just hours after i posted the foregoing rant-cum-list-of-information-wanting-for-more-comprehensive-and-thoughtful-rant, i stumbled onto headlines made from part of an Oxfam report released the same day: "Working for the Few, Political capture and economic inequality" and, by dint of following the footnotes to the trumpeted headline claim, made my way, carefully, past the Forbes list of the world's billionaires, to the Credit Suisse Research Institute's report, "Global Wealth 2013" (... from october).
we've got all our thumbs on the pulse of the cultural zeitgeist here at hellmarkpress!
(yes, we perform diagnosis by pulse, here. the cultural zeitgeist is a hungry ghost!)
from the forbes list i learned that no billionaire from the united states in the top one hundred overall was listed as working in government. (some did say "diversified").
and the credit suisse report is just good all-around reading, principally about the personal wealth -- net value (of the assets) -- of natural persons, approached a number of interesting ways. of note, the authors "estimate that there are 31.4 million . . . adults with wealth between" one and fifty million u.s. dollars, worldwide (and 98,700 persons whose net worth exceeds fifty million).
no doubt the further footnotes of the oxfam and credit suisse reports will offer more concerning wealth and income distribution in the u.s. and worldwide, and i will, in future, try to avoid the barrage of advertising over at forbes by not directing my browser to forbes, unless i must. in the meantime, i had wanted to share the serendipity of these timely reports, in case you are curious about the so-called one percent also.
tangentially: i listened to DemocracyNow!'s broadcast of certain poignant and portentous passages from the public statements of Martin Luther King, Jr., the other day, and did not have to go track down the full text, and recording, of his april 1967 address at Riverside Church, excerpts of which Amy Goodman had played on the broadcast, because someone had thoughtfully linked to it in a comment i was to read in an unrelated forum. you can find them here.
dn! also convened a respectful remembrance of Amiri Baraka, who passed away january 9.