By Mac Slavo | SHTFplan.com

Ford Motor Co. is finishing up their final round of layoffs today. About 7,000 workers worldwide are losing their jobs in this “booming economy” as unsold vehicles continue to pile up in the once empty parking lots of closed retail establishments.

CEO Jim Hackett notified employees in an email Monday that Ford was nearing the end of its months-long bout of white-collar layoffs that would eliminate 7,000 jobs globally, roughly 10% of the automaker’s global salaried workforce, according to Detroit News. When the U.S. layoffs wrap by June, Ford would have cut around 800 jobs in addition to 1,500 buyouts that occurred late last year, or around 7% of its U.S. salaried workforce.

The first 500 employees to be laid off are being told today.  Both sets of layoffs are largely a result of a slowing auto market and looming economic recession. Ford’s layoffs are part of a $25.5 billion pool of cost cuts expected to roll out over the next few years.

Ford layoffs aim to prune management levels, which would allow for quicker ascension through executive ranks and quicker decision-making. Anderson said Ford’s job cuts aim to answer a tougher problem than GM’s. “Ford set a target for a gross number of management jobs to be reduced,” Anderson said. “That is harder to achieve and keep a successful company than it will be for General Motors. … It’s going to be harder for Ford to maintain the quality they have with this significant headcount reduction.”

But the auto industry is barely holding on right now, and it wouldn’t be too surprising if Ford laid off more workers by the end of this year as well.

Dealers Scramble To Deal With 4.2 Million UNSOLD CARS

Abandoned factories, forgotten shopping malls, and undeveloped parcels of land have become parking lots full of new cars as dealers try to figure out what to do with mounting inventories of unsold vehicles, according to OKCFox, a local Oklahoma City Fox News affiliate reported. But the mainstream media keeps saying the economy is great, and even though stocks have fallen on the news of a heightened trade war, there isn’t much other real truth happening when it comes to reporting on the economy. –SHTFPlan

Of the over 4 million unsold cars and light trucks, over half are from General Motors, Ford or FCA brands. May sales have slumped as consumers just cannot afford to buy at this time […]

via Auto Industry Showing Cracks: Ford Begins Final Round Of Layoffs As Unsold Cars Keep Piling Up — A Sweet Dose of Reality | The Mad Truther

by Daniel de Klerk

It is absolutely true that there is no such thing as “free stuff.” Everything has a cost and that cost can come in both the form of concrete labour or that of abstract value and means of exchanging.

The question of wealth distribution is never a question of simply wanting things for free and getting handouts, it is about the question of access. People want food, housing, health care and power over the organisation of their own lives; they don’t want it for nothing, they want it to be within their means to access and use. It is not a matter of entitlement to meaningless luxury, it’s an articulation of real needs necessary for life.

People work their asses off under degrading, backbreaking, boring and mind numbing circumstances, selling away most of their life to be able to live it, or struggle without whilst being deprived of the most basic means to participate in society; while around them the mass of collective wealth accumulates in the hands of rich people and faceless institutions. These People (unlike some other people) are not asking for yachts, private jets, palaces and lifetime supplies of cocaine. Around the world, they’re asking for a roof over their head, food on their table, the health care they need and the real ability to direct the course over their own life. A demand for the most basic necessity for the continuation of *this society* and a demand that is increasingly regarded as impossible and unrealistic.

If life under capitalism becomes impossible then so the continuation of capitalism becomes impossible. The governments developed the welfare system in an attempt to solve this social question, not because we asked them too but because they hoped to stave off the inevitable […]

via Capitalism Will Fall: Not a Matter of If, but a Matter of When — ANARCHIMEDIA

 

The day after Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, signed a bill that put her state on the path to banning almost all abortions, a 20-year-old woman from Tennessee walked into an abortion clinic with an ex-boyfriend and underwent the procedure.

“I’m a single mom of three kids,” said the woman, who asked to remain anonymous, after having an abortion. “I have nothing to offer this child. You know, like, I’m already spread thin. I have my other three to take care of.”

She was one of about 20 women who had the procedure that day at the Alabama Women’s Center. Because there, it was business as usual. The ban — which is certain to be challenged in court — won’t go into effect for several months. Meanwhile, abortion is still legal in the state.

Dalton Johnson co-founded the Alabama Women’s Center in 2001, and since then, the center has had to adapt and sue over multiple new laws and ordinances designed to shut its doors.

“It’s been one thing after another. You know, I kind of feel almost at home in the federal courthouse,” Johnson said. “It’s been admitting privileges. It’s been the zoning.”

“The anti-choice group sued the City of Huntsville for issuing my business license, and so that was a whole battle that we had to fight and pay for out of pocket. And, of course, we prevailed in that one. The building codes,” she added. “And probably some more I just can’t even think of.”

So for Johnson, the latest law isn’t much of a surprise. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t emotionally affecting the staff at the clinic, as they answered phones and cared for patients […]

via What It’s Like at an Alabama Clinic Still Performing Abortions (HBO) – VICE News Published on May 20, 2019 — Just Sayin’

If the U.S. economy is “booming” and very bright days are ahead, then why are many large U.S. corporations laying off thousands of workers?  Layoffs are starting to come fast and furious now, and this is happening even though the coming recession has not even officially started yet.  Of course many are convinced that we are actually in a recession at this moment.  In fact, according to John Williams of shadowstats.com if the government was actually using honest numbers they would show that we have been in a recession for quite some time.  But the narrative that the mainstream media keeps feeding us is that the U.S. economy is “doing well” and that the outlook for the future is positive.  Well, if that is true then why are big companies laying off so many workers right now?

Let’s start by talking about Ford Motor Company.  On Monday, they announced that they will be laying off approximately 7,000 workers…

Ford Motor said Monday that it is laying off about 7,000 managers and other salaried employees, about 10% of its white-collar workforce across the globe, as part of a restructuring plan designed to save the No. 2 automaker $600 million annually.

The cuts, some of which were previously announced by the company, will be completed by August, Ford CEO Jim Hackett said in an email to employees Monday.

If the U.S. economy was about to take off like a rocket, this move doesn’t make any sense at all.

But if we are headed into a recession, this move makes perfect sense.

Another large firm that is laying off thousands of workers is Nestle…

Nestle SA’s U.S. unit will dismiss about 4,000 workers as it stops delivering frozen pizza and ice cream directly to stores and transitions to a warehouse model that’s becoming an industry standard for Big Food companies looking to trim costs.

And we also recently learned that 3M is planning to get rid of about 2,000 workers…

3M plans to cut 2,000 globally as part of a restructuring due to a slower-than-expected 2019.

The maker of Post-it notes, industrial coatings and ceramics said Thursday that the move is expected to save about $225 million to $250 million a year. The St. Paul Minnesota-based company anticipates a pretax charge of about $150 million, or 20 cents per share, this year.

Did you catch that part about these layoffs being due to “a slower-than-expected 2019”?

Unfortunately, things are slow for a lot of companies out there these days.

Another company that is dumping a large number of workers is MGM Resorts…

MGM Resorts International MGM, -2.09% plans to cut about 1,000 positions by the end of the current quarter amid a cost-cutting and operational overhaul that calls for fewer managers across its properties.

That figure includes some 254 positions that the company moved to eliminate last week.

In addition, Dressbarn just announced that all of their stores will be closing…

Dressbarn is closing all of its stores.

The women’s retailer announced Monday “plans to commence a wind-down of its retail operations, including the eventual closure of its approximately 650 stores.”

I am not sure how many employees they have per store, but even if it is just a handful we are talking about the loss of thousands of jobs.

The U.S. economy has been slowing down for months, and now the complete breakdown of trade talks with China threatens to plunge us into a prolonged trade war.  As I noted in another article, a couple of different studies have concluded that an extended trade war could literally cost our economy millions of lost jobs.

And once the job losses start rolling, they can really get out of hand very quickly.  We saw this in 2008, and it is just a matter of time until we see it happen again.

On Sunday, a reader sent me an article about a factory closing that was happening in her neck of the woods in Pennsylvania.  One worker that was laid off said that the closure of the facility “was the final kick in the gut”…

Robert and Brooks Gronlund, owners of Wood-Mode Inc., wrote a text to workers Friday, saying they “are extremely appreciative” of the employees’ contributions and commitments. The company owners then confirmed all of them were terminated, as were their benefits.

“It was the final kick in the gut,” Michele Sanders, a 22-year employee of the company, said Saturday.

The privately-owned company in Kreamer, which produced custom wood cabinets, shut its doors Monday, leaving nearly 1,000 people without jobs. The abrupt closure of the plant stunned workers and community leaders […]

via Large U.S. Firms Are Laying Off Thousands Of Workers — © blogfactory

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Photos Getty

In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, a newly formed group called the Black Psychiatrists of America began to challenge their white colleagues to think about racism in a new way. Its members had been discussing for some time the possibility of creating an organization that would address their lack of representation within the key bodies of American psychiatry. But now, as one of these men, Dr. Chester Pierce, later put it ”we anguished in our grief for a great moderate leader,” and it seemed that the time for moderation on their side was also over. In Pierce’s words: “As we listened to radio reports and called to various sections of the country for the on-the spot reports in inner cities, our moderation weakened and our alarm hardened.”

Racism had led directly to King’s assassination, and not only had white psychiatry consistently failed to take racism seriously; it had, in ways both subtle and overt, enabled it.

The decision was thus made to organize black psychiatrists into an independent body that would use tactics of the civil rights movement to force American psychiatry to acknowledge both its own racism and its professional responsibility to address the scourge of racism in the country.

On May 8, 1969, representatives from the Black Psychiatrists of America interrupted the trustees of the American Psychiatric Association while they were eating breakfast, and presented them with a list of demands. These included a significant increase in African-American representation on APA committees, task forces, and other positions of leadership; a call for the APA to commit itself to desegregating mental health facilities; and a demand that any individual member of the society who was found to be guilty of racial discrimination be barred from practicing psychiatry.

The most fundamental demand made that morning, however, was that the profession begin to think about racism differently than it had in the past. Racism did not just happen because some bad people had hateful beliefs. Unlike many of their liberal white colleagues, who were fascinated by the potential mental pathologies of individual racists, the Black Psychiatrists of America (drawing on new sociological work) insisted that racism was built into the systems and structures of American life, including psychiatry itself. For this reason, as some of them put it in 1973, “institutional change (as opposed to personality change) are needed to root out and eliminate racism.”

Chester Pierce—the founding president of the Black Psychiatrists of America—was most concerned about the pernicious influence of one institution in particular: television. By 1969, virtually every American family home had at least one set. As one commentator at the time observed: “American homes have more television sets than bathtubs, refrigerators or telephones; 95 percent of American homes have television sets.”

Small children of all ethnicities were growing up glued to TV screens. This worried Pierce, because he was not just a psychiatrist but also a professor of early childhood education. And from a public health standpoint, he believed, television was a prime “carrier” of demeaning messages that undermined the mental health of vulnerable young black children in particular. In fact, it was Pierce who first coined the now widely used term microaggression, in the course of a study in the 1970s that exposed the persistent presence of stigmatizing representations of black people in television commercials […]

via The Forgotten Tale of How Black Psychiatrists Helped Make ‘Sesame Street’ The children’s television show entranced preschoolers—and helped teach impressionable black kids. — TheConfirmationFiles

The world’s tallest animal is on a “silent slide toward extinction,” Giraffe Conservation Foundation says The International Union for Conservation of Nature has added 7 out of 9 giraffe species to its Red List of Threatened Species. In an announcement completely ignored by the media (except India Today), the organization categorized two species of giraffe as “critically endangered” and one as “endangered.”

The conservation status of the rest range from “vulnerable” to “near threatened.”

“Many people, including conservationists, remain unaware that the world’s tallest animal is experiencing a silent slide towards extinction,” said Julian Fennessy, director of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, in a press release.

The global giraffe population has plummeted 40 percent in just 30 years, from 157,000 to 97,500, according to The Guardian.

“Human population growth poses the largest threat to giraffes,” says the Giraffe Conservation Foundation.

“Habitat loss and changes through expanding agriculture and mining, illegal hunting, increasing human-wildlife conflict, and civil unrest are all factors” […]

via Giraffes Silently Added to Endangered Species List — Return to Now

U.S. Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan on Saturday became the first Republican lawmaker to say President Trump had “engaged in impeachable conduct.” In a series of tweets, Amash wrote he had read the full report by special counsel Robert Mueller and had concluded there is a “threshold for impeachment.”

“Under our Constitution, the president ‘shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors,’” Amash wrote Saturday. “While ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors’ is not defined, the context implies conduct that violates the public trust.”

Amash also wrote that impeachment does not require “probable cause” has been committed, but rather “simply requires a finding that an official has engaged in careless, abusive, corrupt or otherwise dishonorable conduct.”

After Mueller concluded his report in mid-March, Attorney General William Barr released a four-page summary, which Amash said “deliberately misrepresented” the full 448-page report. “Barr’s misrepresentations are significant but often subtle, frequently taking the form of sleight-of-hand qualifications or logical fallacies, which he hopes people will not notice,” he wrote.

Amash wrote that, contrary to Barr’s initial assessment of Mueller’s report, Mr. Trump had “engaged in specific actions and a pattern of behavior that meet the threshold for impeachment.

Congress, too, was not spared from criticism by Amash. He called out the partisanship of many lawmakers, saying they shift their perceptions “180 degrees” when discussing former President Bill Clinton and Mr. Trump.

“Few members of Congress even read Mueller’s report; their minds were made up based on partisan affiliation — and it showed, with representatives and senators from both parties issuing definitive statements on the 448-page report’s conclusions within just hours of its release,” Amash wrote.

Amash, who has been described as the “new Ron Paul” due to his Libertarian beliefs, has broken ranks with the Republican party before — and especially against Mr. Trump, whom he did not endorse in 2016. Earlier this year, he was one of 14 Republican representatives who tried to override Mr. Trump’s veto over an emergency declaration for the border wall. In March, Amash did not rule out running for president as a Libertarian in 2020 […]

via Michigan congressman Justin Amash becomes first GOP lawmaker to call for impeachment — Nappy News

Ending austerity, individualistic thinking and unstable employment must be the first steps to addressing the ever-growing epidemic of mental health.

Childhood obesity is a serious problem. We see this public health issue as a collective responsibility, therefore different approaches were utilised to address it. Talking and creating awareness was not enough, so the government stepped in with public education around healthy eating, but also a broader range of interventions such as the sugar tax and healthy school meals. So why, then, are people being forced to address their own mental health issues without help from the government?

They have been raising awareness and getting people to talk, which is more of an achievement for charities and the media than the state. Other than this, little has done little in the form of government intervention – in fact government policies are making it worse.

We live in a society that worships individualism; that makes us believe that our mental health is our own responsibility, even in situations when there’s nothing we can do about it. Some things that lead to mental health problems in the first place are beyond many human beings’ control, even more so if you are part of a discriminated minority.

In a time of austerity, rising personal debts and precarious work, we are encouraged to be an individual that should not rely upon anybody for anything. If we do, society perceives us to have failed in life and look weak. The narrative that many people ‘choose’ to be on zero-hours contracts is false. They sell the gig economy as being empowering and entrepreneurial, yet an unstable paycheck and lack of workers’ rights says something else. The stress this puts on someone, already struggling to manage, can be immeasurable. It also leads to higher personal borrowing as the cost-of-living rises but the wages have stagnated, the UK has hit record levels of personal household debt.

With increasing income inequality also comes higher health and social care problems. I worked in an emergency department for several years as a mental health nurse, assessing people that had tried to take their own lives. Many of my patients were not mentally ill, they were desperate and stressed by things such as marriage problems, bringing up children, lack of support from services, employment issues and money problems.

People may say individuals should sort these problems out themselves, but the truth is you need help from family, friends, and government services. If these services were funded correctly to help people, then they could get back to being contributing members of society that pay taxes, help friends out, look after elderly relatives, bring up children and work, which feeds into the economy. Without functioning citizens, you cease to have a functioning country.

However, the problem goes back much further than the austerity era of the last decade. Since the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, the UK has slowly gone from a collective community supporting each other to a country with an individualistic, ‘I’m alright Jack’ attitude. It was Thatcher who introduced an ideology that would see state companies privatised and many industrial towns lose their economic soul. The age of individualism is here, and if you cannot make it, then you are seen as faulty. As we can see from social media, we are more obsessed than ever by who has what. Sending a false image of ourselves to others, we ruminate about how others see us, when in reality it’s our own self-confidence that is suffering […]

via Systemic Societal Change, Not Self-Care, Will Fix Our Nation’s Mental Health Crisis — Edward Lawrence

By Whitney Webb | MintPress News | May 17, 2019

NEW YORK — For nearly two decades, one of the most overlooked and little known arrests made in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks was that of the so-called “High Fivers,” or the “Dancing Israelis.” However, new information released by the FBI on May 7 has brought fresh scrutiny to the possibility that the “Dancing Israelis,” at least two of whom were known Mossad operatives, had prior knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Shortly after 8:46 a.m. on the day of the attacks, just minutes after the first plane struck the World Trade Center, five men — later revealed to be Israeli nationals — had positioned themselves in the parking lot of the Doric Apartment Complex in Union City, New Jersey, where they were seen taking pictures and filming the attacks while also celebrating the destruction of the towers and “high fiving” each other. At least one eyewitness interviewed by the FBI had seen the Israelis’ van in the parking lot as early as 8:00 a.m. that day, more than 40 minutes prior to the attack. The story received coverage in U.S. mainstream media at the time but has since been largely forgotten.

The men — Sivan Kurzberg, Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Yaron Shimuel and Omar Marmari — were subsequently apprehended by law enforcement and claimed to be Israeli tourists on a “working holiday” in the United States where they were employed by a moving company, Urban Moving Systems. Upon his arrest, Sivan Kurzberg told the arresting officer, “We are Israeli; we are not your problem. Your problems are our problems, The Palestinians are the problem.”

For years, the official story has been that these individuals, while they had engaged in “immature” behavior by celebrating and being “visibly happy” in their documenting of the attacks, had no prior knowledge of the attack. However, newly released FBI copies of the photos taken by the five Israelis strongly suggest that these individuals had prior knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center. The copies of the photos were obtained via a FOIA request made by a private citizen.

A high-quality photo, top, shows the area the dancing Israelis were staged. Credit | Panamza

According to a former high-ranking American intelligence official who spoke to the Jewish Daily Forward in 2002, the FBI concluded in its investigation that the five Israelis arrested “were conducting a Mossad surveillance mission and that their employer, Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, NJ, served as a front.” At least two of the men arrested were determined to have direct links to the Mossad after their names appeared in a CIA-FBI database of foreign intelligence operatives. According to one of their lawyers, one of the men, Paul Kurzberg, had previously worked for the Mossad in another country prior to arriving in the United States. Another of those arrested, Oded Ellner, subsequently stated on Israeli TV that the five Israelis had been in New York at the time “to document the event,” meaning the attack on the World Trade Center.

The FOIA release of the photos is notable because responses to prior FOIA requests to the Department of Justice, which oversees the FBI, had previously claimed that all of the photos taken by the Israeli nationals had been destroyed in January 2014. The photos themselves are heavily redacted, making it impossible to see the Israelis’ facial expressions. However, previously declassified yet heavily redacted FBI reports state that the Israelis are “visibly happy” in nearly every photo, even when the burning towers are in the background. The photos released are also not original copies and instead appear to be photocopies of photocopies of the original pictures. In addition, of the original 76 pictures developed by authorities from the camera in the Israelis’ possession, only 14 were released.

However, three of these photos — despite the heavy redaction and poor quality — are damning. Since 2001, even though the photos were never released until now, it had been known that one of the Israelis arrested — Sivan Kurzberg — was seen in a photo “holding a lighted lighter in the foreground, with the smoldering wreckage [of the twin towers] in the background,” according to Steven Noah Gordon, then-lawyer for the five Israelis, as cited in a New York Timesreport from November 2001.

The picture of Kurzberg with the lit lighter appears to be photo #5 in the new FOIA release. Yet, the picture released includes a visible date of September 10, 2001, the day before the attacks, as do two other photos — images #7 and #8 in the collection — whereas all other photos with dates show only the month and the year (9 ‘01). The FOIA release did not provide any information as to the apparent discrepancy in dates […]

via Newly Released FBI Docs Shed Light on Apparent Mossad Foreknowledge of 9/11 Attacks

❝ The United States has spent more subsidizing fossil fuels in recent years than it has on defense spending, according to a new report from the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF found that direct and indirect subsidies for coal, oil and gas in the U.S. reached $649 billion in 2015. Pentagon spending that same year was $599 billion.

❝ Oil, gas and coal companies — and their stooges in public office — have long argued that making consumers pay for the full impacts of fossil fuel use would cripple the economy. The IMF experts call bullshit on this idea, revealing that the world would, in fact, be more prosperous. Eliminating subsidies for fossil fuels would have created global “net economic welfare gains” in 2015 of “more than $1.3 trillion, or 1.7 percent of global GDP…”

Between stooging for corporations killing us with fossil fuels and the military-industrial complex pouring money down the death and destruction rathole, that’s well over a trillion dollar$ a year in wasted money. Funds that could have been spent on healthcare, improved public education, any number of programs designed to benefit the working folks of America.

via Fossil fuel subsidies even greater than military industrial complex — Eideard