TIME Magazine: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: 'The Coming Race War Won't Be About Race'

Source: TIME Magazine-

Source: TIME Magazine: Opinion- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar- The Coming Race War Won't Be About Race

If there's any good that comes out of Ferguson besides the Brown family getting justice for what happened to their relative Michael, is that it will hopefully be a wakeup call for America about the problems that we still have with race-relations. Especially as they relate to poverty and crime that when you have so much concentrated poverty in one area of a city, or state and you leave it as is that people can become desperate that they feel they need to turn to crime just to support themselves. Crime goes up as a result and you have cops doing things that they probably wouldn't normally do. Like using excessive force and as a result people get hurt and even dying.

Ferguson should not be just a wakeup call about poverty in America, but a wakeup call for law enforcement in how they protect us from predators. And that they need to be involved and work with their communities they are supposed to serve and protect so incidents like this don't happen in the future. Especially in areas with highly concentrated poverty where the residents tend to be of one race and where the law enforcement tends to be from another race. And when an incident like this happens it just explodes and looks like one race of people is abusing and murdering people of another race.

Don't expect any major reforms to come from Ferguson. Remember America is not only a country that can apparently tolerate 1-5 Americans living in poverty, (I'm not one of them) can tolerate the War on Drugs, (but less and less everyday)  two-million Americans in jail or prison. Or a sitting U.S. Representative being shot down at a campaign event and all of other gun-related deaths of innocent Americans before any serious reforms are made.
The New York Times: Ferguson 2014- A Protest Ignited

Bloomberg News: Video: Rip Up the Script: "Why Canada's Middle Class Beats America's"

Strange title for an over two-minute video, two-minutes and seventeen seconds to be precise, that spends only twenty seconds talking about the Canadian middle class. Most of this video was about the decline of the American middle class, which should've been reflected in the title.  The last twenty seconds discusses why Canada wasn't hurt as much by the Great Recession as the U.S.

Why Canada wasn't hurt as much by the Great Recession as America and Europe?  Canada is larger than America geographically but has one-ninth the population. They have thirty-five million people v.s. three-hundred and ten million. Canada is also energy independent, sending energy to the U.S. via the Keystone Pipeline. They don't have the debt and deficit issues that the U.S. or a lot of Europe has and they tax business at a much lower rate.  Canada has a lot of economic resources with a fairly small population and a lot of land.  Physically, it is  the second largest country in the world, trailing only the Russian Federation.

Germany's economic system is similar to both Canada's and America's.  It has a robust private sector and a strong safety net.  It has modern infrastructure and taxes business's lower than the U.S. They have managed to keep their debt to GDP ratio down throughout the Great Recession.

The U.S. is trying to figure out how to become energy independent, how to finance and rebuild a crumbling infrastructure, educate more Americans and improve our 39th in the world ranking in education.  We have to move millions of Americans out of poverty.  Our poverty levels are roughly twice that of the rest of the developed world.  This requires improvements in education and job training. We need  to get our national debt stabilized and under control.