The richest 1% of US Americans earn nearly a quarter of the country’s income and control an astonishing 40% of its wealth. Inequality in the US is more extreme than it’s been in almost a century — and the gap between the super rich and the poor and middle class people has widened drastically over the last 30 years.
Every developing country in the world has more mobility between classes than here in America. Since the illusion of “opportunity for all” is such a part of our cultural narrative, we obscure just how little mobility their is in the States and how much class actually matters. The gilded age preceded the great depression, what will the current gilded age precede? – OTI
We’re here because Major League Baseball and the US government has long decided that Barry Bonds would shoulder the burden for the steroid era. We’re here because a surly Black athlete who thinks that the press is just a step above vermin was easy pickings for an industry rife with systemic corruption.
Major League Baseball made billions off of the steroid era, an era many now see as a rancid, tainted lie. It was an era where owners became obscenely wealthy and billions in public funds were spent on ballparks. The press cheered and America dug the long ball. Now the dust has cleared, our cities have been looted, Barry Bonds could be going to prison, and Commissioner Bud Selig still has a job—and a RAISE. With apologies to Harvey Dent, this is the story of the Black athlete today: die a hero or live long enough to be a villain. And the men in the suits walk—or in Selig’s case, slouch—all the way to the bank.…Read the entire article in The Nation
Mexicans work longer days than anyone else in OECD countries, devoting 10 hours to paid and unpaid work, such as cleaning or cooking at home. Belgians work the least, at 7 hours, compared with an OECD average of 8 hours a day. Click for the data
So success in our world has little to do with how hard you work. If this was the case then Mexico would be one of the wealthiest nations with the most robust economy… OTI
A sprawling crime scene. That is what Gaza felt like when I visited in the summer of 2009, six months after the Israeli attack. Evidence of criminality was everywhere—the homes and schools that lay in rubble, the walls burned pitch black by white phosphorus, the children’s bodies still unhealed for lack of medical care. But where were the police? Who was documenting these crimes, interviewing the witnesses, protecting the evidence from tampering?
For months it seemed that there would be no investigation. Many Gazans I met on that trip appeared as traumatized by the absence of an international investigation as by the attacks. They explained that even in the darkest days of the Israeli onslaught, they had comforted themselves with the belief that, this time, Israel had gone too far. Mona al-Shawa, head of the Women’s Unit at the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, told me that Gazans took great solace from news of pro-Palestinian protesters filling the streets of London and Toronto. “People called it war crimes,” she recalled. “We felt we were not alone in the world.” It seemed to follow from these expressions of outrage that there would be serious consequences for the attacks—criminal trials for the perpetrators, sentences. And under the glare of international investigation, Israel would surely have to lift the brutal embargo that had kept Gaza sealed off from the world since Hamas came to power. Those who really dared to dream convinced themselves that, out of the lawlessness and carnage, a just peace would emerge at last.
But six months later, an almost unbearable realization had set in: the cavalry wasn’t coming. Despite all the righteous indignation, Israel had not been forced to change its behavior in any way. Gaza’s borders were still sealed, only now the blockade was keeping out desperately needed rebuilding supplies in addition to many necessities of life. (It would take Israel’s lethal attack last year on a humanitarian aid flotilla for a debate about the siege to begin in earnest.) Even worse, the people I met were acutely aware that they could find themselves trapped under Israeli air bombardment again tomorrow, for any arbitrary excuse of Israel’s choosing. The message sent by the paralysis of the international legal system was terrifying: Israel enjoyed complete impunity. There was no recourse.
Then, out of nowhere, a representative of the law showed up. His name was Justice Richard Goldstone, and he was leading a fact-finding mission for the United Nations. His mandate was to assess whether war crimes had been committed in the context of the attack. I happened to be in Gaza City when Justice Goldstone was wrapping up his public hearings and met several people who had testified before him, as well as others who had opened their homes to the mission, showing the scars left by Israeli weapons and sharing photographs of family members killed in the attacks. Finally some light seemed to be shining on this rubble-choked strip of land. But it was faint…Continue to Naomi Klein’s article in The Nation
If Senators Joe Lieberman (I, Conn.) and Susan Collins (R, Maine) have their way, the President of the United States would have the authority to shut down the Internet in the country in the event of a cyber-attack or cyber-war — in other words, have access to an “Internet kill switch.”
But don’t count Michael Chertoff, former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, among the fans of this idea. From a purely practical standpoint, he said, shutting down the Internet would likely cause as much collateral damage to the United States as any Internet-based attack because of the difficulty in recovering from such a shut-down.
Moreover, he said, giving a president that kind of authority would be “troubling, at least for me personally.”…Continue to article
“Public service” has been quite lucrative for Michael Chertoff. Read more about his company The Chertoff Group. Their tagline – Global Leaders Confronting Global Risk. – OTI
AMY GOODMAN: Social media and online networks played a key role in the early organizing of the Egyptian uprising. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak underlined their power last week when he tried to shut down the internet and cut off most cell phone communication…
TIM KARR: Well, it’s interesting. What we’re seeing is the same technology that has enabled freedom movements around the world is also being used to target and track down political dissidents. In the case of Egypt, we have a company called Narus, as you mentioned—it’s now owned by Boeing—that sells what’s called Deep Packet Inspection. It allows the Egyptian telecommunications companies, many of which are run by the state, to open up online communications, to look at texting via cell phones, and to identify the sort of dissident voices that are out there. And it goes beyond that. It also gives them the technology to geographically locate them and track them down. We had a similar problem happen in 2009 in Iran, when you had Nokia Siemens, which was a Finnish-German joint venture, selling technology to the Iranian Telecom Authority, which was also owned by the Revolutionary Guard there, to be used to track down and imprison cyber-dissidents there…Continue to entire transcript
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower – OTI
The rich and the rest
What to do (and not do) about inequality
APART from being famous and influential, Hu Jintao, David Cameron, Warren Buffett and Dominique Strauss-Kahn do not obviously have a lot in common. So it tells you something about the breadth of global concerns about inequality that China’s president, Britain’s prime minister, America’s second-richest man and the head of the International Monetary Fund have all worried, loudly and publicly, about the dangers of a rising gap between the rich and the rest.
Mr Hu puts the reduction of income disparities, particularly between China’s urban elites and its rural poor, at the centre of his pledge to create a “harmonious society”. Mr Cameron has said that more unequal societies do worse “according to almost every quality-of-life indicator”. Mr Buffett has become a crusader for a higher inheritance tax, arguing that America risks an entrenched plutocracy without it. And Mr Strauss-Kahn argues for a new global growth model, claiming that gaping income gaps threaten social and economic stability. Many others seem to share their concerns. A new survey by the World Economic Forum, whose annual gathering of bigwigs in Davos begins on January 26th, says its members see widening economic disparities as one of the two main global risks over the next decade (alongside failings in global governance)…Continue to article
Misunderstanding Israeli motives
Why is there no Palestinian state?
Al Jazeera’s release of The Palestine Papers helps to make clear why there is no Palestinian state. It illuminates a key flaw in Palestinian and western understanding of Israeli thinking. It is this flaw which helps explain why a state has failed to emerge – despite the many, many opportunities in the last nineteen years in which it could have.
The root premise has been, since the outset of the ‘process’, that Israel was intent on having and maintaining a Jewish ‘majority’ within Israel, and that with time – and a growing Palestinian population – Israel would have to acquiesce to a Palestinian state simply to maintain its Jewish majority: that is, by losing Palestinians into their own state, Israel’s Jewish majority could be conserved – and by these means, and only by such means, finally could such a majority be conserved… Continue
