Walking on Thin Ice

and now, a word from the world of mammon and the servants of 666…

Cleveland was the U.S. city with the highest poverty rate last year, at 32.4%, while San Jose had the lowest, at 9.7%. (Published on Thursday, December 7, 2006 by the Associated Press)
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Personal wealth is distributed so unevenly across the world that the richest 2% of adults own more than 50% of the world’s assets while the poorest 50% hold only 1% of wealth. The concentration of wealth in different countries varies considerably, with the top 10% in the US holding 70% of the country’s wealth, compared with 61% in France, 56% in the UK, 44% in Germany and 39% in Japan. (Published on Wednesday, December 6, 2006 by the Financial Times)
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The length of the Iraq war surpassed that of World War II last month. The costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the global fight against terrorism are expected to surpass the $536 billion in inflation-adjusted costs of the Vietnam War by spring. That’s more than 10 times the Bush administration’s $50 million prewar estimate.  If U.S. troops remain in Iraq through 2010, it will approach $1 trillion. (Published on Wednesday, December 6, 2006 by McClatchy Newspapers)
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Very soon more Americans will have died in Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, than died in the World Trade Center that day. (Published on Tuesday, December 5, 2006 by the Boston Globe)
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Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt always figure in the “great” category. Most presidents are ranked “average” or, to put it less charitably, mediocre. Johnson, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Richard M. Nixon occupy the bottom rung, and now President Bush is a leading contender to join them. Historians are loath to predict the future. It is impossible to say with certainty how Bush will be ranked in, say, 2050. But somehow, in his first six years in office he has managed to combine the lapses of leadership, misguided policies and abuse of power of his failed predecessors. I think there is no alternative but to rank him as the worst president in U.S. history. (Published on Sunday, December 3, 2006 by the Washington Post)
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Currently, U.S. military spending tops $500 billion annually, more than the military budgets of all other governments combined. (After January 3, It Will Be the Democrats’ War - by Stephen Zunes)
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The highest paid CEO in 2005 made as much as 7,443 average workers and 23,282 minimum wage workers. (Minimum Wage Breaks No-Raise Record - by Holly Sklar)
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this has been smith, reporting from underside the scum.