There’s No Vacancies Left In DC
Posted on October 31, 2011 in Political Cartoons
Expensive Shit
Posted on October 30, 2011 in Videos
Expensive Shit by Fela Kuti off of Expensive Shit / He Miss Road.
For those interested, the title refers to an incident in which the Nigerian police tried to arrest Kuti by planting a joint on him. Kuti managed to eat the joint which prompted the police to bring him into custody and try to wait for him to produce the excrement. According to legend he managed to use another inmate’s feces and was eventually released.
Analyzing Poverty & Inequality In America
Posted on October 30, 2011 in Articles
The Article: Why inequality in America is even worse than you thought by Justin Elliott in Salon.
The Text: There has been no shortage of headlines this week about the growing income and wealth inequality in the United States. A new study from the Congressional Budget Office, for example, found that income of the top 1 percent of households increased by 275 percent in the 30-year period ending in 2007. American households at the bottom and in the middle, meanwhile, saw income growth of just 18 to 40 percent over the same period
But less attention has been paid to the fact that not only are the numbers bad in America, they’re particularly bad when compared to other developed nations.
A new report (.pdf) by the Bertelsmann Foundation drives this point home. The German think tank used a set of policy analyses to create a Social Justice Index of 31 developed nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The United States came in a dismal 27th in the rankings. Here, for example, is a graph of one of the metrics, child poverty, in which the U.S. ranked fourth-to-last (click for larger size):
Daniel Schraad-Tischler, who authored the study for Bertelsmann, explained to me how the Social Justice Index works and why the U.S. ranks so low.
