" In early November, David Koch met with Bob Levy, chairman of Cato’s board of directors, at Dulles International Airport. They were joined by Richard Fink, Koch’s chief adviser, and Kevin Gentry, a vice president of Charles Koch’s charitable foundation who’d been put on Cato’s board of directors. (Former Americans for Prosperity President Nancy Pfotenhauer had joined the board after the same meeting.)

" “They said that a principal goal was to defeat Barack Obama,” remembered Levy. “The way David [Koch] put it was, ‘We would like you to provide intellectual ammunition that we can then use at Americans for Prosperity and our allied organizations.’ AFP and others would apply Cato’s work to advance their electoral goals.” "

RT @MikeElk: top 1% captured 93% of income gains in 2010.

" The cause of China’s problems is exactly like America’s. In both nations, a new, powerful Super Rich is aligned with politicians — will eventually self-destruct. The World Bank warns that China’s corrupt state-owned companies have created a Chinese Super Rich class aligning communist party bosses and corporate executives.

" And neither has any interest in the World Bank’s call for reforming their incestuous economic system — which is exactly the same problem with America’s conspiracy between our Super Rich, Wall Street CEOs and Washington politicians. "

" About two dozen individuals, couples or corporations have given $1 million or more to Republican super PACs this year, an exclusive club empowered by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and other rulings to pool their money into federal political committees and pour it directly into this year’s presidential campaign.

" Collectively, their contributions have totaled more than $50 million this cycle, making them easily the most influential and powerful political donors in politics today. They have relatively few Democratic counterparts so far, with most of the leading liberal donors from past years giving relatively small amounts — or not at all — to the Democratic super PACs. "

" budget cuts caused enrollment in California community colleges to decline by over 400,000 students. That’s more than the total number of undergraduates enrolled in the entire California State University system.

" This is, in short, a completely avoidable public-policy catastrophe that will have lasting negative effects on California and the nation as a whole. Yet the lion’s share of national media coverage of California higher education budget cuts has focused on marginal problems among the most privileged people. "

Upper-class looters vs. lower-class looters, part 2

Upper-class looters vs. lower-class looters

RT @ebertchicago: Meanwhile, during the Prayer Rally, a much larger crowd was gathering nearby...

Your "They Live" moment of the day: Virginia Beach considers an official homeless tent city (from @jillwklausen)

" The unemployed need not apply.

" That is the message being broadcast by many of the nation’s employers, making it even more difficult for 14 million jobless Americans to get back to work. "

" More than a third of all U.S. states allow borrowers who can't or won't pay to be jailed. Judges have signed off on more than 5,000 such warrants since the start of 2010 in nine counties with a total population of 13.6 million people, according to a tally by The Wall Street Journal of filings in those counties. Nationwide figures aren't known because many courts don't keep track of warrants by alleged offense. In interviews, 20 judges across the nation said the number of borrowers threatened with arrest in their courtrooms has surged since the financial crisis began. "

" the proposed restitution to Stewart represented the 350 hours he had spent renaming and reorganizing the recovered files, as well as 600 hours spent recreating the unrecoverable PowerPoint presentations.” "

Remember 16 years for shoplifting a Snickers? Oh, let's just reinstate debtor's prisons.

Faux pas: mandating dress code to guests of a social class to be (!!!) chartering planes & helicopters

" The results indicate that there seems to be a link between the health and social effects of unemployment, on the one hand, and the degree of financial hardship and the number of shaming experiences on the other. The group of unemployed people who suffered a greater degree of financial hardship and also experienced a greater number of shaming experiences seemed to exhibit the poorest health, reported deteriorated health to a greater degree than other groups, experienced negative changes in their lifestyle, did less in their free time, and had lower self-confidence than other unemployed persons. The opposite applied for those who experienced less financial hardship and less pressure in terms of experiences of shaming. Against this background, we have formulated a theoretical model based on financial circumstances and social bonds; a model that could have a wider value in explaining social and health problems. "

" “There used to be a sense that unemployment was rich soil for radicalization and revolt,” says Nelson Lichtenstein, a professor of labor history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “That was a motif in American history for a long time, but we don’t seem to have that anymore.” "

" Protests for political reform are crucial, many argue, because the system of governance will define Egypt's future on all levels. Labor strikes, on the other hand, can and should be postponed: it's not the right time, they say; Egypt's floundering post-revolution economy needs all the work it can get.

" But the laboring classes - many members of whom have not received their salaries in months - feel otherwise. "

Beware the military-finance-education-industrial complex.

" The chart below conveys the central point: people think the distribution of wealth is more equal than it actually is; and they think it should be much more equal than their already unrealistically-equal notion of its current state. "

" Brooks went on to say that being part of the secondary market is, paradoxically, seen as a disqualification to those seeking to advance to the tenure track. “Put bluntly, adjuncts and other 'precarious' faculty are 'tainted' by their involvement in the secondary labor market,” he said. “As time goes by, they (we) are considered to be 'damaged goods,' less and less worthy of consideration for the primary academic market.” "

" There is plenty of economic activity in the U.S., and plenty of wealth. But like greedy children, the folks at the top are seizing virtually all the marbles. Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush. "

" However, the available data suggests misuse of welfare money is minimal. Instead, people who receive welfare said the legislation would make it impossible to use the money for basic needs, like paying rent and doing laundry. "

" Minnesota Republicans are pushing legislation that would make it a crime for people on public assistance to have more $20 in cash in their pockets any given month. This represents a change from their initial proposal, which banned them from having any money at all. "

" In some cities, bondholders will be burned. But America’s failing governments may be one of those crises whose full impact is not registered in the muni market, or in any market. Until voters can agree on what government services they want and will pay for, it is possible that bondholders will bank the profits while taxpayers, employees and citizens share the losses. "

" a veritable mountain of evidence indicates that when it comes to Wall Street, the justice system not only sucks at punishing financial criminals, it has actually evolved into a highly effective mechanism for protecting financial criminals. "

" 40 percent of the gains went to the wealthiest 1 percent of California taxpayers; More than 70 percent of the gains went to the wealthiest 10 percent of taxpayers; Just 16 percent of the gains went to the bottom 80 percent of Californians; and Only about 3 percent of the gains went to the middle fifth. "

On attracting the attention of the top tier law firms and investment banks: " So going to Harvard is a prerequisite. But you also need to prove, in the words of the recruiters, that you’re not “boring,” a “tool,” or a ”bookworm.” This is where your leisure pursuits come in. Among the acceptable extra-curricular activities listed in the paper: traveling with a world-renowned orchestra and building houses in Costa Rica. It’s good to play sports, but they have to be the right ones. Being on the crew team is acceptable; being on the ping-pong team is not. Ideally, you should be a national or Olympic champion. And if you like hiking, you should summit some impressive peak. "

" But what must have surprised and disturbed the industrious and energetic Fournier, even more than the absence of crime, was the absence of ambition and hard work. The good folk of Montaillou might not be killing one another, but they were killing time -- or they would have been, had time had the same importance then as it does now. Ladurie notes that for the village's shepherds, in particular, wealth was not measured in terms of money, property, or possessions. Instead, a rich life was one filled with travel and daydreaming, conversations and meals with friends. "

" Rather than setting off a boom in the U.S. manufacture of replacement lights, the leading replacement lights are compact fluorescents, or CFLs, which are made almost entirely overseas, mostly in China. Consisting of glass tubes twisted into a spiral, they require more hand labor, which is cheaper there. "

" It's never explained, of course, how this raging declensionism squares with the "volatile conditions" that have made it harder for bosses to commit to expanding their payrolls. If Obamanomics were so rabidly antigrowth, demand would be flat, not variable-and executives wouldn't have new capital to expend in the first place. But this stolid schizophrenia is a common tic of today's business writing, which holds that executives are monolithically fearless and innovative entrepreneurs until a whispered rollback of a tax cut turns them into quivering neurasthenics. "

" India is enjoying an extended economic boom, with near double-digit growth. But the benefits have not been equally shared, and southern India has rocketed far ahead of much of the rest of the country on virtually every score — people here earn more money, are better educated, live longer lives and have fewer children. ... While in the south lower caste members concentrated on economic development and education as a route to prosperity, in the north the chief aim of caste-based groups has been political power and its spoils. As a result India’s northern lower castes tend to be less educated and less prosperous than their southern counterparts. "

" Academic labor has lost a lot of ground, and fast, in the last few decades. In 1970 roughly three-quarters of professors were on the tenure-track; now only 27 percent are, according to the American Federation of Teachers. "

" What has developed is a situation where the people at the top are doing quite well, while most Americans are finding it increasingly difficult to make it. There are now about 6 unemployed Americans for every new job opening in the United States, and the number of "chronically unemployed" is absolutely soaring. "

" The result has been an experiment in social engineering that has gone horribly wrong: the creation of a faux mass upper middle class. Millions of Americans who by objective standards belong to the working class or lower middle class have persuaded themselves that they are part of the professional-investor elite, because they have worthless degrees from diploma mills, negligible amounts invested in stocks, and suburban trophy houses they cannot afford. "

" During the late 1980s and the late 1990s, the United States experienced two unprecedentedly long periods of sustained economic growth—the "seven fat years" and the " long boom." Yet from 1980 to 2005, more than 80 percent of total increase in Americans' income went to the top 1 percent. Economic growth was more sluggish in the aughts, but the decade saw productivity increase by about 20 percent. Yet virtually none of the increase translated into wage growth at middle and lower incomes, an outcome that left many economists scratching their heads. "

" This chunky infographic examines the origins and (d)evolution of the student loan leviathan. "

" outright sexism is no longer the main barrier to gender equality. The main barrier is the harsh price most workers pay for pursuing anything other than the old-fashioned career path. "

" The rate of children living in poverty this year will climb to nearly 22%, the highest rate in two decades, according to an analysis by the non-profit Foundation for Child Development. Nearly 17% of children were living in poverty in 2006, before the recession began. "

" “They threw out far more workers and hours than they lost output,” said Professor Sum. “Here’s what happened: At the end of the fourth quarter in 2008, you see corporate profits begin to really take off, and they grow by the time you get to the first quarter of 2010 by $572 billion. And over that same time period, wage and salary payments go down by $122 billion.” That kind of disconnect, said Mr. Sum, had never been seen before in all the decades since World War II. "

" Waging a Living chronicles the day-to-day battles of four low-wage earners fighting to lift their families out of poverty. Shot over a three-year period in the northeast and California, this observational documentary captures the dreams, frustrations, and accomplishments of a diverse group of people who struggle to live from paycheck to paycheck. "

" About half make $28 an hour or more, while the rest, the recently hired, make $14. This oddity, which could become the norm in much of the domestic U.S. auto industry, arises from the jury-rigged labor agreement that the United Auto Workers, U.S. automakers and the federal government reached during the industry's near-death experience last year. Now the revival of the U.S. industry depends on a compromise that some on all sides quietly acknowledge is divisive, among other things, and probably cannot last. "

"political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson argue persuasively that the economic struggles of the middle and working classes in the U.S. since the late-1970s were not primarily the result of globalization and technological changes but rather a long series of policy changes in government that overwhelmingly favored the very rich. "

" Every 34th wage earner in America in 2008 went all of 2009 without earning a single dollar... Total wages, median wages, and average wages all declined, but at the very top, salaries grew more than fivefold. "

" “We’ve finally reached the stage where people aren’t afraid of being politically incorrect,” said Douglas S. Massey, a sociologist at Princeton who has argued that Moynihan was unfairly maligned. "

" As populist rage has erupted around the country, stoked by canny politicians, an opposite rage has built on Wall Street and other arenas where the wealthy hold sway. Its expression is more furtive and it’s often mixed with a kind of sublimated shame, but it can be every bit as vitriolic. "

" The rage of the rich has been building ever since Mr. Obama took office. At first, however, it was largely confined to Wall Street. ... Now, however, as decision time looms for the fate of the Bush tax cuts — will top tax rates go back to Clinton-era levels? — the rage of the rich has broadened, and also in some ways changed its character. "

Good morning, reserve army of surplus labor.

" the vice chancellor of academic affairs, cited concerns that it could have a “negative effect” on students who transferred to a California State University or University of California campus and could not get credit for the Kaplan course. Under the agreement, which was apparently never used at any of the state’s 112 community colleges, Kaplan was offering students a 42 percent discount, making the cost about $216 a credit, compared with $26 a credit at the community colleges. "

" the overall Clinton nuptials budget that will run between $3-$6 million. ... In the midst of this pubic atmosphere of crisis and austerity, we have the Clintons onstage strutting exactly like the narcissistic aristocrats they have, in fact, become. "

" As more homeowners, businesses and towns seek to maintain land with fewer chemicals or fossil-fuel-powered machinery, a growing number are trying goats to get rid of unwanted vegetation. "

Wolfgang Puck still serves foie gras, just not to you proles.

"In planning next year's budget, the board voted Monday afternoon to cut bus trips by about one-fourth and lay off nearly 400 bus drivers, supervisors and maintenance workers."

"So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. "