Outis

Back again for my now weekly “post” and I’m going to take a pass on the revelations that the U.S. government has to pay “reporters” to write bad stories about Fidel Castro’s regime. (Like, wtf? Is it that hard?)

Instead, and on a day which is for reflection on other topics, my attention is on an internal threat to the American Way.

Income inequality:

First, some statistics. Between 1979 and 2003, the income of the richest one percent of Americans more than doubled, the income of the middle 15 percent grew by only 15 percent, and the income of the poorest 20 percent barely budged, according to the CBO. By the late 1990s, the richest one percent of Americans households had a third of all wealth in the economy, and took in 14 percent of the country’s income—a greater share than at any point since the Great Depression. These days you can’t swing a dead gerbil without hitting some leftist faithfully reciting these figures, but I thought I’d repeat them anyway.

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To some extent, these findings are likely a result of the fact that elected officials tend to hail from the upper classes, and so tend to be the sort of people who worry more about the burden the estate tax imposes than, say, food insecurity or too-high heating bills. In 2003, financial records revealed that 40 senators and 123 representatives were millionaires. This shouldn’t be surprising. Without publicly-financed elections, it takes a good deal of personal wealth to run for office—the average Senate campaign in 2006 will cost about $10 million, minimum, according to a University of Washington study.

But that’s only the most obvious way economic power begets political power. Consider the fact that wealthy Americans are far more likely to vote: 86 percent of those in families with incomes over $75,000 reported voting in 1990, compared to only 52 percent of those in families with incomes under $15,000. Whether that’s because the well-off are more likely to believe that government will work for them—evidently a sound assumption—or because they have more time and opportunity to inform themselves and do their civic duty is unknown.

But it’s not just voting. People in the $75,000 bracket are much more likely to join a political advocacy group like the NRA or the NAACP (73 percent vs. 29 percent), and much more likely to make campaign contributions (56 percent vs. 6 percent). Indeed, in the 2000 election, 95 percent of those donors making substantial campaign contributions came from households making over $100,000. While high-income donors don’t usually bribe politicians to do their bidding, they do get more face time with their representatives, during which they can frame issues and concerns in ways amenable to their interests.

Bradford Plumer:

[T]he Pullman company took a hit during the 1893 depression, workers saw their paychecks shrink but rents increase, and went on strike, led by Eugene Debs and the American Railway Union. Riots broke out. Trains stopped running. Railway executives panicked. So Grover Cleveland sent in 12,000 troops to break the strike. 13 workers were killed, Debs was hauled off to jail, the ARU dismantled, and industrial unions were effectively finished as a force for the next 40 years. We know the drill.

Sadly for the politicians, though, gunning down the working class has never looked good right before an election year. And 1894 was an election year. So Congress rushed to pass legislation establishing Labor Day, and Cleveland signed the bill in an attempt to look kinder and gentler to the voters. It didn’t work—Cleveland lost—but now we have a holiday that both celebrates a good cause and was essentially a political gambit meant to paper over state-backed repression of organized labor. Like I said, it’s always seemed a bit odd.

Bodies were piled up in the mortuary’s freezers, some on top of one another, she said.

“It’s never been like this in my years here. This is really tragic,” said [redacted].

Many of the dead were elderly who often were too afraid to leave their windows open, she said.

Could be Baghdad, no?

BBC News: Deaths mount amid California heat.

Related: Coping with the heat by Michael O’Hare.

I notice many people going about heat wave management the wrong way, so here’s what you need to know. First, what you can do quickly, and without air conditioning, which is a lot if you’re smart…

The rest is great.

What happens when the very poor live right beside the very rich? What happens when a black market is the only economic link between those two communities and the only civic institution they share is a corrupt police force?

It sounds almost fictional when recounted this way. (Nevermind the details: e.g., eight year-old boys firing automatic machine guns and entire neighborhoods in whcih the state chooses not to intervene.) But it’s all fact, though you’d have to rent a very good work of fiction to see it.

“News From a Personal War” is the extra feature that comes with the “City of God” DVD in the United States.

It is one of the most important documentaries I have ever seen. Perhaps, because it brings news from a frontline that could one day be ours.

I strongly recommend to you, my friends, to watch it and beg you to make your friends watch it with the proviso that their friends also watch it.

iPod sweatshops

“We have to work too hard and I am always tired. It’s like being in the army. They make us stand still for hours. If we move, we are punished by being made to stand still for longer.”

The charges sound deplorable, in that they could reveal the sad truth that Apple is not unlike any other successful global company that relies on cheap labor in poor countries to produce its machines. It might particularly shock the relatively wealthy customers whose attractive little iPod packages proudly proclaim that they are “Designed for Apple in California.”