HOLY CRAP, A TALKING BISCUIT.
October 2011
109 posts
The income mobility myth →
blogs.reuters.com
By David Callahan
The opinions expressed are his own.Top Republicans have a simple answer to surging public concern about America’s vast wealth divide: More income mobility. “We want success for everybody,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said last week, adding that Americans shouldn’t “excoriate some who have been successful.” This remedy for economic unfairness taps into the popular American belief that public policy should ensure equality of opportunity, not outcome.
Too bad it won’t work.
Changes in the economy mean that, no matter how hard people work or how much they invest in education, they may still find themselves barely treading water. Even before the financial crisis, there weren’t enough good jobs to go around – thanks to globalization, automation, declining unionization, and lax labor standards. The majority of new jobs created during the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were low-wage positions with no benefits. These trends – not, say, a lack of ambition – help explain why half of all American households bring in under $50,000 and have no assets. …
“Success for everybody” is simply not possible against this backdrop of structural inequality. Ironically, conservatives like Cantor are placing ever more faith in the great American virtues of hard work and self-improvement even as these virtues deliver less and less mobility. …
"Like the party committees they are rapidly coming to eclipse, the independent groups are financed by some of the Republican Party’s wealthiest donors and operated by some of its most respected operatives and strategists. But thanks to the Citizens United decision, the independent groups can raise money in unlimited amounts and with negligible overhead. Much of the money will be spent through not-for-profit organizations that are not required to disclose their donors." →
nytimes.com
as predicted, citizens united = more money, less accountability.
“We are entering a golden age of journalism. I do think there has been horrible frictional costs but I think when we look back at what has happened, I look at my backpack that is sitting here, and it contains more journalistic firepower than the entire newsroom that I walked into 30 to 40 years ago. It’s connected to the cloud, I can make digital recordings of everything that I do, I can check in real time if someone is telling me the truth, I have a still camera that takes video that I can upload quickly and seamlessly.”
—David Carr reflects on the future of journalism.
Crawling Back To You (Tom Petty Cover)
Bon Iver
most things i worry about never happen anyway
i’ve probably linked somewhere before to stereogum’s roundup of bon iver’s 10 best covers. but it bears repeating, so go download if you haven’t already.
“It is impossible to define an acceptable level of inequality. Any inequality is corrosive if those with wealth are believed to have rigged the game rather than won in honest competition. As inequality rises, the sense that we are equal as citizens weakens. In the end, democracy is sold to the highest bidder. That has happened often before in the history of republics. Peaceful protest is the right of free people. More important, it is a way to bring issues to our attention. The left does not know how to replace the market. But pro-marketeers still need to take the protests seriously. All is not well.”
—Martin Wolf
“A 2008 poll of 1,400 Americans by the Cornell Survey Research Institute found that when people were asked whether they had “ever used a government social program,” 57 percent said they had not. Respondents were then asked whether they had availed themselves of any of 21 different federal policies, including Social Security, unemployment insurance, the home-mortgage-interest deduction and student loans. It turned out that 94 percent of those who had denied using programs had benefited from at least one; the average respondent had used four.”
—New York Times
