Quite often, a stark reality of being poor is that even if you wanted to do the right thing by your children, it’s damn near impossible to do. When The First Lady is being criticized for “anti-obesity” program, many in the media forget that it’s a political catch all that’s really a reductive way of knocking Michelle Obama’s focus on improving American childhood nutrition and food access for lower middle class and poor families. (video from whitehouse.gov)

You don’t have to be as wonky as Ezra Klein to realize that the problem that plagues the entire cities of Chester, PA and Detroit, Michigan is a horrific problem:

There are no chain grocery stores in all of Detroit.

via Ezra Klein – The scariest sentence Ive read today.

Klein found this showstopper in the Charles LeDuff article featured in Mother Jones about the death of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, a seven year old murdered in a botched SWAT raid being filmed for a reality show. “No grocery stores” as a the mark of the failure of a city is a horror story many south eastern PA residents find familiar. Many of us Philadelphians talk about how bad the problems are facing the residents and government of Chester, PA, the fact that a city with a population of 491, 489 people has no chain grocery store is a fact many of us use to drive the point home. Detroit has a population of 951, 270 people and no chain grocery stores.

Stand at the corner of Lillibridge Street and Mack Avenue and walk a mile in each direction from Alter Road to Gratiot Avenue (pronounced Gra-shit). You will count 34 churches, a dozen liquor stores, six beauty salons and barber shops, a funeral parlor, a sprawling Chrysler engine and assembly complex working at less than half-capacity, and three dollar stores—but no grocery stores. In fact, there are no chain grocery stores in all of Detroit.

via What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones? | Mother Jones.

Even though conditions aren’t as dire in most major cities, they still are far less than ideal. Rural and urban areas, that suffer from the lack of access (proximity, price and produce) to fresh food are called “food deserts”. Kansas City resident Sydnee Svejda, a single mom in the Budd Park neighborhood of Kansas City is profiled in the Kansas City Star:

I know this is late, but I am not the biggest fan of Russ Feingold the legislator. He is a Democrat who often chose being correct on the Senate floor over applying the correct leverage in the Senate back rooms.

More recently, he’s done plenty of things that should have earned him more scorn from progressive activists. He joined the GOP in filibustering financial reform because he thought it should’ve been tougher on banks. What eventually happened? Well, Democrats needed an additional vote to break the filibuster, so they got Scott Brown to turn against the filibuster in exchange for an $18 billion giveaway to banks, mostly in his state. The net effect of Feingold’s filibuster was giving $18 billion to banks. This is the sort of thing that anybody with more tactical sense than a popsicle would recognize and then go along with the bill.

via Donkeylicious: Russ Feingold, Good And Bad.

Bernie Sanders, who is to the left of Feingold, illustrated a way to properly legislate for a left of center politician in the majority party in their chamber of congress. Due to the fact that Health Care Reform did not have Public Option, he threatened to withhold his vote from the 60 vote majority and used that leverage to get $11B in funding for Community Health Centers to be built across the nation. Community Health Centers are key to providing primary care for the working class and poor and reducing the costs of providing primary care.

The Dodd-Frank bill — named after Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who ushered it through the House — passed by a vote of 60 to 39. Three Republican senators — Scott Brown of Massachusetts and Olympia J. Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine — joined 57 members of the Democratic caucus in support. Sen. Russell Feingold of Wisconsin was the lone Democratic opponent, saying the measure didn’t go far enough.

via Congress passes financial reform bill.

To contrast, consider the nothing Feingold got us from opposing the Fin Reg bill. Feingold extracted no compromise. He just refused to vote for the Dodd-Frank Fin-Reg bill because it didn’t go far enough. Feingold could not bring himself to find any compromise or additional provision that would have made the bill worth supporting. Scott Brown did. For his vote, Brown negotiated a removal of the $19 billion dollar fee to be charged banks to pre-fund the financial reforms without adding any money to the deficit. Instead Brown demanded that the costs of the Dodd-Frank finreg bill be offset by “spending cuts”.

Quite late in the committee’s negotiations, the Congressional Budget Office examined the near-final version of their bill and said that the bill contained about $19 billion in likely costs to taxpayers over time, and so under pay-go laws, that cost would have to be offset. Barney Frank inserted a tax on large banks and hedge funds to cover the cost. And this is what Brown opposes: A tax on banks to pay for the cost of a bill that regulates banks.

…

Instead, Brown is insisting that the committee find $19 billion in spending cuts to support the legislation. So the banks are getting a new regulatory structure meant to prevent another round of chaotic failures, but Brown doesn’t think they should have to pay for it. Instead, other programs and services should be cut.

via Ezra Klein – Scott Brown’s problems with FinReg.

That Scott Brown vote, had to be secured instead of Feingold’s. He could have taken the opportunity to negotiate something more progressive that wasn’t in the bill. Instead, he took his ball and went home and now the reform he didn’t like, is now the unfunded reform he didn’t like. Here’s Feingold talking about the major things FinReg didn’t do.

Yes it wasn’t complete, yes it wouldn’t have stopped the crisis of 2008, but it helped to begin the roll back 40 years of supply side economics and deregulation. Our consumers are better of with the foundation laid in the Dodd-Frank bill. It was a start to reformating how our government can safely regulate the financial industry.

Feingold took a lot of stands, like voting against the Patriot Act and TARP that really didn’t amount to anything except principled protest. His primary job was to legislate. His all or nothing principles actually resulted in a less favorable bill for Democrats and the American public.

Executive pay vs. relative to average wage in the U.S.

According to Andrew Sullivan, we should acknowledge success more.

Why are so many on the left incapable of acknowledging that many people who are rich – but, of course by no means all of them – earned it the hard way

via “The Successful” – The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.

It’s because many (not some) of them are still grossly overpaid and their largess serves as a drain on the earning potential of every employee in their company. Let’s look at Meg Whitman’s success:

Her worst decision at eBay — to buy internet phone service Skype for over $4 billion in 2005 — bled billions in eBay’s value. It was a huge waste of money whose consequences were passed on to employees and shareholders. The effects are still being felt by the company today, over five years after Whitman’s disastrous decision.

Whitman’s fabled $1 billion in wealth was acquired in the first few months of her tenure, well before she could muck the company’s bottom line up. That billion-plus that eBay’s directors handed Whitman was perhaps the easiest billion anyone has ever been handed in corporate history: eBay hired Whitman in March 1998, when the company was already the tech world’s darling. Just six months after she joined, eBay went public, making Meg Whitman an overnight billionaire thanks to stock options that allowed her to buy eBay stock at just 7 cents a share, and sell them on the market for as high as $170 per share.

via How Meg Whitman Failed Her Way to the Top at eBay, Collecting Billions While Nearly Destroying the Company | News & Politics | AlterNet.

We shouldn’t assume that wealth means success. The real problem here is executive pay in publicly traded companies. Many are overpaid vs. the real performance of their company under their leadership.

To add to the grievance, many executives did not seem to deserve such rewards. Extraordinary pay for great performance is fine, it is routinely said. But many executives have been paid a fortune for presiding over mediocrity. The Corporate Library, an American corporate-governance consultancy, last year identified 11 large and well known but poorly governed companies, including AT&T, Merck and Time Warner, where the chief executive had been paid at least $15m a year for two successive years even as the company’s shares had underperformed. Robert Nardelli received a $210m pay-off when he lost his job earlier this month even though the shares of his company, Home Depot, fell slightly during his six years in charge. Carly Fiorina, ejected from Hewlett-Packard almost $180m better off—including a severance payment of $21.6m—after a lacklustre tenure as chief executive, let it be known in her autobiography that money was not important to her. Not everyone believed her.

via A survey of executive pay: In the money | The Economist.

Some US and British executives are overpaid vs their peers from other nations within their own industry:

It has not only revealed a few high earners (a source of shame in Japan), but exposed wide divergences in pay, especially between Japanese nationals and a few foreign star executives. For example Nissan’s boss, Carlos Ghosn, earned around $9.5m last year—one hundred times the pay of Masamoto Yashiro, the departing boss of Shinsei Bank, who took home just $95,000. Sir Howard Stringer of Sony received more than $8m if stock options are included. His counterpart at Panasonic earned a modest $1.2m. Takeda Pharmaceutical paid its America-based global sales chief $6m, twice as much as its chief executive back in Japan.

Four non-Japanese executives of Shinsei Bank, which is around a quarter owned by the state following a bail-out in the late 1990s, have been forced out, in large part because of their seemingly outsized pay packages, which exceeded the $1m disclosure limit. Among them was the chief financial officer, Rahul Gupta, despite his having managed to increase the bank’s capital-adequacy ratio last year even as the bank suffered losses of more than $1.5 billion. Furthermore, the Shinsei executives’ pay was determined by an independent compensation committee of the board, unlike that of most of their Japanese peers.

via Japanese executive pay: Spartan salarymen | The Economist.

Whitman’s leadership was a cash drain on E-Bay. She was a huge wealthy failure. Same with Fiorna who boosted earnings by bleeding out talent with layoffs, not by improving HP. Let alone departing executives at Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers, the US Auto makers and countless other organizations. When people don’t acknowledge the wealthy, it may be because they only are good at harnessing wealth for themselves. US executives have (on average) the largest disparity of yearly earnings vs. their workers of any industrialized nation. Sullivan needs to acknowledge that we need to be better at judging success before we applaud it.

yes, talking about the back seat of the car is so offensive to Hannity, Dana Perino and some foreign guy. (lipstick on a pig part 2 or 3 or 26, I can’t keep track)

Apparently the woman required medical attention. These two/three people who threw her to the ground and stepped on need to be arrested for assault. Ridiculous.