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Banned
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roachboy, I'm puzzled that all it takes in the US today.....to be considered "radically left", is to study and react to the following with strenuous objections,
(i.e., with "outrage"), and to be influenced by these three examples (and there are many more....) to believe that "Amercan style" capitalism is not working, and neither are the "checks and balances" of the formerly constitutional government, that once seemed to serve this country well:
Quote:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...=Google+Search
[PDF] Currents and Undercurrents: Changes in the Distribution of Wealth ...
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
Currents and Undercurrents: Changes in the Distribution of Wealth, 1989–2004. Arthur B. Kennickell. Senior Economist and Project Director ...
http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/f.../200613pap.pdf
From page 1
Currents and Undercurrents: Changes in the Distribution of Wealth, 1989–2004
Arthur B. Kennickell
Senior Economist and Project Director
Survey of Consumer Finances
Mail Stop 153
Federal Reserve Board
Washington, DC 20551
Email: Arthur.Kennickell@frb.gov
SCF Web Site: http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/o.../scfindex.html
January 30, 2006
Abstract
This paper considers changes in the distribution of the wealth of U.S. families over the 1989–2004 period using data from
the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). Real net worth grew broadly over this period. At the same time, there are
indications that wealth became more concentrated, but the result does not hold unambiguously across a set of plausible
measures. For example, the Gini coefficient shows significant increases in the concentration of wealth from 1989 to
2004, but the wealth share of the wealthiest one percent of families did not change significantly. Graphical analysis
suggests that there was a shift in favor of the top of the distribution, while for the broad middle of the distribution
increases were about in proportion to earlier wealth. Within this period, there are other interesting patterns. For
example, from 1992 to 2004 the wealth share of the least wealthy half of the population fell significantly to 2.5 percent
of total wealth.
from page 11
"Concentration ratios. Because the Gini coefficient attempts to summarize many complex
changes in terms of a single number, it may miss important variation for particular parts of a
distribution or for particular subpopulations. A more detailed means of summarizing the relative
distribution of wealth is the use of concentration ratios, the proportion of total wealth held by
specific groups. In 2004, slightly more than one-third of total net worth was held by the
wealthiest one percent of families (table 5). Although the estimated level of this share has
changed over the surveys since 1989, the differences are not statistically significant. In 2004, the
next-wealthiest nine percent of families held 36.1 percent of total wealth, again, a figure not
significantly changed over the course of the surveys. This leaves less than a third of the total for
the remaining ninety percent of the population. A subset of that group, families in the bottom
half of wealth distribution, held only 2.5 percent of total wealth in 2004, and this figure is
significantly different from the higher estimates for 1995, 1998, and 2001; of course, those
differences reflect movements elsewhere in the distribution, but the statistical power of the tests
is not sufficient to identify where among the groups shown the offsetting changes occurred."....
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Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/bu...ia&oref=slogin
Few of them may become Michael Moore fans. But some insurance industry officials and health policy experts acknowledged yesterday that the film documentary “Sicko,” Mr. Moore’s indictment of health care in this country, taps into widespread public concern that the system does not work for millions of Americans.
http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t...ZUVFeXky&cid=0
It's time to address plight of the uninsured
Sunday, May 20, 2007
HERALD NEWS EDITORIAL
.....Today, more than 45 million Americans lack health insurance. They include 1.3 million in New Jersey, </b>where the number of uninsured has grown by 300,000 in the last five years.</b>
As a series by Herald News health writer Betsy Querna has shown, the uninsured cut across a broad swath. In April, she wrote: "She's the woman ahead of you in the grocery line. The man sitting next to you in church. The child who plays with yours after school. The woman who cares for your son or daughter."
Over time, opposition to universal health care insurance (some have dismissed it as "socialized medicine") has been strong and well-financed. The opponents, including conservative Republican politicians (who maintain that a free market sustains quality and choice), domestic insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies say they seek to protect the nation's health care system from government red tape and ineptitude they believe would attend an American version of European-style universal health care coverage.
But we are already paying much more for our health care and getting much less than people do in other industrialized nations. We trail many other industrialized nations in terms of infant mortality and life expectancy........
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In a post on the <b>"Has The US DOJ, Itself been Politicized into a Criminal Enterprise?"</b>, thread on this forum, I documented the accusations that the US DOJ has been corrupted by the republican party and it's current elected federal administration, into an enforcement bureau of the politcal party's goal of opposition vote suppression via an illegal and elaborate campaign to disqualify, intimidate, and/or prosecute legitimate opposition voters and those who attempt to register them to vote.
The criminal conspiracy implicates white house officials and prominent republican leaning lawyers and law firms. The goal seems to be to achieve permanent control...the ability to win key elections without a constituency for it's policies and platform that would lend itself, in fair, open and untampered with elections, to a winning outcome.....
Quote:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...78&postcount=4
....Bottomline:
May, 2006: Report that Bud Cummins, US Attorney in Arkansas, is investigating Missouri Gov., Matt Blunt, son on US House leader, Roy Blunt.
Matt Blunt has given wife of Missouri US Attorney, Todd Graves, a "perk"..a lucrative franchise in Missouri DMV licensing office, operateed by Mark Hearnes' law firm....
WSJ reports in Jan., 2007, that a month after the May, 2006 reporting about Cummins investigation of Blunt....in June of 2006, Cummins is asked to resign to make way for Karl Roves' "Timothy Griffin". DOJ sends Brad Schlozman, the man who dismantled the DOJ's civil right's section, to replace Todd Graves as US Attorney in Missouri....
Friends....more and more, it's looking certain that the repubs stole both the 2000 and the 2004 presidential elections, and a bunch of other state and federal election races, too !....with the help of the lawyers who worked for Bush/Cheney 2000 in the Florida recount, and then in the Bush administration, or in aligned law firms, ever since. The DOJ has been transformed into a branch of this partisan republican, criminal conspiracy!
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Instead of being "pillars" of the political and the economic status quo, huge numbers of attorneys with conservative and/or christian fundamentalist sympathies, have gained near complete control of the prosecutoriaL apparatus on the federal level, and have used it to insure their own grip on political power, by reversing the protections that civil rights reform had brought, over the last 40 years, to the most fragile and victimized segment of potential voters.....
With the wealth, the means to purchase healthcare when injured or ill, and the ability to achieve change at the polls via the will of the sheer numbers of economically and politically disenfranchised, all removed from the possession of so many....and so relatively quickly and in such great numbers, <b>will a "new left" only energize and grow itself because of a severe, general economic downturn, or will a more extreme political event "do the trick"?</b>
.....or will nothing alter (for so many.....) the economic decline and the loss of of populist political influence of the last six years?
....and it does not help that the news media seems to have under reported all three of my examples. |