produce its own food – and possibly the loss of major parts of its agriculture industry.
“We are trying to sound the alarm without being alarmist, but the situation has become extremely serious,” says Tim Chelling of the Western Growers Association, whose members grow, pack, and ship half America’s produce. “We are now talking of losing the production of key commodities to foreign competition. America’s produce industry is facing a crisis.”
Although the shortage was worsening before 9/11, it’s now extreme, Mr. Chelling and the three California farmers say. Without an emergency guest-worker program, they will be dramatically short of the minimum number of workers needed to harvest the current crop. Without long-term immigration reform that acknowledges America’s reliance on foreign workers, farmers will not be able to make ends meet, they say.
Mr. Cunha, for example, says Central Valley raisin growers need 50,500 pickers and have only 15,000. In the last harvest, $150 million to $300 million in grapes were ruined because they could not be picked and laid out to dry before the period of necessary seasonal sunlight passed. This year predictions are worse.
via A drought of farm labor / The Christian Science Monitor – CSMonitor.com.
By Rick Ungar (Forbes) Recent data provided by the nation’s largest health insurance companies reveals that a provision of the Affordable Care Act – or Obamacare – is bringing big numbers of the uninsured into the health care insurance system.And they are precisely the uninsured that we want– the young people who tend not to get sick.
The provision of the law that permits young adults under 26, long the largest uninsured demographic in the country, to remain on their parents’ health insurance program resulted in at least 600,000 newly insured Americans during the first quarter of 2011.
Wellpoint, the nation’s largest publicly traded health insurer with some 34 million customers, reports adding 280,000 new members in the first three months of 2011.
Add in the results of some of the other large health insurers including Aetna, who added just short of 100,000 newly insured to their customer base, Kaiser Permanente’s additional 90,000, and Highmark’s 72,000 new customers, and we begin to sense our health insurance pools are filling up with some badly needed young blood.
The Health & Human Services Department had estimated that the changes in the law would result in about 1.2 million new enrollees in 2011. However, according to Aaron Smith, the executive director of a Washington based non-profit that advocates for the young, it now looks as if that number will be exceeded.
via More Solid Proof That Obamacare Is Working – Rick Ungar – The Policy Page – Forbes.
