One unmissable snip from Rebecca Solnit’s op-ed that appeared in the Los Angeles Times this weekend, which spoke to state bankruptcy here in California but is just as relevant to the USA as a whole:
Speaking of poor children reminds me of Sitting Bull, as good an authority on our economy as anyone, even if he wasn’t an economist and even though he died in 1890. After the Lakota were defeated, he joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show for a season, but he never got ahead financially. He gave the bulk of his earnings to the street urchins who hung around the show. He was shocked that a nation powerful enough to conquer his people couldn’t or wouldn’t feed its own future. The white man was good at production, he concluded, but bad at distribution.
(thanks, Clayton)