Income Inequality

The whispering around the water cooler is back these days - chatter about fattened 401(k)s, lucky stock picks and such. U.S. stock market bulls have run far enough this year that the venerable Dow Jones Industrial Average last week hit a six-year high and threatened to eclipse its all-time peak - before retrenching at the end of the week. The Dow, of course, is just a slice of the investment world. The broader S&P 500 and the tech-heavy NASDAQ indexes, also still off their highs set before the 2001 bust, are not doing as well as the Dow this year.

WASHINGTON -- The House sent a message to corporate America's plushest executive suites yesterday: It's time to put your pay packages to a vote. Lawmakers voted 269 to 134 to require public companies to put executive pay packages before shareholders for an advisory vote. Business groups lobbied against the measure, saying it would allow special interests such as labor unions to meddle in management decisions. The bill also faces opposition from the White House and an uncertain future in the Senate.

FROM an editorial in the New York Times:"The Bell Curve," a flame-throwing treatise on race, class and intelligence by the late Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, advances a grisly thesis: IQ, largely inherited and intractable, dictates an individual's success -- an economic death knell for much of America's black population.The story has America increasingly divided by race and sliding inexorably into castes based on IQ.The book has ignited bitter controversy, and that is no surprise.

Sunday, Jan. 29 Forum Unitarian Universalist Church of Annapolis will host a community forum on the impact of income inequality on the economy and on democracy from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. at 333 Dubois Road. The event features a talk by Gar Alperovitz, professor of political economy at the University of Maryland and the author of "America Beyond Capitalism. " Doors open at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $5 at the door, $2 for students. Information: uusj.net/wp/?p=4340. Wednesday, Feb. 1 Shutterbugs meet The Arundel Camera Club will meet at 7:30 p.m. in Room D114 of Severna Park High School, 60 Robinson Road.

Although some of the Occupy Baltimore protesters are expressing disappointment and anger at their early morning rousting from their McKeldin Square encampment, both they and the Baltimore Police Department deserve congratulations for peacefully handling the kind of encounter that has led to violence and destruction in other cities. It would not have served the interests of either the police or the protesters to have a confrontation in which dozens of activists — and the homeless and others who had been welcomed in the encampment — were hauled off to jail.

President Obama's State of the Union speech to Congress last night focused largely on jobs, taxes and income inequality, but it had plenty of red meat in it for those concerned about energy and the environment. He vowed to continue to push for "clean energy" while touting the economic potential of shale gas and defending environmental regulations.  He defended government incentives for developing solar, wind and high-tech battery industries, but called for an end to longstanding subsidies for the oil and gas industry.  "It's time to end the taxpayer giveaways to an industry that rarely has been more profitable and double down on a clean energy industry that never has been more promising," he said.  But he renewed his call for an "all-out, all-of-the-above strategy" to develop every available source of American energy, and said he was directing his administration to open up more than 75 percent of potential offshore oil and gas resources for drilling.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his counterparts in several other cities may have done the protesters of the "Occupy" movement the biggest possible favor by kicking them out of the parks where they have erected tent cities for the last several weeks. Many protesters in New York; Oakland, Calif.; Portland, Ore. and other cities where the encampments have been dispersed are vowing to keep their round-the-clock protest going despite police orders, but that would be a mistake. They should take this opportunity to start a new, more pointed phase of their movement.

The reverberations from the departure of Baltimore schools CEO Andrés Alonso will be felt nationally as well as locally. Six years ago, I was a member of the Baltimore school board that hired him. Our risky vision was to try to recruit a game-changer whose achievements would surpass those of the heralded superintendents in New York (Joel Klein, whom Mr. Alonso served as a deputy), Chicago (Arne Duncan) and D.C. (Michelle Rhee). What we sought was what we got, and then some. Mr. Alonso initiated wave after wave of reforms: higher test scores, higher graduation rate, extensive school choice, a nationally groundbreaking transformation of expectations for students with disabilities, a progressive teacher contract, a steep drop in expulsions and suspensions, a remarkable 10-year plan for school facilities, and more.

There comes a time for every trader to tally the bets that paid off, revalue the stinkers and recalibrate assumptions according to changing facts. Mutual funds do this every day. Banking companies, which still hold subprime mortgage bonds that are vastly overvalued on their books, don't do it often enough. Business columnists, if they are honest and faithful, mark their beliefs against reality every few months, if only to themselves. When they stop writing a semiweekly column after more than a decade, however, perhaps the reckoning should be explicit and public.