The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is out with a report showing the growing disparity between the richest 1% of the US population and the rest of us.

The Center used data from the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan research organiazation that advises Congress on budget matters.

The gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest fifths of the country more than tripled between 1979 and 2007 (the period for which these data are available), according to data the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued last week. Taken together with prior research, the new data suggest greater income concentration at the top of the income scale than at any time since 1928.

The gap in income between the wealthiest Americans and all others has grown strikingly in recent decades, the CBO data show.

In 1979, when the data begin, the average after-tax incomes of the top 1 percent of households were 7.9 times higher than those of the middle fifth of households. By 2007, top incomes were 23.9 times higher than those of the middle fifth — a more than tripling of the income gap.

Additionally, the tax cuts implemented under the George W. Bush administration exacerbated the income inequality even further.

Legislation enacted under the Bush Administration provided taxpayers with about $1.7 trillion in tax cuts through 2008. Because high-income households received by far the largest tax cuts — not only in dollar terms but also as a percentage of income — the tax cuts have increased the concentration of after-tax income at the top of the spectrum.

Currently, the debate involved whether to renew the Bush tax cuts that benefit those making over $250,000 a year.

Source: Income Gaps Between Very Rich and Everyone Else More Than Tripled In Last Three Decades, New Data Show , Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 25 June 2010.

Report (Acrobat): Income Gaps Between Very Rich and Everyone Else More Than Tripled In Last Three Decades, New Data Show

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These are the stories I recommend reading for July 27th 2010 through July 28th 2010:

• What Do You Lack? Probably Vitamin D: NY Times – Studies indicate that the effects of a vitamin D deficiency include an elevated risk of developing (and dying from) cancers of the colon, breast and prostate; high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease; osteoarthritis; and immune-system abnormalities that can result in infections and autoimmune disorders like multiple sclerosis, Type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis. – health
• House Approves Money for Wars, but Rift Deepens: NY Times – The House of Representatives agreed on Tuesday to provide $59 billion to continue financing America’s two wars, but the vote showed deepening divisions and anxiety among Democrats over the course of the nearly nine-year-old conflict in Afghanistan. – afghanistan congress
• Water Board Sends Two Desalination Issues to Ballot: Marin IJ – The controversial desalination issue is again heating up after the water board decided to put its own measure on the November ballot addressing the issue. The measure only arose after a citizens initiative successfully qualified a desalination issue for the ballot just last month. During a heated special water agency meeting Monday night, supporters of the initiative said the district put up a measure as way to obstruct the public effort to halt the desalination process. – marin desalination 2010 campaigns
• NASA Says It’s the Hottest Year on Record: McClatchy – Scientists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies reported recently that the average global temperature was higher over the past 12 months than during any other 12-month period in history. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has released corroborating data, adding that the past four months, including June, have each individually been the hottest on record as well. – climatechange globalwarming weather
• Kearney to Run for Petaluma Council: SR Press Democrat – – petaluma 2010 campaigns
• Frank Rich: ‘Why Has He Fallen Short?’: The New York Review of Books – The Obama of Hope and Change was too tough an act for Obama, a mere chief executive, to follow. Only Hollywood might have the power to create a superhero who could fulfill the messianic dreams kindled by his presence and rhetoric, maintain the riveting drama of his unlikely ascent, and sustain the national mood of deliverance that greeted his victory. As soon as Inauguration Day turned to night, the real Obama was destined to depreciate like the shiny new luxury car that starts to lose its book value the moment it’s driven off the lot. – obama
• 22 Statistics That Prove The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Wiped Out Of Existence In America – The 22 statistics that you are about to read prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America.The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace. – economics economy wealth capitalism middle-class
• Cities View Homesteads as a Source of Income: NY Times – Around the nation, cities and towns facing grim budget circumstances are grasping at unlikely — some would say desperate — means to bolster their shrunken tax bases. Like Beatrice, places like Dayton, Ohio, and Grafton, Ill., are giving away land for nominal fees or for nothing in the hope that it will boost the tax rolls and cut the lawn-mowing bills. – revenue cities local land realestate

The New York Times has a front-page story concerning the rightward tilt of the United States Supreme Court since John Roberts became Chief Justice five years ago.

Not surprisingly, the Court is the most conservative one in decades, surpassing even the Burger and Rehnquist courts ideologically.

This time, however, there is political science data to back the assertion up:

Almost all judicial decisions, (scholars) say, can be assigned an ideological value. Those favoring, say, prosecutors and employers are said to be conservative, while those favoring criminal defendants and people claiming discrimination are said to be liberal.

Analyses of databases coding Supreme Court decisions and justices’ votes along these lines, one going back to 1953 and another to 1937, show that the Roberts court has staked out territory to the right of the two conservative courts that immediately preceded it.

And while Chief Justice Roberts gets the credit — or malign — for turning the Court Right, it may actually be the ascension of Samuel Alito to the Court that will has had the most dramatic impact:

But only one change — Justice Alito’s replacement of Justice O’Connor — really mattered. That move defines the Roberts court. The point is not that Justice Alito has turned out to be exceptionally conservative, though he has: he is the third-most conservative justice to serve on the court since 1937, behind only Justice Thomas and Chief Justice Rehnquist. It is that he replaced the more liberal justice who was at the ideological center of the court.

And even the justice Alito replaced – Sandra Day O’Conner — expressed misgivings:

“If you think you’ve been helpful, and then it’s dismantled, you think, ‘Oh, dear,’ ” she said at William & Mary Law School in October in her usual crisp and no-nonsense fashion. “But life goes on. It’s not always positive.”

The Times piece has some interesting charts and also includes a pretty limited and misleading “How Your Views Compare” quiz.

Source:  Adam Liptak, “Court Under Roberts Is Most Conservative In Decades,” New York Times, 25 July 2010.

These are the stories I recommend reading for July 25th 2010 through July 26th 2010:

• Secret CIA Paramilitaries’ Role in Civilian Deaths: The Guardian – US and allied commanders frequently deny allegations of mass civilian casualties, claiming they are Taliban propaganda or ploys to get compensation, which are contradicted by facts known to the military. But the logs demonstrate how much of the contemporaneous US internal reporting of air strikes is simply false. – afghanistan military CIA obama
• Kabul War Diary: Wikileaks – The Afghan War Diary is the most significant archive about the reality of war to have ever been released during the course of a war. The deaths of tens of thousands is normally only a statistic but the archive reveals the locations and the key events behind each most of these deaths. We hope its release will lead to a comprehensive understanding of the war in Afghanistan and provide the raw ingredients necessary to change its course. – afghanistan military obama
• View Is Bleaker Than Official Portrayal of War in Afghanistan: NY Times – A six-year archive of classified military documents made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal. The secret documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, are a daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year. – afghanistan military obama
• WikiLeaks and the War: New Yorker – This stash will be compared to the Pentagon Papers, and in some ways that’s right—WikiLeaks, like Daniel Ellsberg, has been accused of ignoring the national interest. (An unfair charge, unless by “national interest” one means the political interests of a particular Administration.) But the Pentagon Papers were a synthetic analysis, a history of the war in Vietnam. WikiLeaks has given us research materials for a history of the war in Afghanistan. To make full use of them, we will, again, have to think hard about what we are trying to learn: Is it what we are doing, day to day, on the ground in Afghanistan, and how we could do it better? Or what we are doing in Afghanistan at all? – afghanistan military obama
• No to Oligarchy: Sen. Bernie Sanders – While the middle class disappears and poverty increases the wealthiest people in our country are not only doing extremely well, they are using their wealth and political power to protect and expand their very privileged status at the expense of everyone else. – economy taxes wealth sanders
• November Props Pros & Cons: Capital Notes – Unusual alliances… pointed and sometimes personal arguments… and independent analysis — all can be found in the newly released draft documents for this November statewide ballot guide. Voters are facing a pretty sizable fall ballot — ten measures in all – campaigns 2010 california
• Intelligence Nominee’s Contractor Ties May Come Under Scrutiny: LA Times – Four months after James R. Clapper left his federal job as head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in June 2006, he joined the boards of three government contractors, two of which had been doing business with his agency while he was there.<br />
  <br />
  It was not the only revolving door entered by Clapper, who is now President Obama’s nominee to be director of national intelligence. – intelligence CIA lobbying obama
• Portugal Turns to Angola to Grow: NY Times – Portugal, one of Europe’s ailing economies, is increasingly placing its hopes of recovery on Angola, a former colony that has established itself as one of the strongest economies in sub-Saharan Africa — thanks largely to oil and diamonds. The shift comes as competition is getting stiffer in Brazil, another booming former colony, and as Portugal’s traditional European trading partners, led by Spain, struggle under a mountain of debt and soaring joblessness. – angola
• Court Under Roberts Is Most Conservative in Decades: NY Times – In those five years, the court not only moved to the right but also became the most conservative one in living memory, based on an analysis of four sets of political science data. – supremecourt
• Governor: Freezing AB32 ‘Would Be Devastating’: SF Chronicle – Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says political candidates and forces in his own party who argue for the suspension of the state’s climate change law are “trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes” and have “the intention of eliminating” the landmark climate change bill he signed in 2006. – california climatechange 2010 campaigns
• Dueling Desalination Measures Might End Up On November Ballot: Marin IJ – The controversy over desalination will come into focus Monday when the Marin Municipal Water District looks at dueling measures that could both end up on November’s ballot. – marin desalination 2010 campaigns

These are the stories I recommend reading for July 23rd 2010:

• Cabindan Separatists In Exile Deny End to Conflict: IRIN – Offers of peace by senior officials of the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (FLEC), which seemingly ended a long-standing separatist conflict in northern Angola, were made without the knowledge or consent of its president, Henrique N’Zita Tiago, and exiled leaders in France describe the olive branch as a “coup d’état”. – angola cabinda
• Toxic Legacy of US assault on Fallujah ‘Worse Than Hiroshima’: The Independent – Dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004, exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, according to a new study. – iraq cancer health history military
• Counting the Cost of Zimbabwe’s ‘Blood Diamonds’: The Guardian – Mutare, a nest of spies and paranoia in Zimbabwe’s wild east, is the latest corner of Africa to discover the corrupting power of diamonds. The nearby Marange fields contain deposits claimed to be worth billions of dollars, potentially making the crisis-torn country one of the world’s top diamond producers. – africa
• War on Terror or War of Terror?: CounterPunch – Critical evidence from the British government and other sources suggest that the “War on Terror” has actually destabilized the Middle East and increased the terror threat throughout the globe. The former head of Britain’s MI5 – Baroness Manningham-Buller – finds that the Iraq war has dramatically contributed to the growing terror danger as directed against the United Kingdom and its citizens. – waronterror military iraq afghanistan
• U.S. Money Wasted on Afghan Projects, Auditor Finds: LA Times – A federal watchdog criticized U.S. agencies on Thursday for squandering taxpayer money on facilities in Afghanistan that are too complex and costly for the Afghan government to maintain. U.S. officials acknowledge that they plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to hire contractors to operate a complex of buildings in troubled Kandahar and other facilities in Afghanistan for the next 10 years. – afghanistan military
• National Guard and Reserve Suicide Rates Climbing: McClatchy – Sixty-five members of the Guard and Reserve took their own lives during the first six months of 2010, compared with 42 for the same period in 2009. The grim tally is further evidence that suicides continue to plague the military even though it’s stepped up prevention efforts through counseling and mental health awareness programs. – military iraq afghanistan
• P Street Project to Lobby for Progressives’ Agenda: Washington Post – The P Street Project is an effort by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee to build upon the progressive movement’s online organizing of the past few years and move into the business of registered lobbying. The lobby has recently advocated on some issues during a trial run, but will be officially launched here at Netroots Nation, a gathering of 2,100 liberal leaders, bloggers and activists. – progressive campaigns 2010
• 36 Hours In Florence: NY Times – Evidence of a more youthful and revitalized Florence is everywhere. Dilapidated piazzas have been refreshed, contemporary art galleries have sprung up, and old-school palazzi have been turned into trendy restaurants. Traffic has also improved, making the city even more pleasant to navigate. – travel italy
• Married, but Sleeping Alone: NY Times – Nearly one in four American couples sleep in separate bedrooms or beds, the National Sleep Foundation reported in a 2005 survey. Recent studies in England and Japan have found similar results. And the National Association of Home Builders says it expects 60 percent of custom homes to have dual master bedrooms by 2015. – marriage household
• Change Comes to a Place That Doesn’t Care for It – NY Times – Veteran senators say they have never seen the chamber so bogged down in partisanship. Members are getting whiplash as they watch colleagues come and go, creating an aura of instability in a political body that historically has looked upon turnover as something best left to the House. – congress senate
• Cleaning Products Linked to Breast Cancer: SF Chronicle – A new study in Environmental Health magazine suggests that using conventional cleaning products may increase a woman’s risk of breast cancer. The study surveyed 1,500 women, half who’d been diagnosed with cancer and half who had not. The women who reported heavy use of cleaning products — particularly air fresheners and mold and mildew control products — had twice the risk of having cancer as those with lowest reported use. – cancer health environment household
• Woolsey Introduces Bill to Salvage Public Option: Marin IJ – The public option that Woolsey, D-Petaluma, is proposing is based on a robust version proposed early in the health care reform debate before it was modified in hopes of attracting the votes of those opposed to the idea, Woolsey said. The option would create a government health insurance plan that would compete with private insurers. – healthcare publicoption woolsey marin
• Only 2 California House Races IDd As Competitive: SF Chronicle – Three months before the Nov. 2 election, only two of the state’s 53 House members – Reps. Jerry McNerney, D-Pleasanton, and Dan Lungren, R-Gold River (Sacramento County) – face credible threats to their re-election bids, according to party insiders and independent analysts. Most Bay Area members are routinely re-elected with 70 to 80 percent of the vote. – 2010 california congress democrats republicans campaigns
• Most Sonoma County Districts Cutting School Days (PD) – More than half of Sonoma County’s school districts will cut classroom days from the upcoming school year, and still more have dropped staff development days under financial pressure from California’s budget crisis. Twenty-two districts are reducing instructional time, and 12 of them are cutting five days — the maximum allowed. – education petaluma sonomacounty
• Delicious Toolbox: 80+ Updated Tools and Resources – – delicious web2.0 socialmedia

Source: “Pentagon Faces Growing Pressures to Trim Budget,” New York Times, 23 July 2010.

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Little guy reached another milestone: laughing.

One in five American families suffered a 25 percent or greater decline in available household income this year, according to the new “Economic Security Index.” An analysis by The Rockefeller Foundation and Yale University looked at past and current data to conclude that “economic insecurity for American families in 2009 and 2010 was greater than at any time” in the last 25 years.

According to the Rockefeller foundation:

The Economic Security Index (ESI) measures the share of Americans who experience at least a 25% drop in their available family income whether due to a decline in income or a spike in medical spending or a combination of the two, and who lack an adequate financial safety net to catch them when they fall. A higher ESI therefore indicates greater insecurity, much as a rising unemployment rate signals a faltering economy.

Here are direct links to the studies in Acrobat format:

Economic Security at Risk: Findings from the Economic Security Index

The Economic Security Index: A new measure of the economic security of American works and their families

The Youth In Arts Italian Street Painting Festival is an awesome annual event in San Rafael with kids and professional artists.