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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: John who wrote (75099)7/6/2012 12:16:13 PM
From: GROUND ZERO™3 Recommendations  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 103300
 
"There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt."

John Adams - - 1826

GZ



To: John who wrote (75099)7/6/2012 2:36:27 PM
From: Hope Praytochange1 Recommendation  Respond to of 103300
 
Disability Ranks Outpace New Jobs In Obama RecoveryFri, Jul 06 2012 00:00:00 E00_WEB By JOHN MERLINEJOHN MERLINE12655 Beatrice Street
Los Angeles
CA
90066
USA
, INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Investor's Business DailyInvestors.com delivers unique stock investment research, education and stock tips for new or seasoned investors, combined with daily business and financial news.askibd@investors.com310-448-6600WilliamO'Neil12655 Beatrice StreetLos AngelesCA90066USA12655 Beatrice StreetLos AngelesCA90066USA


Posted 09:45 AM ET







More workers joined the federal government's disability program in June than got new jobs, according to two new government reports, a clear indicator of how bleak the nation's jobs picture is after three full years of economic recovery.

The economy created just 80,000 jobs in June, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. But that same month, 85,000 workers left the workforce entirely to enroll in the Social Security Disability Insurance program, according to the Social Security Administration.

The disability ranks have outpaced job growth throughout President Obama's economic recovery. While the economy has created 2.6 million jobs since June 2009, fully 3.1 million workers signed up for disability benefits.

In other words, the number of new disability enrollees has climbed 19% faster than the number of new jobs created during the sluggish recovery. (Even after accounting for people who left the disability program because they died or aged into retirement, the disability ranks have climbed more than 1.1 million in the past three years.)

And the disability ranks will continue to swell. In just the last month, almost 275,000 put in applications for disability benefits. Experts say that more people try to get on disability when jobs are scarce, and changes to eligibility rules enacted back in 1984 have made it far easier to qualify.

In addition, while job growth has been very weak during the recovery, the total number of people who've dropped out of the labor force entirely has exploded, climbing 7.3 million since June 2009, an IBD analysis of BLS data show. Some of them aged into retirement, but most either signed up for disability, stayed in school, moved back in with parents, or just quit looking for a job.

As a result, the "labor force participation rate" — the number of people who have jobs or actively looking for one compared with the entire working-age population — is now 63.8%, down from 65.7% in June 2009. This participation rate is lower than it's been in 30 years. In previous recoveries, the labor participation rate has almost always risen, not fallen.

Other indicators from the BLS report showing that the three-year-old economic recovery isn't producing jobs in adequate numbers:

The unemployment level has been above 8% for 41 consecutive months. To put that in perspective, in the previous 60 years, the unemployment rate topped 8% in a total of only 39 months.

The number of people with jobs is still nearly 5 million below its pre-recession peak.


The number of long-term unemployed — those out of work 27 weeks or more — is still 5.4 million — almost one million higher than when the recovery began three years ago, and almost twice the level it ever reached prior to Obama's recovery.

The median length of unemployment is 19.8 weeks. Throughout Obama's recovery, it has averaged 20.6 weeks. Prior to Obama, that number had had never exceeded 10.5 weeks.

The poor recovery has also driven people to sign up for food stamps in record numbers. Between June 2009 and April 2012, food stamp enrollment climbed 11.3 million — a 32% increase — according to the Department of Agriculture.

In addition, the soft jobs market has driven median household incomes down more after the recession ended than during the recession itself, according the Sentier Research, which tracks monthly household income.

After adjusting for inflation, median annual household income dropped 5.3% between June 2009 and May 2012. In contrast, median incomes dropped 2.6% during the 18-month recession, Sentier found.

"The recession was bad enough," said Sentier's Gordon Green, "but what's extraordinary is the even larger decline during this so-called economic recovery."

It shows, Green said, "how much ground we have to make up just to get back to where we were."



To: John who wrote (75099)7/6/2012 5:24:43 PM
From: Honey_Bee1 Recommendation  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 103300
 
John...as long as the behavior continues that causes AIDS no amount of money for drugs will stop it.

A record number of Africans now have access to drugs to control the HIV virus, but the continent must work harder to strengthen the lifeline, the head of UNAIDS says.


At the end of last year, 6.2 million people in sub-Saharan Africawere taking antiretroviral treatment, an increase of 1.1 million over 2010, UNAIDS Executive Director Michel Sidibe said in an interview on Thursday.

It means that 56 percent of Africans in need of the drugs now have access to them, he said.

"Ten years ago, nobody would have imagined that such a result would be possible," he said.

The cost of the drugs has plummeted from around $15,000 per head a dozen years ago to some $80 today, and many treatments are far simpler for patients than in the past.

Sidibe -- visiting Paris ahead of the July 22-27 International AIDS Conference in Washington -- said he was worried that African countries remained so dependent on foreign help.

"With the exception of South Africa, 80 percent of Africans with HIV have access to drugs via funding from outside Africa. This is not sustainable. It's even dangerous," he said.

Budget constraints in donor countries since the 2008 financial crisis have caused funding to stagnate, falling by 13 percent between 2009 and 2010 alone.

China now totally funds its domestic AIDS programme and the figure for fellow emerging giant India is 95 percent, but in Africa some countries are 100-percent dependent on foreign help, Sidibe sdaid.

Another problem is that Africa is 80-percent dependent on India for its drugs, Sidibe said.

He added he would call for an African Medicines Regulatory Agency at an Africa Union summit, taking place in Addis Ababa from July 13 to 15.

The proposed agency would vet drugs, given the widening problem of fake or below-quality medications that are being sold in Africa, and encourage local production of AIDS pills.

Read more: news.yahoo.com



To: John who wrote (75099)7/6/2012 9:12:44 PM
From: lorne1 Recommendation  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 103300
 
John...This is what IMO hussein obama was deeply involved in creating in egypt. Libya elections going on now, more moslum brotherhood?

"When I want a sex-slave," should be able to go "to the market and pick out whichever female I desire and marry her." — Sheikh Huwaini

Egypt's Sex-Slave Marriage

by Raymond Ibrahim
July 5, 2012
gatestoneinstitute.org

"When I want a sex-slave," should be able to go "to the market and pick out whichever female I desire and marry her." — Sheikh Huwaini

Egypt's "first sex-slave marriage" took place mere days after the Muslim Brotherhood's Muhammad Morsi was made president.

Last Monday, on the Egyptian TV show Al Haqiqa ("the Truth"), journalist Wael al-Ibrashi showed a video-clip of a man, Abd al-Rauf Awn, "marrying" his slave. Before making the woman, who has a non-Egyptian accent, repeat after him the Koran's Surat al-Ikhlas, instead of saying the usual "I marry myself to you," the woman said "I enslave myself to you," kissing him in front of an applauding audience.

Then, even though she was wearing a hijab, her owner-husband declared that she is forbidden from such trappings and commanded her to be stripped of them, so as "not to break Allah's laws." She took her veil and abaya off, revealing, by Muslim standards, a seductive red dress (all the other women present were veiled). The man claps for her and the video-clip (which can be seen here) ends.

The man, Abd al-Rauf Awn, who identified himself as an Islamic scholar who studied at Al Azhar and an expert at Islamic jurisprudence, then appeared on the show, giving several Islamic explanations to justify his marriage, from Islam's prophet Muhammad's "sunna," or practice, of "marrying" enslaved captive women, to Koran 4:3, which declares: "Marry such women as seem good to you, two and three and four… or what your right hands possess."

Though the term malk al-yamin literally means "that which is owned by your right hand," for all practical purposes, and to avoid euphemisms, according to Islamic doctrine and history, she is simply a sex-slave. Linguistic evidence even suggests that she is seen not as a human but as a possession.

Even stripping the sex-slave of her hijab, the way Awn did, has precedent. According to Islamic jurisprudence, whereas the free (Muslim) woman is mandated to wear a hijab, sex-slaves are mandated only to be covered from the navel to the knees—with everything else exposed. Awn even explained how Caliph Omar, one of the first "righteous caliphs," would strip sex-slaves of their garments, whenever he saw them overly dressed in the marketplace.

Awn further went on to declare that he believes the idea of sex slave marriage is ideal for today's Egyptian society. He bases this on ijtihad, a recognized form of jurisprudence, whereby a Muslim scholar comes up with a new idea—one that is still rooted in the Koran and example of Muhammad—that fits the circumstances of contemporary society. He argued that, when it comes to marriage, "we Muslims have overly complicated things," so that men are often forced to be single throughout their prime, finally getting married between the ages of 30-40, when they will have a stable career and enough money to open a household. Similarly, many Egyptian women do not want to wear the hijab in public. The solution, according to Awn, is to reinstitute sex-slavery—allowing men to marry and copulate much earlier in life, and women who want to dress freely to do so, as technically they are sex-slaves and mandated to go about loosely attired.

The other guest on the show, Dr. Abdullah al-Naggar, a professor in Islamic jurisprudence at Al Azhar, fiercely attacked Awn for reviving this practice, calling on him and his slave-wife to "repent," to stop dishonoring Islam, and arguing that "there is no longer sex-slavery"—to which Awn responded by sarcastically asking, "Who said sex-slavery is over? What—because the UN said so?"

In many ways, this exchange between Awn, who advocates sex-slave marriage, and the Al Azhar professor symbolizes the clash between today's "Islamists" and "moderate Muslims." For a long time, Al Azhar has been engaged in the delicate balancing act of affirming Islam while still advocating modernity according to Western standards, whereas the Islamists—from the Muslim Brotherhood to the Salafis—bred with contempt and disrespect for the West, are only too eager to revive Islamic practices that defy Western standards.

While this may be the first sex slave marriage to take place in Egypt's recent history, it is certainly not the first call to revive the practice. Earlier, Egyptian Sheikh Huwaini, lamenting that the "good old days" of Islam were over, declared that, in an ideal Muslim society, "when I want a sex-slave," he should be able to go "to the market and pick whichever female I desire and buy her." Likewise, a Kuwaiti female politician earlier advocated for reviving the institute of sex-slavery, suggesting that Muslims should bring female captives of war—specifically Russian women from the Chechnya war—and sell them to Muslim men in the markets of Kuwait.

And so the "Arab Spring" continues to blossom.