A clear and cold early Monday here on California’s north coast, a few wispy clouds scattered about a whitening sky, otherwise, appears plenty of shine a-coming.
Supposedly, rain free until at least next week.

In the gritty news cycle this morning, amongst war, politics and the Super Bowl match-up, one stand-out is indeed a pisser, though, no surprise.
Via the Guardian:

The charity’s research, published on Monday, shows that the share of the world’s wealth owned by the best-off 1 percent has increased from 44 percent in 2009 to 48 percent in 2014, while the least well-off 80 percent currently own just 5.5 percent.
Oxfam added that on current trends the richest 1 percent would own more than 50 percent of the world’s wealth by 2016.

(Illustration found here).

The study comes from Oxfam, the international anti-poverty confederation, and was released just prior to the World Economic Forum in the Swiz ski resort of Davos, a conclave of the super-rich and just the regular-rich to chew the economic fat. Results pretty worthless over the years, once a war was reportedly averted, and some people who hate each other once had a talk, and so forth. An apparent cleansing of guilt; a rich people’s therapy conference: ‘The week includes 280 sessions, but there are scads of cocktail parties and arts events, including a performance by renowned tenor Andrea Bocelli.’

And more from the Guardian:

Oxfam made headlines at Davos last year with a study showing that the 85 richest people on the planet have the same wealth as the poorest 50 percent (3.5 billion people).
The charity said this year that the comparison was now even more stark, with just 80 people owning the same amount of wealth as more than 3.5 billion people, down from 388 in 2010.
…
Oxfam said the wealth of the richest 80 doubled in cash terms between 2009 and 2014, and that there was an increasing tendency for wealth to be inherited and to be used as a lobbying tool by the rich to further their own interests.
It noted that more than a third of the 1,645 billionaires listed by Forbes inherited some or all of their riches, while 20 percent have interests in the financial and insurance sectors, a group which saw their cash wealth increase by 11 percent in the 12 months to March 2014.
These sectors spent $550m lobbying policymakers in Washington and Brussels during 2013.
During the 2012 US election cycle alone, the financial sector provided $571m in campaign contributions.

And from Slate a couple of weeks ago on another economic study on how since the US doesn’t tax wealth directly, the system is itself is creating the wide, deep, suck-hole — money quote: ‘“Income inequality,” Zucman and Saez write, “has a snowballing effect on the wealth distribution: top incomes are being saved at high rates, pushing wealth concentration up; in turn, rising wealth inequality leads to rising capital income concentration, which contributes to further increasing top income and wealth shares.”‘

Ain’t that coincidental, in all those rich-wealth reports/meetings/studies, it was announced this weekend that President Obama will use the State of the Union address set for tomorrow night, to propose hundreds of billions of dollars in tax hikes on America’s “one per cent,” which in part calls for capital gains tax rate to move from 15 percent to 28 percent, and to close what the officials called “the single biggest loophole in our tax system today: … the trust fund loophole” (certain taxes can be evaded when passed on to heirs).
Both items a premiere topic for the rich, i.e., Republicans.
And according to the bullshit I’ve read about Obama’s upcoming proposal the measure won’t hunt — in echoing GOP bullshit — ‘Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, called the plan “a non-starter.”‘

And off to the races…the rich up in the box seats, with us poor folk who don’t know any Bocelli, down in the saw-grass.