U.S. Losing Its Middle-Class Neighborhoods

As the article below describes, America's neighborhoods are becoming increasingly segregated by class. If you read the World Bank's reports on Third World countries, I believe the technical term for this is "economic miracle." You know, the kind of "miracle" that leads to higher levels of inequality, an increasingly restless underclass, and record profits for transnational corporations.

Here's the story from MSNBC:

Middle-class neighborhoods, long regarded as incubators for the American dream, are losing ground in cities across the country, shrinking at more than twice the rate of the middle class itself. In their place, poor and rich neighborhoods are both on the rise, as cities and suburbs have become increasingly segregated by income, according to a Brookings Institution study released today. It found that as a share of all urban and suburban neighborhoods, middle-income neighborhoods in the nation's 100 largest metro areas have declined from 58 percent in 1970 to 41 percent in 2000. [...]

Middle-income neighborhoods -- where families earn 80 to 120 percent of the local median income -- have plunged by more than 20 percent as a share of all neighborhoods in Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. They are down 10 percent in the Washington area.

It's happening, too, in this prosperous, mostly white middle-income Midwestern city where unemployment is low and a vibrant downtown has been preserved. As poor and rich neighborhoods proliferate, the share of middle-income neighborhoods in greater Indianapolis has dropped by 21 percent since 1970.

"No city in America has gotten more integrated by income in the last 30 years, " said Alan Berube, an urban demographer at Brookings who worked on the report. "It means that if you are not living in one of the well-off areas, you are not going to have access to the same amenities -- good schools and safe environment -- that you could find 30 years ago, " he said. [...]

Source: the-sociologist.blogspot.com

Repbulicans Pushing Tax Cuts for the Rich
If you read this blog often enough then you'll understand the basic "principles" of neo-liberal economics. One of the main "principles" of neo-liberalism is to cut taxes for the rich. Why would anyone support this, might you ask? Because neo-liberals believe your income equals your "productivity". If you're poor it's because you're unproductive, which is largely a consequence of laziness and stupidity; likewise, if you're rich it's because you're productive, which is basically a result of diligence and intelligence. Now we wouldn't want to punish the productive people by taxing them; if anything, we should reward their efforts by giving them outrageous tax breaks! Moreover, by giving them these breaks they will "invest" their hard-earned wealth into the economy (i.e., they will sink ridiculous sums of money into the global casino of financial speculation). From these "investments" wads of greenbacks will eventually "trickle down" to the general population like manna from heaven. See, are you beginning to understand how this "science" works?

Here's the story from the New York Times:

Two weeks ago, the Senate killed an effort to repeal the federal estate tax on multimillion-dollar fortunes. The "no" votes were a stand for budget sanity and basic fairness. But the pro-repeal camp doesn't want to take no for an answer.

Yesterday, the House of Representatives passed an estate-tax cut that is a repeal in everything but name. The so-called compromise would exempt more than 99.5 percent of estates from tax, slash the tax rates on the rest and cost at least $760 billion during its first full decade. Of that, $600 billion is the amount the government would have to borrow to make up for lost revenue from the cuts, which would benefit the heirs of America's wealthiest families, like the Marses of Mars bar and the Waltons of Wal-Mart Stores. The remaining $160 billion is the interest on that borrowing, which would be paid by all Americans.

No lawmaker who voted for the compromise gets any points for moderation. Like the earlier full repeal bill, this one is unfair and grounded in intellectual dishonesty. The goal is not to pass good legislation, but to get this top priority for big-shot constituents nailed into law before the November elections produce a legislature that's more responsible on fiscal matters.

In an attempt to rally support, House lawmakers have included in the bill another, totally unrelated, tax cut — for timber companies, worth $900 million over the next three years. The measure, based on the theory that American timber companies are at a disadvantage in the global marketplace, is essentially a special-interest giveaway that would encourage every business with international competitors to demand its own tax break. There is much to reform on the competitiveness front, but it should be done comprehensively, not on the basis of who has the senators best positioned to carve out a special deal.

The timber provision is a blatant attempt to extort "yes" votes out of four Democratic senators who have supported the timber industry in the past, but who have opposed estate-tax repeal: Senators Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray, both of Washington, Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. The idea is that if a few Democratic opponents can be enticed to vote for the estate-tax cuts, Republicans who have previously broken with their party over the issue might also go along, notably Senators George Voinovich of Ohio and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island.

All this effort for a bill that would put $760 billion in new debt on the backs of Americans in the name of making a handful of extremely rich people even richer. Congressional leaders may know how to count votes, but otherwise their math is pathetic.

Source: the-sociologist.blogspot.com

Bush Administration Secretly Searching Bank Account Records
If the U.S. were a fully-functioning democracy than there would have been a national dialogue over the relative merits of surveillance programs. At there very least there would have been an honest discussion in Congress! Alas, the lords of war have decided that they know best, in the same way that they knew best in attacking Iraq and Afghanistan. As a side note, notice what this database is not being used to uncover evidence of corproate embezzlement, tax shelters, fraud, and so forth.

Here's the story from the Washington Post:

The Bush administration, relying on a presidential declaration of emergency, has secretly been tapping into a vast global database of confidential financial transactions for nearly five years, according to U.S. government and industry officials.

Initiated shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, the surveillance program has used a broad new interpretation of the Treasury Department's administrative powers to bypass traditional banking privacy protections. It has swept in large volumes of international money transfers, including many made by U.S. citizens and residents, in an effort to track the locations, identities and activities of suspected terrorists.

Current and former counterterrorism officials said the program works in parallel with the previously reported surveillance of international telephone calls, faxes and e-mails by the National Security Agency, which has eavesdropped without warrants on more than 5, 000 Americans suspected of terrorist links. Together with a hundredfold expansion of the FBI's use of "national security letters" to obtain communications and banking records, the secret NSA and Treasury programs have built unprecedented government databases of private transactions, most of them involving people who prove irrelevant to terrorism investigators.

Stuart Levey, undersecretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in an interview last night that the newly disclosed program -- the existence of which the government sought to conceal -- has used the agency's powers of administrative subpoena to compel an international banking consortium to open its records. The Brussels-based cooperative, known as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT, links about 7, 800 banks and brokerages and handles billions of transactions a year.

Terrorism investigators had sought access to SWIFT's database since the 1990s, but other government and industry authorities balked at the potential blow to confidence in the banking system. After the 2001 attacks, President Bush overrode those objections and invoked his powers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to "investigate, regulate or prohibit" any foreign financial transaction linked to "an unusual and extraordinary threat."
[...]

Source: the-sociologist.blogspot.com

Pembuatan Showcase, Meja Counter, Digital Print Branding di Bali
Kami CV. ASTRO menerima pembuatan Showcase, Meja Counter, Digital Print Branding untuk perusahaan Anda di Bali. Mungkin digunakan untuk keperluan pameran produk atau peremajaan sarana dan prasarana kantor. Sebagai perusahaan kontraktor Bali, kami sudah lebih dari 1 dasa warsa semenjak CV. ASTRO didirikan pada tahun 1995 membuat kami lebih confidence dalam memberikan layanan kepada seluruh [...]
Source: cvastro.com

Global Warming's Sci-Fi Weather
So, according to the neo-libs, global warming doesn't affect the economy, so long as it is profitable to burn oil. Meanwhile, in the real world, the weather's getting pretty fucking strange. Moreover, there's growing concensus among scientists that global climate disruption will only produce more extemes (though the following article frames it as a faux debate). The following article provides a feaklist of recent Ripley's Believe it or Not Weather.

Full story at ABC News:

[....]

The United States logs the warmest January since 1895, averaging just under 40 degrees.

A record downpour soaks the Nevada desert.

Hail pummels Manhattan in the middle of April.

Glaciers melt in Greenland.

The worst drought hits the Amazon rain forest in a century.

Three Category 5 hurricanes -- including Katrina, Rita and Wilma-- and 27 named Atlantic storms struck in 2005.

Just last summer, India records its greatest precipitation event ever, with a weather station in Mumbai getting 37 inches of rain in 24 hours.

In Hawaii Mount Waialeale got nearly 130 inches -- almost 11 feet-- of rain in six weeks.

Back in 2003, Europe's record-breaking heat wave killed more than 30, 000 eel in the River Rhine.

Wildfires burn 2.6 million hectares in Alaska.

Canada experiences a record cold winter in the east and a record hot summer on the west coast.

Tasmania gets its second wettest January in more than 100 years.

According to the National Climatic Data Center, 2005 marked the warmest global temperature on record.

Source: the-sociologist.blogspot.com

Tips ganti Bola lampu pijar - Neon - Bohlam agar aman
Mengganti bola lampu pijar atau neon atau bohlam memang mudah. Tapi jika tidak hati-hati justru bisa berakibat fatal seperti kesetrum dan kebakaran karena konsleting listrik PLN. Bola lampu memiliki keterbatasan yakni umur. Jadi cepat atau lambat bola lampu yang ada di rumah anda akan mengalami keausan. Maka untuk itu Anda harus secepatnya mengganti dengan yang [...]
Source: cvastro.com

American CEOs Earn 262 Times Pay of Average Worker
Republicans are rejecting calls for increasing the very minimal minimum wage, because according to their neo-liberal pseudo-science paying people decently leads to higher levels of unemployment. Of course, their same pseudo-science tells them that CEOs making record profits merely reflects increased "productivity" among CEOs. It's an interesting "science, " this neo-liberal economics!

Here's the story from Yahoo! News:

Chief executive officers in the United States earned 262 times the pay of an average worker in 2005, the second-highest level in the 40 years for which there is data, a nonprofit think-tank said on Wednesday. In fact, a CEO earned more in one workday than an average worker earned in 52 weeks, said the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. The typical worker's compensation averaged just under $42, 000 for the year, while the average CEO brought home almost $11 million, EPI said.

In recent years, compensation has been a hot issue with shareholders who have been bombarded with news stories about chief executives who are given multimillion dollar bonus and pay packages even if shares have declined. For example, the chief executives of 11 of the largest companies were awarded a total of $865 million in pay in the last two years, even as they presided over a total loss of $640 billion in shareholder value, a recent study from governance firm the Corporate Library, found.

In 1965, U.S. CEOs at major companies earned 24 times a worker's pay. That ratio surged in the 1990s and hit 300 at the end of the recovery in 2000, according to EPI. CEO pay is defined by the sum of salary, bonus, value of restricted stock at grant and other long-term incentives. Worker pay is hourly wage of production and nonsupervisory works, EPI said.

Source: the-sociologist.blogspot.com

In 2003, U.S. Spurned Iran's Offer of Dialogue
The Washington Post mentioned something that should have been front-page news in any functioning democracy: Iran was willing to use diplomacy on ALL of the issues that are currently in the news, including official recognition of Israel.

Note in the article that Iranian regime was believed to be on the "verge of collapse." However, no justification is given for this supposed assertion, though there is a clue: one official admits that the policy in 2003 was focused on "regime change, " or "invasion" for the rest of us.

Here is the story from the Washington Post:

Just after the lightning takeover of Baghdad by U.S. forces three years ago, an unusual two-page document spewed out of a fax machine at the Near East bureau of the State Department. It was a proposal from Iran for a broad dialogue with the United States, and the fax suggested everything was on the table -- including full cooperation on nuclear programs, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian militant groups.

But top Bush administration officials, convinced the Iranian government was on the verge of collapse, belittled the initiative. Instead, they formally complained to the Swiss ambassador who had sent the fax with a cover letter certifying it as a genuine proposal supported by key power centers in Iran, former administration officials said.

Last month, the Bush administration abruptly shifted policy and agreed to join talks previously led by European countries over Iran's nuclear program. But several former administration officials say the United States missed an opportunity in 2003 at a time when American strength seemed at its height -- and Iran did not have a functioning nuclear program or a gusher of oil revenue from soaring energy demand.

"At the time, the Iranians were not spinning centrifuges, they were not enriching uranium, " said Flynt Leverett, who was a senior director on the National Security Council staff then and saw the Iranian proposal. He described it as "a serious effort, a respectable effort to lay out a comprehensive agenda for U.S.-Iranian rapprochement."

While the Iranian approach has been previously reported, the actual document making the offer has surfaced only in recent weeks. Trita Parsi, a Middle East expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said he obtained it from Iranian sources. The Washington Post confirmed its authenticity with Iranian and former U.S. officials.

Parsi said the U.S. victory in Iraq frightened the Iranians because U.S. forces had routed in three weeks an army that Iran had failed to defeat during a bloody eight-year war.

The document lists a series of Iranian aims for the talks, such as ending sanctions, full access to peaceful nuclear technology and a recognition of its "legitimate security interests." Iran agreed to put a series of U.S. aims on the agenda, including full cooperation on nuclear safeguards, "decisive action" against terrorists, coordination in Iraq, ending "material support" for Palestinian militias and accepting the Saudi initiative for a two-state solution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The document also laid out an agenda for negotiations, with possible steps to be achieved at a first meeting and the development of negotiating road maps on disarmament, terrorism and economic cooperation.

Newsday has previously reported that the document was primarily the work of Sadegh Kharazi, Iran's ambassador to France and nephew of Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi and passed on by the Swiss ambassador to Tehran, Tim Guldimann. The Swiss government is a diplomatic channel for communications between Tehran and Washington because the two countries broke off relations after the 1979 seizure of U.S. embassy personnel.

Leverett said Guldimann included a cover letter that it was an authoritative initiative that had the support of then-President Mohammad Khatami and supreme religious leader Ali Khamenei.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has stressed that the U.S. decision to join the nuclear talks was not an effort to strike a "grand bargain" with Iran. Earlier this month, she made the first official confirmation of the Iranian proposal in an interview with National Public Radio.

[....]

Richard N. Haass, head of policy planning at the State Department at the time and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said the Iranian approach was swiftly rejected because in the administration "the bias was toward a policy of regime change." He said it is difficult to know whether the proposal was fully supported by the "multiple governments" that run Iran, but he felt it was worth exploring.

"To use an oil analogy, we could have drilled a dry hole, " he said. "But I didn't see what we had to lose. I did not share the assessment of many in the administration that the Iranian regime was on the brink."

Parsi said that based on his conversations with the Iranian officials, he believes the failure of the United States to even respond to the offer had an impact on the government. Parsi, who is writing a book on Iran-Israeli relations, said he believes the Iranians were ready to dramatically soften their stance on Israel, essentially taking the position of other Islamic countries such as Malaysia. Instead, Iranian officials decided that the United States cared not about Iranian policies but about Iranian power.

The incident "strengthened the hands of those in Iran who believe the only way to compel the United States to talk or deal with Iran is not by sending peace offers but by being a nuisance, " Parsi said.

Source: the-sociologist.blogspot.com


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