Author: susie

Whiny ass titty babies

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The Koch Brothers Campaign Carnaval
They’re so whiny, aren’t they?

Tea Party Patriots has filed a complaint against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) with the Senate Ethics Committee to protest his repeated attacks against Charles and David Koch.

Jenny Beth Martin, the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, filed the complaint, charging Reid with “unlawfully and unethically targeting private citizens.”

The complaint further states that Reid “has misused Senate staff or resources to engage in partisan campaign activity in violation of federal laws and Senate rules.”
Reid has repeatedly slammed the Koch brothers, two of the richest men in the world, for funding attack ads against Democratic candidates.

Americans for Prosperity, a group backed by the Kochs, reportedly plans to spend $125 million on the midterm elections to help Republicans capture a Senate majority.

Reid has called the brothers “un-American” and accused them of “trying to buy America.”

H/t Jason Kalafat.

We’re destroying everything

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Puffin

And no one seems to want to stop it:

Now, thanks to a grant from the Annenberg Foundation, the Puffin Cam offered new opportunities for research and outreach. Puffin parents dote on their single chick, sheltering it in a two-foot burrow beneath rocky ledges and bringing it piles of small fish each day. Researchers would get to watch live puffin feeding behavior for the first time, and schoolkids around the world would be falling for Petey.

But Kress soon noticed that something was wrong. Puffins dine primarily on hake and herring, two teardrop-shaped fish that have always been abundant in the Gulf of Maine. But Petey’s parents brought him mostly butterfish, which are shaped more like saucers. Kress watched Petey repeatedly pick up butterfish and try to swallow them. The video is absurd and tragic, because the butterfish is wider than the little gray fluff ball, who keeps tossing his head back, trying to choke down the fish, only to drop it, shaking with the effort. Petey tries again and again, but he never manages it. For weeks, his parents kept bringing him butterfish, and he kept struggling. Eventually, he began moving less and less. On July 20, Petey expired in front of a live audience. Puffin snuff.

“When he died, there was a huge outcry from viewers,” Kress tells me. “But we thought, ‘Well, that’s nature.’ They don’t all live. It’s normal to have some chicks die.” Puffins successfully raise chicks 77 percent of the time, and Petey’s parents had a good track record; Kress assumed they were just unlucky. Then he checked the other 64 burrows he was tracking: Only 31 percent had successfully fledged. He saw dead chicks and piles of rotting butterfish everywhere. “That,” he says, “was the epiphany.”

Why would the veteran puffin parents of Maine start bringing their chicks food they couldn’t swallow? Only because they had no choice. Herring and hake had dramatically declined in the waters surrounding Seal Island, and by August, Kress had a pretty good idea why: The water was much too hot.

Thanks to Shawn Sukumar Attorney at Law.

I’m biting my tongue

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Rendell

Because it wouldn’t be nice to say it out loud:

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell said Philadelphia Inquirer co-owner Lewis Katz invited him on the doomed flight that crashed, killing seven.

Rendell said Katz tried to persuade him Friday to attend an event at historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Massachusetts home, but he had another commitment.

Katz, a 72-year-old business mogul, and six others were returning home to New Jersey on Saturday night when the plane crashed on takeoff. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating what may have caused the crash.

The former Democratic governor said Katz died at ‘‘maybe the high point of his life.’’ Katz was thrilled this week after he and a partner won an $88 million auction for the Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, Rendell said.

Selling out

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Governor Andrew Cuomo

What a pile of crap this so-called deal is. Andrew Cuomo got the nomination of the Working Families Family by making a bunch of promises he has no intention of keeping. And NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio pulled the whole sorry deal together.

Cuomo is deep under the covers with the state Republicans, thwarting progressive Democratic legislation at every turn. He is trying to burnish his bipartisan credentials, just like his good friend Chris Christie, and for the same reason: He wants to be president. Bah. I wouldn’t vote for this little weasel under any circumstances.

Five ways massive inequality paralyzes society

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tradingplaces

The answer may be an international financial transaction tax:

1. A Broken System of Compensation: The Combined Salaries of 350,000 Pre-School Teachers is Less Than That of Five Hedge Fund Managers

Pre-school teaching may be our nation’s most important job. Numerous studies show that with pre-school, all children achieve more and earn more through adulthood, with the most disadvantaged benefiting the most.

[…]
2. Diminishing Support for Society: The 1% Made More from their Investments in 2013 than the Entire Cost of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Safety Net

America’s wealth grew by almost $9 trillion in 2013. The richest 1% own 34 percent of the wealth (Table 6 here or Table 2 here), or about $3 trillion of the 2013 gain.

[…]
3. Capital’s Long-Term Dominance of Labor: Since 1900, a Dollar of Labor has Grown to $127, a Dollar of Stocks to $1,247

There’s a good reason why the super-rich are cleaning up in the stock market. Thomas Piketty explains that, barring war or depression, the return on capital far outpaces economic growth, causing average workers without a stock portfolio to drop further and further behind. A look at stock market growth over 114 years (Page 60) confirms that a dollar of capital is now worth ten times more than a dollar of labor value.

[…]
4. The Walmartization of America: A Few Super-Rich at the Top, then Everyone Else

Just like at Walmart, a few big moneymakers are ruling over a great majority of increasingly low-income workers. Low-wage jobs ($7.69 to $13.83 per hour) made up 1/5 of the jobs lost to the recession, but accounted for nearly 3/5 of the jobs regained during the recovery. And it’s getting worse. Nine out of ten of the fastest-growing occupations are considered low-wage, generally not requiring a college degree.

[…]
5. Toward Third-World Status: Our Shrinking Middle Class Gets a Smaller Cut of National Wealth than Anywhere except China and India

From a global perspective, we’re becoming the type of country that we used to dismiss as “third-world.” Among developed and fast-rising nations only the middle classes of China and India get a smaller cut of their country’s wealth than in the United States. Both of them are rapidly catching up to us.

HT Karin Riley Porter Attorney at Law

My head is exploding

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Marc Benioff.
Marc Benioff.

Go read the rest of the mostly self-serving blather:

Marc Benioff, the philanthropist and billionaire founder of Salesforce, may have been the angriest man at last week’s Code Conference, held at the Terranea Resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.

Onstage, Benioff launched into a fervent monologue, calling out the audience for failing on a range of social initiatives. The income discrepancy was growing, and techies were being too stingy. Benioff called out conference presenter Re/code for not having a charitable component, and asked people there to raise their hands if their companies had charity programs. Fewer than half did.

“You’ve got to show that we are part of the solution, not just part of the problem,” said Benioff, his voice rising in intensity.

San Francisco, the heart of the tech industry, now has the fastest-growing income inequality in the country, a gap on par with Rwanda’s. This has led to range of protests, including those that have begun targeting public tech symbols like Google’s commuter shuttle buses.

The connection between inequality and the tech industry may be fair: Innovation tends to make things more efficient, so fewer people can accomplish more work (in the Bay area, the WhatsApp texting service sold for $19 billion with 55 employees, while the Gap, worth about the same, has 136,000 employees).

So, what did the wealthy and influential attendees at Code — which was held at a secluded and exclusive beachfront resort — think about income inequality, the housing shortage, and whether tech was to blame or not?

The responses were varied, but the most common answer — no surprise, perhaps — was that tech wasn’t the cause of San Francisco’s income gap, but rather the best solution.

“Tech is solving the problem, because now we have these new qualified, nonprofessional market verticals,” said Mike Jones, CEO of Science and former CEO of Myspace. “You’re qualified to drive a car, but not professionally doing it. Congratulations, boom, you’re making [a] $90,000-a-year average Uber salary.”

Assuming you can afford a car. Assuming no one sues you for tripping on the way out of your car. Assuming… oh, never mind.

Thanks to Karin Riley Porter.