The American Dream is out of reach

The American Dream is impossible to achieve in this country.

So say nearly 6 in 10 people who responded to CNNMoney's American Dream Poll, conducted by ORC International. They feel the dream -- however they define it -- is out of reach.

Young adults, age 18 to 34, are most likely to feel the dream is unattainable, with 63% saying it's impossible. This age group has suffered in the wake of the Great Recession, finding it hard to get good jobs.

Younger Americans are a cause of great concern. Many respondents said they are worried about the next generation's ability to prosper.

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'Yats' Wants EU To Nix Russian Pipeline

FORBES

Ukraine Prime Minister Arseniy “Yats” Yatsenyuk has a future as a U.S. natural gas lobbyist in Washington.

The man made famous by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland in February in a leaked conversation with American diplomat Geoffrey Pyatt in Kiev thinks Europe should block Russia’s planned construction of a new gas pipeline.  If the new South Stream gas pipeline is built, it will deliver natural gas directly to Russia’s most important customer — Europe — without having to pipe it through that troubling piece of real estate known as Ukraine.

Russia and Ukraine have been locking horns since late 2013, when president Viktor Yanukovych nixed a trade deal with Europe in order to move his country closer to Russia.

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Steve Forbes: Link dollar to gold or face Great Depression II

Influential financial publisher and former presidential candidate Steve Forbes is out with a new warning that the U.S. faces an economic catastrophe due to the Federal Reserve's loose dollar policy, and returning to a strict “gold standard” is the only way to avoid disaster.

In Money: How the Destruction of the Dollar Threatens the Global Economy -- and What We Can Do About It, Forbes blames President Obama's money team for the stagnant economy, high prices, declining mobility and big government.

"[The Fed's] vastly misguided monetary policies are now setting the stage for a new economic and social catastrophe — one that could rival the financial crisis and horrors of the 1930s,” he wrote in the book co-authored by Elizabeth Ames.

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Tiananmen Square 25th anniversary – the massacre as it happened: 'Rows of troops advanced slowly, shooting directly into the crowd'

It will go down in the annals of China's Communist Party as The Glorious Fourth of June when the army that was founded for the people turned on the unarmed citizens of Peking to destroy a peaceful student-led democracy movement.

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We haven't heard a word from Obama or Kerry about the killing of innocent civilians in Eastern Ukraine! WTF?

Where is the self-righteous rhetoric? I can hardly find any mention or analysis of the anti-Russian Ukrainian Air Force attack that bombed innocent civilians in Eastern Ukraine! Where is the outrage? Where is the sermon on the mount? It's embarrassing and scandalous to be so blatantly disingenuous and hypocritical. We know Eastern Ukraine doesn't want to be a part of NATO but that doesn't mean they are less than human! They have the right to self-determination! Self-determination denotes the legal right of people to decide their own destiny in the international order. Self-determination is a core principle of international law.

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Quote of the day - The Hypocrisy of America

PUTIN: "We have almost no military forces abroad yet look: Everywhere in the world there are American military bases, American troops thousands of kilometers from their borders. They interfere in the internal affairs of this or that country!"

REVEALED: GCHQ's BEYOND TOP SECRET Middle Eastern INTERNET SPY BASE

Exclusive Above-top-secret details of Britain’s covert surveillance programme - including the location of a clandestine British base tapping undersea cables in the Middle East - have so far remained secret, despite being leaked by fugitive NSA sysadmin Edward Snowden. Government pressure has meant that some media organisations, despite being in possession of these facts, have declined to reveal them. Today, however, the Register publishes them in full.

The secret British spy base is part of a programme codenamed “CIRCUIT” and also referred to as Overseas Processing Centre 1 (OPC-1).

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Confirmed: Ukrainian air force fired over 150 missiles at Lugansk, bombed admin HQ

Kiev has admitted showering the eastern Ukrainian city of Lugansk with dozens of missiles from the air, saying that its Air Force helicopters and jets “fired more than 150 missiles” in Monday’s military action.

DEATH TOLL: 181 people killed, 293 injured in Kiev military op

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Fangs of the Military Industrial Complex are destroying the Republic

Dr. Steve Pieczenik, in a very interesting interview, lays out his take on Ed Snowden. Is Snowden knowingly or unknowingly, part of a larger fight for money and power within the Military Industrial Complex? If this is true, how much blood is left in the host to suck? Steve calls the UCSB shooting a false flag attack and says that the CFR is nothing but a nursing home for neocon Jews.

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Holder announces task force on 'homegrown' terrorists

LA TIMES

Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder, Jr. on Monday announced the creation of a task force within the Justice Department to combat an “escalating danger” from “homegrown” terrorists within the United States.

The Justice Department, in a news release accompanying Holder’s weekly video address, cited a Congressional Research Service report last year that said domestic terrorists were responsible for more than two dozen incidents in the U.S. since 9/11.

Holder, in the video, cited the Boston Marathon bombings last year and shootings at Fort Hood in 2009 and 2014 as examples of “the danger we face from these homegrown threats.”

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The Supreme Court won’t intervene in the James Risen case

WASHINGTON POST

The Supreme Court declined to step in Monday on behalf of James Risen, a New York Times reporter and author who faces potential jail time for not identifying a source.

So what does this mean for Risen’s case? Will the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter be sent to prison? What does he have to say about the decision? And how does this fit into the Obama administration’s war on leaks? Here’s a primer on what is going on, where things stand and what could happen next.

Risen is a reporter for the New York Times who writes about national security issues. In 2006, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his stories about the Bush administration’s domestic wiretapping program.

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Beware the Latest U.S. Mortgage Market Trap

MARKET ORACLE

Shah Gilani writes: Get ready. There’s more trouble ahead for home buyers, home builders, and especially homeowners who took out home-equity lines of credit before the housing crisis. Those heydays have turned into haymakers.

What’s already started to happen might not only knock out the formerly aspiring but now petering-out housing recovery, but also might knock the already weak economy to the ground.

Back in the good old days, when banks and mortgage shops were selling mortgage money and home-equity credit lines like carnival barkers wowing crowds into the big top, millions of homeowners steeped right in. That circus tent was nothing but a trap, however. And now I’m going to tell you what that trap means for those borrowers … and the rest of the economy …

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US Expected to Withdraw QE by End 2014: Chicago Fed President Charles Evans

The US Federal Reserve is expected to entirely withdraw its massive monthly bond-buying stimulus programme by the end of 2014, Chicago Fed President Charles Evans has said.

Evans, speaking at a conference in Istanbul, also said the Fed's 2% inflation target should not be seen as a ceiling and that the target could be higher.

"The expectation is that tapering will be completed by the end of this year," Evans said, reported Reuters.

The world's most powerful bank on 30 April announced a fourth $10bn (£5.9bn, €7.3bn) reduction in quantitative easing (QE), trimming its monthly asset purchases to $45bn a month.

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The CIA Can't Control the Truth at Guantánamo Forever

The government is continuing to fight on various fronts to keep its torture program secret. It's not going to win.

Last week I watched the televised feed in the latest round of pre-trial hearings in the death penalty case against Abd al-Rahim Hussayn Muhammed al-Nashiri for his alleged role in the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole.

The hearings focused on the information the government must give to Mr. al-Nashiri's lawyers about his secret detention and torture at the hands of the CIA. Even though the world knows the CIA tortured Mr. al-Nashiri – in part from an internal CIA report released to the ACLU in a lawsuit – much concerning the CIA's treatment of him, other military commissions defendants, and potential witnesses remains secret from his lawyers and the public.

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N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images

The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.

The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency’s ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed.

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Susan Lindauer Interviews Christopher Bollyn

On the Covert Report, Susan interviews 9/11 researcher Christopher Bollyn. His book, “Solving 9:11: The Deception that Changed the World” is must reading to understand the Israeli connection to 9/11 and Israel’s history of false flag operations as political cover.

They discuss the dancing Israelis, Larry Silverstein as well as the new 911 Museum! Bollyn was himself targeted for malicious prosecution in the cover up of scientific research into nano-thermite found in the dust at Ground Zero. He no longer lives in the United Stasi of America!!!

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Rob Kirby: Dollar Will Absolutely Go to Zero

Macroeconomic analyst Rob Kirby has 15 years' experience as an international derivatives broker. There are hundreds of trillions in derivatives spread around at the major global banks.

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James Rickards: Catastrophic Outcomes May Come Faster Than Expected

James Rickards, author of the new best-selling book called "The Death of Money," says the financial collapse will happen, but he is not sure of when it will come.

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Jim Willie: We've Lost Our Govt to the Banking Cabal, 9/11 was a Bank Robbery

There have been no effective solutions to help economy since 2008 Lehman Bros collapse because the banking cabal "doesn't want to give up their power and control of the wealth printing press.

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9/11: Russia Presents Evidence Against US, UK And Israel Co-Conspirators?

Undoubtedly the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington DC are the most misrepresented by officialdom in US history.

Whereas the assassination of John F. Kennedy is now understood to have been a classic CIA Public Execution Plan, it does not come close to 9/11 in terms of the number and magnitude of outright falsehoods, misleading statements, fake science and fraudulent facts submitted by officials and agents of the US Government.  The ‘official’ 9/11 Commission Report stands as the most fabricated document ever produced by US tax dollars.  Not only did the investigation avoid every serious inquiry about how two steel frame building came down after being dustified in NYC, it also subverted every initiative to ferret out the truth.

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