Turning Our Lonely Eyes
February 27th, 2007On a grave note: Dick Cheney was nearly killed today, just barely surviving an assassination attempt by explosion. Can’t say I feel bad for him — the country might just be better off if he were to die, although that would’ve been more true years ago before the damage was done.
But, at least, it spares us the Condi Rice Vice Presidency and even more bogus rumors that she’ll run for President in a Party that would never tolerate it.
To buzzness! Where have you gone, Joe DiBeegio? Our flowers turn their lonely buds to you.
David Bradshaw has endured countless stings during his life as a beekeeper, but he got the shock of his career when he opened his boxes last month and found half of his 100 million bees missing. In 24 states throughout the country, beekeepers have gone through similar shocks as their bees have been disappearing inexplicably at an alarming rate, threatening not only their livelihoods but also the production of numerous crops, including California almonds, one of the nation’s most profitable.
“I have never seen anything like it,” Mr. Bradshaw, 50, said from an almond orchard here beginning to bloom. “Box after box after box are just empty. There’s nobody home.” The sudden mysterious losses are highlighting the critical link that honeybees play in the long chain that gets fruit and vegetables to supermarkets and dinner tables across the country. Beekeepers have fought regional bee crises before, but this is the first national affliction.
Now, in a mystery worthy of Agatha Christie, bees are flying off in search of pollen and nectar and simply never returning to their colonies. And nobody knows why. Researchers say the bees are presumably dying in the fields, perhaps becoming exhausted or simply disoriented and eventually falling victim to the cold. As researchers scramble to find answers to the syndrome they have decided to call “colony collapse disorder,” growers are becoming openly nervous about the capability of the commercial bee industry to meet the growing demand for bees to pollinate dozens of crops, from almonds to avocados to kiwis.
What with one part of the Killer B’s likely retiring this year, and this apparent honeybee shortage, I’m afraid for those whose noise is Buzz. Although I must admit, it’s a scarier prospect for the economic implications it may have, but I believe that the American Economy can survive this.
I just hope the bumblebees come home safe and sound and have homes to come home to unlike — you guessed it: segway! — record numbers of Americans who are now in extreme poverty.
The percentage of poor Americans who are living in severe poverty has reached a 32-year high, millions of working Americans are falling closer to the poverty line and the gulf between the nation’s “haves” and “have-nots” continues to widen. A McClatchy Newspapers analysis of 2005 census figures, the latest available, found that nearly 16 million Americans are living in deep or severe poverty. A family of four with two children and an annual income of less than $9,903 - half the federal poverty line - was considered severely poor in 2005. So were individuals who made less than $5,080 a year.
The McClatchy analysis found that the number of severely poor Americans grew by 26 percent from 2000 to 2005. That’s 56 percent faster than the overall poverty population grew in the same period. McClatchy’s review also found statistically significant increases in the percentage of the population in severe poverty in 65 of 215 large U.S. counties, and similar increases in 28 states. The review also suggested that the rise in severely poor residents isn’t confined to large urban counties but extends to suburban and rural areas.
The plight of the severely poor is a distressing sidebar to an unusual economic expansion. Worker productivity has increased dramatically since the brief recession of 2001, but wages and job growth have lagged behind. At the same time, the share of national income going to corporate profits has dwarfed the amount going to wages and salaries. That helps explain why the median household income of working-age families, adjusted for inflation, has fallen for five straight years.
These and other factors have helped push 43 percent of the nation’s 37 million poor people into deep poverty - the highest rate since at least 1975. The share of poor Americans in deep poverty has climbed slowly but steadily over the last three decades. But since 2000, the number of severely poor has grown “more than any other segment of the population,” according to a recent study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
It always stuns me that there aren’t more people who care about poverty. Liberals focus far too much on social issues and Conservatives far too much on religious issues — just once I’d like to have a campaign fought on genuine economic grounds, like 1992, and on that note, I’d like you to shoot me, please, for I have praised that election one too many times in the last twenty four hours (not that it doesn’t deserve praise, not that Clinton doesn’t deserve praise, or anything).
To make up for it, I’d like to refer you to the greatest election in American history, in 1948.
And I hope you think about poverty and do something — anything — about it, from buying a homeless man a sandwich to donating to the Salvation Army.
That is all for today.