Wealth inequality you say?
by digby
I don't know about you, but this just shocks the hell out of me. Apparently Judge Judy is more popular than ever and her ratings are among the very few that are going up. Why that might be, I can't say. If you want to watch an older lady in a robe yelling at people and telling them to shut up, you just say hello to my neighbor Mrs Wilton.
Maybe this is really a good sign that people like older ladies in authority, I don't know. But that's not what's shocking. It's this:
Judge Sheindlin, who tapes only 52 days a year, for which CBS pays her an estimated $47 million, has her own theories about her program’s continued popularity.
By all that is decent in this world how can that be right? I'm not saying she doesn't deserve to be rich when she has a popular daytime television program. But that's obscene. In fact, it's enough to make me sick, particularly when I came upon this NY Times story directly after reading this one in Mother Jones:
Living in a wealthy nation, it's easy to forget that a whopping one-sixth of the world's population subsists without stable sources of food, medical care, or housing. More than a billion people around the world are believed to live on a dollar a day—and often less. While the circumstances leading to that sort of extreme poverty are varied and complicated, the situations faced by the planet's poorest are depressingly familiar. A new book out this week painstakingly documents the circumstances of some of them. Written by Thomas A. Nazario, the founder of a nonprofit called The Forgotten International, and vividly reported and photographed by Pulitzer Prize winner Renée C. Byer, Living on a Dollar a Day: The Lives and Faces of the World's Poor offers a window into these people's everyday lives, and calls for action on their behalf.
Here's another elderly lady in a robe. She lives on a dollar a day:
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