In October of 1949, a few months after the release of George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, he received a fascinating letter from fellow author Aldous Huxley — a man who, 17 years previous, had seen his own nightmarish vision of society published, in the form of Brave New World. What begins as a letter of praise soon becomes a brief comparison of the two novels, and an explanation as to why Huxley believes his own, earlier work to be a more realistic prediction.
Fantastic.
Trivia: In 1917, long before he wrote this letter, Aldous Huxley briefly taught Orwell French at Eton.
(Source: Letters of Aldous Huxley; Image: George Orwell (via) & Aldous Huxley (via).)
Richest 1 Percent Account For Nearly All Of U.S. Recovery’s Gains: Report
Technically, the economy has been in recovery for two years. But it turns out the rich have been doing most of the recovering.
In 2010 — the first full year since the end of the Great Recession — virtually all of the income growth in America took place among the country’s very wealthiest people, says an economist at the University of California, Berkeley. The top 1 percent of earners took in a full 93 percent of all the income gains that year, leaving the other 7 percent of gains to be sprinkled among the vast majority of society.
Those numbers come courtesy of Emmanuel Saez, the Berkeley economist who co-created a resource known as the World Top Incomes Database. Saez and his colleagues crunched the data on income growth from 2010, the most recent year available, and found that it was shockingly lopsided.
While much of the country is simply treading water, with a growing number of people either edging toward poverty or already there, the richest of the rich seem to be coping nicely.
Saez’s findings suggest that even though the recession dealt a blow to the 1 percent, it did little to push the U.S. off the path it’s been on for decades — that of a vast and growing disparity between the richest and poorest citizens.
Income for most workers has barely risen in the last 30 years, but the top 1 percent of earners have seen their income almost triple in the same amount of time. Economists and other experts say that could be the result of any number of factors, including the decline of labor unions, the explosion in capital gains during the middle part of the aughts, and tax policies put in place in recent years that favor the wealthy.
In his State of the Union address this past January, President Obama called economic fairness “the defining issue of our time,” perhaps mindful of the growing number of voters who say they can’t even afford basic necessities like food.
The wealth gap has been cited as a major concern for the nationwide Occupy movement, and research has suggested that income inequality might be associated with the kind of underwhelming economic growth the country has experienced for the past two years.
(via socialuprooting)
Homeland Security Does Not Understand British Slang
Emily Bunting and Leigh Van Bryan, a pair of tourists from Great Britain were detained by Homeland Security for twelve hours at Los Angeles International Airport because Bryan had earlier tweeted “Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America.”
Bryan tried in vain to explain that “destroy” is just a quirky Brit way of saying “going out and getting drunk,” but the humorless DHS agents presumably had not heard of partying, either. So they were deported.
“The Homeland Security agents were treating me like some kind of terrorist. I kept saying they had got the wrong meaning from my tweet but they just told me ‘You’ve really fucked up with that tweet, boy’,” Bryan told The Sun.
Bryan had also tweeted that he planned to be “diggin’ Marilyn Monroe up!” — another joke, he said.
“The officials told us we were not allowed in to the country because of Leigh’s tweet,” Bunting told The Daily Mail. “They wanted to know what we were going to do… They asked why we wanted to destroy America and we tried to explain it meant to get trashed and party… I almost burst out laughing when they asked me if I was going to be Leigh’s lookout while he dug up Marilyn Monroe.”
Of course, what this should really leave you wondering is how Homeland Security managed to connect the pair to their tweets in only the time it took them to obtain tourist visas and then clear customs, which is when they were detained.
(via socialuprooting)
Ray Brescia, “A Trust Deficit? Look To The Inequality.”
Disclosure: Ray taught my Civil Procedure class at Albany Law last year. Interesting side-note: Ray was personally involved in litigation against both the Bush Sr. and Clinton administrations concerning the plight of Haitian refugees at Guantanamo Bay back in the ‘90’s. You can read about his experience in Storming the Court, available at fine internet bookstores everywhere.
(via letterstomycountry)
(via pieceinthepuzzlehumanity)
All About ACTA
It’s not over yet. #SOPA and #PIPA are one thing. The international version is #ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The agreement has been signed, while existing mostly in secret, by most of the world, with notable exceptions including the EU.
The act is an attempt to create international standards for intellectual property rights enforcement.
You can look at what is assumed to be the current final form of the agreement, which has been leaked, here. The text has otherwise not been made public; in the US, a Freedom of Information Act request has been denied on the basis of classification for national security. Of course this information was not too classified for those who had a hand in creating the act, a group representing US-based multinational corporations which include International Intellectual Property Alliance (coalition of seven trade associations), The Gorlin Group (Washington “consultancy”), Time Warner Inc. (media company), Eli Lilly and Company (pharmaceutical company), Cisco Systems, Inc. (consumer electronics), The U.S.-China Business Council (nonprofit org), Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc. (beer), Merck & Co., Inc. (healthcare), National Foreign Trade Council, Inc. (business organization), Sidley, Austin, Brown & Wood LLP (representing the biotechnology industry), Entertainment Software Association (computer and video games), CropLife America (crop protection and pest control products), Global Intellectual Property Strategy Center (consulting service representing gauge-manufacturers Thomas G. Faria Corporation), Recording Industry Association of America (recording industry trade org), IBM Corporation (technology), Intellectual Property Owners Association (trade association for owners of patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets), Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (movies), John Wiley and Sons, Inc. (publishers), General Motors Corporation (automobiles).
And that was just the Industry Trade Advisory Committee On Intellectual Property Rights that was involved. There are three other other committees, totaling 93 other members of the business elite who have access to the “classified” details of the act we as citizens are not allowed to see, for our own security.
This video is a chart.
Best ACTA post I’ve seen so far.
(via pieceinthepuzzlehumanity)
Former CIA Spy Tells the Truth (by JonathanTheHurricane)
this needs a proper tag. the guy - Robert D. Steele - talks about ways to help change the broken current political system
U.S. - home to 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners.
NPR - Prisons (retroactive “correction”) funded at the expense of education. [Listen Here]
(via pieceinthepuzzlehumanity)
These findings are particularly interesting when juxtaposed with a separate report from the Pew Economic Mobility project. That report, which examined economic and social mobility in 10 Western countries, found that Americans actually appear to have less control over their success in life than their counterparts do.
In particular, the educational attainment of a person’s parents — a factor usually determined before that person’s birth — seems to matter more for mobility in the United States.
“There is a stronger link between parental education and children’s economic, educational and socio-emotional outcomes than in any other country investigated,” the report says.
As Richard Wilkinson suggested in a recent TED Talk, if you want to live the American dream — and have greater control over your own likelihood of success — you should probably move to Denmark, where the poor have a better chance of moving up in the world.
(via pieceinthepuzzlehumanity)
A Bloomberg report recently revealed that the U.S. government loaned banks $7.7 trillion in secret bailout funds at no interest and then borrowed the money back at interest.
“Basically the government was lending banks money at no interest, and then borrowing it back at interest. Our government is the world’s dumbest loan shark,” Stewart says.
But most of the 7 billion are not endangering the earth. The majority of the world’s people don’t destroy forests, don’t wipe out endangered species, don’t pollute rivers and oceans, and emit essentially no greenhouse gases.
Even in the rich countries of the Global North, most environmental destruction is caused not by individuals or households, but by mines, factories, and power plants run by corporations that care more about profit than about humanity’s survival.
No reduction in U.S. population would have stopped BP from poisoning the Gulf of Mexico last year.
Lower birthrates won’t shut down Canada’s tar sands, which Bill McKibben has justly called one of the most staggering crimes the world has ever seen.
Universal access to birth control should be a fundamental human right — but it would not have prevented Shell’s massive destruction of ecosystems in the Niger River delta, or the immeasurable damage that Chevron has caused to rainforests in Ecuador.
(via loveyourchaos)
Scandinavians wonder ‘where’s winter?
For some reason, Scandinavia is not its frigid self, with unusually warm weather delaying the onset of winter in northern latitudes normally decked in white.
The lack of snow has been bad news for winter sports — World Cup ski races have been dropped, or held on artificial snow, and mountain ski resorts are unable to open.
There are even reports of bird song and blooming gardens in some places typically entering the winter freeze at this time of year.
“Some flowers, like roses, have actually begun to blossom for a second time,” said Mats Rosenberg, a biologist in Orebro, south-central Sweden.
Weather experts say this fall is on track to become one of the warmest on record in the northern part of Scandinavia, where the start of winter has been delayed by more than a month in certain locations.
In the Finnish town of Sodankyla, north of the Arctic Circle, snow cover started Nov. 17, the latest date in 100 years, said Pauli Jokinen, spokesman at the Finnish Meteorological Institute.
Animals — such as stoats, hares and willow grouse — that change color with the season turned white weeks before the snows came, bringing an eerie feeling to the snowless wilds of Lapland. (via msnbc.com)
(via socialuprooting)
David Edwards
‘How Shall I Live My Life?: On Liberating the Earth from Civilization’
(via cultureofresistance)
