Say It Ain't So Already

Payday lenders have got to be the only people in the world who can’t make money charging 36% interest.

The United States is losing its standing in the world in so many ways.  Not only is it falling apart from within, but the world is increasingly isolating it because of its “anachronistic” foreign policy positions.

This is amazing: What if Everybody in Canada Flushed at Once:

The water utility in Edmonton, EPCOR, published the most incredible graph of water consumption last week. By now you’ve probably heard that up to 80% of Canadians were watching last Sunday’s gold medal Olympic hockey game. So I guess it stands to reason that they’d all go pee between periods.

But still—the degree to which the water consumption matches with the key breaks in the hockey game is stunning.

I bet water consumption patterns in the U.S. were pretty similar.

Wow.  This.  Is.  Absolutely.  Shocking:

Women of all races bring home less income and own fewer assets, on average, than men of the same race, but for single black women the disparities are so overwhelmingly great that even in their prime working years their median wealth amounts to only $5.

In a groundbreaking report released Monday by a leading economic research group, social scientists turned a spotlight on the grave financial challenges facing an often overlooked group of women, many of whom could not take an unpaid sick day or repair a major appliance without going into debt.

“It’s rather shocking,” said Meizhu Lui, director of the Closing the Gap Initiative based in Oakland, Calif., who contributed to the report “Lifting as We Climb: Women of Color, Wealth and America’s Future.”

Among the most startling revelations in the wealth data is that while single white women in the prime of their working years (ages 36 to 49) have a median wealth of $42,600 (still only 61 percent of their single white male counterparts), the median wealth for single black women is only $5.

It’s no wonder there is a whole generation of single black women in this country who are living at the same poverty level as their mothers and grandmothers.  Nobody has anything to pass down, to help the next generation get a leg up; the group as a whole has no real chance of breaking out of this vicious cycle.

Terrible.

This from MotherJones, and I absolutely love the last two sentences:

Never let it be said that Walmart doesn’t know how to pander for a fast buck. The megachain acknowledged today  that it’s selling ethnic Barbie dolls for about half of what it charges for Caucasian Barbies.

The store was forced into the admission after a Louisiana-based shopper posted a photo, seen here,

of the diverse dolls—and their respective pricetags—side by side in a Wal-Mart. As the good-humored Latino-interest blog Guanabee: “The same exact doll, in Caucasian, commands almost double the price! Who says Barbie dolls don’t supply young girls with a realistic portrayal of womanhood?”

From Jonathan Turley: