99 Faces, 99 Signs

An Occupy Philly Tumblr:

Inequality reading: The Top 1 Percent

American households right at the 99th percentile (that is, the cut-off for the top 1 percent) will earn about $506,553 in cash income this year, according to a Tax Policy Center analysis. The income curve is very steep at the high end, meaning that people just a few tenths of a percentile point above that make much, much more. A family at the 99.5th percentile, for example, makes $815,868; its neighbor at the 99.9th percentile makes more than double that, at $2,075,574 a year.

The top 1 percent of American earners receive about a fifth of the country’s income, according to Thomas Picketty and Emmanuel Saez, two economists who study inequality.

But as we’ve noted before, economic inequality isn’t just about what you make each year. It’s about how much wealth you have already accumulated, too. And inequality is far, far greater when you include wealth.

According to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research organization, the top 1 percent of Americans by net worth hold about a third of American wealth.

via economix.blogs.nytimes.com

T decides to kill his daddy

Taken at Philadelphia Museum of Art

Does terrorism justify exempting the Defense Department from budget cuts?

That's what Bentley Rayburn suggests at National Review today:

Congress should remember that we are still facing very real threats. Today, we are fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and fighting al-Qaeda across the globe using intelligence and special-operations forces backed up with Predator drones and other modern technologies. We’re also protecting the nascent democratic movements in Libya and elsewhere, expanding operations to hot spots like Yemen, and rotating home a fighting force worn down by a decade of repeated, extended combat deployments.

Terror attacks are on the rise as the threat spreads around the globe — according to the National Counterterrorism Center, there were 2,534 terror attacks worldwide in 2010, nearly triple the 945 recorded five years ago.

I found that last paragraph interesting, so I went to the National Counterterrorism Center website. I couldn't verify Rayburn's numbers, but I did find a couple of other very interesting charts in the NTC's report on 2010 activity.

Like this one:

And this one:

So: Barely any non-military Americans were killed in terrorist incidents around the world in 2010—and 13 of the 15 who did die, died in Afghanistan. (One in Iraq, one in Uganda.) No private-citizen Americans were kidnapped.

Which is to say: It sure doesn't look like Americans are the targets of all this rising terroristic activity.

That's not to say that the United States doesn't have a legitimate concern with this trend. And these numbers don't include uniformed U.S. personnel who died in terror attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the charts above raise the question of whether rising terroristic activity "worldwide" is an actual threat to American security. That's the metric that should determine defense spending priorities: A civil war in the Congo—tragic as that is—doesn't necessarily count.

But the arguments by Rayburn and Max Boot and other hawks rest on the presumption that the United States military should remain a globe-spanning colossus. That's an issue that should be on the table. Our interests—and our security—doesn't stop at our borders. But neither are they infinite. Certainly our resources aren't. Nor should the defense budget be.

John Yoo's red herring

The former Bush Administration torture advocate thinks Obama is a wuss for actually trying to justify the assassination of an American citizen:

It may be that the Obama administration thinks that U.S. citizens who join the enemy are entitled to special rules — like those that apply to the police, instead of those that apply to the military. But this would be wrong too. As I explained in the Wall Street Journal last week, ever since the Civil War, our national leaders and the Supreme Court have agreed that a citizen who joins the enemy must suffer the consequences of his belligerency, with the same status as that of an alien enemy. Think of the incentives that the strange Obama hybrid rule creates. Our al-Qaeda enemy will want to recruit American agents, who will benefit from criminal-justice rules that give them advantages in carrying out operations against us (like the right to remain silent, to Miranda and lawyers, to a speedy jury trial, etc.). Our troops and agents in the field may well hesitate in the field, as they will not be able to tell in the heat of the moment whether an enemy is American or not.

I call BS. Nobody—nobody—disputes the right of American troops to engage enemy combatants in battle on an actual battlefield. If that's what Yoo means by the heat of the moment—and it seems so—then there's no dispute. If Anwar al-Awlaki had been charging against American troops in Afghanistan, AK-47 in hand, there would be no debate to be had. The chance that an American soldier will hesitate in that moment, wondering if the enemy is an American citizen, is virtually nil. And Yoo—once again—is disingenuous for suggesting so.

The debate comes in murkier areas. If reports are to be believed, al-Awlaki was tracked by American drones for weeks while officials waited to get a clear shot at him that wouldn't result in massive collateral damage. That's admirable if true, but it's also something less than a "heat of the moment" situation: American officials were able to make a considered decision to assassinate the man. And because of that, it's more than fair to question the process by which al-Awlaki was targeted.

But this is the world Yoo inhabits. There are precious few ticking time bombs, yet they always justify extreme action where considered processes might serve Americans better.

Today in inequality reading: Americans are getting poorer

WASHINGTON — In a grim sign of the enduring nature of the economic slump, household income declined more in the two years after the recession ended than it did during the recession itself, new research has found.

Between June 2009, when the recession officially ended, and June 2011, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 6.7 percent, to $49,909, according to a study by two former Census Bureau officials. During the recession — from December 2007 to June 2009 — household income fell 3.2 percent.

The finding helps explain why Americans’ attitudes toward the economy, the country’s direction and its political leaders have continued to sour even as the economy has been growing. Unhappiness and anger have come to dominate the political scene, including the early stages of the 2012 presidential campaign.

via nytimes.com

It's this kind of dynamic that helps create the "Occupy Wall Street" movement.

When Philadelphia sucks

A MOTHER of four who was the director of her own elementary school and day care in Overbrook was a bystander killed by reckless gunfire Saturday night, police said.

"She was an excellent person," said Homicide Lt. Mel Williams. "You have a real victim here."

Hafeezah Nunrid-Din, 31, was heading to a car with her father on Malvern Avenue near 58th Street shortly before 8 p.m. when two young men ran past her and her dad, Williams said.

Shortly after, gunshots rang out, according to police. It's believed the bullets were intended for the two men who ran past Nunrid-Din but instead, they hit her once in the left shoulder and once in the right side of her back, police said.

via philly.com