Required Reading

Feeling bad about your minimum wage job?  Have a deathburger!

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/opinion/02kristof.html?_r=1&hp

Kristof cites a study that shows that inequality is incredibly injurious to the population as a whole, especially a population where those with less make up such a large percentage of the population.

Because we are intensely aware of where we stand in society as a whole and because most of us stand pretty far below the Galtian Wall Street Banksters in terms of wealth and the ability to violate the law with impunity, we feel pretty shitty.

And that actively makes us sick.

It also makes us violent.

In Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore raised a good question.  America and Canada have roughly the same amount of guns per capita, but Americans commit a far greater number of murders and violent gun crimes per person than do the Canadians.  Why is that?

Clearly, this study suggests that the fact that America is very much more unequal than Canada would be a leading explanation of this phenomenon.

The authors of the study are epidemiologists not political scientists, so let me be clear in saying that they are not advocating a radical redistribution of wealth and greater equality.

That's what I'm doing.

Also, harkening back to the previous post, the times when political violence was at its highest in this country - aside from the Civil War - was during the Gilded Age. I've wondered in other posts, why we haven't had more riots in this country.

I think the American genius has been Jay Gould's observation that he could hire half the working class to kill the other half.  Nowadays that mechanism is on autopilot.