Gap Between Rich And Poor Named 8th Wonder Of The World

Posted on Wednesday, January 26, 2011 by meganwilson

The Onion


“It’s breathtaking,” said Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, a longtime champion and benefactor of the rift’s conservation. “After all we’ve been through in recent years, there’s no greater privilege than watching it grow bigger and bigger each day. There may be a few naysayers who worry that if it gets any wider, the whole thing will collapse upon itself and take millions of people down with it, but I for one am willing to take that chance.”

PARIS—At a press conference Tuesday, the World Heritage Committee officially recognized the Gap Between Rich and Poor as the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” describing the global wealth divide as the “most colossal and enduring of mankind’s creations.”

“Of all the epic structures the human race has devised, none is more staggering or imposing than the Gap Between Rich and Poor,” committee chairman Henri Jean-Baptiste said. “It is a tremendous, millennia-old expanse that fills us with both wonder and humility.”

“And thanks to careful maintenance through the ages, this massive relic survives intact, instilling in each new generation a sense of awe,” Jean- Baptiste added.

The vast chasm of wealth, which stretches across most of the inhabited world, attracts millions of stunned observers each year, many of whom have found its immensity too overwhelming even to contemplate. By far the largest man-made structure on Earth, it is readily visible from locations as far-flung as Eastern Europe, China, Africa, and Brazil, as well as all 50 U.S. states.

“The original Seven Wonders of the World pale in comparison to this,” said World Heritage Committee member Edwin MacAlister, standing in front of a striking photograph of the Gap Between Rich and Poor taken from above Mexico City. “It is an astounding feat of human engineering that eclipses the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids of Giza, and perhaps even the Great Racial Divide.”

According to anthropologists, untold millions of slaves and serfs toiled their whole lives to complete the gap. Records indicate the work likely began around 10,000 years ago, when the world’s first landed elites convinced their subjects that construction of such a monument was the will of a divine authority, a belief still widely held today.

Though historians have repeatedly disproved such claims, theories still persist among many that the Gap Between Rich and Poor was built by the Jews.

“When I stare out across its astounding breadth, I’m often moved to tears,” said Johannesburg resident Grace Ngubane, 31, whose home is situated on one of the widest sections of the gap. “The scale is staggering—it makes you feel really, really small.”

“Insignificant, even,” she continued.

While numerous individuals have tried to cross the Gap Between Rich and Poor, evidence suggests that only a small fraction have ever succeeded and many have died in the attempt.

Its official recognition as the Eighth Wonder of the World marks the culmination of a dramatic turnaround from just 50 years ago, when popular movements called for the gap’s closure. However, due to a small group of dedicated politicians and industry leaders, vigorous preservation efforts were begun around 1980 to restore—and greatly expand—the age-old structure.

“It’s breathtaking,” said Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, a longtime champion and benefactor of the rift’s conservation. “After all we’ve been through in recent years, there’s no greater privilege than watching it grow bigger and bigger each day. There may be a few naysayers who worry that if it gets any wider, the whole thing will collapse upon itself and take millions of people down with it, but I for one am willing to take that chance.”

Added Blankfein, “Besides, something tells me I’d probably make it out okay.”

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Think Again: American Decline

Posted on Monday, January 24, 2011 by meganwilson

By Gideon Rachman
Foreign Policy

“We’ve Heard All This About American Decline Before.”

This time it’s different. It’s certainly true that America has been through cycles of declinism in the past. Campaigning for the presidency in 1960, John F. Kennedy complained, “American strength relative to that of the Soviet Union has been slipping, and communism has been advancing steadily in every area of the world.” Ezra Vogel’s Japan as Number One was published in 1979, heralding a decade of steadily rising paranoia about Japanese manufacturing techniques and trade policies.

In the end, of course, the Soviet and Japanese threats to American supremacy proved chimerical. So Americans can be forgiven if they greet talk of a new challenge from China as just another case of the boy who cried wolf. But a frequently overlooked fact about that fable is that the boy was eventually proved right. The wolf did arrive — and China is the wolf.

The Chinese challenge to the United States is more serious for both economic and demographic reasons. The Soviet Union collapsed because its economic system was highly inefficient, a fatal flaw that was disguised for a long time because the USSR never attempted to compete on world markets. China, by contrast, has proved its economic prowess on the global stage. Its economy has been growing at 9 to 10 percent a year, on average, for roughly three decades. It is now the world’s leading exporter and its biggest manufacturer, and it is sitting on more than $2.5 trillion of foreign reserves. Chinese goods compete all over the world. This is no Soviet-style economic basket case.
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Should GE’s Jeffrey Immelt Really Be Leading Our Job Creation Strategy?

Posted on Saturday, January 22, 2011 by meganwilson

By Scott Paul
HUFFINGTON POST

You would have difficulty finding a company that has outsourced more jobs and closed more American factories than GE.


There is no swifter way to alienate working class voters than to name an outsourcing CEO to lead your jobs strategy. Yet that’s exactly what President Obama is doing.

General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt has fooled the media and the White House into believing that he cares about American manufacturing jobs. I have a hard time imagining a worse pick, unless Obama would have tapped Immelt’s predecessor Jack Welch, who seemed fine with the idea of putting factories on barges in search of the lowest wages in the world.

Let’s look at GE’s jobs record. You would have difficulty finding a company that has outsourced more jobs and closed more American factories than GE. While they have slashed their American workforce to fewer than 150,000, GE has dramatically expanded its global presence, now employing over 300,000 workers worldwide. Yes, GE has brought a trickle of jobs back to the U.S. over the past two years, but it still outsources more than it insources. And those executives at GE are not clueless–they realize the value of good publicity as it announces new hires at a time like this. But they do not devote nearly the same amount of publicity to their factory closings.

Immelt’s prescription for boosting manufacturing harkens back to the days of bloodletting as a medical procedure — bad policy with consistently poor results:

  • In a speech to the Detroit Economic Club in 2009, Immelt berated “Buy American” policies while acknowledging that GE lived under domestic preference regimes in China, France, and other nations. In Immelt’s mind, it is fine for China and France to require to GE to make what it sells in their nations, but it’s not OK for America to do the same.
  • Immelt essentially rules out any enforcement of our trade laws in his Washington Post op-ed today through a spurious claim that distorts the issue. So China can cheat all it wants, and Immelt wants us to do nothing. Trade enforcement is not “erecting barriers,” as Immelt alleges. Rather, trade enforcement is about removing distortions from the free market. Immelt reveals his true stripes with this ridiculous assertion. It’s a dangerous statement, and it demands an immediate and forceful rebuke from the White House.
  • Immelt supported two of the most disastrous economic policies of the post-World War II era: financial deregulation and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization with few, if any, consequences for breaking the rules.

The result of policies Immelt has supported: one-third of our manufacturing workforce gone in a decade. 50,000 shuttered factories. At least $245 billion in real wage and salary losses for manufacturing workers. Record trade deficits with China. In short, our worst decade in manufacturing history–by most measures even worse than the Great Depression.
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Jeffrey Immelt, GE CEO, To Replace Volcker On Obama’s Economic Team

Posted on Friday, January 21, 2011 by meganwilson

By Lila Shapiro
HUFFINGTON POST

Early Friday morning, Obama announced a significant shift for the White House economic team: the war against Wall Street greed has lost a major player, and corporate America has gained an advocate.

General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt will be the new head of a Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. This panel will replace Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, formerly headed by Paul Volcker.

The two men have significantly different backgrounds. Immelt is a lifelong Republican and, as Bloomberg put it, “a corporate heavyweight who can help burnish Obama’s pro-business credentials.”

Volcker, a Democrat, was the creator of the eponymous rule in last year’s financial regulation bill which was designed to limit banks’ ability to use taxpayer-backed funds to make investments on their own behalf. In John Cassidy’s excellent New Yorker profile, he describes Volcker’s tenure in the White House as “a campaign to curb greed and speculation on Wall Street.”

This news follows the appointment of Gene Sperling as the new top White House economic adviser and William Daley, a top JP Morgan executive, as the new White House chief of staff. Sperling, while he has never worked full-time in the financial sector, made millions on Wall Street in an advisory capacity even as the economy tanked. Daley, for his part, opposed Obama’s consumer protection agency.

In a statement, Obama said that Immelt’s mission will be to help boost up the private sector to speed up economic growth and promote competition.

“As we enter a new phase in our recovery, I have asked the new council to focus its work on finding new ways to encourage the private sector to hire and invest in American competitiveness,” the President wrote.

The Washington Post characterized this move as a shift towards a focus on job creation and economic improvement:

“The council’s new leadership and mission reflects the administration’s shift from trying to halt the recession to broader efforts to improve the U.S. economy and create jobs.”

In an Op-Ed in today’s Post, Immelt outlined some of his goals. The piece is short on details but focusses in on three areas: manufacturing and export, free trade, and innovation. He writes:

“My hope is that the council will be a sounding board for ideas and a catalyst for action on jobs and competitiveness. It will include small and large businesses, labor, economists and government.”

In Peter Baker’s lengthy NYT feature looking at the frustration brewing inside the Obama administration’s efforts to fix the economy, Baker notes: “[Obama] surely knows that if he cannot figure out in the next two years how to create jobs, he may lose his own.” Now, he is changing the players.

Baker tracks the changing personell and agenda:

“The path from crisis to anemic recovery was marked by turmoil inside the White House. The economic team fractured repeatedly over philosophy (should jobs or deficits take priority?) and personality (who got to attend which meetings?), resulting in feuds that ultimately helped break it apart. The process felt like a treadmill, as one former official put it, with proposals sometimes debated for months before decisions were reached. The word commonly used by those involved is “dysfunctional,” and in recent months, most of the initial team has left or made plans to leave, including Larry Summers, Christina Romer, Peter Orszag, Rahm Emanuel and Paul Volcker.

With Geithner as its anchor, a new economic team is being built around Bill Clinton-era figures like William Daley, Gene Sperling and Jack Lew, a group assembled to joust with Republicans instead of one another. Rather than responding to crises or putting into motion grand macroeconomic theories, they will focus on pushing the recovery into higher gear while at the same time figuring out how to reduce the deficit — two goals that some see as incompatible in the short term. And along the way, they need to convince Americans that the president is focused on jobs, jobs, jobs.”

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Cultural icon KUSF radio off the air: sold for $3.75 million

Posted on Wednesday, January 19, 2011 by cherylmeeker

R.I.P. KUSF 90.3 FM, 1977 – 2011, SF Weekly blogs
By Ian S. Port, Wed., Jan. 19 2011 @ 6:00AM

At least two things are clear regarding the surprise sell-off and shutdown of KUSF yesterday by the University of San Francisco:

First, university officials would apparently rather have $3.75 million than a radio station that served the local community (especially the local indie music community) as much as it did the educational activities of the school.

Second, no matter what goes down at tonight’s meeting/protest, it’s all but certain the sale will go through and KUSF will not come back on the air. (Not that aggrieved DJs and listeners shouldn’t try: the FCC still has to approve the sale. Update: KUSF volunteers have developed a plan to halt the sale of the station.)
In all likelihood, 2011 will go down as the year San Francisco freeform radio station KUSF 90.3 FM ceased to be.
Although the university says the station will survive online, it also says it wants programming changes. And whatever form those take, part of what made KUSF special was the fact that it transmitted through the airwaves. It was, you know, a real radio station.
Even if you didn’t listen to KUSF — and doubtless, many more are complaining than actually tuned in regularly — its closure is a major blow to the city’s music culture. There’s one less outpost of funkiness, weirdness, and unpredictability among the corporate-enforced desolation of your local radio dial. There’s no place to hear so many underground S.F. bands on FM radio anymore (and we’re only talking about one sterling part of the KUSF programming lineup).
Amplifying the sadness of this news is the fact that the death of KUSF 90.3 FM is only a small part of a major reshuffling of Bay Area radio. Its frequency will become one home of the soon-to-be nonprofit classical station KDFC, while FM 102.1, KDFC’s previous home, will become a classic rock station. The change over at KDFC may be good for classical fans, but  it’s a tragedy that such a precious, unlikely resource as KUSF had to go to enable them.
We don’t know for certain what motivated the sale, but there have long been signs that KUSF was in trouble. According to a source affiliated with the station, major changes, including possible eviction, were discussed at meetings since at least last summer. At one such meeting earlier this year, the station’s full-time managers warned that a move, closure, or the selling of the station’s FCC license were all possible. Apparently, two full-time station employees knew of yesterday’s sale, but were prohibited from saying anything due to nondisclosure agreements.
The meetings and warnings should have made any major change at KUSF more open and foreseeable. But instead, the sale and shutdown — changes months in the making — were implemented like some top-secret gang of spooks was behind them. Nothing was uttered publicly until university officials simply cut the station’s transmitter at 10 a.m. No warning was given to the station’s volunteers, who were working on their normal programs at the time. “The hallways filled with people in suits, and others started to change the locks,” one DJ told the Bay Citizen. “The university had been keeping this from us, hadn’t involved us at all.”
The university then issued a cryptic, Orwellian press release stating that, “effective immediately,” KUSF would “move to online only format.” The statement neither acknowledged nor shed a single tear for the station’s nearly 34-year history of broadcasting at 90.3 FM. It didn’t even allude to the fact that KUSF had become an important source of local programming (music and otherwise) for as many as 50,000 listeners every week. The press release read like worse than just the expected positive spin on an awful decision. It read like cruel propaganda.
Through these moves, the university precluded any attempt by the public to save the station’s FM broadcasting license. The secrecy, it says, was a component of the deal to sell the license to the University of Southern California.
It’s a long shot that anyone — KUSF volunteers, USF students, or the general public — could change university officials’ minds. It’s perhaps an even longer shot that any of them could raise $3.75 million to buy the FCC license. But it makes this story even more depressing that no one even got a chance. Judging from the outpouring of frustration and anger at yesterday’s sale, there’s no telling what could have happened had listeners and DJs been given ample warning.
Instead, the closest thing we’ll get to a public hearing about the future of KUSF is tonight, when the aggrieved will gather on the USF campus to protest the sale of the station’s FCC license. It’s unlikely their actions will change anything, but with San Francisco having lost its last, best freeform radio station — the only place on the FM dial where many of the city’s most vital musicians can be heard — who can blame them for trying?
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Obama’s Bogus Explanation For Troubles: Too Much Regulation

Posted on Tuesday, January 18, 2011 by meganwilson

By Peter S. Goodman
HUFFINGTON POST

Now he has done it again, throwing a bone to financial lobbyists and their brethren in other industries while burying truth. Unable to point to real gains in fixing the economy, Obama instead engages in the time-honored tradition of the troubled chieftain: rewriting history, and thereby seeking votes at the expense of the public good.

Two years after inheriting the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression, President Barack Obama has settled on an unhelpful new explanation for his failure to restore jobs: A surplus of suffocating regulations.

In an op-ed published in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, the president decries how regulations have sometimes “gotten out of balance, placing unreasonable burdens on business — burdens that have stifled innovation and have had a chilling effect on growth and jobs.”

In the crudest sense, this is probably wise politics. Pandering to businesses in possession of campaign cash reinforces the advantages of Obama’s incumbency in the run-up to next year’s presidential election. By brazenly stealing a long-established Republican talking point — how geeky Washington bureaucrats are squeezing the life out of American businesses — Obama is speaking to the core distrust of government that prevails in many homes. He is also following through on his pledge to get along better with big business, following his recent summit with prominent chief executives at the White House.

But as a message fed into the policy process, one that helps shape the tone of public discourse, Obama’s words are nothing short of a public disservice. Having failed to marshal an economic program sufficiently muscular to restore vigor to a still-lean economy, the president will not even talk straight about how we got here, instead adding confusion to the narrative that will surely embolden industries hoping to write rules in their favor.
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FDA recalls ‘Nuclear Sludge’ candy bars

Posted on Sunday, January 16, 2011 by cherylmeeker

FDA recalls ‘Nuclear Sludge’ candy bars
By Andrew Restuccia – 01/14/11 03:33 PM ET

If you hadn’t already thought twice about eating Toxic Waste Nuclear Sludge candy bars, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) just gave you good reason to opt for a Twix or Snickers instead.

The FDA announced Friday that the company that sells the bars, Indianapolis-based Candy Dynamics, has issued a voluntary recall of the product.

The recall comes after the California Department of Public Health found potentially unsafe levels of lead in the cherry-flavored Nuclear Sludge bars. The company is recalling all flavors of the bars, including sour apple and blue raspberry.

The FDA stressed that there have been no reported cases of people getting sick from the bars, which are manufactured in Pakistan.

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Why You Should Feel Cheated, Deceived and Sickened by America’s Stunning Inequality, Even If You’re Doing Well

Posted on Sunday, January 16, 2011 by meganwilson

By Paul Buchheit
AlterNet

If middle- and upper-middle-class families had the same share of the economic pie as in 1980, they’d be making an average of $12,500 more per year.

Why should a relatively prosperous upper-middle-class family care about inequality? There are lots of reasons, but here’s the most personal one: that’s our money the very rich are taking! Based on Internal Revenue Service figures, if middle- and upper-middle-class families had maintained the same share of American productivity that they held in 1980, they would be making an average of $12,500 more per year.

That bears repeating: $12,500 of my money every year to the richest 1 percent, and $600 more to pay my share of their tax cuts!

Inequality in the U.S. doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Many of us brush it off, thinking, “So the rich get richer — it’s always been that way.” Or we think: “I’m doing OK myself – and I want to be really rich someday, too.”

The lopsided distribution of wealth in the U.S. doesn’t get the blame it deserves for our budget problems, either. On the contrary, since our economic system is based on individual freedom, most of us believe in the inalienable right to make unlimited amounts of money. The thought of taking back a greater share from innovative and industrious business leaders is (shudder) “socialism.”

So instead we increase sales taxes and service fees. We cut police forces and educators. We remove funding for food pantries, homeless shelters and elder assistance.

The massive redistribution of income from the middle classes to the rich over the last 30 years is like a malignant tumor that doesn’t appear on the surface but eventually destroys the whole body. Every one of the 90 percent of Americans who makes less than $114,000 a year should be aware of this – and they should be angry.

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The Invention of Money

Posted on Sunday, January 16, 2011 by meganwilson

THIS AMERICAN LIFE

Five reporters stumbled on what seems like a basic question: What is money? The unsettling answer they found: Money is fiction.
In other words:
MONEY IS OVER IF YOU WANT IT

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SOLUTIONS: Swiss whistleblower Rudolf Elmer plans to hand over offshore banking secrets of the rich and famous to WikiLeaks

Posted on Sunday, January 16, 2011 by meganwilson

By Ed Vulliamy
GUARDIAN

“What I am objecting to is not one particular bank, but a system of structures,” he told the Observer. “I have worked for major banks other than Julius Baer, and the one thing on which I am absolutely clear is that the banks know, and the big boys know, that money is being secreted away for tax-evasion purposes, and other things such as money-laundering – although these cases involve tax evasion.”

The offshore bank account details of 2,000 “high net worth individuals” and corporations – detailing massive potential tax evasion – will be handed over to the WikiLeaks organisation in London tomorrow by the most important and boldest whistleblower in Swiss banking history, Rudolf Elmer, two days before he goes on trial in his native Switzerland.

British and American individuals and companies are among the offshore clients whose details will be contained on CDs presented to WikiLeaks at the Frontline Club in London. Those involved include, Elmer tells the Observer, “approximately 40 politicians”.

Elmer, who after his press conference will return to Switzerland from exile in Mauritius to face trial, is a former chief operating officer in the Cayman Islands and employee of the powerful Julius Baer bank, which accuses him of stealing the information.

He is also – at a time when the activities of banks are a matter of public concern – one of a small band of employees and executives seeking to blow the whistle on what they see as unprofessional, immoral and even potentially criminal activity by powerful international financial institutions.

Along with the City of London and Wall Street, Switzerland is a fortress of banking and financial services, but famously secretive and expert in the concealment of wealth from all over the world for tax evasion and other extra-legal purposes.

Elmer says he is releasing the information “in order to educate society”. The list includes “high net worth individuals”, multinational conglomerates and financial institutions – hedge funds”. They are said to be “using secrecy as a screen to hide behind in order to avoid paying tax”. They come from the US, Britain, Germany, Austria and Asia – “from all over”.

Clients include “business people, politicians, people who have made their living in the arts and multinational conglomerates – from both sides of the Atlantic”. Elmer says: “Well-known pillars of society will hold investment portfolios and may include houses, trading companies, artwork, yachts, jewellery, horses, and so on.”

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