Why America Stopped Caring About The Public Good

The Article: Here’s Why America Stopped Caring About The Public Good by Robert Reich in Business Insider.

The Text: Congress is in recess, but you’d hardly know it. This has been the most do-nothing, gridlocked Congress in decades. But the recess at least offers a pause in the ongoing partisan fighting that’s sure to resume in a few weeks.

It also offers an opportunity to step back and ask ourselves what’s really at stake.

A society — any society —- is defined as a set of mutual benefits and duties embodied most visibly in public institutions: public schools, public libraries, public transportation, public hospitals, public parks, public museums, public recreation, public universities, and so on.

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How Glenn Greenwald Killed The Internet

From creator Mark Fiore: “You know the Internet is in trouble when people start taking plane flights to deliver messages. After Glenn Greenwald’s partner was detained for nine hours and stripped of all his computer gear, it’s clearly time to look at new ways of communicating.”

6 Filthy Facts About The Rich

The Article: Six Filthy Facts About the Rich by Paul Buchheit in AlterNet.

The Text: First of all, who are they? Mostly the 1%. But the top 2-5% have also done quite well, increasing their inflation-adjusted wealth by 75 percent from 1983 to 2009 while average wealth went down for 80 percent of American households. The rest of the top 20% have been prosperous, realizing a 32 percent gain in inflation-adjusted wealth since 1983. The facts to follow are primarily about the richest 1%, with occasional dips into the groups scrambling to make it to the top.

1. Accumulating almost all the wealth

As evidence of the extremes between the very rich and the rest of us, the average household net worth for the top 1% in 2009 was almost $14 million, while the average household net worth for the bottom 47% was almost ZERO. For nearly half of America, average debt is about the same as average asset ownership.

The extremes are just as filthy at the global level. The richest 300 persons on earth (about a third of them in the U.S.) have more money than the poorest 3 billion people. Out of all developed and undeveloped countries with at least a quarter-million adults, the U.S. has the 4th-highest degree of wealth inequality in the world, trailing only Russia, Ukraine, and Lebanon.

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Rand Paul’s Stinging Remarks On Syria Intervention

Say what you will about the Kentucky firebrand, Paul sure knows how to drive his point home. To David Gregory:

“[John Kerry] is famous for saying, you know, how can you ask a man to be the last one to die for a mistake? I would ask John Kerry how can you ask a man to be the first one to die for a mistake?”

The 20 Best Goldman Sachs Elevator Gossip Tweets

Believe it or not, Twitter actually can be good for something beyond revealing in 140 characters or less which of your friends needs to get out more. Case in point: Goldman Sachs Elevator Gossip. Blurring the line between the hilariously farcical and scarily factual, no one knows for sure if the blog’s submissions are true or not. And for that matter, no one really knows the man responsible for the blog, either, beyond the fact that he does work for Goldman. But sometimes there’s more truth in fiction, and if these cynical, steeped-in-gilded-greed conversations tell us anything, it’s that no amount of recession can kill corporate megalomania. Might as well laugh about it?

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