UrbanBaby asks who's 'rich' -- NO JUDGING!

This is why Republicans still do well at the ballot box. Even the coastal liberal elite won't admit they're rich; meanwhile the poor don't want to seem like "haters" and anyway aspire to be rich... er, solidly upper-middle class, too.

This reminds me of the Bloomberg story from last March about a survey of actual U.S. millionaires by Fidelity Investments. Respondents said they'd need $7.5 million in assets to feel rich. Meanwhile, the average annual gross income in the U.S. is $25,000!

This comment on the original post puts it in perspective: (BOOKLES): "If people with 300k feel poor I may as well get a cup and brush off my guitar and hit the trains. Because begging is my only logical next step. I won't even go into the higher amounts."

You literally have to have a private jet and be able to influence elections to be considered "rich" in America today... And even then if you just act normal you get to enjoy suck-ups breathlessly telling everybody "what a normal guy/gal" you are, like you're doubly blessed by fate for not being an asshole too.

It's like everybody wants to take off their uniforms and pretend to play for the other team. (Sigh) Good ole' class consciousness / class interests / class warfare is much more honest and believable.

And yes, I am judging. There's a whole lot of judging coming from my side.

This is a family of millionaires (Life)

UrbanBaby Income Thread Will Make You Feel Horrible About Life

By Jamie Feldmar

January 4, 2012 | Gothamist

With a walloping 46.2 million Americans living in poverty right now, it's the perfect time to start an anonymous internet thread about how much money you make and how it makes you feel, right? No, really: check out this "What's your hhi and do you FEEL poor, middle class, upper middle class or rich where you live. No judging" thread on UrbanBaby, and prepare to feel nauseous inside.

The New Yorker who feels poor on $700,000 a year should probably shack up with the guy who made $2 million and feels middle class, so they can gang up on the Greenwich Village mother who makes $180,000 and feels like "I am doing my child a disservice when she cried at age 4 because I told her we will NEVER buy a country house." Then again, maybe they should all just take advice from the guy who made $13 million, but "FEELS" upper-middle class in New York: "Under 1Bil in savings in NYC, and you cannot buy anything. Rich means being able to influence political contests," he explains. Oh, so that's how it works. No judgement. [via Daily Intel]

Huntsman: Break up the TBTF banks

Well, well, well, it looks like Huntsman's trying to get noticed. "The Obama and Romney plan" for the banks. That's funny. As if they sit and plan together.

Probably it won't do him any good; it may just put pressure on Romney. Criticizing Wall Street doesn't play well to the GOP's radical base, which hates anything that smells like "class warfare" or OWS: now they will have a knee-jerk reaction against any criticism of Wall Street.

The Tea Parties' silence on the Fed's Wall Street bailouts is evidence enough that breaking up the TBTF banks is a losing issue among hardcore Republicans.

Wall Street's Big Banks Are the Real Threat to Our Economy

By Jon Huntsman

January 7, 2012 | FoxNews

Rebuilding our economy and restoring trust in our government will require a leader with the independence to implement bold reforms that take on the establishment, from Washington to Wall Street.

Thus far, however, we are the only campaign willing to confront honestly and directly one of the greatest threats to our long-term economic prosperity: Too-Big-To-Fail Wall Street banks.

In 2008, with the nation's economy in crisis, Washington and Wall Street offered American taxpayers a Sophie's Choice: spend hundreds of billions of dollars to save big banks from failure, or witness the collapse of our financial system and irreparable economic harm.

This was not only a betrayal of the public's trust; it was also a betrayal of our free market system, which only works when every business plays by the same rules.

Taxpayers were promised those bailouts would be a one-time, emergency measure. Yet today, we can already see the outlines of the next financial crisis and bailouts.

The six largest financial institutions are significantly bigger than they were in 2008, having been encouraged to snap up Bear Stearns and other competitors at bargain prices.

These banks now have assets worth over 66% of gross domestic product – at least $9.4 trillion – up from 20% of GDP in the 1990s.

Dodd-Frank, which purportedly designed to fix Too-Big-To-Fail, has only made things worse. Not only has it left us with larger banks, but it imposes massive new regulations and unreasonable compliance costs on smaller banks, which hurts small business lending.

President Obama has offered no real solutions other than to demonize capitalism, which may score political points but does nothing to solve the problem.

My opponents have also failed to take on Wall Street with substantive reforms. This includes – unsurprisingly – the establishment's preferred front-runner, Mitt Romney.

Governor Romney, who has accepted more Wall Street money than any other candidate, has offered no concrete solutions to protect taxpayers in the event of a future financial crisis.

The Obama and Romney plan simply appears to be to cross our fingers and hope no Too-Big-To-Fail banks fail on their watch – a stunning lack of leadership on such a critical economic issue.

As president, I will break up the big banks, end future taxpayer bailouts, and restore capitalist principles – competition and creative destruction – to our financial sector.

We will accomplish this by imposing a fee on banks whose size exceeds a certain percentage of GDP, proving them an incentive to slim down and localize.

Many of us can recall an earlier time when we had community banks that were actually a part of the community, instead of a faceless Wall Street entity. They sponsored our kids' baseball teams. You knew the president on a first name basis. Your small business or farm's credit was based as much on your reputation and character as your FICO score.

We need banks that are closer to our communities that, if mismanaged, are small and simple enough to fail – not financial public utilities.

The federal government cannot afford to wait until the next financial crisis is upon us to act, which will be too late and cost taxpayers too much.

Whether it is ending Too-Big-To-Fail, reforming the corrupted culture of Congress, or eliminating special interest preferences in our tax code, we need a president who is not indebted to the power brokers in Washington or on Wall Street.

We need a president who will take on the establishment from the outside, and deliver the bold reforms our country desperately needs. That is what I will continue to offer the American people.

Canada & U.S. in 'race to the bottom'

This is the "race to the bottom" in action, folks. Guess what? Canada's not going to win it; neither will we. That's why it's a fool's game; we shouldn't play it. Germany has found a better way.

Cheap U.S. Labor Used As Leverage To Lower Canadian Workers' Wages

By Alexander Eichler

January 6, 2012 | Huffington Post

URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/06/us-cheap-labor_n_1189428.html

Jeremy Rifkin on the 3rd Industrial Revolution

Jeremy Rifkin, a professor at Wharton business school, gives longer and shorter versions of this presentation on the Third Industrial Revolution that's coming (or already starting). This is a longer one from 2010, still current, covering pretty much everything. You can find shorter ones on YouTube, the gist is the same.

You can focus on the scary parts of his presentation, like this:

"We human beings, we are the youngest species in the evolutionary neighborhood.... Anatomically modern human beings have been here only 175,000 years. We make up only one-half of one percent of the entire living biomass of the earth. One-half of one percent. Right now this afternoon we are using 24 percent of all the photosynthesis of the earth. And we're heading from 6.8 to nearly 10 billion people. We're monsters. We're devouring this earth, and it's probably going to lead to our extinction unlesse we turn this around quickly. This is just not sustainable by any reckoning."

... or this:

"... in 1980 that was the first time we mentioned climate change.... And we continued to underestimate the speed and accelaration of climate change, all of us, for 30 years, because we can't anticipate all the feedback loops. That's what's terrifying us right now."

...or this:

"So our scientists say that we may see a 3 degree Celsius rise in temperature on Earth in this century. It could go much higher. That's a middle, negotiated scenario. But to put this in perspective, if we only go up 3 degrees, it takes us back to the temperature on earth 3 million years ago in the Pliocene. Different flora, different fauna, different ecosystems. And here's the key, that I wish Al Gore and others had talked about in their public campaigns. It is all about water. This is really all about the water. The hydrological cycle. And that is for every 1 degree Celsius that the temperature rises on this planet, the atmosphere absorbs 7 percent more precipitation from the ground. That's the key. That means the whole water cycle shifts: more floods, more droughts, more periods of infrequent rain. And so ecosystems that were developed over eons of time cannot adjust to this disruptive change in the hydrological cycle.

If we go 2-3 degrees, which is looking awfully optimistic, our scientists say we could lose between 23-24 percent of all the assessed species on Earth by the end of this century -- your kids' lifetime -- and on the upper end 70 percent or more extinction -- in the lifetime of babies who are here now."

... or the more hopeful, pragmatic parts:

"Peak oil, peak globalization, accelerating climate change. What do we do? What do we do? What we need now is a new economic vision, a new economic game plan that is powerful enough, practical, can be implemented in less than 40 years, and can move us to a complete post-carbon era by mid-century. Nothing short of that will do. And we have to do it now, because the window is narrowing every year.

"So we stepped back and we asked how did the great economic revolutions in history occur? That will give us a cue, as to what we need to do. The great economic revolutions in history occur, I believe, when two things come together. First, we change the way we organize energy on the earth. And we've done that many times. When we create new energy regimes, they make possible more complex civilizations. When that happens, it requires a communication revolution agile enough to manage these complex new energy regimes. When energy revolutions converge with communication revolutions, they change economic history. They change temporal and spacial orientation. They change the way we set up our living environments. As the Germans say, they change gestalt. And they change consciousness. Fundamentally."

Most interesting is his far-ranging review of human civilization to-date, when he describes how new economic forms required new communications methods and new consciousness in order "to extend empathy to cover new temporal-spacial boundaries."

Empathy is what he calls "the social glue." It's what organizes us, allowing us to live and work together. Empathy has so far extended from mythological-blood ties --> to theological-religion --> to ideological-nation states --> and now to psychological-modern. Rifkin wonders if empathy could extend to cover every human being on the planet within two generations?

This would sound like a lot of Kumbaya-hippie claptrap if it weren't so thoroughly and convincingly argued.

Without much fanfare in the media, the EU has committed to a Five-Pillar Infrastructure to build a new energy-communications economy. Rifkin advises them on their strategy. According to him, for us to survive, the future must be "flat, collaborative, and distributive" -- including our sources of energy. (Fast forward to 31:00 to hear Rifkin's explanation of "distributive energies.") It may seem risible now to think Europe will follow through, what with all their debt problems, but then again, if Rifkin is right, they can't afford not to. Neither can the U.S.

Jeremy Rifkin - The Third Industrial Revolution

Uploaded by Green Home TV

April 26, 2011 | YouTube

No big fracking deal: Ohio earthquakes

Oh, just frack it, it's no big fracking deal. What's a couple of little fracking earthquakes?

Mother Nature just has to get used to our fracking her in the crack. There's a lot more fracking coming her way, in Ohio at least, because fracking politicians like Kasich, Boehner and Chabot get a lot of fracking campaign donations for it.

Yep, we are so fracked.

Ohio magnitude 4.0 earthquake linked to fracking

By Michael Marshall

January 5, 2012 | New Scientist

URL: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2012/01/ohio-earthquake-linked-to-frac.html