Inequality in America (and Britain)

Dr. Alan Krueger, chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, spoke yesterday at the Center for American Progress about how inequality threatens both the middle class and the economy at large.

The chart below, from his Powerpoint presentation, illustrates how America became the Western World champion of Income Inequality and more surprisingly of lack of intergenerational mobility. The children of the poor stay poor. The American Dream is dead. 

Furthermore, it is not a shock to see that the former colonial power, Britain, now the most American part of Europe, comes a close second to the US.

“The Great Gatsby Curve” - Higher income inequality associated with lower intergenerational mobility

Economist Alan Krueger, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and his boss, a certain Hussein Obama

Note on the graph:

Originally from a paper by Miles Corak,  professor of economics with the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa’s, it shows a negative relationship between the Gini coefficient and intergenerational earnings elasticity.

The Gini coefficient is a standard way of measuring inequality. It is an index between 0 and 1, based on the Lorenz curve, which is the proportion of the total income earned by each percent of the population. The larger the number, the less equal the society.

Intergenerational earnings elasticity is the relationship between parents’ earnings and those of their children. In a way, it shows if children can escape their parents’ poverty. According to the 1921 song by Van & Schenck, immortalized in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s "The Great Gatsby", they can’t: “The rich get richer and the poor get children.” 

Therefore the title of the graph!

Cover of  F. Scott Fitzgerald’s "The Great Gatsby"
Inequality in America

Muammar Gaddafi: he died fighting, as per his promise

Muammar Gaddafi killed - rebels drag the body

May he rest in peace, Muammar Gaddafi 1942-2011.
The man fought against all the odds and died fighting after air and ground attacks.
Gaddafi stayed true to his words, that he would stay in Libya till the bitter end.
Rarely does a politician keeps his promises in such a dramatic way.

"There is a conspiracy to control Libyan oil and to control Libyan land, to colonise Libya once again. This is impossible, impossible. We will fight until the last man and last woman to defend Libya from east to west, north to south." 


and in his last will:

"Let the free people of the world know that we could have bargained over and sold out our cause in return for a personal secure and stable life. We received many offers to this effect but we chose to be at the vanguard of the confrontation as a badge of duty and honour.

Even if we do not win immediately, we will give a lesson to future generations that choosing to protect the nation is an honour and selling it out is the greatest betrayal that history will remember forever despite the attempts of the others to tell you otherwise."

Ha-Makom yenahem etkhem b'tokh sha ar aveilei Tzion vYerushalayim

After Iraq, Egypt and Tunisia, another Arab nation is ready for "Democracy".
We already have seen what "democracy" has brought to Iraq, and Egypt, and it seems that less blood flowed and more tolerance existed under Saddam and Mubarak. The only positive secondary effects will be some degree of freedom for Kurds and Berbers, but even those will be lost in a return to medieval Islamic intolerance.

Intelligence and real-politik are gone from our Washington lead foreign policy. As if the self defeating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not enough, the West will live to regret supporting these revolutions.

For how long will beautiful Damascus keep a Christian quarter?
Good luck Bashar!

Colonel Gadhafi in his glory days (1969)

Col. Muammar Gaddafi, the Jewish-descendent leader of Libya is greeted by President Hussein Obama, the Muslim Raïs of America - Hypocrisy in motion, an operetta like prelude to a backstabbing

Libya - another war based on lies

William James (1842-1910), the father of modern Psychology  said "There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it." (this quote is often wrongly attributed to the Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, making it sexier).

Anyway, everywhere we turn we see NATO members stating that bombings in Libya are for the "protection of civilians", when it is in plain sight that regime change is the goal... even if the country's infrastructure is wiped out in the process and if the casualties of a full fledged war are much higher than a simple insurrection suppression by Khadaffi. Acephalous journalists echo this propaganda view like  inebriated parrots.

This protection of civilians euphemism bears a deja vu feeling when we think about the chorus line on "weapons of mass destruction" endelessly repetead by the Bush administration to get rid of Saddam Hussein. However now it is more serious, besides President Hussein Obama, such words are also coming from the European side of the Atlantic. From Sarkozy, from Cameroon... These men should know better!

Come the day when Europe actually needs to fight a war for legitimate reasons, the public will be saturated and credibility exhausted. As if no one knew about Peter and the wolf...

Bin Laden - only idiots would kill him!

Given the chance of capturing Bin Laden, only idiots would kill him!

The man should be an endless source of information on the Islamist networks worldwide.

Finding him unarmed, given a chance of apprehending him alive, would any intelligent person kill him?

Of course Americans have a reputation of shooting first, and asking questions after, but there must be someone in the administration with an IQ above chicken level.

So, I would not be surprised if for the next few months Mr Laden would still be alive.
Probably locked in a cubicle somewhere, under daily torture, until he spills all the information.

Then one day, his mind properly drained, he will receive a merciful shot in the head and his body will be destroyed. Maybe even dumped at sea...

Of course the US would never bring the man to a court of law, where his career financed and propped by several American administrations would be publicly scrutinized. Americans cannot stomach that they created and nurtured Mr Laden.

Furthermore, any court process would end in the death penalty. An execution of Mr Laden would certainly bring back to the US some of the bad karma they have for long spread across the globe.

Bin Laden may well be alive, undergoing torture somewhere in the globe.

Kosovo & Metohija province under the Albanian criminals

As the dust of war settles what was obvious to many, is now official. The US administration in a barbarian war against Serbia, Delivered the province to a gang of organ-snatching mafia ogres, in short the klepto-terrorist band known as the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army. Compared to these US allies, group like Hezbollah are a gentleman's club. Kosovo is lost for Western civilization for the foreseeable future, that was America's achievement by interfering in European affairs.

The Council of Europe is finally publishing a report naming Hashim Thaci, the KLA's prime minister and former war lord 27 times! Allegations of organ-trafficking against the KLA were first published by the former prosecutor of the Hague International War Crimes Tribunal, Carla del Ponte, in 2008, but conveniently forgotten.

Of course in Washington D.C., president Hussein Obama II will pretend nothing happened.

The BBC reports:

"The Drenica group within the KLA, which was led by Mr Thaci, is accused of involvement in organised crime, including drug-trafficking and the trafficking of human organs.

Leaders of the group are also said to bear "the greatest responsibility" for running the "KLA's ad hoc network of detention facilities" inside Albania as well as determining the fate of prisoners.

Evidence is also presented of organised crime activities continuing up to the present day.

Mr Marty's report argues that the abuses were sufficiently widespread to constitute a pattern in neighbouring Albania as well as in Kosovo.

It suggests that at least six detention centres operated in Albania and it adds that prisoners continued to be detained after the end of the 1999 Kosovo conflict.

In addition, it says, a "state-of-the-art" reception centre was used for the removal of captives' kidneys as part of the organised crime of organ-trafficking. Mr Marty's sources allege the organs were shipped out to private overseas clinics.

The report also appears to corroborate allegations of crimes, mainly against ethnic Serbs, at a farmhouse in the Albanian village of Rripe known as the "Yellow House".

The Yellow House allegations were contained in a joint investigation by the BBC and the Center for Investigative Reporting.

The draft Council of Europe report says a small number of deaths occurred there and goes on to claim that the house was used as a transit point where victims were processed according to their physical condition.

The end point, the report alleges, was at Fushe-Kruje where victims were killed and their organs removed. The report notes its proximity to Albania's main airport near Tirana

Yet another source spoke of driving trucks packed with shackled prisoners - mainly Serbian civilians from Kosovo - to secret locations in Albania where they were eventually killed.

He recalled hearing two of the captives begging to be shot rather than tortured and "cut into pieces".

"I was sick. I was just waiting for it to end," the source told me. "It was hard. I thought we were fighting a war [of liberation] but this was something completely different.

Very few Kosovo Albanians have publicly revealed crimes committed by their own side. And for good reason. Witnesses who have agreed to provide testimony for prosecutions of KLA commanders have faced intimidation and death threats.It has taken these men 10 years to speak to an outsider about the dark side of the war. They were breaking a code of silence that has held strong in Kosovo.

Some have been killed, according to United Nations officials in Kosovo."

map of Serbia with its rebel province of Kosovo