The Economic Policy Institute has put together an amazing interactive chart that shows the growth of incomes in the U.S. over the past 90 years, from 1918 to 2008, and is broken down by who the gains went to (the bottom 90% versus the top 10%).
By adjusting the sliders on the chart, you can break down the period into different eras, which show startlingly different trends. More…
(Reuters) – More than 1,000 firefighters converged on this village in the Gila National Forest on Saturday as a massive wildfire that scorched eastern Arizona moved to a quarter mile from the New Mexico border.
With the winds picking up, temperatures rising and humidity low, the National Weather Service issued a Red Flag Warning for this sparsely populated corner of the state, indicating grave fire danger.
“Everything is ripe for a perfect storm,” Fire Information Officer Sean Johnson told Reuters.
“There’s not enough hose and water to put out a fire in these conditions.”
Firefighters raced to set controlled fires, designed to deny the advancing wall of flames the fuel it needs, “so we can manage the fire instead of the fire managing us,” Johnson said.
The fire has forced some 10,000 people from their mountain homes and charred more than 600 square miles of mostly pine-studded forest land in Arizona.
Although the so-called Wallon Fire has not entered New Mexico yet, its smoke has hung ominously in the skies over some parts of the state for days.
On Saturday, the Albuquerque Isotopes minor league baseball club was forced to push up its game against the Nashville Sounds by three hours to get it in before an new wave of smoke rolled in from the southwest.
Weather forecasts call for wind gusts of up to 35 miles per hour to buffet the already hard-hit area, with low humidity adding to the already bone-dry conditions.
“We’ve had this scenario before in this fire,” Flory told Reuters. “We’re just going to have to do our best with the conditions in front of us.”
Fire officials said progress had been made against the monster blaze that has raged in and around the Apache Sitgreaves National Forest since May 29. As of early Saturday, the fire was 6 percent contained and more was expected to be announced later in the day.
The easing of high winds that had rapidly spread the flames for several days earlier this week had allowed a fleet of water-dropping helicopters to work to douse the blaze, and a DC-10 supertanker carrying payloads of fire retardant took to the air on Thursday.
Ground crews worked around the clock with bulldozers to cut buffer zones between the fire’s edge and populated areas and to set backfires designed to draw flames away from homes.
Flory said the helicopter crews, too, were taking part in backfire operations, dropping “aerial ignition” canisters into remote, hard-to-reach stretches of forest behind fire lines.
Their job was eased as the blaze, which ranks as Arizona’s second largest on record, began burning out of the heavy timber into areas with fewer trees, fire officials said.
The latest aerial infrared images of the fire showed it has consumed nearly 409,000 acres, or almost 639 square miles. The Rodeo-Chediski fire charged nearly 469,000 acres in 2002, making it the largest in Arizona history.
The Forest Service reports that the fire has destroyed 29 homes in eastern Arizona, including 22 homes in the town of Greer, a small mountain retreat of about 200 dwellings. Another five residences were damaged and 35 nonresidential buildings have been lost.
No serious injuries have been reported.
Fire crews have so far kept flames from encroaching on two larger nearby towns of Eager and Springerville, ordered fully evacuated on Wednesday.
The towns are home to roughly 8,000 permanent residents combined, accounting for most of those displaced in the White Mountains region, a popular vacation destination for Arizonans seeking to escape the summer heat.
Flory said an estimated 1,900 people already had been forced from their homes by the time Springerville and Eager were evacuated.
Springerville Mayor Eric Baca, 38, who has lived in the area his entire life, called the fire “a punch in the gut.”
“This is devastating,” he told Reuters by telephone. “This couldn’t have happened to a more pristine area. This is our lifeblood … and now a lot of it is gone.”
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Source: Reuters
Photos by REUTERS/Joshua Lott
Darwin’s bark spider (Caerostris darwini) was discovered in Madagascar. It makes some of the largest webs known, reaching 25 metres across, and produces silk that is more than two times stronger than silk made by any other spider. More…
In what has been dubbed Operation Virtual Shield, thousands of public and privately owned security cameras have been put in place in Chicago and linked together, creating a capsule of surveillance over the entire city, more extensive than anywhere else in the United States. Chicago holds the record for number of surveillance cameras, estimated at up to 10,000. The network is said to have cost $60 million. Officials say it is worth the price, but privacy concerns are at a peak.
This brings back memories of the Red Squad in Chicago back during the cold war….
The arm of Chicago’s law enforcement known alternately as the Industrial Unit, the Intelligence Division, the Radical Squad, or the Red Squad, had its roots in the Gilded Age, when class conflict encouraged employers to ally themselves with Chicago’s police against the city’s increasingly politicized workforce. Following the Haymarket bombing, Captain Michael J. Schaack orchestrated a vicious campaign against anarchism, resulting in 260 arrests, bribed witnesses, attacks on immigrants and labor activists, and convoluted theories of revolutionary conspiracy. Continuing its use of both overt and covert tactics, such as surveillance, infiltration, and intimidation, Chicago’s Red Squad in the 1920s under Make Mills shifted its attention from anarchists to individuals and organizations who the Red Squad believed to be Communist. Casting a wide net, the squad by 1960 had collected information on approximately 117,000 Chicagoans, 141,000 out-of-towners, and 14,000 organizations. After the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the Red Squad expanded its targets from radical organizations like the Communist and Socialist Workers Parties to minority and reform organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, National Lawyers Guild, and Operation PUSH.
After 11 years of litigation, a 1985 court decision ended the Chicago Police Department’s Subversive Activities Unit’s unlawful surveillance of political dissenters and their organizations. In the fall of 1974, the Red Squad destroyed 105,000 individual and 1,300 organizational files when it learned that the Alliance to End Repression was filing a lawsuit against the unit for violating the U.S. Constitution. The records that remain are housed at the Chicago Historical Society. The public requires special permission to access them until 2012.
Often referred to as “The Father of our National Parks,” John Muir (1838-1914) was America’s most famous and influential naturalist and conservationist, and founder of the Sierra Club.
Ten Reasons John Muir Is Awesome
1. He has his own Woods, mineral (Muirite), bird (Muir’s Winter Wren), and minor planet (Johnmuir).
2. While working in a factory at age 29, Muir was blinded in accident. When his sight returned months later, he left factory work to study nature.
3. Muir once described himself as a “poetico-trampo-geologist-botanist and ornithologist-naturalist, etc., etc.”
4. Choosing to go by “the wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way I could find,” he walked 1,000 miles from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico.
5. Muir was a vocal proponent of the awesomeness of dogs, even referring to them as “our horizontal brothers.” (His position on cats has been lost to the sands of time.)
6. Before he took President Theodore Roosevelt camping in Yosemite Valley: 0 national parks. After? Five national parks, 18 national monuments, 55 national bird sanctuaries and wildlife refuges, and 150 national forests.
7. He traveled on every continent (except Antarctica), including exploring the Chilean Andes at age 72.
8. His beard can go toe-to-toe with any beard in history (including Brian Wilson’s).
9. He appears on the California state quarter.
10. Muir loved him some sequoias. He discovered that soaking sequoia pine cones in water turned the water purple. He then used the purple liquid as ink, and also drank it, “hoping thereby to … render myself more tree-wise and sequoical.” Click here to see the Sequoia and Kings Canyon site.
Original post in Charlotte Sierra Club on WP
NC Central Piedmont Group of the Sierra Club
Explore, enjoy, and protect the planet
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John Muir Trail
On the California State Quarter
10. Dennis Kozlowski
In May 2006, Dennis Kozlowski was ordered to repay $21.2m in owed New York sales taxes. The tax had been dodged on 12 paintings, including a Monet, a Renoir and a Bouguereau. Added to this charge were several other scandals relating to his former company, Tyco, including $81m in unauthorized bonuses. Kozlowski had reportedly liked to throw his money around; he bragged of his shower curtain costing $6,000. However, 8.5-25 years in prison was a bonus he wasn’t expecting.
9. Steve Rubell
After publicly commenting that his prominent New York Disco, Studio 54, was only outmatched in profits by the Mafia, Steve Rubell drew considerable attention from the Feds. Comparing his income to that of the world’s most prominent criminal organization was probably not the wisest move. After a raid on the club, Rubell and his associate were charged with tax evasion to the tune of $2.5m in unreported earnings. Heavy fines and a 42 month jail term were handed out. I guess the judge felt unable to just blame it on the boogie.
8. Joe Francis
Joe Francis, creator of the ‘Girls Gone Wild’ brand, has a strangely drooping face that carries an arrest-worthy suggestion of sleaze; but it was on his tax return that the law caught up with him. Accused of filing over $20m in fabricated business deductions on corporate tax returns, Francis pleaded guilty to filing false tax returns as well as bribing Nevada jail workers in 2009. He was ordered to pay fines totaling $250,000 in addition to racking up jail time. ‘Girls Gone Wild’ may have been a financial success, but ‘Calculators Gone Wild,’ in the end, proved a terrible investment.
7. Edward and Elaine Brown
Believing that the world was locked in a conflict between God and the secretive Illuminati-backed US government, Elaine and Edward Brown felt quite justified in not paying tax, and indeed going to great lengths not to. Bolstered by the material support of sympathizers, the couple locked themselves in their New Hampshire home and protected their fortress with armaments and booby-trapped surroundings. Undercover federal officers infiltrated their home, however, and promptly arrested them before any violence could break out. In October 2009 and January 2010, Elaine and Edward were sentenced to 35 and 37 years in prison respectively.
6. Jack Abramoff
Jack Abramoff, an influential lobbyist and businessman, was convicted in 2006 of charges of conspiracy, honest services fraud and tax evasion, though the investigation which led to his conviction was just the tip of an iceberg that revealed focal-points of corruption deep within the American political system. Owing the IRS $1.7m, notwithstanding the other charges he faced, Abramoff was sentenced to 6 years, of which he served 3 and a half.
5. Igor Olenicoff
It doesn’t matter how rich one gets, some people just want more! This was the case with Russian-born billionaire real estate developer Igor Olenicoff, who filed dodgy tax returns which omitted accounts holding up to $200m. Pleading guilty at trial in Santa Anna, CA, in 2007, he paid back the $52m in owed taxes and received 2 years’ probation. With a net worth of almost $2bn, however, he’s unlikely to feel the pinch.
4. Victor Posner
Victor Posner was an innovative businessman and ruthless corporate raider who is credited with popularizing the term “leveraged buyout” and pioneering the hostile takeover. He was also a noted philanthropist, but given that his 1987 conviction for tax evasion was based on deliberate overvaluing of a charitable donation in order to deny the IRS millions of dollars, one has to wonder if he was motivated by his heart or his number-crunching head. As well as paying out $4m in back taxes, penalties, interest and fines, he had to give $3m of his fortune to the homeless (in 1984 he had a net worth of $250m) and work with them for twenty hours a week, every week, for five years.
3. Leandro P. Rizzuto
Despite a 2008 net worth of $1.4bn, the founder of Conair, Leandro Rizzuto, hasn’t always had it easy. Perhaps with the aim of climbing higher up the Forbes Rich List, or perhaps simply because he could, Rizzuto funneled millions of dollars of kickback money into various foreign bank accounts, the existence of which he neglected to mention to the IRS. In 2002 he pleaded guilty to tax fraud and was sentenced to just over three years in prison, while also paying the IRS almost $2m for the six year’s worth of federal taxes he had dodged. Con-air indeed…
2. Leona Helmsley
Shockingly, someone with the nickname “The Queen of Mean” turned out to not be the kind of person who abides by the rules of civil society – like paying taxes. Billionaire hotel operator Leona Helmsley had a particular philosophy when it came to taxes. As her housekeeper famously testified, Helmsley felt that: “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.” Apparently, Helmsley also didn’t feel that she should pay her bills, and when disgruntled contractors took her to court over a $8m mansion remodeling contract they felt it only fair to mention that Helmsley had been deducting the cost as hotel expenses. A sentence of 16 years in prison swiftly followed, although it was later significantly reduced.
1. Walter Anderson
Some people say that if you’re going to lie, you may as well tell a big lie. This certainly seems to have been telephone entrepreneur Walter Anderson’s philosophy when in 1998 he claimed he owed only $495 in tax on a reported income of $67,939. His actual income was around $126m, but he didn’t stop there. He admitted as part of his plea that he had hidden $365m overall, and was sentenced to nine years in prison and ordered to pay $200m in restitution. Clearly nobody ever told him that not only does crime not pay, but it can end up leaving you with the bill.
