Actually, a whole collection of infographics courtesy of BuzzFeed.com, providing some very illuminating information about the state of the Republican presidential candidates and their fundraising. This graph, for example, shows how much each candidate had raised between April and December 2011. But a couple of graphs down on that page, you’ll see what happened to Rick Perry after that “Oops” moment and how all those Cain supporters turned into Gingrich supporters overnight.

At least Mittens is finally dropping all pretense of what his campaign is really about:

Because this is a) a documentary and b) sponsored by the National Film Board of Canada, I don’t expect that you’ll see this at your local multiplex any time soon, but perhaps the fortuitous timing will get this booked into some smaller indie movie houses that might have otherwise not bothered. NFBC is also good about putting content online, so it might wind up on their website at some point too.

“Well, it looks that way. You have to ask… How is it possible that the most dynamic, best capitalized, most high-tech economy in world history could not add a single dollar to the real wealth of the average working man over a 40 year period?”

Washington Post guest blogger Bill Bonner relates a conversation with a European diplomat wherein they discuss the long, slow decline of capitalism over the last 40 years.

One thing we can be certain of is that capitalism will end. Maybe not soon, but probably before too long; humanity has never before managed to craft an eternal social system, after all, and capitalism is a notably more precarious and volatile order than most of those that preceded it. The question, then, is what will come next. Rosa Luxemburg, reacting to the beginnings of World War I, cited a line from Engels: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.”

Writing in the Winter 2012 issue of Jacobin Magazine, editor Peter Frase indulges in an exercise of imagination to consider four possible successor systems to global capitalism: communism, rentierism, socialism, and exterminism. They are, by his own admission, overly simplistic and deterministic, and unlikely to come to pass in the distilled forms he describes. Nevertheless, we are at least part of the way down the road toward a rentier society in this country and will go a great deal further if someone like Newt Gingrich has anything to say about it. And, if the past is any gauge, the living hell of exterminism is merely one ecological cataclysm away.

I have seen this graph all over the place lately, but the first place I saw it was on my friend Ben’s blog, so I’ll give him the linky-love. What this graph shows you is the elasticity of income — your ability to make more money than your parents — against degrees of income inequality, with the values of a bunch of industrialized nations plotted for comparison. Income inequality is lowest in the Scandinavian countries, but economic opportunity is also the highest (ooh, those damned European socialists!). Meanwhile, as Ben says, if you live in the U.S. or U.K., you’d better hope you have rich parents.

Speaking of those damned European socialists, Claude S. Fischer at “Made In America” considers the Euro-bashing from Mittens and Newtster and takes some of the same measurements that you see in the graph above, along with a few others, to paint a different picture of just how awful life must be for those poor beknighted Swedes and Frenchmen compared to Americans.

It seems to many today that the United States’ 30-year drift from a democracy to an ostensible corporatocracy has resulted in nothing but business-interest legislation and disparities of wealth so wide among the classes that it appears impossible for them to be rectified.

Here’s a post that ran at “Prose Before Hos” back in October, at the height of the Occupy movement, from political science student Savannah Cox that illustrates what Claude Fischer’s and Ben Hyde’s graphs are trying to quantify: the on-the-ground effects of the destructiveness of income inequality in the United States, aided and abetted by compliant politicians of both parties including Barack Obama. Her “ray of hope”: that some of the billionaires themselves, such as Warren Buffet and Mark Cuban, who have been willing to speak out against the iniquities.

Lastly, also from October 2011, here is an op-ed from Sam Smith, who edits Progressive Review.com, entitled “The Party’s Over”, which begins like this:

The party’s over. The national delusion that began 30 years ago with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan has run its course. Free trade, competition, innovation, entrepreneurship, market driven, bottom line, laissez faire, deregulation, privatization, mission statements, strategic plans, value added and all the other gibberish that was meant to save us has brought us to where we are today.

Three decades of sweet buzzwords and brutal economics fostered by a media that thought “free markets” were required by the Bill of Rights have left America broken, busted, and bitter.

No, it didn’t have to happen. After all, as John Maynard Keynes noted, “Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.” We might have noticed. But our teachers in government, academia and the press largely went along with the most wickedest of men, girding their cause with false arguments and misleading logic. The rest didn’t have much time to think about it all; they were too busy taking tests or finding ways to make enough money to buy all the things they were told they had to have.

The media lost interest in the Occupy movement as soon as they were chased out of Zuccotti Park, but that does not mean Occupy is done.

Over the weekend, Occupy Oakland protestors clashed with police, resulting in 300 arrests. The Oakland group has been particularly active, taking over abandoned property once they were forced to leave the public park where they were camped.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that groups in other cities are making preparations for more public actions in the spring, but in the meanwhile are engaged in activities such as the protest in New York last Thursday to block a foreclosure auction.

Despite the assertions from the right and from the media that Occupy “didn’t have a point”, they’ve genuinely had an impact on public discourse, and though these other actions are smaller in scope they are important in building toward a long-term role.

The Scots, the Northern Irish, the Welsh, even the Cornish have all expressed a desire to have more autonomy from the United Kingdom in recent years. The announcement came this week that the Scottish referendum is now scheduled for the fall of 2014, but the Christian Science Monitor says that the latest group to be feeling its oats a bit is the English themselves. Public opinion in England proper is beginning to show a bit of resentment towards the other nations, particularly Scotland, for the amount of money the national government spends to support them, and a bit of old-fashioned John Bull-ism.

FLASH!
The New York Daily News recently reported that one Colin Hagendorf of Brooklyn, New York has completed his quest of eating a slice of pizza from every single pizza place in Manhattan. For his next quest, Mr. Hagendorf will make use of every public toilet in Manhattan.

FLASH!
The citizens of Dog Shit Village in Guizhou Province, China, were ecstatic to learn that the government has finally awarded their town with a new name. Until the presentation of the new town sign.

FLASH!
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich told a group of Florida voters yesterday that if he is elected he will order NASA to build a colony on the moon. No, really, he did. No joke. Except for Gingrich himself, of course.

And now let’s go live to our correspondent for breaking news from a situation developing on the expressway…Steve, over to you…

They held their presidential election over the weekend. The Scandinavian countries have largely been spared from the financial chaos that threatens their southern neighbors, and Finland consistently rates right up there as one of the best places to live in the world, but the leading candidate after the first round is former finance minister Sauli Niinsto, who favors closer ties to the European Union. However, Niisto did not receive the needed 50% of the vote for an outright win, so he faces Green Party candidate and second-place finisher Pekka Haavisto in a runoff.

But this is just the icing on the proverbial cake: check out the election results from the first round of voting as displayed by the Finnish national television network YLE on their website. When the page finishes loading, click the button near the bottom that says “Sivakoikaa!”, and spend the next five minutes wishing that FOX News would do this for the Republican primaries.

Satellite photo of the Costa Concordia shipwreck (via Fogonazos).

If you look really, really closely you can see the captain cowering under a cafe table in the village.

Back in November I posted about the efforts to stage a referendum on independence for Scotland. Now, Prime Minister David Cameron is calling Scottish Premier Alex Salmond’s bluff by agreeing to a referendum…as long as it is held “sooner than later” and as long as it is a straight up-or-down vote on complete independence. This analysis by Guy Lodge in the British political magazine “Prospect” considers the risks both sides run by going ahead with the referendum. Lodge argues that Salmond has more to lose and that Cameron has triangulated the situation well, but the national government could find itself having less room to negotiate in any future devolution agreements.

The third option, called “devo max”, gives Scotland full financial responsibility, while retaining the national structure for most political/governmental institutions. This Guardian op-ed by Simon Jenkins states with little ambiguity why “devo max” is probably the best solution for both sides, and takes Cameron to task for not embracing what Jenkins sees as a pragmatic solution to devolution.

Maine shrimp are small and sweet, and they are usually only available fresh for a few weeks in winter. The catch is traditionally sort of a holdover season for the local fishermen, who would otherwise not be fishing during those weeks. Last year, however, the state Department of Marine Resources decided that the number of shrimp was so abundant that they let the season linger on until May. The fishermen caught 13 million pounds of shrimp last year, but now officials are saying that the catch was waaaaay too big and has resulted in depleted stocks, so they’re limiting the catch to only a third of that – 4.4 million pounds. The regulators are using a couple of schemes to help stretch out the length of the season, but the conventional wisdom says that most of the quota will have been caught by the end of the month.

Lots of people in New England, myself included, eagerly anticipate the arrival of the little Maine shrimp every winter, but they’ll probably find the price pretty steep if the catch is only a third of what it was last year.