The law of wealth, according to the French economist, Thomas Piketty, is that the more one has of it, the less of it comes from earnings and the more from assets. And so it is. According to Seattle Times' Gene Balk, rich King County is 8th in the US when it comes to "wealth without working" (WWW).
Here is how Balk defines WWW:
Asset income comes from three sources: stock dividends, which are cash payments to shareholders; interest, which includes payouts from money deposited in a bank, invested in government bonds or loaned in some other way; and rental income from investment properties (excluding the income of people primarily engaged in the real estate business).
Records from 2019 show that the per capita average of this kind of income for King County is $24,100. It's an astonishing $64,200 for Manhattan. But King County is really closer to top on the list of the wealth because it is "one of the few places in the U.S. (along with Manhattan and San Francisco) where incomes both from earnings and assets are extremely high."
Of course, rural America is almost completely out of this picture, which is why the right/left divide in the US is in itself so puzzling. One would expect this system of wealth to result in the rural being dominated by leftist and revolutionary feelings and the opposite feelings be the case for the urban. True, those in American cities are denounced by the rural as the coastal elites, but it really goes no further than that. The leading rural feeling is uncritically aligned with the most crass business interests. They see Trump as a revolutionary. This, I think, is what Marx meant by rural idiocy.
Today in amen:
Slowly raises hand ⊠https://t.co/Y9wPlpBzn7
â Seattle Weather Blog (@KSeattleWeather) August 30, 2021
Jason Rantz is keeping the spirit of death-cult shit going on in the heart of Seattle, talking about the rejection of the COVID vaccine mandate as a resistance movement. Okie, you and your kind are feeding death to mouths that pay your bills. Do you realize this? 100,000 gone in the near future. Almost all of these will be your mouths. But maybe those are the only mouths you can feed.
The wife of the man, Caleb Wallace, who organized an anti-mask group called The Freedom Defenders, has organized a GoFundMe to help cover the housing and medical expenses that accumulated during her husband's doomed three-week fight with COVID. So far, she, Jessica Wallace, has raised nearly $70,000. She is also expecting a fourth child from the union with the dead man.
UPDATE: Texas Anti-Mask activist Caleb Wallace has died of COVID. https://t.co/vNJy2H0feE
â Lalo (@LaloDagach) August 30, 2021
To get a sense of the grip Trump has on his followers, read this article in the Kansas City Star: "'As theyâre being intubated, they still donât believe it.â The COVID denial wonât die". Here is the key paragraph:
Another man â not the only one, mind you â berated the hospitalâs emergency room staff for urging him to be admitted. He walked out, albeit tethered to oxygen, insisting angrily that COVID isnât real. âAnd then we found out that he was at (another hospital) within 12 hours on a ventilator,â the nurse says. âHe was, the whole time, just saying, like, âCOVIDâs not real. You guys are stupid.â
âI could tell you that story about every day â that theyâre just yelling at us and they leave and then they come back or they go to (another hospital) because theyâre worse than when they left. And as theyâre being intubated they still donât believe it.
What might save some Trumpers from being pulled into the dark hole at the center of the pandemic? Backdoor vaccinations.
The US is finally out of a long and punishingly useless war. The last planes left the airport at 12:29 pm PST. To understand why the mainstream media is deeply unhappy about this drawdown, one must recall the fact that their rise in the 19th century, which coincided with the rise of literacy in leading capitalist societies, resulted in the objective to replace labor activism with patriotic feeling. This is why the first big news story concerns the war that gave us Florence Nightingale, the Crimean War. This is why many in the emerging mass of consumers identified not with their class position (labor) but with state power. This is why the mainstream of our day can't help but support militarism. It's in its DNA.
Today in car propaganda: "Child riding electric scooter dies after getting hit by vehicle in Caldwell [Idaho]". Who is to blame? The child on the electric scooter, of course. Why? Because the "scooter rider was not wearing a helmet." Nothing in the report is said about the vehicle: size, speed, state of the driver.
Warmer oceans mean stronger hurricanes. This is old news. Scientists have been saying it for years. For anthropogenic reasons, the Gulf of Mexico is warmer than usual, and so Ida was more powerful than usual. And expect more Idas in the near future because we are doing nothing about global warming.
Hurricane Ida meets one of its makers: the Royal Dutch Shell refinery in Norco, Louisiana pic.twitter.com/qkkvzSCaXX
â bue rĂŒbner (@BueRubner) August 30, 2021
One of my fav albums of the 1980s is Battle of Armagideon (Millionaire Liquidator) by a musical genius who became one of the others this weekend, Lee "Scratch" Perry. This was the record that opened the Zion gates to his afro-dub-dreamy world, which went back to the 1960s. In the 1970s, he transformed popular music. At the end of the 1980s, he was rightly calling himself a madman.