The guy on the left usually gets credit for saving places like the one where he is standing. And he deserves a lot of it. But the guy on the right of this knob of rock high above Yosemite Falls should get at least half the credit. That's John Muir. He had, since the 1880s, worked to preserve Yosemite. But he was not the first. Settler Galen Clark and others persuaded Congress to pass protective legislation—the Yosemite Grant—and Abraham Lincoln to sign it in 1864. But the land was ceded to California as a state park. That management was skewed toward practices, like intensive sheep-grazing, that destroyed rather than preserved. Muir's writings on Yosemite in
Century magazine persuaded leaders in Congress to pass a bill in 1890 making it a national park. U.S. Army troops from the 1st, 4th and 9th Cavalry regiments were charged with its protection. The enabling legislation followed most of the recommendations in Muir's articles. But Congress frustrated him by leaving park management in the hands of the state. In May of 1903, during three days camping and talking late into the night with Theodore Roosevelt, he convinced the president to take Yosemite more deeply into federal control, not just the valley floor and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias, but also the surrounding mountains and forests for a unified national park. Congress passed and Roosevelt signed such a bill in 1906.
John Cassidy at The New Yorker writes Rising Inequality: Janet Yellen Tells It Like It Is:
The extent of and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concerns me. … It is no secret that the past few decades of widening inequality can be summed up as significant income and wealth gains for those at the very top and stagnant living standards for the majority. I think it is appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation’s history, among them the high value Americans have traditionally placed on equality of opportunity. |
No, that wasn’t Elizabeth Warren, or the editor of the Nation, or Paul Krugman (or even me) banging on about how the rich are getting richer and most everybody else is struggling to keep up. It was Janet Yellen, the chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, addressing a conference in Boston on Friday morning. It’s not unheard of for a Fed chief to discuss rising inequality: Ben Bernanke addressed it in a 2007 speech. But Yellen’s speech is surely the first time a Fed chief has pointed out that rising inequality threatens America’s sense of itself.
Yellen began by noting that inequality is still rising. During the Great Recession, income fell more steeply at the top, largely as a result of the decline in the stock market. That caused inequality to “narrow slightly,” she said, but it “resumed widening in the recovery, and by 2013 it had nearly returned to the pre-recession peak.” […]
Turning to wealth, which includes financial assets, real estate, and durable goods, such as cars, Yellen noted that the pattern was the same—except the increase in inequality had been even more stark. In 1989, the richest five per cent owned fifty-four per cent of over-all wealth. By 2010, that figure had risen to sixty-one per cent. And by 2013, it had reached sixty-three per cent.
Since the top five per cent of households own almost two-thirds of the wealth, it stands to reason that most American households don’t own very much at all. But the figures that Yellen presented are still shocking. In 1989, the bottom half of the distribution owned just three per cent of all wealth. By 2013, that figure had fallen to one per cent. No, that’s not a typo: half the country owns one per cent of its wealth.
These numbers confirm an old but rarely stated truth. Many, if not most, individual American households possess next to nothing. […]
It was an important
speech. One that reminded us why Yellen was the better choice for the Fed post than the fellow with the inside track. She included some words about long-term "opportunity." But none about how to make that opportunity a reality either immediately or down the road.
No suggestion or recommendation about how to get around or over or through the political juggernaut that this economic inequality has given to a self-selected few who make the nation's biggest decisions. It can be argued, of course, that such suggestions, much less recommendations, are not part of her job portfolio.
Trouble is, too many of our leaders don't think it's part of theirs either. Or they're on the payroll—in one fashion or another—of those who benefit most from inequality. Which means the solutions are up to us.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2012— Festering economic boil Phil Gramm says Obama is winning because poor people have it too good:
See there? The reason so so many people are voting for Barack Obama in this election is that they're not hungry enough. In the wake of the Great Recession. When the first sub-eight-percent unemployment numbers have come in in for-freaking-ever, itself a dismally modest improvement that proved so shocking to conservatives that they have all but convinced themselves that it must be a government plot. Why, if we let those 18.5 million people starve, they'd be much more pissed off—and then they'd go out and vote for Mitt Romney!
This is, mind you, the exact philosophy behind Romney's infamous "47 percent" comments: those damn poor people all have it too good, what with social programs designed to allow them to not die in the streets, and of course people like that aren't going to vote for the good, responsible Republicans who want to bring back "dying on the streets" as this century's hot new thing. It does not dawn on Phil Gramm, who is a remarkable idiot by any standards, that the increases in food stamps and other government assistance are the obvious and expected results of a prolonged and utterly devastating economic downturn—no, it must be because we are just being too damn generous these days. This is the world according to Phil Gramm. He then goes on to complain that Obama hasn't fixed all the various things Phil Gramm and his fellow financial wizards have screwed up in the last decade, so clearly it's time to pass the reins to Mitt Romney so Phil Gramm and his fellow financial wizards can get back to screwing it up worse.
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