The Margate beachfront (Photo from UK Independent)
CAN BRITAIN’S “GROTTIEST PLACE TO LIVE” BE RESTORED TO ITS VICTORIAN SPLENDOR?
(UK Independent)
The town is Margate, a seaside place in Kent County, and developer guru Andrew Ashenden , who has specialized in restoring other “grotty” UK towns, thinks it just might happen. His vision for this restoration features an unsual promotion of small-scale local enterprises rather than the massive housing and retail buildings often featured in urban “renewal.” Ashenden even has a plan for giving jobs to people in a town with a high unemployment rate: pay them to pick up trash on the beach for an hour or two each week. It’s Thinking Small 101.
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SPEAKING OF THE PRICE (AND THE SAFETY) OF CORN IN CHINA.
(Asia Times)
The Chinese government has forbidden the use of genetically-modified seeds for food crops, out of concern for the food contamination issues that have arisen about the country’s world food exports. Now, there is talk of excluding corn seed from this prohibition as a strain of seed from DuPont suspected of GMO parentage is raising concerns, even as corn growers eye the “silver bullet” of GMO that promises huge profits on the price-inflated world food market.
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THE RECESSION IS OVER ALREADY! YOU GOT A JOB, THE STOCK MARKET IS BULLISH, STOP YOUR COMPLAINING!
(New York Times)
A tiny drop in unemployment rates has led to the declaration of end of the recession. Problem is, this new-found “prosperity” is not translating into an increase in household income. In fact, the average inflation-adjusted income of Americans has actually DECLINED by 6.7% since the recession officially ended in June 2009. And people wonder from whence comes all that energy behind the “Occupy Wall Street” protests across the country and pundits obsess over whether they will help or hurt Obama’s re-election rather than whether they will do anything to reverse the tide of decline in real income.
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TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGING: THEN IT WAS “ROCKY”; NOW IT’S “REAL STEEL.”
(Rapid City Journal)
The new Disney movie, featuring the heroic story of a father and son converting junkyard material into a robot as a world championship robot boxing contender is the box office champion of the week. Maybe it’s fundamentally the Rocky Balboa story of a self-trained boxing contender, but Disney catches the drift of the times by re-casting the story in a time when drones are being fashioned for more efficient killing in war, why not drones for boxers?
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OCCUPY STRANAHAN PARK! IT WAS LIKE FACEBOOK OR TWITTER, FACE-TO-FACE AND NO “ORGANIZATION.”
(South Florida Sun-Sentinel)
An “Occupy Wall Street”-type rally in Fort Lauderdale, Florida exemplifies the character of the movement as essentially leaderless and unorganized, an opportunity like Facebook for like-minded “Friends” to share their views and their particular causes without any central organization or set agenda for the event. It and similar gatherings may furnish a critical test case of the old sociological question whether organized “groups” or more amorphous “networks” are better able to bring about social change
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Quote of the day...
As a labor economist, I do not think the recession has ended. Job losers are having more trouble than ever before finding full-time jobs.
Henry S. Farber, economics professor at Princeton University, in a study showing that people who lost jobs in the recession and later found work again made an average of 17.5 percent less than they had in their old jobs
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Do you receive the daily headlines in the form of an early-morning e-mail? If you don’t and you would like to receive them, just send a note to sunstateactivist2@yahoo.com and you’ll be enrolled in the “Progressive breakfast club.”
The most pathetic in all of this are the people in the middle class, especially those unemployed, who allow themselves to be brainwashed by the wealthy Right and Corporate America. They continue to vote for, and elect, Republicans who are working for the latter two, at the their expense. If they [Republicans] manage to win the White House and the Senate, these misguided, misinformed people will have only themselves to blame for the certain economic decline which will follow.
Between 1992 and 2007 the average household income went up 13%. In that same time-frame, the top 1% saw their incomes increase by 123%. The top 400 households saw their incomes grow by 399%. In the pre-Bush tax era, those increases would have been a boost to federal revenues, but recent tax policies have actually increased the size of the deficit. Yes, the tax cuts helped everybody (except the budget) but the 1% of households with the highest incomes benefited disproportionately, reaping 38% of the total benefit, while the middle 20% of households received only 11%. If trickle down really worked, we’d have a BOOMING economy right now, wouldn’t we?