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Income Distribution/Poverty

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Date	Fairness.com Resource	Read it at:
May 06, 2013	Charts: Why You're in Deep Trouble If You Can't Afford a Lawyer:Fifty years after the groundbreaking "Gideon" ruling, public defenders are overworked, underpaid—and America's poor are paying the price QUOTE: the Supreme Court disappointed reformers when it refused to rule on a case involving a Louisiana man serving a life sentence after waiting five years in jail while the state came up with money to pay his court-appointed lawyer....Since the 1963 Supreme Court decision, America's prison population has grown more than tenfold—from 217,000 inmates to 2.3 million—largely due to decades of the war on drugs and tough-on-crime policies. It's been nearly impossible for the public defense system to keep pace.	Mother Jones
Apr 04, 2013	As economy flails, debtors' prisons thrive (MoneyWatch) QUOTE: Thousands of Americans are sent to jail not for committing a crime, but because they can't afford to pay for traffic tickets, medical bills and court fees. If that sounds like a debtors' prison, a legal relic which was abolished in this country in the 1830s, that's because it is. And courts and judges in states across the land are violating the Constitution by incarcerating people for being unable to pay such debts.	CBS News
Mar 15, 2013	Right to Lawyer Can Be Empty Promise for Poor QUOTE: Fifty years ago, on March 18, 1963, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Gideon v. Wainwright that those accused of a crime have a constitutional right to a lawyer whether or not they can afford one.... the promise inherent in the Gideon ruling remains unfulfilled... Civil matters — including legal issues like home foreclosure, job loss, spousal abuse and parental custody — were not covered by the decision. Today, many states and counties do not offer lawyers to the poor in major civil disputes, and in some criminal ones as well. Those states that do are finding that more people than ever are qualifying for such help, making it impossible to keep up with the need.	New York Times
Dec 14, 2012	Tax Plan Is Popular, but Not Quite Fair QUOTE: The political appeal of a proposal that limits deductions without actually naming any — inciting the powerful interests and lobbyists that support them — seems obvious. But many tax experts said that a fixed dollar cap is anything but the evenhanded approach to closing loopholes it appears to be.	New York Times
Dec 01, 2012	Utah Hunters Criticize Market Approach to Licenses and Conservation QUOTE: It especially bothers him — and other hunters — that those with means can buy public licenses through private outlets, paying thousands of dollars to move to the head of the line. More than any state in the West, Utah has expanded hunting opportunities for the well-to-do and has begun to diminish them for those seeking permits directly from the state.	New York Times
Nov 30, 2012	Aid Changes Raise Issue of Diversity at Colleges QUOTE: a number of prestigious smaller colleges are straining to meet students’ financial needs. To bridge the gap, some colleges have begun revising their financial aid formulas, raising concerns about how campus diversity — both economic and racial — might be affected.	New York Times
Nov 13, 2012	deleted_parsed_too_soon2 QUOTE: Fairness—or lack of it—is central to human relationships at every level, from a marriage between two people to disputes involving war and peace among the nations of the world. I believe fairness is what we need to focus on, not inequality—though I readily acknowledge that high inequality in wealth and income is corrosive to society.	Psychology Today
Nov 13, 2012	Unequal or Unfair: Which Is Worse? Inequality is a symptom; unfairness is the disease. QUOTE: Fairness—or lack of it—is central to human relationships at every level, from a marriage between two people to disputes involving war and peace among the nations of the world. I believe fairness is what we need to focus on, not inequality—though I readily acknowledge that high inequality in wealth and income is corrosive to society.	Psychology Today
Nov 02, 2012	Hardship Strains Emotions in New York QUOTE: Emotions, frayed after almost a week of desperation, darkness and cold, approached a breaking point on Friday as the collective spirit that buoyed New York in the first few days after Hurricane Sandy gave way to angry complaints of neglect and unequal treatment. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, facing criticism that he was favoring marathon runners arriving from around the world over people in devastated neighborhoods, reversed himself and canceled the New York City Marathon.	New York Times
Aug 31, 2012	The Evolution of Fairness QUOTE: A multimedia investigation asks: Can examining how inequality began in a hunter-gatherer society teach us how to fairly share the costs and consequences of how we use diminishing natural resources?	Pacific Standard
Aug 23, 2012	Is Private School Not Expensive Enough? QUOTE: To the extent that any family with the wherewithal is paying less than the full cost of the product it is buying through combined tuition payments and donations, that family is effectively being subsidized by other current and past donors. Not only is this ethically unsupportable, but ultimately, it is also financially unworkable.	New York Times
Jul 21, 2012	£13tn: hoard hidden from taxman by global elite • Study estimates staggering size of offshore economy • Private banks help wealthiest to move cash into havens QUOTE: "The problem here is that the assets of these countries are held by a small number of wealthy individuals while the debts are shouldered by the ordinary people of these countries through their governments," the report says	Guardian Unlimited
Mar 12, 2012	The Reproduction of Privilege QUOTE: Instead of serving as a springboard to social mobility as it did for the first decades after World War II, college education today is reinforcing class stratification, with a huge majority of the 24 percent of Americans aged 25 to 29 currently holding a bachelor’s degree coming from families with earnings above the median income. Seventy-four percent of those now attending colleges that are classified as “most competitive,” a group that includes schools like Harvard, Emory, Stanford and Notre Dame, come from families with earnings in the top income quartile, while only three percent come from families in the bottom quartile.	New York Times
Feb 27, 2012	Are rich people more unethical? QUOTE: A series of experiments conducted by psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that people who are socially and financially better-off are more likely to lie, cheat, and otherwise behave unethically compared to individuals who occupy lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder.	CNN (Cable News Network)
Jan 30, 2012	Lower-Income Families May Pay More for Auto Insurance QUOTE: Many low-income families cannot afford car insurance, at least in part because insurers price their policies in ways that cost them more...	New York Times
Jan 24, 2012	In Address, Obama Makes Pitch for Economic Fairness QUOTE: President Obama pledged on Tuesday night to use government power to balance the scale between America’s rich and the rest of the public, trying to present an election-year choice between continued leadership toward an economy “built to last” and what he called irresponsible policies of the past that caused an economic collapse.	New York Times
Dec 22, 2011	A Christmas Message From America's Rich QUOTE: The entire ethos of modern Wall Street, on the other hand, is complete indifference to all of these matters. The very rich on today’s Wall Street are now so rich that they buy their own social infrastructure. They hire private security, they live on gated mansions on islands and other tax havens, and most notably, they buy their own justice and their own government....nobody even minds that they are rich. What makes people furious is that they have stopped being citizens.	Rolling Stone
Dec 21, 2011	Scaling Caste Walls With Capitalism’s Ladders in India QUOTE: The rapid growth that followed the opening of India’s economy in 1991 has widened the gulf between rich and poor, and some here have begun to blame liberalization for the rising tide of corruption. But the era of growth has also created something unthinkable a generation ago: a tiny but growing group of wealthy Dalit business people.	New York Times
Dec 18, 2011	Don’t Tax the Rich. Tax Inequality Itself. (Op-Ed) QUOTE: we propose an automatic extra tax on the income of the top 1 percent of earners — a tax that would limit the after-tax incomes of this club to 36 times the median household income. Importantly, our Brandeis tax does not target excessive income per se; it only caps inequality....It is not a “claw back” tax. It merely assures that things don’t get worse.	New York Times
Nov 10, 2011	Greece and Italy Seek a Solution From Technocrats QUOTE: The question now, in both Italy and Greece, is whether the technocrats can succeed where elected leaders failed — whether pressure from the European Union backed by the whip of the financial markets will be enough to dislodge the entrenched cultures of political patronage that experts largely blame for the slow growth and financial crises that plague both countries.	New York Times
Nov 09, 2011	What Occupy Wall Street got right: The problem isn't that Wall Street broke the rules to their own benefit, it's that the rules themselves are unhelpful. QUOTE: Business leaders, the famous 1%, need to resist the urge to dismiss the whole [Occupy Wall Street] movement based on the scattershot and at times ill-conceived nature of the arguments on the placards. Our task is instead to parse the protest, understand the nature of the legitimate complaints that underpin the movement and to attempt to create smart remedies to those complaints.	CNN (Cable News Network)
Oct 24, 2011	Why Homelessness Is Becoming an Occupy Wall Street Issue QUOTE: political protesters do not face the challenges of urban camping alone. Homeless people confront the same issues every day: how to scrape together meals, keep warm at night by covering themselves with cardboard or tarp, and relieve themselves without committing a crime. Public restrooms are sparse in American cities—"as if the need to go to the bathroom does not exist," travel expert Arthur Frommer once observed. And yet to yield to bladder pressure is to risk arrest.	Mother Jones
Sep 21, 2011	Tradition forces girls into prostitution QUOTE: Under the devdasi system, girls were dedicated to a life of sex work in the name of religion...Gradually, this gave way to a life of prostitution....It's an area of extreme poverty – so sending a daughter into the sex business is seen as a way for parents to unburden themselves of a child -and, it's lucrative.	CNN (Cable News Network)
Sep 04, 2011	Israeli protests: 430,000 take to streets to demand social justice: Up to 300,000 take part in Tel Aviv, 50,000 in Jerusalem and 40,000 in Haifa in Israel's biggest ever demonstration QUOTE: Hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets on Saturday night in Israel's biggest ever demonstration to demand social justice, a lower cost of living and a clear government response to the concerns of an increasingly squeezed middle class.	Guardian Unlimited
Aug 19, 2011	Feds investigate L.A. sheriff's office for civil rights violations QUOTE: The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department is being investigated for alleged "systemic" civil rights violations during routine traffic stops by trying to identify people who live in publicly subsidized housing...	CNN (Cable News Network)
Aug 01, 2011	Somalis Waste Away as Insurgents Block Escape From Famine QUOTE: The Shabab Islamist insurgent group, which controls much of southern Somalia, is blocking starving people from fleeing the country and setting up a cantonment camp where it is imprisoning displaced people who were trying to escape Shabab territory.	New York Times
Jul 08, 2011	Allegations Link U.S. Companies to Brazilian Sex Tourism QUOTE: The Justice Department has been conducting a criminal investigation of sports fishing expeditions in the Amazon that may have been used as covers for Americans to have sex with underage girls...	New York Times
Jul 06, 2011	Settlement Is Reached in Suit Over Katrina Grants QUOTE: Federal officials announced on Wednesday that they had reached a settlement with a group of homeowners who sued the federal government and the State of Louisiana alleging discrimination in the state’s Road Home program, which distributed grants to those whose houses were destroyed in Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding.	New York Times
Jun 28, 2011	In South Korea, fairness is the new ideal QUOTE: Experts say the fairness fixation reflects dismay at what rapid change has wrought: a widening gap between the rich and the poor, and residual corruption. For President Lee Myung-bak, this is more than a passing problem, because middle-class economic concerns and a string of frauds and scandals have convinced South Koreans that theirs is anything but the “fair society” that he has touted.	Washington Post
Jun 24, 2011	Them That’s Not Shall Lose QUOTE: if Washington politicians ever knew the sting of poverty then they have long since vanquished the memory. How else to qualify their positions? In fact, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, nearly half of all members of Congress are millionaires, and between 2008 and 2009, when most Americans were feeling the brunt of the recession, the personal wealth of members of Congress collectively increased by more than 16 percent.	New York Times
Jun 23, 2011	North Carolina hearing explores history of forced sterilization QUOTE: After World War II, most states abolished their eugenics programs when it became clear that Nazi's used similar practices to further their ideals of racial purity. But the number of sterilizations in North Carolina peaked between 1950-1960...	CNN (Cable News Network)
Jun 20, 2011	Court Issues Split Ruling on Poor’s Right to Counsel QUOTE: In a 5-to-4 decision that divided along ideological lines, the court said there is no automatic right to counsel for people charged with civil contempt, at least when the parent seeking to collect child support does not have a lawyer.	New York Times
Jun 16, 2011	Who Is James Johnson? QUOTE: Morgenson and Rosner write with barely suppressed rage, as if great crimes are being committed. But there are no crimes. This is how Washington works. Only two of the characters in this tale come off as egregiously immoral. Johnson made $100 million while supposedly helping the poor.	New York Times
Jun 07, 2011	The Earth Is Full QUOTE: Gilding cites the work of the Global Footprint Network, an alliance of scientists, which calculates how many “planet Earths” we need to sustain our current growth rates. G.F.N. measures how much land and water area we need to produce the resources we consume and absorb our waste, using prevailing technology. On the whole, says G.F.N., we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth’s resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future.	New York Times
May 25, 2011	Chasing Riches From Africa to Europe and Finding Only Squalor QUOTE: Experts say thousands more — many of whom have been moving around North Africa trying to get to Europe for years, including Somalis, Eritreans, Senegalese and Nigerians — are likely to follow, sure that a better life awaits them. But for Mr. Jallow and for many others who arrived before them, often after days at sea without food or water, Europe has offered hardships they never imagined.	New York Times
May 24, 2011	Top Colleges, Largely for the Elite QUOTE: For all of the other ways that top colleges had become diverse, their student bodies remained shockingly affluent. At the University of Michigan, more entering freshmen in 2003 came from families earning at least $200,000 a year than came from the entire bottom half of the income distribution. At some private colleges, the numbers were even more extreme.	New York Times
Apr 29, 2011	Soft Drink Industry Fights Proposed Food Stamp Ban QUOTE: They also fear that restrictions on soft drinks would set a precedent for the government to distinguish between good and bad foods and to ban the use of food stamps for other products… The plan is unfair to food stamp recipients because it treats them differently from other customers.	New York Times
Apr 29, 2011	Silliness and Sleight of Hand QUOTE: There’s something immoral about giving handouts to entrenched corporate interests with armies of lobbyists while seeking to cut those to hungry children, struggling families and frail seniors… In the last several months, Republican state lawmakers and party officials have said the most reprehensible things about Hispanics, gays and blacks.	New York Times
Apr 22, 2011	China Curbs Fancy Tombs That Irk Poor QUOTE: Some local governments would like those who succeed not to lord it over others, at least when it comes to paying final respects... “Of course, if we cannot change the fact of the disparity between the rich and poor, the least we can do is lessen the impact of it on society and lessen the advertising of it.”	New York Times
Apr 17, 2011	The Middle-Class Tax Trap QUOTE: Asking a population that’s increasingly brown and beige to accept punishing tax rates while white seniors receive roughly $3 in Medicare benefits for every dollar they paid in (the projected ratio in the 2030s) promises to polarize the country along racial as well as generational lines.	New York Times
Apr 12, 2011	Suit Alleges Bias in Disability Denials by Queens Judges QUOTE: Now, a class-action lawsuit... says that five of the eight Queens judges are not just difficult, but also biased against the applicants — many of whom are poor or immigrants — and have systematically denied benefits to the disabled by making legal and factual errors.	New York Times
Mar 29, 2011	Why We’re Fasting QUOTE: The budget proposes cuts in the WIC program... in international food and health aid... and in programs that aid farmers in underdeveloped countries. Food stamps are also being attacked, in the twisted “Welfare Reform 2011” bill... These supposedly deficit-reducing cuts — they’d barely make a dent — will quite literally cause more people to starve to death, go to bed hungry or live more miserably than are doing so now. And: The bill would increase defense spending.	New York Times
Mar 28, 2011	Amber Waves to Ivory Bolls QUOTE: Many farmers, both in the United States and abroad, will join Mr. Vela this year in chasing the higher profits to be made in cotton — with consequences that could ripple across the globe... “It’s good for the farmer, but from a humanitarian perspective it’s kind of scary... Those people in poor countries that have a hard time affording food, they’re going to be even less able to afford it now.”	New York Times
Feb 11, 2011	Administration Calls for Cutting Aid to Home Buyers QUOTE: The three ideas that the report outlines for replacing Fannie and Freddie all would raise the cost of mortgage loans and push homeownership beyond the reach of some families.	New York Times
Jan 14, 2011	Joy as Tunisian President Flees Offers Lesson to Arab Leaders QUOTE: The protests’ success gripped a region whose residents have increasingly complained of governments that seem incapable of meeting their demands and are bereft of any ideology except perpetuating power. The combustible mix that inspired them — economic woes and revulsion at corruption and repression — seemed to echo in so many other countries in the Middle East...	New York Times
Jan 13, 2011	Behind Tunisia Unrest, Rage Over Wealth of Ruling Family QUOTE: summer getaway of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and his large extended family, many of whom have built vast beachfront mansions here with the wealth they have amassed during his years in power. But their new and conspicuous riches, partly exposed in a detailed cable by the American ambassador and made public by WikiLeaks, have fueled an extraordinary extended uprising by Tunisians who blame corruption among the elite for the joblessness afflicting their country.	New York Times
Jan 05, 2011	Microlenders, Honored With Nobel, Are Struggling QUOTE: microloans have prompted political hostility in Bangladesh, India, Nicaragua and other developing countries....But as with other trumpeted development initiatives that have promised to lift hundreds of millions from poverty, microcredit has struggled to turn rhetoric into tangible success.	New York Times
Nov 05, 2010	Money doesn't buy many wins for self-funded candidates QUOTE: Tuesday's midterms featured an unusually large crop of moguls who sought to ease their way into power by pouring millions of their own dollars into their campaigns. In most cases, they failed spectacularly.	Washington Post
Jun 11, 2010	Confusion Over the Dormant Estate Tax Keeps Advisers Busy QUOTE: THE disappearance of the federal estate tax this year has created confusion and frustration among the wealthy, even among those who stand to benefit from it.	New York Times
Jun 09, 2010	Views of North Korea Show How a Policy Spread Misery QUOTE: North Koreans are used to struggle and heartbreak. But the Nov. 30 currency devaluation, apparently an attempt to prop up a foundering state-run economy, was for some the worst disaster since a famine that killed hundreds of thousands in the mid-1990s.	New York Times

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