There are Two Americas, the wealth and the rest of us:

Income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression, according to a recently updated paper by University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez. The paper, which covers data through 2007, points to a staggering, unprecedented disparity in American incomes.

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Saez calculates that in 2007 the top .001 percent of American earners took home 6 percent of total U.S. wages, a figure that has nearly doubled since 2000.

As of 2007, the top decile of American earners, Saez writes, pulled in 49.7 percent of total wages, a level that’s “higher than any other year since 1917 and even surpasses 1928, the peak of stock market bubble in the ‘roaring” 1920s.'”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

The entire paper is available here:

http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez…

From Saez’s paper:

[W]hile the bottom 99 percent of incomes grew at a solid pace of 2.7 percent per year from 1993-2000, these incomes grew only 1.3 percent per year from 2002-2007. As a result, in the economic expansion of 2002-2007, the top 1 percent captured two thirds of income growth.”

Paul Krugman comments that it was “Even more gilded” than we thought.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c…

The charts from Saez at Krugman and HuffPo say it all.

This is so worth reading:

http://www.alternet.org/health…

Why? Because the author used to be one of them:

Right-Wing Turncoat Gives the Inside Scoop on Why Conservatives Are Rampaging Town Halls

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They are using my old shock troops — given many of these folks were first energized by the Evangelical pro-life movement that my late father and I started in the 1970s. What we did to clinics they are now doing to congressmen and others speaking out for health care reform.

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“How do I know this is the norm? … I know this script. I helped write it.”

He tells it exactly how it is.

There is no daylight between the Republican Party, the health-care insurance industry, far right leaders like Dick Armey, the legion of insurance lobbyists, and now, a small army of  thugs. All we’re missing is actual uniforms, otherwise we now have a full blown American version of the Nazi Brown Shirts.

No, I don’t believe that these people are about to take over the country. No, the sky is not falling. But the Republican Party is. It is now profoundly anti-American.

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Here’s the emerging American version of the fascist’s formula: combine millions of dollars of lobbyists’ money with embittered  troublemakers  who have a small army of not terribly bright white angry people (collected over decades through pro-life mass mailing networks) at their beck and call, ever ready to believe any myth or lie circulated by the semi literate and completely and routinely misinformed right wing — Evangelical religious underground. Then put his little mob together with the insurance companies’ big bucks. That’s how it works — American Brown Shirts at the ready.  

What’s the results of the fascist formula for the rest of us? Well, think how this “method” worked against Dr. Tiller’s abortion clinic and how that story ended. In this case a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to save our economy from going bankrupt because of spiraling health care costs may be lost, not because of a better argument, but because of lies backed up by anti-democratic embittered thuggery. The motive? Revenge on America by the Old White Guys of the far right, and greed by the insurance industry.  

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It’s time to give this garbage in name: insurance industry funded fascism.

Why? Because Obama won:

They can’t compute that their white man-led conservative revolution is dead. They can’t reconcile their idea of themselves with the fact that white men like them don’t run the country any more — and never will again. To them the black president is leading a column of the “other” into their promised land. Gays, immigrants, blacks, progressives, even a female Hispanic appointed to the Supreme Court… for them this is the Apocalypse.

Could someone do a diary on Daily Kos on this?  I did one today.  It needs ot be out there.

650,000 farm workers face a daily risk of death and illness from toiling in stifling summer heat. Six died last year and fifteen farm workers have died of heat-related complications since July 2004.

The United Farmworkers Unions and ACLU have filed a lawsuit against the state and its Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board (Cal/OSHA) for failing to live up to their constitutional and statutory duties to protect the safety of farm workers.  See NY Times: Farm Workers’ Union Sues California Agency Over Rules on Heat Safety

“If hundreds of thousands of white-collar employees had to work under dangerous and life-threatening conditions, the state would almost certainly take immediate action to protect their health and safety,” said David Blair-Loy, legal director for the ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties. “Low-income farm workers, who are overwhelmingly Latino, deserve no less.”

“The people who feed us should not fear death when they go to work”

UFW President Arturo S. Rodriguez

More, after the fold.

(Also on dkos: http://www.dailykos.com/story/… )

Well, they sure know how to play hardball with Progressives over at the White House:

The White House is playing hardball with Democrats who intend to vote against the supplemental war spending bill, threatening freshmen who oppose it that they won’t get help with reelection and will be cut off from the White House, Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.) said Friday.

“We’re not going to help you. You’ll never hear from us again,” Woolsey said the White House is telling freshmen.

HuffPo: White House Browbeats Dem Freshmen On War Money: “You’ll Never Hear From Us Again”

More, after the fold.

I have some good news.  This is a story of how worker activism along with the help of Democratic officeholders can save jobs.  

First, my title.   It’s title is derived from the fact that one of Workers United’s predecessor unions at Hartmarx was the International Ladies Garment Worker’s Union.   Looks like the union label will stay on the President’s suits.  (President Obama wore a Hartmarx suit at the Innaugaration, I believe.)

The 1978 ad:

Two weeks ago workers voted to hold a sit-in action at the factores of the company that makes Obama’s suits (Hartmarx) if Well Fargo sold it to a company that would close the plants and send the jobs overseas.  This week, the bidder approved as the “stalking horse” bidder in bankruptcy is a good company who will keep jobs in Amerirca and honor the union contracts.

More, after the fold.

Thank God or the Goddess for Teddy Kennedy!  He has done so much for America over his lifetime, and even in sickness, the “Lion of the Senate” is roaring again:

May 29 (Bloomberg) — Senator Edward Kennedy, chairman of one of two Senate panels drafting health-care overhaul plans, said he will include a government-run program to compete with private insurers in a measure to be considered in mid-June, asserting his role in the emerging debate despite his battle with brain cancer.

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“An important foundation of our legislation is the following principle: If you like the coverage you have now, you keep it,” Kennedy wrote in an op-ed article in the Boston Globe. “But if you don’t have health insurance or don’t like the insurance you have, our bill will give you new, more affordable options.”

Bloomberg