MatrixLeaks

If you’re a typical family, you’re considerably poorer than you used to be. No wonder the “recovery” feels like a recession. A  new study published by the Russell Sage foundation helps explain why many families feel like they’re falling behind: They actually are. The study, which measures the average wealth of U.S. households by income level, reveals a startling decline in wealth nationwide. The median household in 2013 had a net worth of just $56,335 -- 43% lower than the median wealth level right before the recession began in 2007, and 36% lower than a decade ago. “There are very few signs of significant recovery from the losses in wealth suffered by American families during the Great Recession,” the study concludes. Wealth generally comes from two types of assets: financial holdings and real estate. Financial assets have more than recovered ground lost during the recession, thanks largely to a stock-market rally now in its sixth year. The S&P 500 index, for in...

Bodies Of 800 Children, Found at Former Irish Home For Unwed Mothers In a town in western Ireland, where castle ruins pepper green landscapes, there's a two-metre stone wall that once surrounded a place called the Home. Between 1925 and 1961, thousands of "fallen women" and their "illegitimate" children passed through the Home, run by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam. Many of the women, after paying a penance of indentured servitude for their out-of-wedlock pregnancy, left the Home for work and lives in other parts of Ireland and beyond. Some of their children were not so fortunate. More than five decades after the Home was closed and destroyed - where a housing development and children's playground now stands - what happened to nearly 800 of those abandoned children has now emerged: their bodies were piled into a massive septic tank sitting in the back of the structure and forgotten, with neither gravestones nor coffins. Children at "the Hom...

How the NSA & FBI Made Facebook The Perfect Mass Surveillance Tool The National Security Agency and the FBI teamed up in October 2010 to develop techniques for turning Facebook into a surveillance tool. Documents  released alongside  security journalist Glenn Greenwald’s new book, “No Place To Hide,” reveal the NSA and FBI partnership, in which the two agencies developed techniques for exploiting Facebook chats, capturing private photos, collecting IP addresses, and gathering private profile data. According to the slides below, the agencies’ goal for such collection was to capture “a very rich source of information on targets,” including “personal details, ‘pattern of life,’ connections to associates, [and] media.” NSA documents make painfully clear how the agencies collected information “by exploiting inherent weaknesses in Facebook’s security model” through its use of the popular Akamai content delivery network. The NSA describes its methods as “assumed a...

What if you had only three weeks before the Internet you know and love was about to disappear? Would you spend your time binging on listicles or the final season of Breaking Bad? Or would you do something about it? Would you email all your friends with the news? Blast your social media networks? Demand that Congress and the president keep this amazing invention from going away? If the Internet had only three weeks left, would you take to the streets and raise hell? I bet you would. And here's your chance to prove it: Because three weeks from today the Internet as we know it may not disappear, but it could be a lot closer to the precipice. On May 15, the Federal Communications Commission will propose a new set of rules that are supposed to stop big phone and cable companies from blocking websites or discriminating against apps and services they don't like. Only as written the rules would do pretty much the opposite. According to  numerous   sources , FCC C...

The tiny Nordic European island country of iceland is presently experiencing one of the greatest economic comebacks of all time. After the privatization of the banking sector completed in 200o, the economy was thrown into a tailspin when over a five year period, private bankers borrowed 120 billion dollars (10 times the size of Iceland’s economy). A huge economic bubble was created, causing house prices to double, and making a small percentage of Iceland’s population rich enough to buy up overseas investments, mansions, yachts, and private jets, while leaving an absolutely un-payable debt for all Icelanders. Iceland was facing national bankruptcy. In response to the failed banking system, in October 2008, Iceland’s revolution against this financial tyranny began, rather casually in the street, in front of the Icelandic general assembly. In the duration of five months, the main bank of Iceland was nationalized, government officials were forced to resign, the old government w...

Why isn't the American Psychological Association pursuing ethics charges against psychologist John Leso for abuses he helped carry out at the Guantánamo prison? George Orwell wisely observed that our understanding of the past, and the meaning associated with it, directly influences the future. And as the unprecedented public feud between the CIA and Congress makes clear, there are still significant aspects of our recent history of state-sponsored torture that need examination before we put this national disgrace behind us. Important questions remain unresolved about the U.S. torture program in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. And the four-year, $40 million Senate Intelligence Committee  report   on CIA torture is unlikely to provide sufficient answers, even if it’s ever declassified and released. For example, what will be done about doctors who helped create U.S. torture programs and participated in their implementation? And is there any evidence that cruel, inhuman...

Less than a month before the 11th anniversary of the illegal US-led invasion of Iraq, the near destruction of much of the country, heritage, culture, secularism, education, health services and all State institutions, the country is poised to revert “two thousand years” say campaigners. On February 25th, Iraq’s Cabinet approved a draft law lowering the age of legal marriage for females to nine years old. Iraq was, prior to the invasion, a fiercely secular country, with a broadly equal male, female workforce and with women benefiting from a   National Personal Status Law , introduced in 1959, which remained “one of the most liberal in the Arab world, with respect to women’s rights.” The legal age for marriage was set at eighteen, forced marriages were banned and polygamy restricted. Cohesion between communities was enhanced and fostered by “eliminating the differential treatment of Sunnis and Shiites under the law (and erasing differentiation) between the various religio...