Now at 5241 blog postings and 1290 news articles. Coverage is actually growing.
For much more on the Downing Street memo, check out The Big Brass Alliance.
For web devs: this is a great vertical community aggregator to check out. Very nicely done.
Category Archives: Public Service, Civics, Government, Activism
“make it clear you will not consent to a lie”
Whiskey Bar: Truth and Consequences
Sometimes the truth is so damning you have to speak it for its own sake — not to convince or condemn or even because you think it might right the wrong, but to make it clear you will not consent to a lie by remaining silent.
However, this is not the kind of behavior you normally expect from a politician. Even the good ones — or rather, the less bad ones — tend to treat the truth like a scarce commodity, one that has to be strictly rationed in order to avoid running out all together. Evasion, on the other hand, is plentiful, and used as freely as a Hummer burns gasoline.
Which is why I did a double take when I saw what Sen. Durban of Illinois said on the Senate floor yesterday…
Go and read the rest.
Rich-poor gap gaining attention
The Fed chief than added that the 80 percent of the workforce represented by nonsupervisory workers has recently seen little, if any, income growth at all. The top 20 percent of supervisory, salaried, and other workers has.
The result of this, said Greenspan, is that the US now has a significant divergence in the fortunes of different groups in its labor market. “As I’ve often said, this is not the type of thing which a democratic society – a capitalist democratic society – can really accept without addressing,” Greenspan told the congressional hearing.
The cause of this problem? Education, according to Greenspan. Specifically, high school education. US children test above world average levels at the 4th grade level, he noted. By the 12th grade, they do not. “We have to do something to prevent that from happening,” said Greenspan.
From Think Progress: Minimum Wage: By The Numbers:
4.3 million: Number of Americans who have fallen into poverty since President Bush took office
$5.15: Federal minimum wage
26%: How much the inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage has eroded since 1979
0: Number of times minimum wage has increased since 1997
7: Number of times Congress has increased its own pay since 1997
$0: How much more a year people earning minimum wage earn today compared to 1997
$28,500: How much more a year members of Congress make today compared to 1997
$10,700: Amount a person making minimum wage will earn in a year
$5,000: Amount below the poverty level working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year at minimum wage will leave a family of three
7,300,000: Number of workers who would benefit from an increase in the minimum wage
72%: Percentage of adult workers who would benefit from an increase in the minimum wage
1,800,000: Number of parents with kids under the age of 18 who would benefit from an increase in the minimum wage
11 million: Number of jobs added to the economy in the four years after the last minimum wage hike
$8.70: Amount minimum wage would have to be today to have the same purchasing power it had in 1968
2.5 years: Amount of health care for two children which could be bought by raising the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25
86%: Percentage of Americans who support raising the federal minimum wage
“reforming into thousands of cultural tribes”
Chris Anderson, in his latest post, “Massively parallel culture” says:
…Rather than the scary fragmentation of our society into a nation of disconnected people doing their own thing, I think we’re reforming into thousands of cultural tribes, connected less by geographic proximity and workplace chatter than by shared interests. Whether we think of it this way or not, each of us belongs to many different tribes simultaneously, often overlapping (geek culture and Lego), often not (tennis and punk-funk).
What’s interesting is that the same Long Tail forces and technologies that are leading to an explosion of variety and abundant choice in the content we consume are also helping to connect us to other consumers, whether through Amazon and Netflix reviews, blogs, p2p networks or playlist sharing.
Here goes how I see it: Web 1.0 technologies helped us to define our own personal niches by letting us filter: find and consume entertainment, goods, services information exactly to our liking. This empowered us to focus our attention and consumption to our own idiosyncratic tastes. Web 2.0 technologies enable us to communicate and connect with others who share these preferences, concerns, and joys – but only if we are so motivated.
Left Self Correcting?
Chris Bowers of MyDD posts a roaring call to arms and announces he is going local – he wants to pursue reform of the local Philadelphia Democratic party.
He’s joining the terrific group Young Philly Politics that have been pursuing the same.
Meanwhile, Shelley Powers, a writer whose opinion I respect, declares she’s going Green.
I just mentioned three Democratic leaning bloggers pushing for either reform of their own party, or leaving it all together.
How much of this is blowback from November? How much of it is because we feel empowered to make change? Or maybe more precisely – how much of it is because we don’t feel empowered – that we don’t feel a collective ownership of the party?
A commenter in the MyDD thread rebuts that instead of forming whole new organizations that maybe we should be working actively to change what is already here: “If you want to make changes, contact your committeeperson, say you’d like to go to the next ward meeting and get involved, then go. Being a footsoldier in local politics is a thankless job and volunteers for it are few – you won’t have much competition. Or volunteer to work at the polls. Don’t know how it is in other wards, but after the election, all the pollworkers in my ward are invited to a post-election party where one can smooze and network.”
Getting College Dropouts Back To School
Philadelphia Inquirer | 06/13/2005 | Hope for Phila. in college dropouts:
“These are people who might have 20 or 40 years left in their careers, who have already demonstrated some interest in college,” said David B. Thornburgh, executive director of the Pennsylvania Economy League. “You can make a substantial difference in someone’s life and in the economic vitality of the city if you can get that 25-year-old back to school.”
Getting working adults, many with family obligations, to reenroll is no easy feat, which Thornburgh and others who worked on the report concede.
But compared with other workforce-enhancement alternatives – such as massive improvement in Philadelphia’s K-12 education or stanching the “brain drain” of college graduates – reaching out to comebackers could prove a relatively quick fix, said Sallie A. Glickman, executive director of the Philadelphia Workforce Investment Board.
The tentative goal, Glickman said, is to coax 12,000 dropouts back to school by 2010, which would fill a projected gap in Philadelphia’s demand for college-educated workers.
“We want people to just zero in on that ranking: 92d out of 100,” Thornburgh said. “I mean, this is all hands on deck. We’re just not going to build a new economy with that kind of a labor force.”
An initiative called Graduate! Philadelphia, led by the report’s author, Hadass Sheffer, seeks to raise the alarm.
Sheffer’s plans include a “reengagement center,” where returning students can receive counseling and help in navigating red tape, and a “cohort” approach, where comebackers take courses together to provide positive peer pressure.
The report calls on schools and employers to do more as well. Comebackers need flexible schedules on the job and night and weekend courses from schools. Tuition and fee breaks, help with child care, and paid time off for classes were also recommended.
Chris Nolan has some words to say to Kos
Wow. You don’t see any of this happening on the right. I’m noticing Democrats/Liberals/Progressives tearing each other to ribbons regularly now. I wonder if it has always been this way, or if this is a relatively new phenominon. Is it simply a case of “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”?
Report Any Unusual Activities
This poster, seen at train stations between Baltimore and DC on MARC, and uploaded by Articulatory Loop, is downright creepy. View image
Bloggers Push Story U.S. Media Has Been Ignoring
“This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.”. So begins the “Downing Street Memo” and contained within is the revelation that “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” – way back in July of 2002!
A week or so ago I opined on how little attention this has garnered in the press.
Dan Gillmor has called the coverage a failure of U.S. media.
Now I’m not a blog triumphalist (err… maybe I am?) but PSoTD has been studiously tracking how bloggers have been keeping this story alive while organizations we trust to provide us with the news have passed on it.
At last count there were 2353 related blog postings (found via Technorati) vs. only 394 related news articles (found via Google News).
Why is that?
The Daily News Daily News: “Deep Throat is 91. He and the rigorous media that held a president accountable are footnotes in history. Their contemporary counterpart? Deep Indifference.”
Of note: Bolton is implicated in trying to keep weapons inspectors from Iraq: “John R. Bolton flew to Europe in 2002 to confront the head of a global arms-control agency and demand he resign, then orchestrated the firing of the unwilling diplomat… A former Bolton deputy says the U.S. undersecretary of state felt Jose Bustani “had to go,” particularly because the Brazilian was trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Baghdad. That might have helped defuse the crisis over alleged Iraqi weapons and undermined a U.S. rationale for war.”
Wow.
Today, if I have PSoTDs technique down, there were 616 mentions at Google News. A huge jump most likely due to yesterday’s Bush/Blair press conference where a brave reporter asked them directly about the memo.
Income Mobility
Richest Are Leaving Even the Rich Far Behind – New York Times:
…Under the Bush tax cuts, the 400 taxpayers with the highest incomes – a minimum of $87 million in 2000, the last year for which the government will release such data – now pay income, Medicare and Social Security taxes amounting to virtually the same percentage of their incomes as people making $50,000 to $75,000.
Those earning more than $10 million a year now pay a lesser share of their income in these taxes than those making $100,000 to $200,000.
The alternative minimum tax, created 36 years ago to make sure the very richest paid taxes, takes back a growing share of the tax cuts over time from the majority of families earning $75,000 to $1 million – thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars annually. Far fewer of the very wealthiest will be affected by this tax.
…One way to understand the growing gap is to compare earnings increases over time by the vast majority of taxpayers – say, everyone in the lower 90 percent – with those at the top, say, in the uppermost 0.01 percent (now about 14,000 households, each with $5.5 million or more in income last year).
From 1950 to 1970, for example, for every additional dollar earned by the bottom 90 percent, those in the top 0.01 percent earned an additional $162, according to the Times analysis. From 1990 to 2002, for every extra dollar earned by those in the bottom 90 percent, each taxpayer at the top brought in an extra $18,000.
…While most economists recognize that the richest are pulling away, they disagree on what this means. Those who contend that the extraordinary accumulation of wealth is a good thing say that while the rich are indeed getting richer, so are most people who work hard and save. They say that the tax cuts encourage the investment and the innovation that will make everyone better off.
“In this income data I see a snapshot of a very innovative society,” said Tim Kane, an economist at the Heritage Foundation. “Lower taxes and lower marginal tax rates are leading to more growth. There’s an explosion of wealth. We are so wealthy in a world that is profoundly poor.”
But some of the wealthiest Americans, including Warren E. Buffett, George Soros and Ted Turner, have warned that such a concentration of wealth can turn a meritocracy into an aristocracy and ultimately stifle economic growth by putting too much of the nation’s capital in the hands of inheritors rather than strivers and innovators. Speaking of the increasing concentration of incomes, Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, warned in Congressional testimony a year ago: “For the democratic society, that is not a very desirable thing to allow it to happen.”
Others say most Americans have no problem with this trend. The central question is mobility, said Bruce R. Bartlett, an advocate of lower taxes who served in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations. “As long as people think they have a chance of getting to the top, they just don’t care how rich the rich are.”
But in fact, economic mobility – moving from one income group to another over a lifetime – has actually stopped rising in the United States, researchers say. Some recent studies suggest it has even declined over the last generation.
Related:
The Mobility Myth (NYTimes) via Suburban Guerrilla:
“Under the Bush tax cuts, the 400 taxpayers with the highest incomes – a minimum of $87 million in 2000, the last year for which the government will release such data – now pay income, Medicare and Social Security taxes amounting to virtually the same percentage of their incomes as people making $50,000 to $75,000. Those earning more than $10 million a year now pay a lesser share of their income in these taxes than those making $100,000 to $200,000.”
US Income Distribution, 1980-1999 (rebeccablood)