Who Fucking Cares?
This post is in: Our Awesome Meritocracy, Our Failed Media Experiment, Our Failed Political Establishment
This post is in: Our Awesome Meritocracy, Our Failed Media Experiment, Our Failed Political Establishment
This post is in: Decline and Fall, Jump! You Fuckers!, Our Awesome Meritocracy
(Tony Auth via GoComics.com)
Professor Krugman blogs:
I had lunch with Gabriel Zucman today, co-author of the startling new paper (pdf) showing that the concentration of wealth at the very top — the 0.1% — is fully back to Gilded Age levels. And he pointed me to another paper that flew under my, and I suspect other peoples’, radar: his demonstration that a lot of wealth at the top is held in offshore tax havens (pdf).
You might have suspected that already, but it’s one thing to rely on anecdotal evidence, another thing to find the clear footprint of underground money in official statistics. What Zucman points out is that we have international data on investment positions, with each country reporting its assets abroad and foreign-owned assets at home. But the numbers don’t add up: globally, liabilities are substantially larger than assets. That’s mathematically impossible, but Zucman shows that it’s what will appear in the statistics if a lot of money is run through offshore havens, so that the ownership doesn’t show up in anyone’s national statistics. And he uses other data and information to show that this is by far the most compelling explanation…
All the Missing Billions of Our New Gilded AgePost + Comments (92)
by Betty Cracker| 216 Comments
This post is in: Post-racial America, The War On Women, Vagina Outrage, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Our Awesome Meritocracy
I usually don’t comment on race issues because, hello, cracker, but I’ve been reading the Chait-Coates debate (here, here, here, here, here and here) and surrounding commentary with interest. Now Sully has piped up, and some of his readers are concerned that Coates has grown fatalistic on the prospect of the USA ever transcending its white supremacy framework.
One Sully reader (whose comment was front-paged) believes Coates’ pessimism about America is “an overreaction to the Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis tragedies along with the uglier aspects of the Tea Party movement… It’s up to writers to rise above our emotional outrage and to not take isolated — yes, these were isolated events — and stretch them until they cover from sea to shining sea.”
Coates responds to that idea in detail here and ends with a link to the Serenity Prayer.
To reiterate, I generally choose to keep my opinions on racial issues to myself on the grounds that the supply of middle-aged white person commentary on that topic far outstrips demand. But as the mother of a teenage daughter, I empathize with Coates’ anxiety for his teenage son.
I also empathize with his pessimism — realism may be closer to the mark — about the prospect that the burden of Otherness will ever be lifted. Gender bias doesn’t form a perfect analog to racism, as people far more learned than I have explained in detail elsewhere.
But yeah, I know what it’s like to look at a group of laughing, incredibly brilliant teenage girls and realize that there’s a statistical likelihood that a quarter of them will be sexually assaulted during their lifetimes and to know that there’s a 100% chance that their ideas and skills will be undervalued during their professional careers strictly because of their plumbing. Even if we have come a long way, baybee.
The patriarchy? We’re soaking in it. White supremacy? As Coates says, “It is but the rain.” The Serenity Prayer is as sane a response to that as any (except for the God part!).
by Betty Cracker| 177 Comments
This post is in: Kochsuckers, Politics, Assholes, Decline and Fall, General Stupidity, Good News For Conservatives, Our Awesome Meritocracy, Our Failed Political Establishment
Via the NYT, breaking news:
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday issued a major campaign finance decision, striking down limits on federal campaign contributions for the first time. The ruling, issued near the start of a campaign season, will change and most likely increase the role money plays in American politics.
Aaaand wait for it:
The decision, by a 5-to-4 vote along ideological lines…
The ways of the Flying Spaghetti Monster are mysterious, but if He could see fit to, as a BJ commenter once suggested, smite a certain corpulent jurist via Fettuccine Alfredo within the next year or so, it would be an exquisitely well-timed deus ex pastana.
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Open Threads, Our Awesome Meritocracy
Gawker‘s Hamilton Nolan says the latest RS interview makes Bill Gates look like “kind of a dick”:
Jeff Goodel’s lengthy new Rolling Stone interview with Gates delves deep into Gates’ greatest accomplishment: his $36billion foundation, and its meaningful, data-driven contributions to public health and anti-poverty initiatives. But it also does a good job proving that— although many people reflexively assume that someone so concerned about helping the poor must be a progressive liberal—Gates is anything but….
[Gates]: Should the state be playing a greater role in helping people at the lowest end of the income scale? Poverty today looks very different than poverty in the past. The real thing you want to look at is consumption and use that as a metric and say, “Have you been worried about having enough to eat? Do you have enough warmth, shelter? Do you think of yourself as having a place to go?” The poor are better off than they were before, even though they’re still in the bottom group in terms of income.He goes on to criticize the lack of efficiency in government programs for the poor. Moderately liberal? Yes. But he is no George Soros. He’s not even as far left as Warren Buffett, when you get right down to it. A $36 billion foundation and a call for a 50% tax rate is admirable, in isolation. The same things are somewhat less admirable in the context of a $76 billion fortune.
Gates’ gods are not political, but technical. He worships efficiency and measurability, not ideals. And he evinces the sunny optimism (about technology’s ability to fix climate change without serious political changes, and about the inevitability of collective human progress in general) of a man free of personal worries. To Gates, the government is just another stakeholder instrumental to his plans, not an overarching force in life that must be held in check by an empowered citizenry.
A kindhearted technocrat with more means than ideals is not, of course, the worst thing the world’s richest man could be. It’s also not the best.
Discuss. Or, if you don’t care, share: What’s on the agenda for the start of the weekend?
Friday Evening Open Thread: Bill Gates, Techno-CentristPost + Comments (152)
by $8 blue check mistermix| 66 Comments
This post is in: Bring On The Meteor, Our Awesome Meritocracy
Atherton, California is the richest zipcode in the nation, so graffiti there gets the police involved:
On Feb. 16, vandals spray-painted the message “F… the 1%” on perimeter walls, fences, garage doors, a gate and a car on at least nine properties in the town’s Lindenwood neighborhood, according to Atherton police Lt. Joe Wade.
And on a street in front of one house was scrawled in black paint the words, “Kill People.”
As part of its investigation, the Atherton Police Department contacted other local law enforcement agencies as well as the FBI, Wade said.
Bieber H Christ, I don’t like death threats of any kind, but do you think there’s any more rewarding publicity for what’s probably some neighborhood kids than the treatment this got in the media? And why weren’t the CIA and NSA called? Is President Obama dragging his feet by not immediately declaring Atherton a disaster area? Does FEMA stock the right kind of paint remover to help the victims?
BTW, Reader R sent a link to CNBC’s coverage [warning, obnoxious, loud auto-play video], and the related links are worth a chuckle:
by Kay| 81 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Our Awesome Meritocracy
“This isn’t about some aging rockstar way past his prime that simply needs to go away,” Davis said during her remarks at the Texas Democratic Women Convention in Austin. “This is about Greg Abbott. It’s about his character, his judgment, his values when he stands on a stage next to someone like that and refers to him as his ‘blood brother.’”
Feel free to discuss whether this is about some aging rockstar, or something else entirely.