Topics this week: spring comes slowly; income inequality; earth's rejuvenation; and new saints

Spring in the Mile High city. Denver's nighttime and morning temperatures are slowly creeping upward. I find it less chilly retrieving the morning paper. The Abell tulip display is slowly opening, brightening the not-yet green front yard. The backyard lilly pond, totally ice free, is now self-clearing, ready for the annual pruning of the water lilies and other water flora. Here in the southeast metro area we had our first brief thunderstorm, followed by a lengthy, late evening rain shower. Given the strong winds of the past few days, the moisture was much needed.

Income and wealth inequality.  The future does not bode well for America's middle class. One report shows our's has now fallen behind similar population/economic groups in other developed nations. Here is a quote from a review of Thomas Piketty's new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. A review, "Taking on Adam Smith (and Karl Marx)", was published in the NY Times on April 20,2014. Piketty's book was also discussed in a recent Bill Moyers conversation with Nobel prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman. Piketty's major point is that it is the wealth inequality that counts, since the very wealthy do not earn income so much as they gain wealth in a myriad of other ways.

In 2012 the top 1 percent of American households collected 22.5 percent of the nation's income, the highest total since 1928. The richest 10 percent of Americans now take a larger slice of the pie than in 1913, at the close of the Gilded Age, owning more than 70 percent of the nation's wealth. And half of that is owned by the top 1 percent.

The following quote is from the autobiography by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA), A Fighting Chance. She was chosen to chair the congressional oversight panel that was to oversee the controversial TARP bank bailout program, then blatantly not chosen by President Obama to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which she was instrumental in creating. Of the TARP program, she said, “Over and over Congress had declared that there was no money for bridges or preschool or more medical research, but now the American taxpayer was on the hook for a $700 billion bailout of the big banks.” 

Then there is this opening sentence from an article in the April 18th issue of Foreign Policy magazine, a not so subtile reminder of history's vagaries and organizational impermanence. "Nothing lasts forever, not even the Chinese Communist Party. Whether it will perish in a few years, or last for decades to come, there are a series of worrying indicators [that it, too, may be running out of time]." The CCP now finds itself knee-deep in their own "Watergate" of corruption, with growing better informed population that is becoming ever more aware of the income disparities in their society. While the now dead USSR had to deal with the clumsy, slow, laborious, hand/typewritten samizdat of the mid-20th century, the CCP now has to deal with today's far more potent, far reaching internet.

Earth's future. For those of you with little visited coffee table books, the review of Edward O. Wilson's coffee table-sized, A Window on Eternity, provides a ray of hope for those concerned with species depletion. His professional dedication to, and study of, insects in their millions gives him hope. "[Wilson's many]...lyrical passages underscore [his] enduring debt to Henri Fabre, the French entomologist and writer who always had his nose to the ground, with magnifying glass in hand but his head firmly planted in the cosmos, contemplating the big questions of existence."

Two new saints? I am not Roman Catholic, so (but?) I must confess to being totally in the dark about saints in general, particularly the seeming rush to judgement in canonizing two so recently deceased popes. To this outsider, it seems a rush to judgement that acknowledges the Church's troubles, a bureaucratic, top-heavy organization, struggling mightily to regain its lost place in a society that is rapidly moving on.