SkydiveJonathan

Violence flared on Tuesday in the centre of Madrid as baton-wielding police charged crowds and fired rubber bullets at demonstrators who had tried to surround the country's parliament building. Some 32 people were injured, including several police officers, and several dozen were arrested after police broke up the "surround the parliament" demonstration against Mariano Rajoy's government shortly after it overran its 9.30pm deadline. Several hundred protesters remained peacefully on the streets near the parliament building late on Tuesday night. They are demanding the resignation of the government and the king, as well as a rewrite of Spain's constitution.

Many mocked us, many vilified us, many told us we would achieve nothing. But after a wave of student mobilization in Quebec through the spring and summer, we can count our victories: on the first day of the new PQ government’s term, it cancelled a tuition hike and repealed an anti-protest law that curbed basic freedoms of expression and assembly. If the PQ yielded so quickly to some of our demands, it is because we organized a strike movement whose support was popular and broad, which allowed people of all ages and walks of life to express their grievances about our political and economic system, and which helped defeat the Charest Liberal government. That might be hard to believe, going by the depictions of us in English Canada: halfwitted hooligans, spoiled brats or frightening extremists. But if we are guilty of anything, it is of questioning the dogmas of the rich and powerful, who have spent the last decades trying to lower our expectations for what is politically possible.

A mailer blasted out by the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a nonprofit group spending millions of dollars to mobilize evangelical voters this November to help Mitt Romney's campaign, compares President Barack Obama's policies to the threat posed by Nazi Germany and Japan during World War II. It also says that Obama has "Communist beliefs." A copy of this so-called "Voter Registration Confirmation Survey" was obtained by Mother Jones after it was sent to the home of a registered Republican voter.

Spain's Parliament took on the appearance of a heavily guarded fortress Tuesday, hours ahead of a protest against the conservative government's handling of the economic crisis. The demonstration, organized behind the slogan 'Occupy Congress,' is expected to draw thousands of people from around Spain and was due to start around 13:30 E.T. Madrid's regional Interior Ministry delegation said some 1,300 police would be deployed though protesters say they have no intention of storming the chamber, only of marching around it. http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2012/09/25/thousands-occupy-congress-in-spain/

Created 17 years ago to benefit Romney's five sons, the Ann and Mitt Romney 1995 Family Trust is worth "roughly $100 million," a Romney campaign official said a few months ago. The Romney campaign claims that its candidate did not pay gift taxes* on money in the trust, which, if true, would mean that Romney could have only funded it to the tune of $10.6 million, with the rest of its assets reflecting capital gains. Tax experts find that scenario unlikely, and argue that Romney might have made a low-interest loan to the trust, which the trust then used to make investments. Whatever the setup, Romney should have no trouble influencing how the money is allocated: The fund's sole trustee is R. Bradford Malt, Romney's financial adviser. It's also worth noting that Romney's affluent sons don't appear to need the money anymore. Theoretically, each son and his wife could gift up to $26,000 back to their father each year, tax free.

Mitt's remark that he has "inherited nothing." A variety of commentators have jumped on Romney for that. They've pointed out that Mitt, the son of a wealthy CEO, has enjoyed plenty of privilege — everything from an elite private school education to a rolodex full of rich family friends he could tap to start up his business career. On top of that, the struggling young Mitt had $1 million worth of stock his father threw his way to tide him over until the big paydays started arriving.

The indignados are likewise beginning attempts to construct concrete alternatives to the present system. They have published a Manual of Economic Disobedience, and are working on solutions that return economic control into local hands. More than 200 time banks now exist across the country, with an estimated five new ones springing up a month. Local currencies, barter markets and networks of co-operatives are slowly developing. Filling the gaps in the current system with these nascent alternatives not only offers practical ways for people to survive the crisis; they embody the fundamental idea of the indignados that democracy is something you do, not something you have.

After a year of revolt which became known as the "Maple Spring"—including massive street protests that received global attention—university students across Quebec were celebrating victory on Thursday night following the announcement from newly elected Premier Pauline Marois that the government was cancelling the proposed tuition hike that led to the student uprising and nullifying the contentious Bill 78 law which was introduced to curb the powerful protests.

The workers earn the healthy profit that the walmart heirs then take.

Please focus and stay on topic It seems to be hard for you Unless employees are part owners which are sometimges known as associates, they earn a wage not profit It is your position that the employess should get all the profit from thier work? The workers have earned the profit. The 1% take the profit. Simple.

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/09/watson-the-supercomputer-geniu.html Watson, the Jeopardy-winning supercomputer developed by IBM, could become a cloud-based service that people can consult on a wide range of issues, the company announced yesterday. "Watson is going to be an advisor and an assistant to all kinds of professional decision-makers, starting in healthcare and then moving beyond. We're already looking at a role for Watson in financial services and in other applications," says John Gordon, Watson Solutions Marketing Manager at IBM in New York. Watson is a modular supercomputer made up of at least 90 servers with 16,000 gigabytes of RAM, giving its smart learning software plenty of working memory for interpeting the meaning of the natural-language questions asked of it. And as New Scientist revealed a month ago, Watson's ability to sift through and make sense of hundreds of evidence-based, peer-reviewed cancer research papers and clinical guidelines is already proving to be a powerful diagnostic aid to oncologists, in trials at least. "We want broad exposure for Watson. We want physicians all over the planet to be able to use it," says Gordon. "And we are now looking at ways of delivering Watson as a service to make sure that it is something that is very accessible and which doesn't require a significant level of technology investment by the user. "We hope to expand Watson's scope by delivering it as a cloud-based service. We have a number of other application areas under consideration." Whatever applications IBM settles on, with the cloud already making computer storage available to us in ways similar to utilities like gas and electricity, it will be fascinating to see if artificial intelligence is the next commodity it delivers.

The Walmart heirs certainly haven't earned the profit so that only leaves the workers.

Walmart make a profit. The workers do the work that makes the profit.

...with money that is taxed from the 1%. Isn't that your endgame, anyway? If the workers kept more of the profit they earn they wouldn't have to be subsidised by the state.

The workers earn the profit - the 1% take the profit. Result - workers have to be subsidised by the state.

The six Walmart heirs now have more wealth than the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined, up from 30 percent in 2007. Between 2007 and 2010, the collective wealth of the six richest Waltons rose from $73 billion to $90 billion, while the wealth of the average American declined from $126,000 to $77,000.

Walmart people earn a healthy profit. So their employees would be better off if they had a large loss? a company must earn a profit to pay employees. No, the workers earn the profit. The 1% take the profit.

But they do need tax expenditure to survive once the 1% have leeched their percentage of the profit.

That, a National Health Service and a decent tax on unearned inheritance would certainly be a good move.

Walmart people earn a healthy profit.

well then they should ask for more money if they are not happy. if they dont get it then they should quit. Walmart can pay whatever they want and no one is forced to work there. what am i missing? Unions aren't illegal.

Gilded Age. Mark Twain coined the phrase to represent his further observation that a society consisting of the sum of its vanity and greed is not a society at all but a state of war. In the event that anybody missed Twain’s meaning, President Grover Cleveland in 1887 set forth the rules of engagement while explaining his veto of a bill offering financial aid to the poor: “The lesson should be constantly enforced that, though the people support the government, the government should not support the people.” Twenty years later, Arthur T. Hadley, the president of Yale, provided an academic gloss: “The fundamental division of powers in the Constitution of the United States is between voters on the one hand and property owners on the other. The forces of democracy on the one side... and the forces of property on the other side.”

so you're saying that public HC and government entitlements support the 1% in a very dramatic way. I'm saying that an increase in the minimum wage will mean less tax expenditure on behalf of the 1%.

In 2004, a year in which Wal-Mart reported $9.1 billion in profits, the retailer's California employees collected $86 million in public assistance, according to researchers at the University of California-Berkeley. Other studies have revealed widespread use of publicly funded health care by Wal-Mart employees in numerous states. In 2004, Democratic staffers of the House education and workforce committee calculated that each 200-employee Wal-Mart store costs taxpayers an average of more than $400,000 a year, based on entitlements ranging from energy-assistance grants to Medicaid to food stamps to WIC—the federal program that provides food to low-income women with children.

Certainly not if it's inherited. So nobody should recevie anything from inheritance. I take it that includes the 99%? They won't receive anything from when someone dies, right? They'll receive the benefit of their children not being enslaved by the 1%.