Americans are pie in the sky regarding economic and social mobility

Based surveys by the Brookings Institute, Americans fervently want to believe that hard work pays off in America. They believe that you are not locked into a particular strata of social and economic mobility by the lot of your parents. Yet the evidence doesn't bear this out.

While cross-country comparisons of relative mobility rely on data and methodologies that are far from perfect, a growing number of economic studies have found that the United States stands out as having less, not more, inter-generational mobility than do Canada and several European countries. American children are more likely than other children to end up in the same place on the income distribution as their parents. Moreover, there is emerging evidence that mobility is particularly low for Americans born into families at the bottom of the earnings or income distribution.
The truth is that the United States is a low-mobility country:
In the United States and the United Kingdom, about half (50 percent) of parental earnings advantages are passed onto sons. If trends hold consistent, it would take an average of six generations for family economic advantage to disappear in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Paul Krugman sums it up: "[T]he right is winning economic debates because people believe, wrongly, that there’s something inherently moral about free-market outcomes." We Americans are dreamers, even when it blinds us to the need for real change. "American children are more likely than other children to end up in the same place on the income distribution as their parents." The real numbers contained in the linked report are real eye-openers. All of this was predictable. The Economist wonders where the anger is:
It's striking how little inchoate public rage has actually boiled to the surface in the rich world. Rising inequality, especially at the top end, combined with stagnating middle class incomes, has been a feature of the world for at least the past ten years. It's been two years since the biggest bail-outs and the rise toward double-digit unemployment. And the anger is...where? Europeans are demonstrating against budget cuts, but these are rarely explicitly directed at national plutocrats. In America, the language of the angriest is very similar to that of the plutocrats themselves. Indeed, the complaint that today's elite lack the noblesse oblige of the aristocrats of old, and are therefore risking public anger, seems to badly misread American public opinion. The middle class doesn't want hand-outs from condescending rich people. They want moralistic language and complaints about deficits.

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Wikileaks and a Swiss bank list

On Monday, Rudolph Elmer is said to have turned over to Wikileaks names of US, UK and Asian celebrities, lawmakers and business-folks who may or may not have been trying to avoid paying taxes. Apparently, the data are confusing even to those used to dealing with such, so release won't be soon. Still, it will be interesting to see who is in the Heidi Fleiss Black Book of off-shore accounts. Most particularly if there are any prominent (and current) US lawmakers.

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Welcome back to the United States. Give me your laptop and your passwords.

Glenn Greenwald has written about the federal government's common practice of seizing laptops and smartphones of American citizens who are re-entering the United States and reviewing their private data. Amazingly, our government is seizing this personal data without probable cause and even without reasonable suspicion:

When you really think about it, it's simply inconceivable that the U.S. Government gets away with doing this. Seizing someone's laptop, digging through it, recording it all, storing the data somewhere, and then distributing it to various agencies is about the most invasive, privacy-destroying measure imaginable. A laptop and its equivalents reveal whom you talk to, what you say, what you read, what you write, what you view, what you think, and virtually everything else about your life. It can -- and often does -- contain not only the most private and intimate information about you, but also information which the government is legally barred from accessing (attorney/client or clergy/penitent communications, private medical and psychiatric information and the like). But these border seizures result in all of that being limitlessly invaded. This is infinitely more invasive than the TSA patdowns that caused so much controversy just two months ago.
But how often are these e-strip searches occurring?
[T]his is happening to far more than people associated with WikiLeaks. As a result of writing about this, I've spoken with several writers, filmmakers, and activists who are critics of the government and who have been subjected to similar seizures -- some every time they re-enter the country.
But this is the tip of the iceberg:
A FOIA request from the ACLU revealed that in the 18-month period beginning October 1, 2008, more than 6,600 people -- roughly half of whom are American citizens -- were subjected to electronic device searches at the border by DHS, all without a search warrant.
I highly recommend reading Greenwald's detailed article for the reaction to this practice by a smattering of members of Congress and by a few court decisions. The sad bottom line is that there is no political momentum to condemn and bar this practice, even in the context of ubiquitous rhetoric regarding the need to limit the power of the federal government.

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The cigarette industry is even more evil than we thought

According to Scientific American, there are more dangers to smoking cigarettes than tar and nicotine. There's also polonium:

[P]eople worldwide smoke almost six trillion cigarettes a year, and each one delivers a small amount of polonium 210 to the lungs. Puff by puff, the poison builds up to the equivalent radiation dosage of 300 chest x-rays a year for a person who smokes one and a half packs a day.  Although polonium may not be the primary carcinogen in cigarette smoke, it may nonetheless cause thousands of deaths a year in the U.S. alone. And what sets polonium apart is that these deaths could be avoided with simple measures.
The print edition of this article reveals that most of the polonium could be removed from cigarettes by removing it from the fertilizer and by washing the tobacco leaves with a dilute solution of hydrogen peroxide. What follows is an old sad story: the tobacco industry has long refused to incorporate these changes to reduce the polonium. The good news is that the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, passed in June 2009, requires the tobacco industry to address this problem, which it has ignored for more than four decades. Now let's be conservative with the numbers. Let's assume that only 2,500 people needlessly died each year from polonium poisoning for the past 40 years. That's 100,000 people who have been sent to early deaths by tobacco executives. That's the moral equivalent of dropping an atomic bomb on Green Bay, Wisconsin. Yet no tobacco executives have ever been prosecuted, much less thrown in prison for this hideous conduct.

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Remember states’ rights? Sit back and watch the power of money

Mix Lux sees what's coming. Will it be another bailout for the banks in the form of a federal invasion of states rights? Will it be a federal law that says that banks don't need to obey state law? It could be ugly, and it might involve the transfer of massive amounts of money to banks that caused the current foreclosure problem. Lux cites to the writings of someone named "Numerian":

With increasing desperation, banks along with their enablers in Washington are going to try to jerry-rig a way out of this problem. Unfortunately for the banks, ex post facto laws are strictly forbidden by the Constitution, which is now being treated with new-found reverence by the Congress. It may be impossible to construct a law that solves problems like this that already exist. Perhaps the banks will get lucky, and some courts will begin to find in their favor, though that is certainly not the trend at the moment. Maybe the US Supreme Court will accept the banks’ argument that the securitization process in itself established a valid foreclosure claim even though mortgages were not properly assigned as required by state laws. This, however, would require the Supreme Court to make up a legal doctrine out of the blue (as the banks have done), thereby overturning all state laws and court rulings going back well over 100 years. Only a Supreme Court bought and paid for by bank lobbyists, and willing to prostitute itself publicly to its paymasters, would issue such a ruling. This means that the likely progression of events – the path we are now on - will lead to a near complete collapse of the housing market, because the big banks and the two government enterprises responsible for supporting the housing market will be fatally crippled wards of the state. The US government itself, including the Federal Reserve, will be equally crippled. Try as you might, you will find no words in the Bible – no phrases applicable to The Flood or to the destruction of whole cities at the hands of a vengeful God – that appropriately capture the financial gravity of this situation. But if we are forced to come up with some metaphor, Financial Armageddon will have to do.

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