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Today’s comic by Ruben Bolling is How to Tell When Someone Is Lying:
• Inequality in the new Gilded Age:
Inequality has risen in every state since the 1970s and, in most states, it has grown in the post–Great Recession era. From 2009 to 2015, the incomes of the top 1 percent grew faster than the incomes of the bottom 99 percent in 43 states and the District of Columbia. The top 1 percent captured half or more of all income growth in nine states. In 2015, a family in the top 1 percent nationally received, on average, 26.3 times as much income as a family in the bottom 99 percent. [...]
The rise of top incomes relative to the bottom 99 percent represents a sharp reversal of the trend that prevailed in the mid-20th century. From 1928 to 1973, the share of income held by the top 1 percent declined in every state for which we have data. This earlier era was characterized by a rising minimum wage, low levels of unemployment after the 1930s, widespread collective bargaining in private industries (manufacturing, transportation, telecommunications, and construction), and a cultural, political, and legal environment that kept a lid on executive compensation in all sectors of the economy.
• NYC will pay midwives and nurses $20 million in gender discrimination lawsuit: The nurses’ complaint notes that the city designates some jobs as “physically taxing.” Until the program was discontinued in 2012, employees in these physically taxing positions who worked 25 years could retire with a full pension as early as age 50. Since the list was initiated in1968, nursing and midwifery have not been on it. In 2013, according to the complaint, 90 percent of nurses were women. “The settlement is a victory for all nurses and a testament to the hard, physically demanding work that nurses do every day for those in need of care in the public hospitals,” said Anne Bové, a board member at the nurses’ labor union, the New York State Nurses Association. “It is an acknowledgement of the injustice done to our sister and brother nurses who were denied recognition of the difficult nature of our work, all based on the discriminatory perception that nurses are mostly women and women’s work isn’t physically strenuous,” Bové said.
• Travelers can again take California’s Highway 1 after landslide repairs completed. it took 14 months and about $54 million to reconstruct a quarter-mile section of the highway over the landslide. That May 20, 2017, event sent some 6 million cubic yards of rock and dirt onto the highway and into the ocean. It was the largest slide ever recorded along the Big Sur coast. A ribbon-cutting ceremony is slated for Friday, July 20.
MIDDAY TWEET
• On July 19-20, in 1848, Americans held their first national convention on women’s rights in Seneca Falls, New York: Some 250 women showed up on the first day of the event initiated by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The two abolitionists had met at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, and they were furious that they had been barred from participation on the convention floor simply because they were women. Seneca Falls was chosen for the convention because that was Stanton’s home turf. The meeting including six sessions over the two days. Stanton and her Quaker sisters presented a Declaration of Sentiments and Grievances—aka Declaration of Rights and Sentiments—plus a list of 12 resolutions on specific matters of equality. Eleven of these were approved unanimously on the second day of the convention when some 40 men joined by invitation. Resolution No. 9 stated that “it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.” This generated heated debate and several people, including Mott, argued for removing this from the final declaration. However, Frederick Douglass, the only African American at the convention, argued in its favor, and the suffrage resolution was ultimately kept in the document. But just 100 of the 300 people attendance signed it—68 women and 32 men. The Seneca Falls convention sparked numerous women’s conventions afterward.
• Denver becomes the 10th Colorado city to commit to 100 percent renewable electricity: Democratic Mayor Michael Hancock announced the initiative at Monday’s State of the City address. The goal is part of Denver’s 2018 80×50 Climate Action Plan. This establishes a strategy targeting those economic sectors that generate the most greenhouse gas emissions with a goal of cutting that pollution 80 percent by 2050, as compared with 2005. One small Colorado city, Aspen, already generates its power with 100 percent renewable energy sources. Boulder, Breckenridge, Lafayette, Longmont, Nederland, the City and County of Pueblo, and Summit County have each committed to doing the same.
• Tribal leaders in DC tell Senate that discriminatory voting barriers against American Indians are persistent, systemic: Since 1924 when all American Indians were supposedly given full citizenship in the United States and with it the right to vote, politicians have come up with various ways—brazen and sneaky—to keep Native people from exercising that franchise. This isn’t just history a number of tribal officials told an informal group of senators from the Committees on Indian Affairs and Rules on Tuesday. Democratic Sen. Tom Udall from New Mexico said this is part of an “insidious” effort to suppress the Indian vote. “To this day … many states and local jurisdictions have found new, more insidious ways to impose barriers on Native access to the ballot box,” Udall said, “from voter ID laws to inadequate polling and registration sites, to lack of availability of Native language ballot materials.”
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Greg Dworkin assures us that although electoral effects move at glacial pace, they do move. Today's hot items: NYT says Trump knew the whole time. The Russian who catfished the NRA gets busted, somehow ensnaring the National Prayer Breakfast.