Thank you for educating me.
This is a really good roundup. I grok a bit more about what y’all’re having to deal with.
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This is story of my life. Behind. On… everything. Everywhere…
Not gonna like. Sure it’s not true. 
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Moving on, but in a similar vein, you might find this from today’s Guardian of relevance.
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FTA:
… Fear of revolution in the cold war years kept unions strong and boardrooms wary of excess: the mid-70s, famed for union militancy, were the most equal years in British history. …
Dang.
And in the U.S., the unions have had declining membership for years. We did benefit from a higher standard of living, having union workers earning decent wages. I know a organizer. She is working to change this, but it is clearly an uphill battle right now.
This research suggests that as countries get more unequal, people live in greater social isolation, locked within a narrow income group. Their friends and family share the same incomes, are segregated by neighbourhood and marry similar partners. Children mix less in socially segregated schools. People no longer see over the high social fences, so they don’t know how the other half lives, Mijs finds.
Social isolation aided and abetted by working a lot of jobs to make rent, and having no social time because waking hours not spent working an outside are spent dealing with home chores like laundry, washing dishes, wading through piles of medical bills, phoning creditors and insurance companies (if you’re lucky enough to have one), etc. I suppose this is one reason why Facebook is so popular. It’s socializing for the exhausted who can’t manage to leave their homes.
Ignorant of the facts, everyone wrongly places themselves on the income scale closer to the middle. Both rich and poor delude themselves that they are ordinary. But telling people the facts doesn’t change their attitudes: increasingly they cling to a moral belief that people rise by merit, sinking for lack of it. …
And here I thought Americans were the sole self-deluders with that whole “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” problem and the Horatio Alger Myth and “if I win the lottery, I sure don’t want lose my winnings to mean bad government taxes” even as their odds are staggeringly low:
Talk to the mega-rich – I once conducted focus groups of earners up to £10m – and they are wilfully ignorant about their super-privilege, unshakable in believing their superior merit.
The profiteers of human misery have been with us from the start. I would argue that we should expect something better today, as we aren’t all still walking about with caveman brains and lifespans of 30 years.
Who in corporate America is leading the evolution toward a sustainable future (ok, besides Patagonia)?
Is this the part where we talk about how (U.S. at least) corporations are not people and since corporations will never serve jailtime, have an undefined “lifespan,” etc., we now see the consequences of giving away our power to them for years?
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Well it would be, if anyone who mattered in respect of changing it was present and listening. /cynicism
(Actually, no, NEVER /cynicism)
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I’m one of the Lucky Ones…
I have a hand crank flashlight.
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