Archive for the ‘wealth divide’ tag
On Linsanity, reports of Occupy’s death have been greatly exaggerated
Listen to the episode of Citizen Radio and subscribe to the free podcast.
Allison and Jamie talk about Linsanity and small Occupy offshoots that are making a big, big difference, plus tons of rich people who continue to be rewarded despite their history of fail. Also, Listener Mail.
Special announcement: Check out Thrive Food Direct, and use the code “CitizenRadio” to receive a discount. Your purchase will go towards a Maniac receiving FREE meals!
Citizen Radio is a member-supported show. Visit http://wearecitizenradio.com to sign up and support media that won’t lead you to war, and to keep CR Productions growing!
The “Let ‘im die!” Party, HPV vaccine hysteria, number of poor Americans at all-time high
Listen to the new Citizen Radio and subscribe to the free podcast.
Citizen Radio discusses the Tea Party debates, including the shocking “let him die!” moment, and the anti-HPV vaccine hysteria. Also, the number of poor Americans is at an all-time high, racists aren’t very bright people, and Scrubs is a very bad show.
Special announcement: Saturday September 17th is the Occupy Wall Street (#OccupyWallStreet) protest: https://occupywallst.org/
Special announcement 2: Tomorrow’s guest is the brilliant Naomi Klein!
Citizen Radio is a member-supported show. Visit http://wearecitizenradio.com to sign up and support media that won’t lead you to war!
Celebrating 10 years of tax cuts for rich people, Clarencegate, the forgotten scandal
Listen to the new Citizen Radio and subscribe to the free podcast.
It’s been ten years of tax cuts for rich people! WE DID IT, GUYS! Also, how Weinergate has distracted from a larger, much more serious scandal involving Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, and Glenn Beck is now charging his rubes for their stupidification.
The GOP starts attacking Democrats…from the left, Tim Pawlenty wows Americans with his plans to give rich people more tax breaks, Evan Bayh sucks it up and takes one for the team by going to lobby for the Chamber of Commerce, Al Qaeda encourages terrorists to buy weapons at gun shows, Japan doubles its radiation leak estimate for Fukushima, a badass citizens records a police shootout on his phone and protects the footage by hiding the memory chip in his mouth, and Citizen Radio offers some advice about what to do when your sucky job sucks the creative energy out of you.
Jamie will be in Pittsburgh at 222 Ornsby July 1st! Come out and say hello!
Citizen Radio is a member-supported show. Visit http://wearecitizenradio.com to sign up and support media that won’t lead you to war!
Tea Party favorite continues class war against the poor
I write a lot about how certain elite (pundits, politicians) have made it their quest to criminalize poverty. David Walker, a lackey of billionaire and Social Security pirate, Pete Peterson, openly pined for the days of debtors’ prison, which is actually already a reality in six states. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) proposed an amendment that would demand mandatory drug tests for welfare and unemployment beneficiaries. A particularly enlightened commenter on my blog summarized the logic behind the amendment thusly: “you gotta make sure they’re not on the crack pipe.”
Previously, I have also written about hiring practices that act to preserve America’s permanent underclass, and how some employers are now making it a practice to check potential employees’ credit scores. Poor people are buried under extravagant loans, which they might never fully pay back, simply for attempting to pursue higher education. Some students actually resort to killing themselves to escape debt, but these are isolated instances that shouldn’t overly concern anyone.
Then there was the embarrassing spectacle of the ruling elite dangling the carrot of unemployment relief before the noses of millions of jobless Americans. There were actual lengthy debates about if the country could really afford the lavish benefits ($300 a week per person) to help people survive the recession during a time when the U.S. is engaged in two separate tremendously expensive military occupations – not to mention the shadow wars in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, etc. – and after taxpayers spent trillions bailing out the crooks on Wall Street.
Now, a Tea Party favorite Carl Paladino has thrown his hat in the poor-bashing ring.
Paladino said he would transform some New York prisons into dormitories for welfare recipients, where they could work in state-sponsored jobs, get employment training and take lessons in “personal hygiene.”
Don’t worry. The program would be totally voluntary.
Ben Stein: the unemployed possess poor work habits, personalities
I know. You’re sitting there, wondering why I’m wasting precious bandwidth on trashing the dude from those commercials for free credit scores, which aren’t really free, and landed freescore.com in a heap of trouble when they were accused of misleading consumers.
Anywho. When he isn’t lending his mug for the purposes of misleading the public, Stein is an economist, atheist-basher, and had a semi-regular columnist gig at the godless New York Times.
Oh, he also hates poor people. Or rather, he thinks they’re poor, or unemployed, because they’re lazy philistines who can’t keep their shit together for the span of a job interview. (via)
One million Americans to lose their homes this year
A new report from RealtyTrac, Inc. predicts that lenders may foreclose on one million homes this year (via). In the spirit of accuracy, I should write “at least one million Americans,” since more than one person undoubtedly lives in a majority of those doomed residencies.
Nearly 528,000 homes were foreclosed in the first six months of 2010. As lenders work through a huge backlog of borrowers behind on their mortgages, even more home repossessions could occur before the end of the year.
According to RealtyTrac, Inc., a foreclosure listing service, the number of households facing foreclosure in the first half of the year climbed 8 percent when compared to the same time frame last year. In June, 1 in every 411 households received a foreclosure filing.
The fastest growing group of foreclosures involved homeowners with good credit who took out conventional fixed-rate loans. Many of these borrowers have fallen behind in their mortgages due to unemployment or reduced income.
It takes about 15 months for a home loan to go from being 30 days late to the property being seized and sold. Between January and June of this year, about 1.7 million homeowners received a foreclosure-related warning. At the time of this writing, more than 7.3 million home loans are in some stage of delinquency. The states experiencing the highest foreclosure rates are California, Florida, Michigan, Illinois, Arizona and Nevada.
As Susie Madrak and Atrios have been saying, HAMP was a total failure that actually ended up prolonging the agony of homeowners. Additionally, Congress has thus far failed to extend unemployment benefits, which will result in more waves of foreclosures.
600th study released showing huge wealth disparity
It seems like we see this same study every month.
The gap between the wealthiest Americans and middle- and working-class Americans has more than tripled in the past three decades, according to a June 25 report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Yeah, but we’ve known that forever, right? Wages are stagnate, the majority of people have very little wealth (it’s much worse for women of color) while a smaller and smaller minority hoard all the cash.
I posted a question on Twitter: “How many studies need to come out showing the huge wealth disparity before the government acts to fix it?” and got the usual snarky, flippant response I’ve grown to expect and love from readers. The standard response goes like this: the government knows it’s a problem, but the rich, connected people are the ones in power, they benefit from this feudal system, and so they vote to preserve it.
I completely agree with that assessment, but there comes a time every few generations where that system becomes utterly unsustainable, and even the well-healed oligarchy must make some concessions to the serfs. Seriously – who in their right mind thinks this economic model can go on forever? Eventually, the whole thing will collapse and the rich won’t have a government left to protect their sweet little ponzi scheme. At this point, it behooves not only the poor to rework the system, but also the rich.
Consumers unlikely to spend cash as government rips away their safety net
Team Internet has been doing a great job all day of ripping apart Bobo’s embarrassing op-ed, which he apparently wrote to demonstrate how not much has changed since he flunked high school math (seriously.)
Dean Baker‘s take down is particularly good, and he raises an interesting point that I haven’t heard many people discuss.
The talking heads on the teevee keep bitching and moaning about how consumers just aren’t spending money for some darn reason, while crazy austerity cheerleaders simultaneously threaten to rip Social Security and Medicare from their arms.
Asking people to believe in a government that expresses precisely zero interest in their long-term well being requires they be either extremely trusting, or extremely stupid. Saying, “Please, drop a couple grand into the economy even though we may not be paying for you to buy bread when your eighty,” takes giant balls – or a complete misunderstanding of how a civilized society is supposed to function.
Toronto on lockdown for G20 summit: the wall, snipers, and sound cannons
Protesters march through downtown Toronto on Thursday to draw attention to aboriginal issues. (Pras Rajagopalan/CBC)
I find it disturbing that a major city being put on lockdown in order to accommodate the international elite and suppress the underclass has become standard — and acceptable — procedure.
Right now, the leaders of rich and developing nations are in Toronto, and the authorities anticipated that there will be a series of protests during the conferences because there are always protests during the G8/G20 meet-ups.
Capitalism is particularly unpopular right now because the US has unleashed a steroid-filled version of it unto the world, and this economic system has failed to provide for the majority of people. It has, however, created a dwindling elitist echelon who control a vast majority of riches. In the year of Hayward and his yachting adventures, there’s no reason to doubt there will be any fewer protests against the douchiest rich people among us.
Toronto was ready to suppress such dissent, and shape a nice, pleasant narrative for the city’s visitors, by implementing a complete and total lockdown.
The “lockdown” of central Toronto includes a 3m-high (10ft), 3.5km (2.2-mile) concrete and metal fence enclosing the G20 meeting area and a huge security presence. Banks and theatres will be closed, as will one of Canada’s most famous tourist attractions – the CN Tower.
It’s important to remember that the supposed goal of the G20 summit is “to continue the work of building a healthier, stronger and more sustainable global economy.” And what better way to express that kind of egalitarian unity than to build a 10-ft-high, 2-mile-long fence to keep out the serfs?
These kinds of global gatherings have also become a playground for authorities to experiment with their newest, shiniest crowd control devices. Last year, I reported that Pittsburgh police demonstrated the latest suppression technology on protesters near that year’s G20 summit. The weapon du jour were sound cannons.
Hiring practices preserve America's permanent underclass
Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife
If you’re part of the lucky 29 percent of adults living in the US who attended a college or university, and are now the proud owner of a bachelor’s degree (in addition to a mountain of debt), you’re no doubt eager to find some employment.
Hopefully, you have a perfect credit score, never committed a felony, and have a solid “in” for an entry level position at your dream company. Otherwise, arrival into the corporate world may serve as a rude awakening.
According to a Sallie Mae study, only 17 percent of college kids paid their credit cards in full every month and another 1 percent left that to their parents. The remaining 82 percent carries a growing debt. In 2009, seniors graduated with an average credit card debt of $4,100, up from $2,900 among 2004 graduates. Almost one-fifth of 2009′s graduates owed more than $7,000 on their cards.
Carrying such a fiscal burden is stressful enough, but now indebted graduates may not be jeopardizing just their credit scores — they could also be endangering their job prospects.
