"Occupy Wall Street" activists ARE the world's richest one percent

Yes, you read that correctly: Most of the Occupy Wall Street activists -- who scream indignantly about income inequality, and who want confiscatory taxes imposed on the "wealthiest one percent" -- are themselves among the world's wealthiest one percent:

In America, the top 1% earn more than $380,000 per year. We are, however, among the richest nations on Earth. How much do you need to earn to be among the top 1% of the world?

$34,000.

That was the finding World Bank economist Branko Milanovic presented in his 2010 book The Haves and the Have-Nots. Going down the distribution ladder may be just as surprising. To be in the top half of the globe, you need to earn just $1,225 a year. For the top 20%, it's $5,000 per year. Enter the top 10% with $12,000 a year. To be included in the top 0.1% requires an annual income of $70,000....

The global distribution figures may seem incomprehensibly low, but consider a couple of statistics you're likely familiar with: According to the U.N., "Nearly half the world's population, 2.8 billion people, earn less than $2 a day." According to the World Bank, 95% of those living in the developing world earn less than $10 a day.

Those numbers are so shocking that you might only think about them in the abstract. But when you consider them in the context of the entire globe, including yourself, the skewing effects they have on the distribution of income is simply massive. It means that Americans we consider poor are among some of the world's most well-off. As Milanovic notes, "the poorest [5%] of Americans are better off than more than two-thirds of the world population." Furthermore, "only about 3 percent of the Indian population have incomes higher than the bottom (the very poorest) U.S. percentile."

In short, most of those protesting in the Occupy Wall Street movement would be considered wealthy -- perhaps extraordinarily wealthy -- by much of the world. Many of those protesting the 1% are, ironically, the 1%.

Now, I wonder how many of the protestors would be eager to have their own incomes and property confiscated in order to "level" income disparities with the rest of the world? Think they'd like to live in the "equality" of, say, $3 per day incomes?

Muslim alternative to capitalistic interest payments: insolvency

Okay, here's my belly laugh of the day:"Sharia-compliant mortgage lender in receivership":

UM Financial was one of the first companies in Canada to offer so-called Islamic financing to Muslims who believe that sharia, or Islamic law, prohibitions against usury include interest on things such as mortgages.

UM would buy a property then lease it to a client so they were paying rent instead of interest. Some homeowners complained that the firm would also charge extra fees.

The company had $50 million in financial backing from Central 1 Credit Union of which almost $29 million is outstanding.

Qayum Mian knew he was paying a premium on his Markham house for the seven years he used UM Financial — he estimated up to 2 percentage points more than if he’d gone through a bank — but was happy to pay the price “because my conscience was satisfied.”

"Occupy Wall Street" does NOT represent the American middle class

Democrat pollster Doug Schoen explodes the Democrat/progressive Narrative about the "Occupy Wall Street" gang. It's a wishful-thinking-based storyline (promoted by the liberal media) that casts the demonstrators as righteously aggrieved "victims" of capitalism, who represent the views of "99 percent" of Americans and their aspirations. Reports Schoen:

Our findings probably represent the first systematic random sample of Occupy Wall Street opinion.

Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn't represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence. Half (52%) have participated in a political movement before, virtually all (98%) say they would support civil disobedience to achieve their goals, and nearly one-third (31%) would support violence to advance their agenda.

The vast majority of demonstrators are actually employed, and the proportion of protesters unemployed (15%) is within single digits of the national unemployment rate (9.1%)....

What binds a large majority of the protesters together—regardless of age, socioeconomic status or education—is a deep commitment to left-wing policies: opposition to free-market capitalism and support for radical redistribution of wealth, intense regulation of the private sector, and protectionist policies to keep American jobs from going overseas.

Sixty-five percent say that government has a moral responsibility to guarantee all citizens access to affordable health care, a college education, and a secure retirement—no matter the cost. By a large margin (77%-22%), they support raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, but 58% oppose raising taxes for everybody, with only 36% in favor. And by a close margin, protesters are divided on whether the bank bailouts were necessary (49%) or unnecessary (51%).

Thus Occupy Wall Street is a group of engaged progressives who are disillusioned with the capitalist system and have a distinct activist orientation. Among the general public, by contrast, 41% of Americans self-identify as conservative, 36% as moderate, and only 21% as liberal. That's why the Obama-Pelosi embrace of the movement could prove catastrophic for their party.

Team Obama and their willing media accomplices are such prisoners of the leftist Narrative that many actually believe that these street agitators and social misfits reflect the demographics of Middle America. We can only hope that continue to drink this Kool-Aid until November 2012.

"Public education" in the Age of Equality

I don't really think that I need to comment on this.

Except to say that, in the Age of Egalitarianism -- which is what our president and his party are all about -- not only can you be "too big to fail," you can be "too incompetent to fail," also.

"Pathological Altruism"

Well, I haven't read this book yet, but it has been getting plenty of MSM buzz, including from the New York Times.

But I'm confused. Didn't Ayn Rand first make this an issue, oh, around 1943, in The Fountainhead?

And isn't she still being denounced and mocked for it, to this very day?

Why is it that a truth isn't a truth unless it's "discovered" and propagated by a gang of Establishment academics?

A personal message from Vince Flynn

I just received by email a copy of this personal message from bestselling thriller author Vince Flynn. It speaks for itself.

I had the honor of interviewing Vince a few years ago (and I’ll be re-posting that interview on my “Vigilante Author” blog soon). In addition to being a great writer, he is one of the most personable and principled men I know.

I know all of you will wish this wonderful man a full and speedy recovery as he continues his gallant battle with cancer.

My fiction site: "The Vigilante Author"

Just a reminder:

Anyone looking for posts about fiction, self-publishing, and my own novel HUNTER: A Thriller, should visit my separate blog, "The Vigilante Author." My latest two posts there (late Sept./early Oct.) contain my extensive list of "The Best Thriller Writers -- Ever."

EPA thugs use fake "wetlands" charges to bully Idaho couple

Check out this video.

These poor people -- trying to build a home on obviously bone-dry land that the EPA has arbitrarily, ex post facto declared to be a "wetland" -- face the loss of their property plus noncompliance fines of $30,000 per day.

Fortunately, they have the wonderful Pacific Legal Foundation on their side, on a battle headed to the Supreme Court. But countless other victims of environmentalist bullies, within government and without, don't have a champion. Hmm... maybe they could use the help of a vigilante....

Those Diabolically Clever Racist Republicans!

DIABOLICALLY CLEVER RACIST REPUBLICANS HIDE THEIR RACISM BY SUPPORTING BLACK CANDIDATE HERMAN CAIN.

Thus reasons that brilliantly incisive political pundit Janeane Garofalo.

Of course, if Republicans supported a white candidate, instead...why, they'd be RACISTS.

"Attila and the Witch Doctor" in Venezuela

Readers of Ayn Rand's For the New Intellectual will recognize these archetypes, what she described as a symbiotic relationship between "mystics of muscle" and "mystics of mind." And they'll also grasp how it relates to the following amusing news story:

Shamans from tribes in Venezuela's Amazon jungle held a ceremony at the Miraflores presidential palace Saturday to help Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez recover from his cancer treatment.

Chavez, who insists that he was "not sick but recovering" from cancer, greeted the shamans wearing a track suit in the colors of the Venezuelan national flag and wore a crown of feathers the visitors gave him.

Members of the Yekuana, Jivi and Wayuu communities danced, sang and prayed as they invoked their ancestors to protect the Venezuelan leader.

The ritual was aimed at protecting Chavez "against enemies and bad health," said Miguel Morales, a shaman from the Jivi community.

It also serves "so that he is left in peace, politically," he said.

I just couldn't make this stuff up.

A 9/11 commentary: "Unilateral Moral Disarmament"

Not long after the attacks of September 11, 2001, I wrote a commentary on the meaning and source of the attack for a magazine called Navigator.

Nothing in the intervening ten years has caused me to alter my fundamental analysis of the ideas at the root of the assault on America. As we contemplate the tragic losses of human life from that infamous day, and the philosophy at the heart of the attack, I thought I'd share with you that commentary:

"Unilateral Moral Disarmament."

An unsurprising political fall

Way back in 1978, I met the former Margaret Kelley, a young woman running a quixotic campaign for state representative as a Republican in the Democratic stronghold of downtown Boston. I was impressed enough to volunteer to become her campaign manager, and also personally smitten enough to later become her husband. (We raised a daughter together before separating and divorcing in the mid-1990s).

Margaret was running against another political newbie, a Democratic lawyer from Boston's Italian North End neighborhood by the name of Salvatore DiMasi. He struck us at the time as a terminally ambitious young man on the make, too slick to be scrupulous (as he demonstrated in several ways during the campaign). In other words, a typical creature of Boston machine politics.

We gave it a gallant shot, even took a couple of precincts away from him in the election. But the gerrymandered votes were heavily stacked in the North End, where against a name like "DiMasi," the name "Kelley" didn't have the odds of a pizza slice's survival in an Italian sports bar. We were out-registered Democrat to Republican something like 13-1; we lost about 2 to 1; for us, that was a moral victory.

In the intervening years, Sal DiMasi rose like scum to the top of a stagnant pond, up through the ranks of Massachusetts politicos eventually to become the Speaker of the state House of Representatives -- in short, one of the most powerful politicians in the Commonwealth. He did it the old-fashioned way for a Boston Democrat: by a combination of cronyism, corruption, and outright criminality.

It all caught up with him in 2009 when the Boston Globe exposed his sordid machinations. Sal DiMasi has just been sentenced to eight years in federal prison "for steering millions of dollars in state contracts to a software company and secretly profiting from the scheme."

I saw this guy's lack of scruples first-hand in 1978, so this news comes as no surprise to me now. I do find it dispiriting that so many voters expect this sort of behavior as the norm -- even as desirable -- from their politicians. So, before we dismiss the memory of Mr. DiMasi with indifferent contempt, perhaps we should ponder the words of the guy who once said: "Politicians, like water, cannot rise higher than their source."

Steyn on "The Desperation-Deprivation Myth"

Mark Steyn, who tops my list of favorite political/cultural commentators, once again hits it out of the park with a column that blasts the lame excuse-making for the recent British riots. In part:

In fact, these feral youth live better than 90 percent of the population of the planet. They certainly live better than their fellow youths halfway around the world who go to work each day in factories across China and India to make the cool electronic toys young Westerners expect to enjoy as their birthright. In Britain, as in America and Europe, the young take it for granted that this agreeable division of responsibilities is as permanent a feature of life as the earth and sky: Rajiv and Suresh in Bangalore make the state-of-the-art gizmo, Kevin and Ron in Birmingham get to play with it. That’s just the way it is. And, because that’s the way it is, Kevin and Ron and the welfare state that attends their every need assume ’twill always be so.

To justify their looting, the looters appealed to the conventional desperation-of-deprivation narrative: They’d “do anything to get more money.” Anything, that is, except get up in the morning, put on a clean shirt, and go off to do a day’s work. That concept is all but unknown to the homes in which these guys were raised....

The problem for the Western world is that it has incentivized non-productivity on an industrial scale. For large numbers at the lower end of the spectrum (still quaintly referred to by British reporters as “working class”), the ritual of work — of lifetime employment as a normal feature of life — has been all but bred out by multigenerational dependency. At the upper end of the spectrum, too many of us seem to regard an advanced Western society as the geopolitical version of a lavishly endowed charitable foundation that funds somnolent programming on NPR.

As is always mandatory when it comes to a Mark Steyn piece, read it all.

UPDATE: Related: Eminent criminologist and scholar James Q. Wilson demolishes the notion that unemployment and bad economic times lead to an increase in crime:

But the notion that unemployment causes crime runs into some obvious difficulties. For one thing, the 1960s, a period of rising crime, had essentially the same unemployment rate as the late 1990s and early 2000s, a period when crime fell. Further, during the Great Depression, when unemployment hit 25 percent, the crime rate in many cities went down....

[And] when the recent recession struck...[and] as the national unemployment rate doubled from around 5 percent to nearly 10 percent, the property-crime rate, far from spiking, fell significantly. For 2009, the FBI reported an 8 percent drop in the nationwide robbery rate and a 17 percent reduction in the auto-theft rate from the previous year. Big-city reports show the same thing. Between 2008 and 2010, New York City experienced a 4 percent decline in the robbery rate and a 10 percent fall in the burglary rate. Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles witnessed similar declines. The FBI’s latest numbers, for 2010, show that the national crime rate fell again....

Some scholars argue that the unemployment rate is too crude a measure of economic frustration to prove the connection between unemployment and crime, since it estimates only the percentage of the labor force that is looking for work and hasn’t found it. But other economic indicators tell much the same story.... So we have little reason to ascribe the recent crime decline to jobs, the labor market, or consumer sentiment.

A new blog launched: THE VIGILANTE AUTHOR

I'd like to invite you to my new blog, focused entirely on fiction -- especially my own -- and self-publishing: THE VIGILANTE AUTHOR.

For quite some time, I've been uncomfortable with this multiple-purpose blog. It has tried to address two largely distinct audiences: people interested in my discussions of politics, culture, and philosophy, and people interested in fiction and self-publishing. Many readers eager to read about the former won't want to be harangued about the latter -- and vice-versa.

For that reason, I've decided to launch THE VIGILANTE AUTHOR as a site dedicated to the fiction/self-publishing topic areas, while this blog will sharpen its focus entirely to comments and observations about socio-political topics.

I'll eliminate a number of links on the right margin of this site that pertain to fiction/self-publishing matters. If that's what interests you most, head on over to THE VIGILANTE AUTHOR.

If hard-hitting commentary about the passing scene is what interests you most, though, stay put, kick off your shoes, and feel free to chime in here.

I'm interviewed by blogger Rich Engle about "HUNTER"

Those interested in learning a bit more about me, my writing methods, the public response to HUNTER, and the role that my philosophical views played in the novel, are invited to read the interview just posted by Rich Engle on his blog.

Thanks, Rich, for asking some questions that other interviewers won't.

"HUNTER" ranked #1 by customers on 3 Kindle lists

As of August 15, there are posted a whopping 45 "5-star" Amazon customer reviews for HUNTER; there is also one lone "4-star" review. Because of these stellar buyer ratings, my debut thriller now stands at #1 on three Kindle "Top Rated" lists: "Thrillers," "Romantic Suspense," and "Spy Stories & Tales of Intrigue."

Based on customer ratings, it also ranks #2 among all "Mysteries & Thrillers," #3 among all "Romance" titles, #7 in all "Genre Fiction," and #22 among ALL "Fiction" titles on the Kindle. Finally, among all 986,000+ Kindle ebooks -- both fiction and nonfiction -- HUNTER stands at #102.

Check out the new Amazon reviews here.

UPDATE: The first review from an actual book-review site, "Crime Fiction Lover," in Britain, gives 4 stars to the book, which it describes as "a tight, slick spy thriller" with "engaging characters":

There are convincing details of weapons, combat, information gathering, information masking methods, and the technology that makes it all possible. While the author’s background is not in this area, the research done to provide a convincing image is obvious.... If you are a fan of slick espionage thrillers, and are looking to find something a little closer to home that carries a message with the story, this tale is for you.

UPDATE: I've posted a lot of new material at the Dylan Hunter Facebook Fan Page.

UPDATE, 8/16: HUNTER (8-16, 9 pm) has now entered the Kindle "Top 50 Bestsellers" in "Spy Stories & Tales of Intrigue," at #47. It also has reached #77 on the Kindle bestseller list in "Romantic Suspense." And it now appears on a third bestseller list, too: the broader Amazon.com bestseller list of "Romantic Suspense" titles, at #93, a list that includes many more titles than the Kindle ebook list.

In other words, the book's sales numbers are beginning to track more closely with the its stellar "customer ratings."

UPDATE, 8/17: Amazing -- the charts just continue to improve. I woke up checked at 9 am on 8-17 to find HUNTER with the following new low rankings on three "bestseller" charts: #45 bestseller in "Spy Stories & Tales of Intrigue"; #67 in the Kindle Store's "Romantic Suspense"; and #79 on Amazon.com's broader "Romantic Suspense" list. Again, these are actual sales lists -- not customer-rating lists, which are even better.

UPDATE, 8/18 -- Today, HUNTER reached as low as #40 bestseller on the Kindle "Spy Stories & Tales of Intrigue" chart, and #56 on the "Romantic Suspense" list. It's overall ranking on the Kindle among all paid (rather than free) items descended to about #2000 out of over 969,000 products. HUNTER is now selling on the Kindle at a rate three times greater per day than it did during the first four days this month.

Investigation into publishers under-reporting ebook royalties

There have been stories for some time that major publishers have been systematically under-reporting ebook royalties, and hence stiffing their authors the payments they've earned.

Now a law firm has launched an investigation. Here are the details.

Publishers terrified to compete with Amazon Publishing

Publishers Weekly has begrudgingly acknowledged the obvious in an article titled "All Eyes on Amazon Publishing." After quoting a lot of grousing bookstore owners and nervous agents, the meat of the article -- which reveals the real concern of PW and its Big 6 clientele -- is to be found in the final two paragraphs:

For many agents, along with some booksellers, the real concern about Amazon Publishing has to do with what it could signal for traditional publishers. If Amazon lands enough bestselling authors, it could dominate traditional publishing the way it has come to monopolize online bookselling. Jeff McCord, owner of the Atlanta shop Bound to Be Read Books, thinks Amazon has long “wished to take over the book industry from top to bottom” and its recent foray into publishing is proof. “Amazon Publishing is a bigger worry for publishers than for bookstores,” he said.

While agents don’t want to see Amazon gain more control over any part of the business, they will go where they find the best deals. If Amazon is offering better royalty rates on both print and digital than many traditional houses—as some reports suggest—agents will be forced to do business with a company that, as one insider put it, “there is a lot of bad blood with.”

Translation: Publishers are scared out of their wits that Amazon is going to out-compete them for authors on the publishing end, just as booksellers are furious that Amazon's online and Kindle business has out-competed them on the retail end. Just you wait: It won't be long before all the dying dinosaurs try to get the government to crack down on this superb competitor with the bludgeon of antitrust" laws, instead of their own improvements in quality, author terms, and customer service.