Stealing the FBI's Spy Files

What an amazing story:

Do We Need a Bigger Congress?

Bruce Bartlett looks at the issue:

One problem that continues to fester is that the Constitution says no state may have fewer than one House member. This means that small states such as Wyoming, Vermont and North Dakota are overrepresented in the House — and other states are underrepresented. This is a violation of the principle of one person one vote, established by the Supreme Court in the 1964 case Reynolds v. Sims.
A number of political scientists and legal scholars now contend that an increase in the size of the House is necessary to relieve the growing malapportionment under the fixed size of 435, the minimum representation requirement and the mathematical formula used for reapportionment. Articles making this argument have appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Polity, the Washburn Law Journal, the New York University Journal of Legislation and Public Policy and The New York Times....
In 2009, some activists brought suit in federal court challenging the constitutionality of the law freezing the number of House members at 435. But it was rejected by a Federal District Court in 2010, which said the question was a political one for Congress to decide, and the Supreme Court refused to review the case.
In closing, let me note that according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the House of Representatives is on the very high side of population per representative at 729,000. The population per member in the lower house of other major countries is considerably smaller: Britain and Italy, 97,000; Canada and France, 114,000; Germany, 135,000; Australia, 147,000; and Japan, 265,000.

While I appreciate the idea that one person representing 729,000 people is pretty crazy, I just can't imagine how  many clowns we'd end up with if we halved the size of the districts.  If Jim Jordan is the best his district can offer, who else would get elected if the districts were cut in half.  We could use a better class of public servants instead of more of what we've got.

RIP Phil Everly

Phil Everly, who with his brother Don made up the most revered vocal duo of the rock-music era — their exquisite harmonies profoundly influencing the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Byrds and countless younger rock, folk and country singers — died Friday in Burbank, Calif., of complications from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, his wife, Patti Everly, said. He was 74.

Family Budgets, In and Out of the Social Safety Net

Via The Atlantic Cities:

This month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics compared yearly spending between families that use public assistance programs, such as food stamps and Medicaid, and families that don't. And surprise, surprise, households that rely on the safety net lead some pretty frugal lifestyles. On average, they spend $30,582 in a year, compared to $66,525 for families not on public assistance. Meanwhile, they spend a third less on food, half as much on housing, and 60 percent less on entertainment.
These figures, drawn from the 2011 Consumer Expenditure Survey, don't capture all non-cash perks some low-income families get from the government, such as healthcare coverage through Medicaid. But they give you a sense of the kind of tight finances these families deal with.

But that surfer on Fox News buys lobster, so we know folks in government programs have it easy! I think I'll pay my taxes and be happy I'm not struggling to rotate which bills to pay this month.  Then again, because of how the tax laws are structured, I can stash away over $16,000 in a tax deferred 401K account while folks I know try to raise children on not much more than that in income.  I've told conservatives I know that they can quit their jobs and take government programs if it is such a good deal, but they say they are too proud.  Also, that might cut into their Keno playing funds.

Drought and Civil War

How four years of drought helped start Syria's civil war:

Four years of devastating drought beginning in 2006 caused at least 800,000 farmers to lose their entire livelihood and about 200,000 simply abandoned their lands, according to the Center for Climate & Security. In some areas, all agriculture ceased. In others, crop failures reached 75 percent. And generally as much as 85 percent of livestock died of thirst or hunger. Hundreds of thousands of Syria’s farmers gave up, abandoned their farms, and fled to the cities and towns in search of almost non-existent jobs and severely short food supplies. Outside observers including UN experts estimated that between 2 and 3 million of Syria’s 10 million rural inhabitants were reduced to “extreme poverty.” 
As they flocked into the cities and towns seeking work and food, the “economic” or “climate” refugees immediately found that they had to compete not only with one another for scarce food, water, and jobs, but also with the existing foreign refugee population. Syria was already a refuge for a quarter of a million Palestinians and about 100,000 Iraqis who had fled the war and occupation. Formerly prosperous farmers were lucky to get jobs as hawkers or street sweepers. And in the desperation of the times, hostilities erupted among groups that were competing just to survive.
Survival was the key issue. The senior UN Food and Agriculture Organization representative in Syria turned to the USAID program for help. Terming the situation “a perfect storm,” in November 2008 he warned that Syria faced “social destruction.” He noted that the Syrian minister of agriculture had “stated publicly that [the] economic and social fallout from the drought was ‘beyond our capacity as a country to deal with.’” His appeal fell on deaf ears: the USAID director commented that “we question whether limited USG resources should be directed toward this appeal at this time,” according to a cable obtained by WikiLeaks.

The Egypt uprisings grew out of wheat shortages. Never underestimate the availability of food as it relates to stability.

Germany Also Shorts Infrastructure Spending

NYT (h/t nc links):

Germany was once known for its superfast autobahns, efficient industry and ability to rally public resources for big projects, like integration with the former East Germany. But more recently, it has been forced to confront a somewhat uncharacteristic problem: Its infrastructure — roads, bridges, train tracks, waterways and the like — is aging in a way that experts say could undermine its economic growth for years to come.

As it has been preaching austerity to its neighbors, Germany itself has kept a tight rein on spending at home. Now critics abroad, including the European Union and the United States, are pressing it to do more to stimulate its own economy, and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s likely partners in a new coalition government, the left-leaning Social Democrats, are seeking more money for a variety of domestic programs.

A good place to start plowing money into, many experts say, is the nation’s physical underpinnings. A government-appointed commission recently concluded that it needed to spend 7.2 billion euros a year, or $9.7 billion, for the next 15 years — roughly 70 percent more than it spends now — just to get existing infrastructure back into shape. Others say that even more is needed for schools, for instance, and for extending fiber optic cables to less populated areas.

$9.7 billion a year?  That sounds like nothing compared to what ASCE thinks the U.S. needs to spend ($3.6 trillion by 2020.  Admittedly, ASCE isn't exactly a neutral observer).  But still, Germany has about 25% of the number of people as the U.S., and spends a tiny fraction of what the U.S. does on defense spending, so $9.7 billion a year is practically nothing.  To put it in perspective, the Brent Spence Bridge replacement, carrying I-75 across the Ohio River from Cincinnati to Northern Kentucky, is expected to cost $2.5 billion by itself.  Anyway, at least we aren't the only extremely short-sighted developed nation.

Petroleum Coke Piles Anger Neighbors

AP:

With the amount of Canadian oil entering the U.S. increasing almost daily, refineries like Marathon in Detroit, BP in Whiting, Ind., and Phillips 66 in Roxana, Ill., have expanded to handle the glut. Even more oil could be on the way if the controversial Keystone XL pipeline is approved, though by then additional domestic pipelines could direct some to refineries in other regions, experts say.
Refineries usually sell the petcoke to other companies, which store it until it can be loaded onto Great Lakes ships for export to places like China. Burning it emits high levels of soot and greenhouse gases, so its use in the U.S. is limited.
In Detroit, petcoke began appearing along the Detroit River in the spring, several months after the Marathon Petroleum Corp. refinery completed a $2.2 billion expansion. But an outcry by residents, who shot video footage of the blowing grit, prompted city officials to order the removal of the piles.
In Chicago, residents became alarmed when the black piles began growing about six months ago, said Tom Shepherd, a member of a neighborhood group. The last straw was when the petcoke went airborne on Aug. 30 and blew into their yards, churches and a Little League field.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has ordered the city Health Department to adopt regulations for petcoke, while aldermen introduced competing ordinances to regulate or ban it outright. The city and Illinois Attorney Gen. Lisa Madigan have filed suit against Beemsterboer over the petcoke on his sites.

The anti-Oil Sands crowd and the folks concerned with global warming will combine with neighbors of refineries to really limit these petroleum coke piles, unless the owners find a way to effectively control dust emissions.  As unpopular as petroleum coke is in these crowds, they have to be better neighbors.

Indiana Police Chief Gets Tasered For Fundraiser

AP:

Knightstown police Chief Danny Baker has used pig roasts and golf tournaments to augment his department's shrinking budget, but badly in need of $9,000 for a new squad car, he's reprising his most shocking fundraising approach to date: getting shot by a stun gun.
The jocular 63-year-old chief and another Knightstown official were planning to have a detective shoot them with a Taser at a free event Wednesday night in the middle school gym in their small eastern Indiana town. Spectators — who Baker hopes feel compelled to donate — will get a firsthand look at how 50,000 volts of low-amp electricity affects the human body.
"It's a shame we have to go to the extent of having fundraisers and getting electrified and so forth, but with small-town budgets you have to do something to get by," said Baker, a lifelong Knightstown resident who has been in law enforcement for 35 years.
Many rural communities like Knightstown, a mile-square town of 2,100 about 25 miles east of Indianapolis, are having to become inventive to fund needed services, said Brian Depew, executive director of the Center for Rural Affairs, an advocacy group based in Lyons, Neb.
Depew said federal farm bill funding for rural development has fallen by a third since 2003, leaving less money for police cars and other necessities in an era of shrinking rural populations and tax bases.
Some communities have taken to putting ads on cruisers, while others, like Knightstown, are relying on donations for help.

Why is their funding drying up?  For that, they can thank the Republicans they keep voting in office.  Anyway, here's what he raised:

 A police chief of a small eastern Indiana town who was shot by a stun gun at fundraising event to buy a new squad car says he raised about $800 in cash and received a $25,000 pledge from a Texas company.
Knightstown Police Chief Danny Baker says he's been receiving calls from all over the country and expects to collect more money. His goal was to raise $9,000 so the town of about 2,100 people about 25 miles east of Indianapolis could lease a new squad car. He says he might be able to get a second car.

This isn't the way to run a country.

A Conservative Solar Power War?

The New Republic:

Clean energy technology has always been an easy punching bag for conservatives. Propelled by growing strain of global warming denial within their party, Republicans in Congress have proposed to slash funding for renewable energy programs in half this year, and mocked the idea of a green economy as “groovy” liberal propaganda. Their argument, as laid out by House Republicans and libertarian organs like the Cato Institute and Reason magazine, is that the federal government shouldn’t “pick winners and losers” in the energy markets or gamble taxpayer dollars on renewable-energy loans to companies like Solyndra, the Silicon Valley solar panel manufacturer that went bankrupt in 2011 after receiving $535 million in federal loan guarantees. The assumption has always been that, without heavy government subsidies, renewable energy sources like solar and wind power would never be able to compete with fossil fuels.

But something funny has happened to renewables that major power companies and their Republican allies didn’t see coming. Over the past two years, the solar industry has skyrocketed, with one new solar unit installed every four minutes in the US, according to the renewable energy research group Greentech Media. The price of photovoltaic panels has fallen 62 percent since January 2011. Once considered a boutique energy source, solar power has become a cost-competitive alternative for many consumers, costing an average $143 per megawatt-hour, down from $236 in the beginning of 2011. Backed by powerful conservative groups, public utilities in several states are now pushing to curb the solar industry, and asking regulators to raise fees and impose new restrictions on solar customers. And as more people turn to rooftop solar as a way to reduce energy costs—90,000 businesses and homeowners installed panels last year, up 46 percent from 2011—the issue is pitting pro-utilities Republicans against this fledgling movement of libertarian-minded activists who see independent power generation as an individual right. In other words, the fight over solar power is raging within the GOP itself.

One of the big breakthroughs in the next decade or so will be how to efficiently balance energy demand and renewable supply.  I would anticipate some upland reservoirs, and maybe hydrolysis of water, along with batteries, may be storage options.  This will be a nice mathematical challenge for grid operators.

The Threat Posed by Antibiotic Resistance

Maryn McKenna:

If we really lost antibiotics to advancing drug resistance — and trust me, we’re not far off — here’s what we would lose. Not just the ability to treat infectious disease; that’s obvious.
But also: The ability to treat cancer, and to transplant organs, because doing those successfully relies on suppressing the immune system and willingly making ourselves vulnerable to infection. Any treatment that relies on a permanent port into the bloodstream — for instance, kidney dialysis. Any major open-cavity surgery, on the heart, the lungs, the abdomen. Any surgery on a part of the body that already harbors a population of bacteria: the guts, the bladder, the genitals. Implantable devices: new hips, new knees, new heart valves. Cosmetic plastic surgery. Liposuction. Tattoos.
We’d lose the ability to treat people after traumatic accidents, as major as crashing your car and as minor as your kid falling out of a tree. We’d lose the safety of modern childbirth: Before the antibiotic era, 5 women died out of every 1,000 who gave birth. One out of every nine skin infections killed. Three out of every 10 people who got pneumonia died from it.
And we’d lose, as well, a good portion of our cheap modern food supply. Most of the meat we eat in the industrialized world is raised with the routine use of antibiotics, to fatten livestock and protect them from the conditions in which the animals are raised. Without the drugs that keep livestock healthy in concentrated agriculture, we’d lose the ability to raise them that way. Either animals would sicken, or farmers would have to change their raising practices, spending more money when their margins are thin. Either way, meat — and fish and seafood, also raised with abundant antibiotics in the fish farms of Asia — would become much more expensive.
And it wouldn’t be just meat. Antibiotics are used in plant agriculture as well, especially on fruit. Right now, a drug-resistant version of the bacterial disease fire blight is attacking American apple crops. There’s currently one drug left to fight it. And when major crops are lost, the local farm economy goes too.

Again, the routine feeding of antibiotics to healthy livestock is a practice that needs to stop.

Moving Between States

Chris Walker made an awesome interactive chart showing migration between states based on 2012 American Community Survey data:

A little explanation of what it shows:

The visualization is a circle cut up into arcs, the light-colored pieces along the edge of the circle, each one representing a state. The arcs are connected to each other by links, and each link represents the flow of people between two states. States with longer arcs exchange people with more states (California and New York, for example, have larger arcs). Links are thicker when there are relatively more people moving between two states. The color of each link is determined by the state that contributes the most migrants, so for example, the link between California and Texas is blue rather than orange, because California sent over 62,000 people to Texas, while Texas only sent about 43,000 people to California. Note that, to keep the graphic clean, I only drew a link between two states if they exchanged at least 10,000 people.

The surprise data point for me is that more Texans moved to Ohio than Ohioans moved to Texas.

Fast Food Workers and Social Welfare Programs

The Wall Street Journal looks at the issue (h/t Ritholtz):

One point that isn't disputed: $7 billion isn't much, in the context of the U.S. fast-food industry and of government benefits. It is about one-fifth or one-quarter as much as fast-food restaurants pay their front-line workers in wages and benefits. And it is less than 2% of the total benefits paid out by the four programs studied by the researchers.

Why, then, focus on fast food? "$7 billion is $7 billion. You have to start somewhere," Dr. Allegretto said, adding that the proportion of fast-food workers who receive benefits from those programs—52%—is larger than in other major industry categories she and her colleagues studied.

Dr. Allegretto said the figure is an underestimate, for several reasons. First, there is no ready-made data set of fast-food workers, so researchers used three different sources and several assumptions. "We always erred on the side of being conservative," she said. The researchers also omitted many other benefits programs.

Some economists praised the research, which hasn't yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. "They produced the best estimates available using sound methods and data," said Aaron J. Sojourner, a labor economist at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota.

I find it interesting that the two industries with the highest percentage of employees who had family members on social welfare programs were both food production or provision industries.  So does that have something to do with the government subsidizing cheap food?  I don't see how, when profits for the companies have increased over time.  I think this does have to do with the half-assed employer-based health care system we have, and the fact that the restaurant industry has long used part-time help that they stiffed on health insurance.  I would be curious to know what would happen if we got an increased minimum wage combined with a tax on large businesses that don't provide health insurance based on their total number of part-time and full-time workers.  I would expect they might cut part-time employees, but dramatically increase full-time workers.  In the end, an employer-based system doesn't work if an increasing number of employers don't provide insurance.  Since we are there, we need to work out a different system.

In New England - Fall 2013

In New England - Fall 2013 from Vincent Urban on Vimeo.

Who's Taking it on the Chin in the Recession?

Rural folks:

Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released its annual survey of rural America, which puts the divergence in stark relief. Non-metropolitan areas experienced their first recorded period of population loss, and a decline in the labor force participation rate pushed unemployment down slightly (though the jobless rate surpassed the urban unemployment rate earlier this year). But even as the rest of the country entered a tepid recovery, and some rural areas gained jobs from the natural gas boom, net employment didn't budge rural regions:

The bifurcation adds another dimension to the widening political and social urban-rural divide.
The Department of Agriculture has a whole division devoted to rural issues, which is aimed at fixing the jobs problem through initiatives such as farming cooperatives and infrastructure development. But the long-term problem might be more structural in nature, as the USDA suggests in its finding that suburbanization is slowing down:

The housing mortgage crisis slowed suburban development and contributed to an historic shift within metro regions, with outlying metro counties now growing at a slower rate than central counties. Similarly, nonmetro counties adjacent to metro areas that had been growing rapidly from suburban development for decades declined in population for the first time as a group during 2010-12. This period may simply be an interruption in suburbanization or it could turn out to be the end of a major demographic regime.

It's important to note, though, that not all cities have recovered equally from the recession.

As much as I love this part of the country, we are getting killed.  It just isn't good.

The Ox

The Ox from Ben Proudfoot on Vimeo.

Not the First Time The Postal Service Delivered on Sunday

Here's a little Postal Service history I didn't know:

And in 1810, Congress passed a law requiring that local post offices be open for at least an hour on Sundays; most were open for much longer.

Despite and because of all that, the Postal Service was also … a party. As the historian Claude Fischer puts it, "post offices themselves were important community centers, where townsfolk met, heard the latest news read aloud, and just lounged about." (The offices played that role, in part, because the Postal Service didn't offer home delivery, even in large cities, until after 1860.) On Sundays, that town-center role was magnified. When everything else was closed but the local church, post offices were places you could go not just to pick up your mail, but also to hang out. They were taverns for the week's tavern-less day. "Men would rush there as soon as the mail had arrived," Fischer writes, "staying on to drink and play cards." 

Post offices, as a result, were also sources of controversy. In the 1820s, leaders from a variety of Protestant denominations campaigned to end Sunday delivery on religious grounds. Similar movements would arise over the course of the 19th century. And the objection wasn't just to the Sunday-ness of Sunday delivery, to the fact that mail delivery on Sunday was a violation of the Sabbath. It was also to the social-ness of Sunday delivery. The six-day-delivery campaigns, Fischer writes, were "part of the churches’ wider efforts to enforce a 'Puritan Sabbath' against the demands of Mammon and against worldly temptations like those card games." Exacerbating the problem, from the Puritanical perspective, was the rise in immigration among Catholics, "many of whom," Fischer notes, "celebrated 'Continental' Sundays which included all sorts of secular pleasures—picnics, even beer halls—after (or instead of) church."......

Toward the end of the 19th century, though, another alliance would arise: Religious leaders would join with organized labor to end Sunday mail delivery. For workers, closing post offices on Sundays wasn't necessarily a matter of religion, but it was a matter of time. A Sunday-less work week was also a six-day work week. (Though, Fischer points out, "the church-labor alliance did have its limits. Protestant ministers and the union men disagreed on how the Lord’s day of 'rest' should be spent—in religious devotion or in play.")

It proved to be the right alliance for the right time.

Yeah, I didn't know they used to deliver mail on Sundays.  For more on Sunday drinking, see here and here and here and here and here.

These United Regions

Colin Woodard looks at how the eleven regional "nations" of North America that he laid out in his book, American Nations:A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America relate to today's politics in Tufts Magazine (h/t Kaye).  He describes the historical roots of each region and how those historical traits affect relations in group and between groups.  Here is the description of the Midlands, where my home county is on the borderland with Greater Appalachia:

America’s great swing region was founded by English Quakers, who believed in humans’ inherent goodness and welcomed people of many nations and creeds to their utopian colonies like Pennsylvania on the shores of Delaware Bay. Pluralistic and organized around the middle class, the Midlands spawned the culture of Middle America and the Heartland, where ethnic and ideological purity have never been a priority, government has been seen as an unwelcome intrusion, and political opinion has been moderate. An ethnic mosaic from the start—it had a German, rather than British, majority at the time of the Revolution—it shares the Yankee belief that society should be organized to benefit ordinary people, though it rejects top-down government intervention.

That seems pretty realistic, although the area is smaller than I would expect.  I personally would lump Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota in there, too, but I think the greater Liberalism in those regions cause Woodard to lump them in with New England.  So what seems to be the driving force of the American culture?  Jim Webb's Scots-Irish:

More recently, researchers have begun to probe beyond state boundaries to distinguish among different cultural streams. Robert Baller of the University of Iowa and two colleagues looked at late-twentieth-century white male “argument-related” homicide rates, comparing those in counties that, in 1850, were dominated by Scots-Irish settlers with those in other parts of the “Old South.” In other words, they teased out the rates at which white men killed each other in feuds and compared those for Greater Appalachia with those for Deep South and Tidewater. The result: Appalachian areas had significantly higher homicide rates than their lowland neighbors—“findings [that] are supportive of theoretical claims about the role of herding as the ecological underpinning of a code of honor.”
Another researcher, Pauline Grosjean, an economist at Australia’s University of New South Wales, found strong statistical relationships between the presence of Scots-Irish settlers in the 1790 census and contemporary homicide rates, but only in “southern” areas “where the institutional environment was weak”—which is the case in almost the entirety of Greater Appalachia. She further noted that in areas where Scots-Irish were dominant, settlers of other ethnic origins—Dutch, French, and German—were also more violent, suggesting that they had acculturated to Appalachian norms.

American gun culture and violence compared to Europe seems to be rooted in the folks who tend to describe themselves as American when asked their national origin:

A Small Town Wrestles with Immigration

Fremont, Nebraska deals with whether to repeal an ordinance to require renters to prove their citizenship status and making it a crime for landlords to rent to illegal immigrants.  The town is home to a Hormel packinghouse, and a large Hispanic population.  The debate centers around teaching English as a second language in the schools and social costs of the undocumented immigrants.  However, some of the talking points don't really hold up well:

Their influx drove the Hispanic population in this part of Nebraska from less than 1,000 in 1990 to nearly 16,000 today, roughly 20 percent of the population in the state’s northeastern corner. (Fremont’s population in 2012 was 26,167.)
But other facts about the Hispanic presence in the region are less cut-and-dry. Proponents of the ordinance point to Washington Elementary as evidence that overwhelming numbers of Fremont preschoolers arrive unable to speak English, but the school’s former principal told me that by the time those students are fifth graders, they’re score highest among the city’s elementary schools on statewide reading comprehension exams. Similarly, the CEO of the Fremont Area Medical Center said that while it’s true Hispanics account for roughly half a million dollars in unpaid medical bills each year, uninsured Hispanics actually pay up at a higher rate than uninsured white patients.

My experience has been that Hispanic immigrants are extremely hard-working, and contribute to making their community better, with strong families and family ties.  I would like to see immigration reform which would allow many more legal immigrants, and would allow more of these workers who are already here come out of the shadows and participate more in society.  The Fremont ordinance will hopefully go by the wayside.

Hurricane Sandy Aftermath and Recovery Roundup

This:


The Rider And The Storm from RYOT on Vimeo.


and this:


A Year of Recovery After Hurricane Sandy from The New York Times - Video on Vimeo.


and this, from someone who was slated to run in the New York Marathon and ended up volunteering in the aftermath: 

DeAngelis asked if we minded taking general care packages door-to-door. As for how to find the homes where the real need was, we were instructed to drive around sniffing out desperation.
“Look down a street and if it’s a disaster, go there.”
A short, friendly, high school senior advised me on the best approach: just thrust a bag at them and say, “This is for you.” Asking if they need it means they’ll say no, she said.
“Is it a pride thing?” I asked. She shrugged. “I think they just think other people probably need it more.”
It was just past 4:30 and already dark in the powerless section of the borough. The temperature was dropping fast, and not the healing, ice bath kind of cold. Harsh and getting harsher.
All we could see was what was illuminated by the headlights as we wound around trash, furniture, and mystery objects. It was hard to distinguish between what was dismantled during clean up and what the storm destroyed, and I didn’t try for long, because I was squinting for upward facing nails.
When we detected human-size movement, we hopped out. Christine mastered the art of getting people to accept the care packages: Beg them.
“We have a ton of food and supplies, will you please take some, for our sake?”
It wasn’t true. Garbage bags, diapers in the right sizes, and flashlights were scarce. But the residents kept claiming they weren’t the worst off. “Give it to those people over there. They need it more,” we heard from men and women standing in front of frames that used to hold up walls.
The exceptions were gloves and socks—no one turned those down. One woman shook her head at me, saying, “I’m fine,” but as I put the socks in her hand, it closed around them.
At one house where men were working below ground level, a tiny cloud of light from a lantern glowed up from the basement. I yelled, “Does anyone in there need socks?” They cheered.
Back at the car, I found a woman nodding as Christine listed what we had left. The woman didn’t say anything, she was just nodding. Christine handed me items and once my arms were full, she finally spoke. “I don’t know if I need it—I will need it—I just don’t need it now—I can’t think.” I asked if I could take the stuff inside and she nodded again. I walked in and set it in a corner of a dimly lit kitchen. Then I looked up to see four people at a table, a candle flickering between them, all watching me silently.

Wow.  It is hard to imagine such devastation, and yet people didn't want to take any assistance.

Bill Gross Not Talking His Book

At least for once:

Bill Gross is feeling guilty about being among the wealthiest people in America. That's why he thinks that he and other filthy rich members of the 1% should pay more in taxes.
"Having gotten rich at the expense of labor, the guilt sets in and I begin to feel sorry for the less well-off," writes Gross, co-founder of investment firm Pimco and manager of the biggest bond fund in the world, in the opening of his latest monthly investment letter.
Gross usually devotes his outlook pieces to discussions of the bond market. And they are often littered with pop culture references. He didn't disappoint this month.
He compared those who complain about paying a greater percentage of their wealth in taxes to the Disney (DIS, Fortune 500) character Scrooge McDuck.
"It's time to kick out and share some of your good fortune by paying higher taxes and reforming them to favor economic growth and labor, as opposed to corporate profits and individual gazillions," Gross wrote.
Gross is at the very top of the ultra-rich group he is talking about. Forbes estimates his net worth at $2.2 billion, which would put him in the top 0.01%.
Gross said he and other top 1% earners need to recognize that they have had the "privilege of riding the credit wave and a credit boom for the past three decades. Paraphrasing President Obama's "you didn't build that" comment from the 2012 campaign, Gross reminds the rich "you did not create that wave. You rode it."

I've been critical of Gross at times, but in this case, he gets it.  Today's inequality is staggering, and it can't last.  There are two options, raise wages or raise taxes.  I'd be happier than hell to see this be handled by the private sector, but I won't hold my breath.