Why income disparity matters

In a series of articles that he calls "The Great Divergence," Timothy Noah advises that in the United States of Inequality, income disparity is rapidly growing and it does not bode well for our country? Here's an excerpt from today's posting at Slate.com:

Income distribution in the United States is more unequal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador. Income inequality is actually declining in Latin America even as it continues to increase in the United States. Economically speaking, the richest nation on earth is starting to resemble a banana republic. The main difference is that the United States is big enough to maintain geographic distance between the villa-dweller and the beggar. As Ralston Thorpe tells his St. Paul's classmate, the investment banker Sherman McCoy, in Tom Wolfe's 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities: "You've got to insulate, insulate, insulate."
Wikipedia offers much more information on income distribution in the United States.

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Refusing to recognize marriage

Tom Ackerman has an provocative approach for dealing with a constantly simmering problem here in America: gay marriage. Whenever someone mentions their husband or wife (or their "marriage"), he makes a blunt statement that he "doesn't recognize marriage." His reason? "[N]obody should have marriage until everybody does." That gives people who have been privileged with the ability to marry a bit of the perspective of those are aren't allowed this privilege. Here's how he does it:

Yesterday I called a woman’s spouse her boyfriend. She says, correcting me, “He’s my husband,” “Oh,” I say, “I no longer recognize marriage.” The impact is obvious. I tried it on a man who has been in a relationship for years, “How’s your longtime companion, Jill?” “She’s my wife!” “Yeah, well, my beliefs don’t recognize marriage.” Fun. And instant, eyebrow-raising recognition. Suddenly the majority gets to feel what the minority feels. In a moment they feel what it’s like to have their relationship downgraded, and to have a much taken-for-granted right called into question because of another’s beliefs.

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Read more about the article CEOs Earn More When They Fire People
John D Rockefeller - Archetype of today's CEO

CEOs Earn More When They Fire People

John D Rockefeller - Puck Magazine 1901 The Institute for Policy Studies has just released their 17th annual review of CEO salary. It makes for scary reading. While the rest of us suffer through the double-dip-recession-that-never-actually-lifted-off-the-bottom, CEOs, who are not only some of the wealthiest people in the country but are also the most handsomely paid to boot, have seen their income rise in real terms, while their employees have seen a reduction in real income and a significant contraction of job opportunities. According to the Institute

Corporate executives, in reality, are not suffering at all. Their pay, to be sure, dipped on average in 2009 from 2008 levels, just as their pay in 2008, the first Great Recession year, dipped somewhat from 2007. But executive pay overall remains far above inflationadjusted levels of years past. In fact, after adjusting for inflation, CEO pay in 2009 more than doubled the CEO pay average for the decade of the 1990s, more than quadrupled the CEO pay average for the 1980s, and ran approximately eight times the CEO average for all the decades of the mid-20th century.
Their employees, meanwhile
are taking home less in real weekly wages than they took home in the 1970s. Back in those years, precious few top executives made over 30 times what their workers made. In 2009, we calculate in the 17th annual Executive Excess, CEOs of major U.S. corporations averaged 263 times the average compensation of American workers. CEOs are clearly not hurting.
But reality is even worse:
In 2009, the CEOs who slashed their payrolls the deepest took home 42 percent more compensation than the year’s chief executive pay average for S&P 500 companies
The market, and the embedded compensation committees, are rewarding CEOs for destroying livliehoods, for shipping jobs overseas, and for eviscerating the american workplace. These are the same people who lobby our politicians to create business friendly legislation (aka legislation that will protect their bonuses and options) and to fight against social programs (that would level the playing field a little) What was so wrong with the vibrant, growing, energetic America of the 70s and 80s? Why do CEOs hate America, so?

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The Onion: “Man already knows everything he needs to know about Muslims.”

The Onion has issued a new report from Salina, Kansas:

Local man Scott Gentries told reporters Wednesday that his deliberately limited grasp of Islamic history and culture was still more than sufficient to shape his views of the entire Muslim world. . . "I know all I'm going to let myself know."
Here's the rest of the story.

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Instant Rockstar and Instant Respect

Now you don't have to learn how to play the guitar. All you need to do is pretend that you can play guitar. At my neighborhood Walgreens, there is now a big display featuring Paper Jamz plastic and cardboard string-less guitars (electronic sensors pick up where your hands are). For only $25 ($15 extra if you want a separate amp made mostly out of cardboard), you can be an "Instant Rockstar." I picked up one of these "guitars" to see whether I could feel like an "Instant Rockstar" right there in the aisles of Walgreens. I felt the glow of stardom for only a few seconds, because you can't actually play Paper Jamz guitar like you can play a real guitar (I play the guitar professionally). You can't play individual notes, you can't play precise rhythms, the sound range is extremely limited, there are no dynamics and there is only one genre offered: distorted rock chords. Each of these five models of "guitar" is loaded with only three songs. Once you master the three songs on one of the guitars, you'll need to go back to Walgreens and pay $25 for a different model in order to play three more songs. Instead of real guitar lessons, just go to Rockstarz Academy. The manufacturer of the Paper Jamz "guitar" tells you that you'd be wasting your time and money to buy a real guitar and learn how to play it. The Paper Jamz display actually includes a video promo with this opening line: "Why play an electric guitar when you can play Paper Jamz?" Why, indeed? I would offer one good reason why you might want to forgo the Paper Jamz "guitar." When you play a fake guitar instead of a real guitar, you will get fake respect, instead of real respect. To paraphrase and expand the Paper Jamz motto, "Why live a real life when you can watch TV and pretend to be living a life?" Amotz Zahavi made it clear that in order to be reliable, a signal means to be expensive. If you want lots of respect, then, go practice hard so that you really learn how to play the guitar, and then come back and impress people by playing real songs. Paying $25 and then banging on a piece of plastic and cardboard isn't going to get you much respect, unless your audience consists of three-year-olds. Then again, I'm probably missing the point because massive numbers of Americans are under the delusion that reality is the way they desire it to be, rather than the way it actually is. Buying a cardboard guitar can bring instant respect to many teenagers because they believe it can. We are a society that craves instant respect. We show off our gadgets and toys to the have-nots for instant respect. We join the military so we can carry guns, wear uniforms and blow things up in order to get instant respect, even though we've floundered through life until then. We celebrate family tragedies, sickness and addictions because these bring us respect as high-ranking victims. We strive to shake hands with Hollywood and sports celebrities, because this brings us instant respect. We become fans of professional sports teams in the hopes that they will win their championship, which seems to bring us respect. I hope that everybody buying a Paper Jamz guitar really takes the time to impress their friends by "playing the guitar" before they lose all interest in "playing" the three songs programmed into their "guitar." I'm not denying that this gadget is technologically impressive or that it could be fun for a small child. But within a few months after buying a Paper Jamz guitar, this gadget will undoubtedly end up in the back of the closet, and it will eventually be tossed into a landfill with all the other gadgets we buy in our attempts to gain instant respect.

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