4 Reasons We Should Take America's Inequality Personally It's infuriating.

It was recently reported that Americans greatly underestimate the degree of inequality in our country. If we were given proper media coverage of the endless takeaway of our country's wealth by the super-rich, we would be infuriated. And we would take it personally.

Each of nine individuals (Gates, Buffett, two Kochs, four Waltons, Zuckerberg) made on average so much from their investments since January 2013 that a median American worker would need a quarter of a million years to catch up. For the most part it was passive income, new wealth derived from the continuing productivity of America's workers.

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The Afro-pessimistic ‘Rising’ and Afro-optimistic Uprising

Whenever an African agitates for self-determination in Africa , he is quickly jumped on by critics and dismissed as a tribalist. He is ridiculed as a backward ethnic chauvinist, whose sole-purpose in agitating for a new state is a desire for a fiefdom where he can lord it over others whose only crime is belonging to a different ethnic group.

He is reviled as a throw-back to a backward African past, an aberration, an intellectual dwarf who is incapable of grasping and living by higher ideals that other more educated, progressive African people live by. He becomes an object of pity. He is perceived as having failed to conform to modernity, and has decided to cover up his failures by romanticizing about a distant, backward past. If only he were a little bit more modern looking, ideological, and a little bit more intellectually refined, he would see how backward it is to agitate for separation, especially something as backward as an ethnic-based state in Africa.

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Obama’s big joke!

uly 2014 marked the 50th anniversary of the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This event was perhaps the most significant achievement and benchmark of the civil rights movement that had been so ably led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others from 1955-1966. July 2014 also marked the 50th anniversary of Malcolm X’s attendance at the 2nd annual summit of the Organization of African Unity (OAU). It was at this summit in Cairo, Egypt, the Malcolm submitted his famous memorandum to the African heads-of-states that declared ‘African problem are our problems and our problems are African problems’.

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XCLUSIVE: German Companies Are Selling Unlicensed Surveillance Technologies to Human Rights Violators – and Making Millions

This exclusive report was compiled by Ben Wagner and Claudio Guarnieri, leading researchers on surveillance and digital security technology. The Berlin-based scholars work at the Centre for Internet & Human Rights, European University Viadrina.

From Mexico to Mozambique to Pakistan and beyond, there is now ample evidence that governments across the globe are using mass surveillance technologies such as FinFisher to spy on their citizens. This has driven researchers and advocates like ourselves to consider the source: Who makes these technologies? And who benefits from their sales?

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Inviting a continent to dinner insults African reformers

Most visibly, when Vice President Joe Biden uttered his gaffe about the “nation of Africa,” it demonstrated the compulsion to treat the continent as one undifferentiated mass. Miriem Bensalah Chaqroun, executive director of the Oulmes Water Co. and president of the Moroccan Confederation of Businesses, told me, “Perception is important. These are 54 countries and each one has specific [characteristics]. You can’t address an entire continent.” But that is precisely what Biden and President Obama did, speaking as if the same prescriptions apply everywhere.


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