“Minimum wage laws likely play an important role in the high youth unemployment rates. This is where unskilled labor exists, which results in low marginal revenue product that makes it unprofitable for firms to hire workers above the minimum wage.”
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2013/08/us-unemployment-rates-by-age.html
“Joe, like much else in his era, was hardly what he seemed. Launched the year Lyndon Johnson ran for president as a peace candidate against Barry Goldwater while his administration was secretly planning the large-scale bombing of North Vietnam, Joe, too, was involved in a cover-up. For if Joe was a behemoth of a toy soldier, he was also, though the word was unmentionable, a doll. War play Joe-style was, in fact, largely patterned on and due to a ‘girl’ — Mattel’s Barbie.”
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175735/tomgram:_engelhardt,_war_games/
“As John W. Whitehead explains in his new book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, our nation’s children are not being spared from the police state mentality which is slowly gripping all aspects of American society. While parents get ready to send their children back to school, Whitehead provides a chilling reminder that the police state mindset is pervasive in our public schools, with students becoming the victims of inflexible zero tolerance policies, mass surveillance, and arrest for childish, noncriminal behavior.”
“The Health and Human Services’ website states that your family will be targeted if you fall under the ‘high-risk’ categories below: Families where mom is not yet 21; Families where someone is a tobacco user; Families where children have low student achievement, developmental delays, or disabilities; Families with individuals who are serving or formerly served in the armed forces, including such families that have members of the armed forces who have had multiple deployments outside the United States. In 2011, the HHS announced $224 million will be given to support evidence-based home visiting programs to ‘help parents and children.'”
http://benswann.com/obamacare-provision-forced-home-inspections/
“In April 2013, police officers and a social worker from Sacramento County’s Child Protective Services entered the home of Anna and Alex Nikolayev and took their baby, Sammy, away from them. They had no warrant. ‘What they’d done was, basically, kidnapped our child with the help of police,’ says Alex Nikolayev. The young, first-time parents were not notified of where Sammy was being taken and wouldn’t find out for a full 24 hours. The dispute stemmed from the parents’ desire to obtain a second medical opinion before subjecting Sammy to major heart surgery.”
“The U.S. Department of Education’s ‘live-shooter’ section doesn’t recommend that schools arm teachers or employ armed guards. It doesn’t even advise schools to add door locks for classrooms. Instead, the section counsels teachers and students to ‘run,’ ‘hide’ and then ‘fight’ — but only ‘if neither running nor hiding is a safe option.’ Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, does not explain how this guidance differs from the very unsuccessful actions attempted by the 26 victims of Adam Lanza, the lone gunman who attacked Sandy Hook Elementary School. Twenty of those victims were children who were six and seven years old.”
“I was trouble at school. Thank God this was in the early 80s, otherwise I bet someone would have suggested Ritalin. For, since the mid 80s, society has decided that adolescent trouble-making is some sort of medical condition. We have given it a scientific-sounding classification, ADHD, securing a sense that a messy adolescence is pathological, some sort of chemical imbalance. Thus the scientists are called in to reinforce generally conservative norms of appropriate behaviour. In the US, between 1987 and 2007, there was a 35-fold increase in the number of children being classified as having some form of mental deficiency.”
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2013/aug/09/pills-unhappiness-reinforces-sad-human
“Hit by years of budget cuts, some U.S. public school boards are looking to avoid providing health benefits to substitute teachers and supporting staff under President Barack Obama’s reform law, education officials say. According to the law, employers will have to offer health coverage to all full-time employees, defined as those who work an average of 30 or more hours per week each month, or else pay a fine starting in 2015. The need to find creative solutions, or risk cutting back staff hours further, will increase as they finalize their budgets, they say.”
“Isaac Gagnon stepped off the school bus sobbing last October and opened his mouth to show his mother where it hurt. A dentist’s statement in his backpack showed he had received two pulpotomies, or baby root canals, along with the crowns and 10 X-rays — all while he was at school. ‘I was absolutely horrified,’ said Gagnon.’I never gave them permission to drill into my son’s mouth. They did it for profit.’ [Dental management-services companies like ReachOut] have been riding a boom in Medicaid outlays on dentistry, which rose 63 percent to $7.4 billion between 2007 and 2010, outstripping the 4.9 percent growth in other dental spending.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-17/dental-abuse-seen-driven-by-private-equity-investments.html
“Instead of making the schools safer, we simply managed to make them more authoritarian. It used to be that if you talked back to a teacher, or played a prank on a classmate, or just failed to do your homework, you might find yourself in detention or doing an extra writing assignment after school. Nowadays, students are not only punished for transgressions more minor than those—such as playing cops and robbers on the playground, bringing LEGOs to school, or having a food fight—but they are punished with suspension, expulsion, and even arrest. As a result, America is now on a fast track to raising up an Orwellian generation.”