Income inequality: Nothing New!

Lifestyles_of_the_Rich_&_FamousThe following article was in The Week magazine dated February 7, 2014.  Their title was Income inequality: Why does the gap keep widening?  Then the article proceeds to tell readers that it hasn’t widened.  It’s just great political rhetoric that might help win elections.

 Perhaps it’s the strong rhetoric of Pope Francis and President Obama, or the growing sense that the economic recovery is leaving the poor and the middle class behind. But income inequality-an issue that once preoccupied liberal policy wonks and scruffy Occupy Wall Street activists-has suddenly become “part of the mainstream kitchentable debate” in America, said Michael Hiltzik in LATimes.com.

 A startling new Gallup poll finds fully two thirds of adults either somewhat or very dissatisfied with the distribution of wealth in this country-and that includes 54 percent of Republicans. The rich just keep getting richer, said Harry Bruinius in CSMonitor.com, and “the public has been taking notice.” Since 2009, 95 percent of U.S. economic gains have gone to the wealthiest 1 percent of the population. Wall Street stocks and corporate profits are soaring to all-time highs, yet on Main Street, salaries have been stagnant, and millions can’t find jobs that pay middle-class salaries. Americans who once believed that anyone could climb the ladder with hard work and talent now suspect that the system is “stacked against them.”

The rich may be getting richer, said Nick Gillespie in TheDailyBeast.com, but that doesn’t mean it’s getting harder to join their ranks. A study released last week by Harvard economists shows that a child born into the poorest fifth of U.S. households has the same 7.8 percent chance of climbing the ladder into the richest fifth as he or she did 50 years ago. That figure is “unacceptably low,” but “upward mobility” is still happening. To address income inequality with effective policies, said David Brooks in The New York Times, we have to understand its real roots. The “growing affluence of the rich” isn’t causing the problems of the poor. Those problems are the result of globalization’s impact on “low-skill jobs,” and even more importantly, of social and cultural factors. America’s underclass lives in a world of broken homes, crime-filled communities, dysfunctional schools, and personal chaos. That’s what is keeping people stuck at the bottom, not the growing wealth of the top 1 percent.

Now there’s a convenient rationalization, said Matthew O’Brien in TheAtlantic.com. The reality is that as the rich award themselves with all the gains created by technology and cheap labor, they’ve come to inhabit “a different world.” Their kids grow up with $40,000-a-year preschools, tutors, private lessons, special college prep, and on and on. On this unlevel playing field, how do kids from the bottom 90 percent compete? Those at the top of the social ladder have one overriding goal, said David Horsey in the Los Angeles Times: “to protect what they have and get even more.” That’s why wealthy individuals and corporations flood Washington and state capitols with political contributions. It’s no accident that people who make $20 million on investments pay lower tax rates than struggling plumbers and teachers. Unless the rich suddenly get a conscience, the U.S. will soon be “the world’s biggest banana republic,” with the ruling plutocrats living behind gilded gates.

So what’s the answer? said Mickey Kaus in The Wall Street Journal. Democrats may moan about inequality, but when it comes to policies that might reverse the trends, “they got nothin’, as comedians say.” Raising the minimum wage? Hiking the top tax rates? Please. Small tweaks to the status quo will not “stop the top 10 percent from taking home 50 percent of the nation’s income.” Let’s face it: Everyone may be talking about income inequality, but thus far, it’s a problem without a solution.

Free Trade Brings Creative Destruction

The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a brainchild of Barack Obama.  Consider this posting I made on February 22, 2014.

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Creative destruction occurs when something new kills something older. A great example of this is personal computers.  Free Trade is another example.

NAFTA was President Bill Clinton’s naive plan to increase American trade while helping our neighbors.  It has not worked out as promised.

 

Mexico becoming a driving force in auto production
Mexico becoming a driving force in auto production

Honda Fit rolls off the assembly line at a new $800 million factory near Celaya, Mexico

Mexico, with its low labor costs, has been the beneficiary of the free trade agreement.  More products have entered the United   States from Mexico than ever before.    In 2013, according to our census bureau, $226 Million in products were exported and $280 Million were imported.  That number is on a path to increase dramatically over the next few years.  The reason is that Mexico has become the assembly floor for many products made in other countries.  The Los Angeles Times article titled “Mexico becoming a driving force in auto production” tells of the average hourly labor cost in their assembly plants of $8 versus an average hourly rate in the United States of $37.  These are the kinds of pay rates that drove American manufacturers to southern states in the USA.

What is the United States doing about this financial advantage?  Nothing!  Rather, the president of the United States, the Prime Minister of Canada, and the President of Mexico have just had meetings in Mexico at a town named Toluca (home of the Fiat 500 assembly plant), near Mexico City, discussing ways to further the NAFTA agreement.

Barack Obama claims to be concerned about the poorest in our nation and enhancing middle class opportunities.  How are more free trade agreements bringing jobs to the non-tech workers that assemble cars, refrigerators, and televisions?  They are not.  It’s creative destruction at work.

Sephardic Jews Receive a Spanish Embrace

Five hundred years ago Spain implemented the Inquisition.  The Inquisition was originally intended in large part to ensure the orthodoxy of those who converted from Judaism and Islam. This regulation of the faith of the newly converted was intensified after the royal decrees issued in 1492 and 1501 ordering Jews and Muslims to convert or leave. The following report is a fascinating situation that evokes one question for me. Why would the decendants of the Jews of Spain want to return to a country that persecuted them so severely?

David Bancroft

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By Aran Heller, The Associated Press

MADRID» They were burned at the stake, forced to con­vert or chased into exile. Now Spain is moving to right a half-millennium old “historic mistake” against its onetime flourishing Sep­hardic Jewish community: the European Union coun­try is on the verge of offering citizenship to descendants of victims estimated to number in the millions.

The Spanish conserva­tive government plans to make amends with a law ex­pected to be passed within weeks or months in Parlia­ment that offers citizenship to the descendants of legions of Jews forced to flee in 1492. Asked whether the new law amounted to an apology, Spanish Justice Minister Alberto Ruiz-Gallardon re­plied: “Without a doubt.”

“What the law will do, five centuries later, is make amends for a terrible historic mistake, one of the worst that Spaniards ever made,” Ruiz- Gallardon told The Associated Press in an interview.

Descendants of Sephardic  Jews, he said, will be considered “children of Spain.”

The term “Sephardic” literally means “Spanish” in Hebrew, but the label has come also to apply to one of the two main variants of Jewish religious practice. The other and globally dominant one – being  Ashkenazic,” which to Jews whose lineage, in recent times, is traced to northern and eastern Europe.

Because of mixing between the groups and other factors, there is no accepted figure for the global Sephardic population, but reasonable estimates would range between a fifth and a third of the world’s roughly 13 million Jews.

The largest community is in Israel, where almost half of the 6 million Jews are con­sidered Sephardic.

It is not completely clear how much of a historical link Spain will require.  Most of Israel’s Sephardics hail from  North Africa and southern Europe, which were early ports of call after the expulsion from Spain, and so they may be able to easily show direct links. But other communi­ties, from places like Iraq and Yemen, are considered Sephardic by religious practice yet may have trouble proving  a connection to Spain.

Hundreds of Israelis  claiming Sephardic ancestry have contacted the Spanish Embassy in Tel Aviv, begun researching their family histories  and taken to the airwaves to discuss their newfound citizenship possibilities.

Lawmakers Intimidate VW Workers

Government interference at it’s best. Using the people’s tax money to threaten the people.

Submitted by Thom Hartmann, an NPR contributor, on 17 February 2014

It’s illegal for an employer to intimidate workers trying to form a union, but apparently it’s just fine when a lawmaker does it. On Friday, workers at a Volkswagen Plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee voted against joining the United Auto Workers union. However, that vote may have turned out differently if workers weren’t pressured by Republican Governor Bill Haslam and Senator Bob Corker.


In the days leading up to that vote, Governor Haslam warned that he would take away Volkswagen’s state tax incentives if workers unionized, and Senator Corker claimed that a no vote would lead to the production of a new SUV at that plant. Volkswagen flatly denied Corker’s claim, and expressed their support for the workers, but that wasn’t enough to relieve the fear created by these powerful Republicans.

The UAW issued a statement saying, We’re outraged by politicians and outside special interest groups interfering with the basic legal right of workers to form a union.  And, they may ask the National Labor Relations Board to overturn Friday’s vote. For decades, we’ve seen corporations fight to block workers from organizing, but these extreme anti-worker tactics are a new low for politicians.


Hopefully, the NLRB will overturn this vote, and give workers a chance to make their decision without intense pressure and lies from those in public office. Either way, it’s clear who Governor Haslam and Senator Corker really work for, and every voter should remember that during the next election.

OK.. So why did the chicken cross the road?

chicken crossing the roadSARAH PALIN: The chicken crossed the road because, gosh-darn it, he’s a maverick!

BARACK OBAMA: Let me be clear, the chicken crossed the road because it was time for change! The chicken wanted change! Real change! Change he could believe in!

JOHN McCAIN: My friends; that chicken crossed the road because he recognized the need to engage in cooperation and dialogue with all the chickens on the other side of the road.

HILLARY CLINTON: When I was First Lady, I personally helped that little chicken to cross the road. This experience makes me uniquely qualified to ensure, right from Day One, that every chicken in this country gets the chance it deserves to cross the road. But then, this really isn’t about me.

GEORGE W. BUSH: We don’t really care why the chicken crossed the road. We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road or not. The chicken is either with us or against us. There is no middle ground here.

DICK CHENEY: Where’s my gun?

COLIN POWELL: Now to the left of the screen, you can clearly see the satellite image of the chicken crossing the road.

BILL CLINTON: I did not cross the road with that chicken.

AL GORE: I invented the chicken.

JOHN KERRY: Although I voted to let the chicken cross the road, I am now against it! It was the wrong road to cross, and I was misled about the chicken’s intentions. I am not for it now, and will remain against it.

AL SHARPTON: Why are all the chickens white? We need some black chickens.

DR. PHIL: The problem we have here is that this chicken won’t realize that he must first deal with the problem on this side of the road before it goes after the problem on the other side of the road. What we need to do is help him realize how stupid he’s acting by not taking on his current problems before adding new problems.

OPRAH: Well, I understand that the chicken is having problems, which is why he wants to cross this road so bad. So instead of having the chicken learn from his mistakes and take falls, which is a part of life, I’m going to give this chicken a NEW CAR so that he can just drive across the road and not live his life like the rest of the chickens.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN: We have reason to believe there is a chicken, but we have not yet been allowed to have access to the other side of the road.

NANCY GRACE: That chicken crossed the road because he’s guilty! You can see it in his eyes and the way he walks.

PAT BUCHANAN: To steal > the job of a decent, hardworking American.

MARTHA STEWART: No one called me to warn me which way that chicken was going. I had a standing order at the Farmer’s Market to sell my eggs when the price dropped to a certain level. No little bird gave me any insider information.

DR SEUSS: Did the chicken cross the road? Did he cross it with a toad? Yes, the chicken crossed the road, but why it crossed I’ve not been told.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY: To die in the rain, alone.

JERRY FALWELL: Because the chicken was gay! Can’t you people see the plain truth? That’s why they call it the ‘other side.’ Yes, my friends, That chicken is gay. And if you eat that chicken, you will become gay too. I say we boycott all chickens until we sort out this abomination that the Liberal media whitewashes with seemingly harmless phrases like ‘the other side.’ That chicken should not be crossing the road. It’s as > plain and as simple as that.

GRANDPA: In my day we didn’t ask why the chicken crossed the road. Somebody told us the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough.

BARBARA WALTERS: Isn’t that interesting? In a few moments, we will be listening to the chicken tell, for the first time, the heart warming story of how it experienced a serious case of molting, and went on to accomplish it’s lifelong dream of crossing the road.

ARISTOTLE: It is the nature of chickens to cross the road.

JOHN LENNON: Imagine all the chickens in the world crossing roads together, in peace.

BILL GATES: I have just released eChicken2013, which will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents, and balance your checkbook. Internet Explorer is an integral part of eChicken2013. This new platform is much more stable and will never reboot.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: Did the chicken really cross the road, or did the road move beneath the chicken?

COLONEL SANDERS: Did I miss one?

Alarming Rise in Antisemitic Boycotts of Israeli Universities and Scholars

There have been some articles sprinkled in the media discussing Antisemitic Boycotts.  This web site that I have copied is worth your attention. The web site is at http://www.amchainitiative.org/academic-boycotts-israel-antisemitic/.

Israel, the Jewish State, is predicated on a decisive and stable Jewish majority of at least 70 percent. Any lower than that and Israel will have to decide between being a Jewish state and a democratic state. If it chooses democracy, then Israel as a Jewish state will cease to exist. If it remains officially Jewish, then the state will face an unprecedented level of international isolation, including sanctions, that might prove fatal.
— Michael Oren, Israeli Ambassador to the U.S.,
May 2009

David Bancroft

More than 1,000 Faculty and 2 Academic Organizations have Endorsed the Academic Boycott of Israel

In the 1930’s, thousands of Jewish professors were kicked out of German universities, simply because they were Jews.  Shamefully, today it is in the United States that Jewish professors are threatened with being thrown out of scholarly conferences, prevented from publishing in scholarly journals, and denied research or employment opportunities, simply because they are citizens of the Jewish state.

Today’s academic boycott of the Jewish state and its scholars is no less antisemitic than the academic boycott of Jewish scholars in Germany 70 years ago.

Academic boycotts of Israeli academic institutions and scholars, like virtually all anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns within the last several years, have been established in response to the Palestinian political call to join the BDS movement against Israel.  That call was issued in 2005 by a coalition of Palestinian organizations that include the terrorist organizations Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and its purpose was to facilitate the elimination of the Jewish state.  It is not surprising that most of the American founders of academic boycotts of Israel have publicly expressed their opposition to the Jewish state.

Hannah Rosenthal, the former U.S. State Department’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, has unequivocally condemned academic boycotts, saying: “when academics from Israel are boycotted – this is not objecting to a policy – this is anti-Semitism.”  In addition 446 American University Presidents signed a statement published in the New York Times entitled “Boycott Israeli Universities? Boycott Ours, Too!”

Alarmingly, more than 1,000 faculty members, teaching students on over 300 US college and university campuses, have endorsed an academic boycott of Israeli universities and Jewish Israeli academics.

http://www.amchainitiative.org/academic-boycott-of-israel-map/

Click on the map link to see the names of faculty
who have endorsed the academic boycott of Israel

Even more disturbing is that well-known academic organizations are embracing the academic boycott of Israel.  Last April, the general membership of the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) unanimously approved the resolution put forward by the AAAAS National Council to endorse the boycott of Israeli universities.

On December 15, the American Studies Association (ASA), which claims to be the nation’s oldest and largest association devoted to the interdisciplinary study of American culture and history,  approved an anti-Israel academic boycott resolution put forward by the ASA National Council.

The ASA’s recent endorsement of the academic boycott of Israel has drawn scathing criticism from many organizations, including the American Association of University Professors, the Anti-Defamation League, the Simon Wiesental Center, Zionist Organization of America, American Jewish Committee, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and Stand With Us.

In addition, two universities — Penn State Harrisburg and Brandeis — have officially withdrawn their membership from the American Studies Association, after the ASA’s endorsement of the academic boycott of Israel, and the Chancellor of University of California San Diego, one of the ASA member organizations, has issued a statement condemning the boycott.

The Fear of illegal Immirants

Do you remember the biblical story of the Jews who traveled from Cannan to Egypt? The Egyptians enslaved the Jews. There is a similarity in that story to the large numbers of Mexicans who have entered the United States. Americans believe that slavery is immoral. However, many Americans have no problem treating the illegal aliens as second class citizens even if they are given legal residency. Thus there has been little progress in resolving the illegal alien issue over the past decade.

I started writing about illegal (undocumented) aliens in the USA in November 2007. Since then no new legislation has been enacted. It was a hot topic then and still is today. When Hillary Clinton was running for president she opposed even the issuance of driver’s licenses to those here illegally.

Say what you want but we really want those people in the United States. They do so many of the jobs we prefer not to do. From cleaning toilets to making beds to working in food processing facilities, we simply do not want to perform those functions and hope to send our children to college so they too can avoid those menial tasks.

Immigration reform principlesThe GOP is standing in the way of creating even a path to second class residency. The Los Angeles Times had an on line article about licensing illegal alien drivers that included the fact that “The applicants may include people from rural villages who never obtained birth certificates as well as day laborers with no fixed address to prove California residency.”

I understand the feelings and fears of those who oppose any legal documentation for those entering the country illegally. They are here. They do the jobs we don’t want to do. As I asked in November 2007, How many of us are prepared for an uprising of the down trodden?

Gay Marriage and who cares?

I now say it again, I Don’t Like Gay People.  Apparently it needs repeating.  My reason remains the same.  Many of them feel the need to announce their sexual preferences openly and repeatedly.  The most obvious display is their participation in gay or LGBT parades.

On an individual basis these people are mostly nice and well behaved.  I have no reason to ask any one their sexual preference.  I really don’t care.  Their marriage will not effect my marriage one iota.

The question is why should anyone care?  The answer is religious belief.  Most religions frown on homosexuality.  At least the orthodox do.

ted_cruz 2-13-14That view has provided the religious right with another campaign issue.  Thus Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has another opportunity to campaign against Democrats and moderate Republicans.  Perhaps because he realizes a legal challenge could soon strike down his state’s ban on marriage equality and that Republicans are generally losing the battle over equal marriage, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has introduced a bill “defending” states’ right to regulate marriage.

Is this a case of “state’s rights” or does he have a real opposition to gay marriage?  Rawstory.com “Citing states’ rights, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) has introduced an anti-gay marriage bill.” Tea Party basic view is reduce the power of the federal government.  That leads to opposing all federal legislation.  That would include far a field topics from gay marriage to drought aid.

Do a crime, get jail time

The NRA is the vocal defender of the second amendment.  That is OK with me.  Their reticence to insist on prosecution of those who commit murder with guns is their undoing.

The latest is the retired policeman in Florida who killed another person in a theater because that man was texting on his smartphone.  The former Tampa police captain has been jailed since he fatally shot the man and was denied bond on Friday.

America’s problem with guns is really an issue of crime.  What we really need is swift justice!

There should be no delays in conducting trials.  That too is in the constitution.  The Speedy Trial Clause of the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that “[i]n all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy that right.  The Clause protects the defendant from delay between the presentation of the indictment or similar charging instrument and the beginning of trial.  It also ensures speedy justice to those who are injured.

Do a crime, get jail time. If we all really want justice for everyone, including the NRA, we should be pursuing criminals to mete out swift justice.

Sadly we have a slow moving court system that delays verdicts and the guilty are mildly punished.  It’s a system that has sympathy for the criminals. 

A man went to the movies with his wife.  He sent a text message to the baby sitter.  Now he is dead.  Will the retired policeman be punished for murder?  Like George Zimmerman will he be found innocent?  This is not a Black and White confrontation.  In a country where life is cheap and “stand your ground” laws are prominent I won’t be surprised if the killer is found innocent.