This is the best intro to a magazine story I’ve seen in ages. These three paragraphs by Jeffrey A. Winters have real stopping power:

In 2005, Citigroup offered its high net-worth clients in the United States a concise statement of the threats they and their money faced.

The report told them they were the leaders of a “plutonomy,” an economy driven by the spending of its ultra-rich citizens. “At the heart of plutonomy is income inequality,” which is made possible by “capitalist-friendly governments and tax regimes.”

The danger, according to Citigroup’s analysts, is that “personal taxation rates could rise – dividends, capital gains, and inheritance taxes would hurt the plutonomy.” [In These Times]

How is it possible, Winters wonders, that our society has made such strides towards equality on race, gender, sexual orientation and disability, yet has fallen so far behind in income equality? The answer, Winters argues, is oligarchy.

[Photo credit: Lee Bailey, Creative Commons.]

A Chinese watchdog group that monitors working conditions at the electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn says that the company hid underage workers after being tipped off about an upcoming inspection by the Fair Labor Association. Josh Ong of Apple Insider reports: 

Workers at Apple partner Foxconn have alleged that their employer transferred underage employees to other departments or did not schedule them to work overtime in order to avoid discovery during recent inspections by the Fair Labor Association, according to one non-governmental organization.

Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) project officer Debby Sze Wan Chan relayed the claims in a recent interview with AppleInsider. SACOM is a Hong Kong-based NGO that was formed in 2005 and has been researching labor rights violations in the electronics industry since 2007.

Chan said she had heard from two Foxconn workers in Zhenghou last week that the manufacturer was “prepared for the inspection” by the Fair Labor Association that had been commissioned by Apple and began last week.

Last month, Apple became the first technology company to join the Fair Labor Association, an NGO that says it bring companies, NGOs, and other stakeholders together to improve working conditions in factories. 

FLA president Auret van Heerden told Nightline that Apple paid $250,000 to join and that the group was footing the bill for the audits at Foxconn.

[Photo credit: Laughing Squid, Creative Commons.]

Ronald Fraser, one of the preeminent historians of the Spanish Civil War, has died at the age of 81:

Ronald Fraser, an English oral historian known for his deftness at collecting and presenting ordinary people’s experiences during momentous events like the Spanish Civil War, died on Feb. 10 in Valencia, Spain. He was 81.

Tariq Ali, a friend and colleague, announced the death. He gave no cause.

Mr. Fraser used transcriptions of interviews, the oral historian’s principal tool, to write books chronicling working-class life, the ways of a Spanish village, the 1968 student uprisings in the United States and Europe, and even his own life.

His most influential book was “Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War,” a 628-page work published in 1979 that Paul Preston, a historian of the Spanish Civil War, said in The New York Times Book Review would “take its place among the dozen or so truly important books about the Spanish conflict.”

Time magazine said, “No other volume on the Spanish Civil War can surpass the power and detail of this one.” [NYT]

Fraser’s friend Tariq Ali remembers him in The Guardian.

An audit of recent home foreclosures in California found that almost all the reposessions were illegal or suspicious, Gretchen Morgenson reports in the New York Times. An astonishing 84% of foreclosure files contained what appeared to investigators to be clear violations of the law:

An audit by San Francisco county officials of about 400 recent foreclosures there determined that almost all involved either legal violations or suspicious documentation, according to a report released Wednesday.

Anecdotal evidence indicating foreclosure abuse has been plentiful since the mortgage boom turned to bust in 2008. But the detailed and comprehensive nature of the San Francisco findings suggest how pervasive foreclosure irregularities may be across the nation.

The improprieties range from the basic — a failure to warn borrowers that they were in default on their loans as required by law — to the arcane. For example, transfers of many loans in the foreclosure files were made by entities that had no right to assign them and institutions took back properties in auctions even though they had not proved ownership.

Commissioned by Phil Ting, the San Francisco assessor-recorder, the report examined files of properties subject to foreclosure sales in the county from January 2009 to November 2011. About 84 percent of the files contained what appear to be clear violations of law, it said, and fully two-thirds had at least four violations or irregularities.

These findings will be grist for the Occupy movement, which has devoted considerable energy to defending homes against foreclosures in recent months.

[Photo credit: o_corgan, Creative Commons.]