It's awful to be poor, but of all of the Western economies it's America that treats our poor the worst......I recommend #2 story about stress.....excellent.....
1/ Screw the Poor #1
Paul Krugman on why Atlanta symbolises the fading American dream for the people at the bottom of the ladder....
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Stranded by Sprawl
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: July 28, 2013 742 Comments
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Detroit is a symbol of the old economy’s decline. It’s not just the derelict center; the metropolitan area as a whole lost population between 2000 and 2010, the worst performance among major cities. Atlanta, by contrast, epitomizes the rise of the Sun Belt; it gained more than a million people over the same period, roughly matching the performance of Dallas and Houston without the extra boost from oil.
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Yet in one important respect booming Atlanta looks just like Detroit gone bust: both are places where the American dream seems to be dying, where the children of the poor have great difficulty climbing the economic ladder. In fact, upward social mobility — the extent to which children manage to achieve a higher socioeconomic status than their parents — is even lower in Atlanta than it is in Detroit. And it’s far lower in both cities than it is in, say, Boston or San Francisco, even though these cities have much slower growth than Atlanta.
So what’s the matter with Atlanta? A new study suggests that the city may just be too spread out, so that job opportunities are literally out of reach for people stranded in the wrong neighborhoods. Sprawl may be killing Horatio Alger.
The new study comes from the Equality of Opportunity Project, which is led by economists at Harvard and Berkeley. There have been many comparisons of social mobility across countries; all such studies find that these days America, which still thinks of itself as the land of opportunity, actually has more of an inherited class system than other advanced nations. The new project asks how social mobility varies across U.S. cities, and finds that it varies a lot. In San Francisco a child born into the bottom fifth of the income distribution has an 11 percent chance of making it into the top fifth, but in Atlanta the corresponding number is only 4 percent.
When the researchers looked for factors that correlate with low or high social mobility, they found, perhaps surprisingly, little direct role for race, one obvious candidate. They did find a significant correlation with the existing level of inequality: “areas with a smaller middle class had lower rates of upward mobility.” This matches what we find in international comparisons, where relatively equal societies like Sweden have much higher mobility than highly unequal America. But they also found a significant negative correlation between residential segregation — different social classes living far apart — and the ability of the poor to rise.
And in Atlanta poor and rich neighborhoods are far apart because, basically, everything is far apart; Atlanta is the Sultan of Sprawl, even more spread out than other major Sun Belt cities. This would make an effective public transportation system nearly impossible to operate even if politicians were willing to pay for it, which they aren’t. As a result, disadvantaged workers often find themselves stranded; there may be jobs available somewhere, but they literally can’t get there.
The apparent inverse relationship between sprawl and social mobility obviously reinforces the case for “smart growth” urban strategies, which try to promote compact centers with access to public transit. But it also bears on a larger debate about what is happening to American society.
2/ Screw the Poor #2
Absolutely fascinating article on stress - not the stress of busy people making decisions under pressure, but the stress in knowing you have no control over your life, which happens to the people at the bottom of the economic scale......
Being poor in childhood produces stress, which will affect you all through your life, which will be shorter than if you were middle class.....
Although professionals may bemoan their long work hours and high-pressure careers, really, there’s stress, and then there’s Stress with a capital “S.” The former can be considered a manageable if unpleasant part of life; in the right amount, it may even strengthen one’s mettle. The latter kills.
What’s the difference? Scientists have settled on an oddly subjective explanation: the more helpless one feels when facing a given stressor, they argue, the more toxic that stressor’s effects.
That sense of control tends to decline as one descends the socioeconomic ladder, with potentially grave consequences. Those on the bottom are more than three times as likely to die prematurely as those at the top. They’re also more likely to suffer from depression, heart disease and diabetes. Perhaps most devastating, the stress of poverty early in life can have consequences that last into adulthood.
Even those who later ascend economically may show persistent effects of early-life hardship. Scientists find them more prone to illness than those who were never poor. Becoming more affluent may lower the risk of disease by lessening the sense of helplessness and allowing greater access to healthful resources like exercise, more nutritious foods and greater social support; people are not absolutely condemned by their upbringing. But the effects of early-life stress also seem to linger, unfavorably molding our nervous systems and possibly even accelerating the rate at which we age.
The British epidemiologist Michael Marmot calls the phenomenon “status syndrome.” He’s studied British civil servants who work in a rigid hierarchy for decades, and found that accounting for the usual suspects — smoking, diet and access to health care — won’t completely abolish the effect. There’s a direct relationship among health, well-being and one’s place in the greater scheme. “The higher you are in the social hierarchy,” he says, “the better your health.”
Dr. Marmot blames a particular type of stress. It’s not necessarily the strain of a chief executive facing a lengthy to-do list, or a well-to-do parent’s agonizing over a child’s prospects of acceptance to an elite school. Unlike those of lower rank, both the C.E.O. and the anxious parent have resources with which to address the problem. By definition, the poor have far fewer.
So the stress that kills, Dr. Marmot and others argue, is characterized by a lack of a sense of control over one’s fate. Psychologists who study animals call one result of this type of strain “learned helplessness.”
3/ Screw the Poor #3
No matter what the spin coming from our 'leaders" says, poverty is getting worse. This is a chilling story, and look at the last line of the excerpt below - I think this means 76% of Americans are going into retirement with no assets......
80 Percent Of U.S. Adults Face Near-Poverty, Unemployment: Survey
WASHINGTON — Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.
Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.
The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his administration's emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to "rebuild ladders of opportunity" and reverse income inequality.
As nonwhites approach a numerical majority in the U.S., one question is how public programs to lift the disadvantaged should be best focused – on the affirmative action that historically has tried to eliminate the racial barriers seen as the major impediment to economic equality, or simply on improving socioeconomic status for all, regardless of race.
Hardship is particularly growing among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families' economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy "poor."
"I think it's going to get worse," said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, Va., a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend but it doesn't generate much income. They live mostly off government disability checks.
"If you do try to go apply for a job, they're not hiring people, and they're not paying that much to even go to work," she said. Children, she said, have "nothing better to do than to get on drugs."
While racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in poverty, race disparities in the poverty rate have narrowed substantially since the 1970s, census data show. Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than is shown in the government's poverty data, engulfing more than 76 percent of white adults by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next year by the Oxford University Press
4/ Screw the Poor #4
Pity the young adults looking for decent jobs and kids in school facing graduation and unemployment......how are they going to have a standard of living that will let them buy a house and have kids?
Even college graduates who have better prospects of getting work have their student debt to pay off.....
According to a recent poll, young Americans are finding themselves with fewer job opportunities as the recovery continues.
The poll, conducted by Gallup, discovered that only 43.6 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 had a full-time job in June 2013. That rate is lower than the 47 percent of millennials who were employed full-time in 2012. In fact, more young Americans reported to be employed full-time three years ago than last month.
Here is the chart from Gallup:
One report by the organization Generation Opportunity measured the youth jobless rate at 16.1 percent in June, more than double the 7.6 percent unemployment rate experienced by all Americans. Additionally, Generation Opportunity has estimated that there are 1.7 million young adults without a job who are not counted as unemployed because they've given up looking for work altogether.
5/ Screw the Poor #5
If you don't have a bank account and need to cash your paycheck you are at the mercy of the payday loan companies who charge outrageous fees......but if you made even a small financial mistake in your past [and who hasn't] banks use a database that flags you, and won't open a bank account for you, especially if you are poor......
INVESTMENT BANKING JULY 30, 2013, 9:17 PM 662 Comments
Over a Million Are Denied Bank Accounts for Past Errors
BY JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG
Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesTiffany Murrell, who had a $40 overdraft in 2010, was rejected repeatedly for an account.
Mistakes like a bounced check or a small overdraft have effectively blacklisted more than a million low-income Americans from the mainstream financial system for as long as seven years as a result of little-known private databases that are used by the nation’s major banks.
The problem is contributing to the growth of the roughly 10 million households in the United States that lack a banking account, a basic requirement of modern economic life.
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Unlike traditional credit reporting databases, which provide portraits of outstanding debt and payment histories, these are records of transgressions in banking products. Institutions like Bank of America, Citibank and Wells Fargosay that tapping into the vast repositories of information helps them weed out risky customers and combat fraud — a mounting threat for banks.
But consumer advocates and state authorities say the use of the databases disproportionately affects lower-income Americans, who tend to live paycheck to paycheck, making them more likely to incur negative marks after relatively minor banking missteps like overdrawing accounts, amassing fees or bouncing checks.
When the databases were created more than 20 years ago, they were intended to help banks guard against serial fraud artists, like those accused of writing bogus checks. Since then, though, the databases have ensnared millions of low-income Americans, according to interviews with financial counselors, consumer lawyers and more than two dozen low-income people in California, Illinois, Florida, New York and Washington.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/
6/ OK, sorry for the depressing stories, but it's part of the face of the New America.....so here's a goofy video to take your mind [or at least the male mind] out of your funk....
Remember the Watercar? They have made an ad........one minute, and if anyone reading this buys a Watercar I want a ride.........
7/ The gift that keeps on giving for comedians is of course the Weiner, and John Oliver loves this guy.....an amusing five minutes......
John Oliver Takes Weiner To The Woodshed: Where Does He Get The Balls To Be Outraged At Us?! Oh, Wait…
by Josh Feldman | 11:49 pm, July 29th, 2013VIDEO» 24 comments
John Oliver tonight tore into the growing arrogance of Carlos Danger (a.k.a. Anthony Weiner) and his insistence that not only should he not drop out of the New York mayor’s race because of this scandal, but he could actually be a good mayor because of it. Oliver said Weiner’s sinking poll numbers are the least of his worries, and proceeded to shred Weiner for actually having the balls to get angry at the press for continuing to hound him over the fact that he’s kind of a sleazebag.
Weiner, or as Oliver called him, “the everlasting gobstopper of embarrassing revelations,” apparently paid thousands of dollars to investigate his own scandal two years ago. Oliver asked, “Who did he hire? The same guy that O.J. paid to go look for the real murderer?!”
8/ Whether you realise it or not we are coming up next month for some knock down, drag out vicious politics as the debt limit is reached. If you thought it can't get any worse in Washington, it will. And the crazy wing of the Republicans is driving it.......
6 Ways Rabid Republicans Are Declaring War On America
Some of the biggest political fights in a generation are taking shape.
Photo Credit: Shutterstock
July 25, 2013 |
The GOP, the party led by angry white men and libertarian corporatists, is ratcheting up its political warfare against everyday Americans with unmatched brazenness.
In Congress, Republicans in both chambers have launched sweeping attacks on long-held centrist priorities and have renewed threats to block Obamacare. These attacks are seen in House bills slashing spending in almost every federal program except for the military and domestic policing for the federal fiscal year starting October 1. Anti-poverty, education, human services, environmental protection, energy, labor, Wall St. oversight—all face cuts averaging 20 percent, although some areas face cuts by a third or more.
These budget bills are part of an escalating fight over funding federal government and raising the debt ceiling. In 2011, the GOP used the debt limit fight to nearly shut down the government, creating chaos that undermined the weak economy. In 2013, House ideologues have delayed adopting budgets with the most draconian cuts until the last weeks, creating a crisis atmosphere to try to ram through their horrendous bills.
On Thursday, for example, the Appropriations Committee delayed its scheduled release of what GOP staffers said would be the details of $40 billion in cuts to next year’s federal human services, labor and education budgets. Two weeks ago, the House passed a farm bill with zero funds for anti-poverty food stamps. In contrast, the House’s FY2014 military and police budgets were on par with 2013 funding levels.
“It’s higher stakes,” said Matthew Dennis, spokesman for the House Appropriation Committee’s Democratic members. “From my perspective, the Republican Party is making demands that are less reasonable than in the past.”
Rabid Republicans are also acting with renewed zeal to roll back voting rights in key Southern states. In North Carolina and Texas, GOP-led legislatures are resurrecting a catalogue of Jim Crow-era barriers to minority voting, in response to the U.S. Supreme Court overturning of the 1965 Voting Right Act’s toughest enforcement provision. In North Carolina, the GOP wants to repeal 20 years of best practices that made North Carolina a model of fair and accessible elections. In Texas, the GOP wants to revise political districts to dilute minority representation and pass tougher voter ID laws.
The White House is not sitting still. On Wednesday, the president began a nationwide tour to tout an economic agenda favoring the middle class. He attacked Republicans for “an endless parade of distractions, political posturing and phony scandals.” On Thursday, Attorney General Eric Holder said the Justice Department would use the still-standing sections of the Voting Rights Act to try to stop the GOP in Texas and North Carolina, although election law experts say that is a risky “ go for broke” strategy based on the conclusion that this Congress will do nothing to restore the Voting Rights Act.
9/ SNL is a live show, so sometimes the actors lose it and just start laughing......and it's infectious.....
Here is a three minute supercut of SNL skits gone wrong.......
Slacktory's latest supercut proves that not even the most seasoned "Saturday Night Live" veteran is totally immune from breaking now and then. Check out the clip above to see Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, Will Ferrell, Phil Hartman, Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, and many more than just Jimmy Fallon lose it.
10/ Bad NFL Lip-Reading.....most amusing three minutes of large burly linebackers saying unlikely things in strange voices.....
I love this one, especially the first guy......
11/ Some people feel animals and plants will adapt to climate change, and although it's a problem life will remain similar to now.......
Think again. It could take 100,000 years for animals to adapt to a single degree C.
ange
New study suggests animals need an average of one million years to adapt to a single-degree increase in overall temperature
Many adults remember middle-school lessons about England's peppered moth – a popular, easily understood illustration of the principle of natural selection. Most of the moths were once white, perfectly camouflaged to hide amid lichen and light tree bark; once the Industrial Revolution began, however, the lichen died off and the trees became dark with soot. The common light moths became easy pickings for predators, while rare, darker ones hid and flourished. When air quality standards improved, white-bodied moths became common again.
Stories like this feed our impression that evolution is a relatively quick process – that animal and plant species are readily equipped to adapt to whatever humans throw at them. I've heard this idea directly in conversations about climate change: Humans will just use more air-conditioning, and everything else will just evolve. No big deal.
The truth, unfortunately, is less comforting. A new study published in Ecology Letters found that the rate of climate change forecast for the next century is a bit more than vertebrate species are used to coping with via evolution. How much more? Try a factor of 10,000 times or more.
12/ Another excellent Daily Show clip - this time John Oliver reams the Fox News coverage of the minimum wage story.....it's two parts, one five minutes and two minutes below the first.....
A very good one - I think Oliver really likes eviscerating Fox....
Fox News is having a really hard time relating to the struggles of minimum wage earners. On Thursday's "Daily Show," John Oliver gave pundits at the network a thorough drubbing that culminated in a call-to-action to the fast food workers of America.
It's not that he said they SHOULD pee in their food, he just said these Fox News talking heads deserve the "special sauce." Totally different.
Watch the first part of Oliver's look at the ‘saying stupid stuff on television industry’ above and the rest below.
13/ Men - one for you.....
Nothing exciting happens in this 14 minute video, but if you are at all interested in airplanes it's worth watching - the first landing at San Francisco airport of a Lufthansa Airbus A-380, and the routine of landing a plane......
Also remember this is the airport where Captain Sum Ting Wong put it into the bay......
Lufthansa A380 first landing at SFO
The humongous A380 makes its first landing at San
Francisco airport. It seems extensively automated. The air traffic
controller gives them heading, altitude and speed, and they dial it in.
Pretty interesting.
http://www.wimp.com/
14/ A report that lists the states that send the most people to prison.......yes Florida's on the list, but for the #1 incarceration-happy state, think private prison systems......
Last year, 1.57 million Americans served prison sentences in state or federal penitentiaries, a slight decrease from nearly 1.6 million in 2011, according to figures released Thursday by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). Despite the decline, the United States still incarcerates people at a higher rate than anywhere else in the world.
According to the BJS report “Prisoners in 2012,” for every 100,000 Americans, an estimated 480 people were serving at least a one-year sentence in a state prison during the year. In some states, the rate of incarceration was much higher. Louisiana, the state with the highest rate, sentenced 893 people to a state prison for every 100,000 residents. Based on the BJS release, 24/7 Wall St. identified the states that send the most people to prison.
As might be expected, states that had more people in their prison systems tended to have higher crime rates. Seven of the states with the highest incarceration rates were in the top 15 for murder rates, and overall violent crime rates were generally higher in these states as well. The states with high incarceration rates also tended to have high property crime rates. Of the 10 states on this list, eight had the highest burglary rates in the country.
While the causes of higher crime rates are difficult to determine, these states often shared some of the risk factors that appear to make their populations more likely to commit crimes. The states were among the most impoverished in the country, a factor commonly associated with crime. Residents of these states were also among the least likely to have graduated from high school, another factor often linked to higher crime rates.
But higher crime rates do not tell the whole story. In an interview with 24/7 Wall St., John Roman, Senior Fellow at the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center, explained that each state’s policies on enforcement are a major factor. “It really is a political choice,” he said.
There are several sentencing policies that can dramatically increase the number of inmates in a state’s prison system. According to Roman, such policy is mandatory minimum sentencing, which requires a minimum predetermined prison sentence length, regardless of the circumstances of the crime, tend to have larger prison populations. Roman also pointed to three-strikes laws, which impose much longer sentences on criminals who have committed three or more serious crimes.
“Take Texas,” said Roman. “Texas has some of the safest cities in America. You wouldn’t expect it to have a high incarceration rate, but it is third in the country.”
http://247wallst.com/special-
15/ Like Blues? Like good geetar playin'? This is Gary Clark Jr. with "When My Train Pulls In".....he was the supporting act for Neil Young in Bairritz, and it was an amazing show.......
16/ A very well written discussion of the water problems coming for the American west, and the legal fights this will generate.
More like an essay, very easy to read.......and it starts with the Colorado River.......
Several miles from Phantom Ranch, Grand Canyon, Arizona, April 2013 -- Down here, at the bottom of the continent’s most spectacular canyon, the Colorado River growls past our sandy beach in a wet monotone. Our group of 24 is one week into a 225-mile, 18-day voyage on inflatable rafts from Lees Ferry to Diamond Creek. We settle in for the night. Above us, the canyon walls part like a pair of maloccluded jaws, and moonlight streams between them, bright enough to read by.
One remarkable feature of the modern Colorado, the great whitewater rollercoaster that carved the Grand Canyon, is that it is a tidal river. Before heading for our sleeping bags, we need to retie our six boats to allow for the ebb.
These days, the tides of the Colorado are not lunar but Phoenician. Yes, I’m talking about Phoenix, Arizona. On this April night, when the air conditioners in America’s least sustainable city merely hum, Glen Canyon Dam, immediately upstream from the canyon, will run about 6,500 cubic feet of water through its turbines every second.
Tomorrow, as the sun begins its daily broiling of Phoenix, Scottsdale, Mesa, Tempe, and the rest of central Arizona, the engineers at Glen Canyon will crank the dam’s maw wider until it sucks down 11,000 cubic feet per second (cfs). That boost in flow will enable its hydroelectric generators to deliver “peaking power” to several million air conditioners and cooling plants in Phoenix’s Valley of the Sun. And the flow of the river will therefore nearly double.
It takes time for these dam-controlled tidal pulses to travel downstream. Where we are now, just above Zoroaster Rapid, the river is roughly in phase with the dam: low at night, high in the daytime. Head a few days down the river and it will be the reverse.
By mid-summer, temperatures in Phoenix will routinely soar above 110°F, and power demands will rise to monstrous heights, day and night. The dam will respond: 10,000 cfs will gush through the generators by the light of the moon, 18,000 while an implacable sun rules the sky.
Such are the cycles -- driven by heat, comfort, and human necessity -- of the river at the bottom of the continent’s grandest canyon.
The crucial question for Phoenix, for the Colorado, and for the greater part of the American West is this: How long will the water hold out?
Todays video - a flash mob in a London Grocery store......great especially if you like opera.......
Todays awful puns
1.) I tried to catch some fog…..I mist.
2.) When chemists die….They barium.
3.) Jokes about German sausage are the wurst.
4.) A soldier who survived mustard gas and pepper spray…Is now a seasoned veteran
5.) I know a guy who’s addicted to brake fluid…He says he can stop anytime.
6.) How does Moses make his tea ?…..Hebrews it.
7.) I stayed up all night to see where the sun went….The it dawned on me.
8.) This girl said she recognized me from the vegetarian club..But I never met herbivore.
9.) I’m reading a book about inti-gravity…..I can’t put it down.
10.) I did a theatrical performance about puns…..It was a play on words.
11.) They told me I had type A blood…But it was a type O.
12.) A dyslexic man walks into a bra.
13.) PMS jokes aren’t funny….Period !
14.) Why were the Indians here first ?….They had reservations.
15.) Class trip to the Coca Cola factory…..I hope there’s no pop quiz.
16.) Energizer Bunny arrested……Charged with battery.
17.) I didn’t like my beard at first….Then it grew on me.
18.) How do you make Holy water ?….Boil the hell out of it.
19.) What do you call a dinosaur with an extensive vocabulary ?…A thesaurus.
20.) When you get a bladder infection….urine trouble.
21.) What does a clock do when it is hungry ?..It goes back for seconds.
22.) I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger….And then it hit me.
23.) Broken pencils are pointless.
Todays golfer joke
When I came home from golfing today, the wife left a note on the fridge:
It's not working, gone to stay with my Mother.
I can't take it anymore.
I opened the fridge, the light came on, and the beer was cold.
What the hell is she talking about?
Todays ED joke
On his 74th birthday, a man got a gift certificate from his wife. The certificate paid for a visit to a medicine man living on a nearby reservation who was rumored to have a wonderful cure for erectile dysfunction.
After being persuaded, he drove to the reservation, handed his ticket to the medicine man and wondered what he was there for. The old man handed a potion to him, and with a grip on his shoulder, warned," This is a powerful medicine. You take only a teaspoonful and then say “1-2-3.”
When you do, you will become more manly than you have ever been in your life and you can perform as long as you want."
The man was encouraged. As he walked away, he turned and asked, "How do I stop the medicine from working?""Your partner must say “1-2-3-4,”he responded. "But when she does, the medicine will not work again until the next full moon."
He was very eager to see if it worked so he went home, showered, shaved, took a spoonful of the medicine and then invited his wife to join him in the bedroom.When she came in, he took off his clothes and said, "1-2-3!" Immediately, he was the manliest of men.
His wife was excited and began throwing off her clothes and then she asked "What’s the 1-2-3 for?"
And that, boys and girls, is why we should never end our sentences with a preposition, because we could end up with a dangling participle.
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