Author: Brian

The vast majority of Americans saw their incomes rise only modestly in 45 years.

Measured in 2006 dollars, the average income of the bottom 90 percent grew from $22,366 in 1961 to $31,642 in 2006. That is a real increase of $9,276 in average income. But it was also after 45 years, longer than the careers of most workers.

Lower taxes, free market initiative and lazy government has been and is a complete fraud.

Millions are out of work, and the jobs they once held are … not coming back.

And even if the Great Recession is coming to an end, we face years of jobs growing more slowly than the working-age population, which could radically transform America’s culture, work ethic, and sense of progress.

In 2006 families worked on average about 900 more hours than families did in the 1960s and early 1970s. That is a roughly 45 percent increase in hours worked…

For many, the reality is that two jobs produce the same or a smaller after-tax income than just one job did three and four decades ago. …

During the 45 years starting in 1961, payroll taxes have gone from a minor levy to almost a sixth of wages for the bottom 90 percent of American households. This $760 in income tax savings that the average taxpayer enjoyed in 2006 was taken back, and more, by the increased tax rates for Social Security and Medicare. Those rates rose from 3 percent withheld from pay in 1961 to 7.65 percent in 2006. Not all income is from wages, of course, but those higher payroll taxes wiped out the seeming reduction in the income tax and more. …

And at the top? Now, that’s a different story. The average income for the top 400 taxpayers rose over the 45 years from $13.7 million to $263.3 million. That is 19.3 times more.

The income tax bill went up too, but only 7.8 times as much because tax rates plunged. Income tax rates at the top fell 60 percent, three times the percentage rate drop for the vast majority. And at the top, the savings were not offset by higher payroll taxes, which are insignificant to top taxpayers.

Tony Judt:

We are entering, I believe, a new age of insecurity.

Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it.

Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage? What do we mean when we speak of a “good society”?

What we have been watching these past decades is the steady shifting of public responsibility onto the private sector to no discernible collective advantage.

If we have learned nothing else from the twentieth century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences.

NYTimes review of ‘The Faith Instinct‘:

Hunter-gatherers were egalitarian and, shamans aside, had direct access to the divine.

But when humans began to farm and to settle in cities and states, religion became hierarchical.

Priests emerged, turning unwritten rules and chummy gods into opaque instruments of surveillance and power. Church bureaucracies created crucial social institutions but also suppressed the more ecstatic aspects of worship, especially music, dance and trance.

This is an idea I’ve relied upon over the years; a mother of motive that should be in our thoughts while we bump heads. Better living reduces social argument, though I doubt humans will ever stop bitching at each other. It’s too easy, with too many prizes.

I had lunch with Bucky about 1981 I think. He filled his life and innovation poured out. Good model. Diligent fellow. Gracious and warm.

B. Fuller Institute published this hand: The handshake we do not want and mustn’t offer.

John Maynard Keynes said at the end of the Second World War.

If by some sad geographical slip the American Air Force (it is too late now to hope for much from the enemy) were to destroy every factory on the North East coast and in Lancashire (at an hour when the directors were sitting there and no-one else) we should have nothing to fear. How else are we to regain the exuberant inexperience which is necessary, it seems for success, I cannot surmise.

Posted by John Hempton.

1. In the past, information consumption was overwhelmingly passive, with telephone being the only interactive medium.
2. Thanks to computers, a full third of words and more than half of bytes are now received interactively.
3. Reading, which was in decline due to the growth of television, tripled from 1980 to 2008, because it is the overwhelmingly preferred way to receive words on the Internet.

Global Information Center via ieee

New York Times:

About six million Americans receiving food stamps report they have no other income!

The recall of Tylenol is fresh evidence of the need regulate wood pallets used to transport food and pharmaceuticals because of Salmonella, E. coli, Listeria or extremely high bacteria counts – as much as 6.8 million spores per gram – in more than one-third of the wood pallets tested.

In Portland, 5 of 30 pallets tested positive for Listeria.

In Philadelphia, 15 of the 30 wood pallets had high bacteria counts that exceeded 100,000 colonies/gram.

Nearly half of the wood pallets tested in Maine had high bacteria counts.

“There are more than one billion wood pallets used in the United States, so it’s critical to understand the role they play in outbreaks of food poisoning.”

But note: It’s chemicals used to treat wood pallets cited as causing a moldy, musty or mildew-like odor in the recalled Tylenol that caused nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and stomach pain.

news link
lab report

Listening to Peter, Paul, and Mary, I’ve started to feel that your harmonies become a metaphor for human cooperation.

“You’ve stumbled onto something that’s fundamental to my life. Other vocal groups look straight out at the audience; Peter, Paul and Mary looked at each other, and always did. We became the model of the way people could be: totally open, virtually naked before each other. And we celebrated that. You didn’t see that intensity of closeness in other groups.” ?

You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars; . . . Till your spirit filleth the whole world, and the stars are your jewels; . . . till you love men so as to desire their happiness, with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own. – Thomas Traherne

He was moreover not alone in his search.

Happy New Year!

What have Reagan Republican free-market no-tax trickle-down policies done to America?

Shift the burden and lie about it.

[pic source]

Our bodies appear symmetrical on the outside, but our brains are lop-sided. For example, the brain is better at controlling one hand than the other.

And right-handers prefer to sit to the right at the movies.

By sitting to the right of the screen, the film is predominantly processed by the right-hemisphere and the suggestion is that, without realizing it, right-handers are choosing to sit in an optimal position for their brain to digest the movie.

And see here. We trigger our ‘brain bias’ in other ways too:

This new research comes after a past study showed that adults with a more artistic, less analytic thinking style (associated with the right hemisphere) were more likely to sit on the right-hand side of the classroom; and another that showed people are more likely to exhibit the left side of their face (controlled by the right hemisphere) when asked to express emotion in a family photo, but to show their right profile when asked to pose as a scientist.

Kellogg School of Management:

1. Powerful people – many of whom take a moral high ground – don’t practice what they preach.
2. The ‘powerful’ condemn the cheating of others while cheating more themselves.
3. The powerful impose rules and restraints on others while disregarding these restraints for themselves.

The facts are in.

Sara Libby:

Karl Rove, the architect behind using gay marriage as a wedge issue to drive the Christian right to the polls, has just gotten a divorce in Texas, ending his 24-year marriage.

No one should really be surprised by the hypocrisy.

Doug Glanville……in the athletes’ world, relationships can get crafted around their whims:

It is amazing how easy it is, if you are not careful and grounded, to start seeing women as another accessory in your life.

But it isn’t rooted in good practices; it’s more like, “flash your badge and they will come.”

Dana Blankenhorn:

Is gravity real? The reporter asks the question, and finds one person who will say it’s not, at which point it becomes an open question.

Conservatives have learned to use this laziness to create hosts of false controversies, destroying good people and good ideas because reporters are afraid to call a lie a lie.

Death panels are a lie. Obama’s Kenyan roots are a lie. The tea party’s charges are lies.

When large political movements are built on lies, reporters do not have a duty to give them equal time. They have a duty to call them out.

They have a duty to call the liars liars, and to stop using them as sources, to exile them from their newsrooms. Instead these self-created assholes are called upon again-and-again.

It has gone on too long.

It’s pretty obvious executives consider themselves a separate social class.

Teabaggers=Suckers

The political action committee behind the Tea Party Express paid almost two thirds of its spending on the Republican consulting firm that created the PAC in the first place.

Of $1.33 million, a total of $857,122 went to Sacramento-based Tea Party organizers.

Levi Johnston, in a sworn statement:

I know that public scrutiny will simplify this matter and act as a check against anyone’s need to be overly vindictive, aggressive or malicious, not that Bristol would ever be that way, nor that I would.

But her mother is powerful, politically ambitious and has a reputation for being extremely vindictive.

So, I think a public case might go a long way in reducing Sarah Palin’s instinct to attack.

Johnston said he didn’t want to hurt or embarrass his son — or Bristol. He thinks Sarah Palin, not Bristol, is acting with “sheer malice”.

The overuse of antibiotics in humans and animals has led to a plague of drug-resistant infections that killed more than 65,000 people in the U.S. last year – more than prostate and breast cancer combined.

Nuts.

America’s farmers give their pigs, cows and chickens about 8 percent more antibiotics each year… 13 percent of the antibiotics administered on farms last year were fed to healthy animals to make them grow faster.

Antibiotics also save as much as 30 percent in feed costs among young swine.

Sloppy. Sloppy. Sloppy.

Mark Thoma:

Honest and transparent are not adjectives that come easily to mind when looking at our modern financial system and events over the last decade.

This issue is in fact the lynch pin to modern capitalism.

Business interests are dominant in Washington, and these powerful interests will do what they can to resist constraints on their behavior no matter what lessons the rest of us may have learned from their actions in the past.

More than $16.5 billion disappeared like smoke in 2009.

1. The FBI opened more than 2,100 securities fraud investigations in 2009, up from 1,750 in 2008. The FBI also had 651 agents working in 2009 on high-yield investment fraud cases, which include Ponzis, compared with 429 last year.
2. The SEC this year issued 82 per cent more restraining orders against Ponzi schemes and other securities fraud cases this year than in 2008, and it opened about six per cent more investigations. Ponzi scheme investigations now make up 21 per cent of the SEC’s enforcement workload, compared with 17 per cent in 2008 and nine per cent in 2005.
3. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed 31 civil actions in Ponzi cases this year, more than twice the 2008 amount.

More than 150 Ponzi, or pyramid, schemes collapsed in 2009, compared with about 40 in 2008.

University of Alabama:

Calorie-intake restriction can benefit longevity and help prevent diseases like cancer linked to aging.

Restricting consumption of glucose, the most common dietary sugar, can extend the life of healthy human-lung cells and speed the death of precancerous human-lung cells, reducing cancer’s spread and growth rate.