Kristof: “Our Banana Republic”

According to NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF of the NY Times:

In my reporting, I regularly travel to banana republics notorious for their inequality. In some of these plutocracies, the richest 1 percent of the population gobbles up 20 percent of the national pie.

But guess what? You no longer need to travel to distant and dangerous countries to observe such rapacious inequality. We now have it right here at home — and in the aftermath of Tuesday’s election, it may get worse.

The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.

C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.

Read on

If you despise that there’s a gross inequality between the rich and poor in this country, give this post 5 stars.

Via Reddit and Cynical C (and NY Times)

Therapeutic Abortion

Saturday night I had dinner at a neighbor’s home. There were eight of us. Four couples. Four of the people I had never met.

There was a girl named Jo-neat. I have no idea if that’s really how to spell her name. I don’t know if that’s what her name was, because it was bizarre. It was bizarre, yet she said the name like it was the most common name ever. If I had a different name like Jo-neat, I would come up with a mnemonic so it wouldn’t be so fucking hard to remember.

During dinner, Jo-neat used the term “Therapeutic Abortion”. It is the term given to an abortion in which a pregnant woman’s health is compromised, and the ugly choice of an abortion becomes necessary to save the mother’s life.