Some Favorites from 2008
l3wis 
January 2009
The Benefits of Unions
Great letter about re-unionizing our country;
The real incomes of middle-class families are lower at the end of the Bush administration’s final term than they were when it started. In the past few years, $400 billion of pre-tax income flowed from the bottom 95 percent of wage earners to the top 5 percent, an average loss of $3,660 per household in the bottom 95 percent.
Bush’s tax cuts in 2008 had no effect on low-income families and lowered the tax liabilities of middle-income families by about $1,000, but they gave tax cuts of more than $50,000 to families in the top 1 percent. The top 1 percent of wage earners now earns 23 percent of the total income in this nation. By 2004 the wealthiest 1 percent of all households controlled a larger share of national wealth than the bottom 90 percent.
The coolest kitchen gadget of all time
Ghost of Dude 
It’s hard to tell from the picture, but the device you see here will revolutionize the kitchens of beer lovers the world over. It is a totally self-contained, self-cleaning brewery inside a kitchen cabinet. It does the entire process of brewing beer from sterilization of the equipment all the way to the taps at the other end. It includes two 7.5 gallon containers under the taps so you can have two brews at the same time – make your own black and tan!
This is just the sort of device we’ll need to bring ourselves out of this recession.
