Mammon category archive

(Methinks he misplet “honey bees.”)

Warning: Language.

Via C&L.

Robert Glover wants to know who America is for. A nugget:

It is a place where people starve to death, and seven out of 10 Americans are food-challenged, which means that they do not know where their next meal is coming from.

America is not about them.

It is a place where three million children go to bed hungry in this “great country” every night.

America is not for them.

It is a country where the elderly die from too much heat in the summertime and too little heat in the wintertime.

America is not about them.

Follow the link for his answer.

Via Job’s Anger.

Reuters’ Bethany McLean investigate the stealth jets.

According to Federal Aviation Administration records, Jos. A. Bank leases a private plane, and not just any private plane — a high-end Dassault Falcon 2000EX. A reader of Jos. A. Bank’s financial statements would almost certainly not be aware of the existence of the plane.

What’s interesting is that despite all the furor about corporate jets, and the complaints about executive compensation, experts say this situation is not uncommon.

(snip)

Jos. A. Bank’s plane is not identified in the company’s financial statements. I searched its proxy statements and 10Ks going back to 2003 for the terms “jet,” “personal use,” “aircraft,” and “airplane,” and found nothing related to this aircraft. And this is technically proper — if the plane is being used entirely for business purposes.

Read the rest, in which she explains how the perk can be kept in a poke, right there next to the pig.

When does “compensation” turn into plain ordinary skimming? Inquiring minds want to know.

. . . with magickal secret fracking juice.

It is not news that fast food (and other eating place) workers are underpaid, but few persons realize just how underpaid they are.

Facing South runs the numbers. A nugget:

• Average hourly wage currently earned by U.S. fast-food workers: $9
• Yearly salary that amounts to: about $19,000
• Official poverty line for a family of three: $19,790

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Not just in Philly, folks.

Tony Norman sees the fee hand of the market in right-wind reactions to Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos. The excerpt starts with a quotation from Tyson:

“All the while, the glorious sun pours immaculate free energy down upon us, more than we will ever need. Why can’t we summon the ingenuity and courage of the generations that came before us? The dinosaurs never saw that asteroid coming. What’s our excuse?”

It is views like this that have enraged many of Mr. Tyson’s critics on the right, who view his very entertaining presentation of the scientific worldview as a threat to tradition, morality, capitalism and the authority of the Bible.

(snip)

The ideology of the free market unencumbered by concerns about the present or the future always trump science based on observable reality. This is why we have a major political party that finds it a problem to admit that man-made climate change is real or that the Earth is billions of years old.

Image via All Things Amazing, an image site (occasional images NSFW).

It’s the real (estate) thing.

The Rude One rudely exposes the grift (not that anyone is listening):

By just about any measure, Hawthorne Avenue School in Newark, New Jersey, is a success, even something of a miracle. It scores in the top ten in Student Growth (which is business-laden rubric-speak for “learning”), #1 in the city, #7 in the state. It meets or beats the state targets on literacy and math competence. And it does extraordinary work educating poor and non-white elementary school students.

So, obviously, New Jersey school superintendent and Chris Christie appointee Cami Anderson is going to close it and open a charter school in its place.

More and ruder rudeness about the grift at the link.

Attempts to destroy public education continue apace in Florida. John Romano reports:

Charter schools are growing rapidly in Florida. Enrollment has nearly tripled since 2004, suggesting that parents have embraced this concept of non-traditional school choice.

At the same time, charters are also failing rapidly. Florida had the second-most school closings in the nation last year. In Pinellas and Hillsborough counties alone, nearly 30 charters have opened and closed in recent years.

Charter growth is clearly not a problem.

Charter accountability, on the other hand, might be.

So do you:

A) Say it’s time to monitor charter applications more closely?
B) Say the plan is working and continue on the same path?
C) Say “Yippee!” and make it even easier to open charters?

If you chose C, you just might be a state legislator.

This is a logical consequence of a societal decision made some 30 years ago, coincident with the deification of MBAs, that there is no such thing as the public good, that accumulation of wealth is the only standard for judging any effort.

It is good to be a Duke.

Dukes can can exercise droit du seigneur.

Duke Energy’s top North Carolina executive told state lawmakers Tuesday that digging up coal ash from disposal sites across the state and trucking the industrial waste to modern landfills, as critics are demanding, could cost as much as $10 billion.

A cheaper option, which leaves the coal ash in place at most sites, would cost at least $2 billion.

Duke officials are keeping a low profile about who will pay that cost, but a state regulator estimated the higher price tag cited Tuesday could cost North Carolina households more than $20 a month.

The story explains that Duke is claiming that the ponds were legal when they were built, so pffftttt!

Who cares that said ponds had a history of problems and poor maintenance?