Jim Feltner's days are empty. He is a poor man in the poorest county in the United States and lives off government aid.

But the Kentucky resident has nothing but scorn for the head of that government, President Barack Obama, who has made the fight against economic inequality one of his battle cries.

Feltner sits in a plastic chair outside his ramshackle mobile home, surrounded by rusty cars and car parts. He has no television.

People around here, he says, are "just surviving, barely. I know, because I'm one of them."

A victim of two heart attacks, he lives off disability checks, and $105 a month in government food stamps.

Feltner voted for a previous Democratic president, Bill Clinton, but now says: "I will vote for anybody against Obama.

"I don't care who runs against him, I'll vote for him. I don't care if it's a Democrat, a Republican, an Indian, a Pakistani - even a Frenchman!"

Divided, The Perils of Our Growing Inequality, edited by David Cay Johnston (New York: The New Press, March 2014)

Truck drivers do an essential job. No society can exist without them. Truck drivers work hard; they drive long hours, they sleep in their trucks, and they hardly see their families. Why are truck drivers making only a meager living, then? Sociologist Lisa Dodson, the contributor of the last chapter in this page-turner of a book, posed this question to Joe [not his real name], a truck driver. "That money came from somewhere, didn't it?" Joe responded. "It came out of my pocket and my kids' mouths." Is inequality really the result of the rich taking money that belongs to the poor? And if so, why do the poor let them? [Full disclosure: I am one of the 46 contributors included in Divided.]

The route from pocket to pocket that Joe sees is direct. But the most popular explanation for the growing inequality in the US involves an indirect route. When managers can threaten workers that they would shift work overseas, the workers have no choice but to agree to low wages; and when they do, managers can then pay themselves huge salaries and bonuses and they can also consume huge quantities of perquisites, such as corporate jets, on the job. Thus, the falling wages workers and the rising incomes of executives in the US are both attributed to globalization.

If one looks only at the United States, this appears to be true. This review is written a day after the workers in a Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted against having a union. Wages in the VW plant are low. The workers who managed to become VW employees are paid $19.50/hour, lower than most other auto workers in the US. New employees make even less. They are hired by and work for Aerotek, a staffing contractor and their wage is only $12.50/hour. Several weeks before the vote the majority of the VW employees (Aerotek employees do not get to vote) signed cards that indicated their preference for a union and it appeared that they would have a union. But then a senator claimed that if they were to vote for a union Volkswagen would shift a new factory that was intended for Chattanooga to Mexico instead.

Christopher Jencks, a professor of social policy at Harvard, points out, however, that globalization does not have the same effect elsewhere. Inequality was quite similar among rich countries in the 1970s, but today the degree of inequality in the US is by far the highest. In those other countries work still pays, and Jencks attributes the difference to a difference in political systems. In The US there are just two parties and the winner takes all. Workers are therefore just one faction in a party that represents a great number of interests. In Europe, because of proportional representation, there are many parties, and workers can therefore have parties that represent them exclusively. The result of this difference, according to Jencks, is that in Western European countries the law protects workers from the race-to-the-bottom that in the US is blamed on globalization.

One law that protects workers in Germany, for example, is the law that requires that half of the members of board of directors in all companies with more than 2,000 employees be workers' representatives (this is far from true equality, though, because the tie breaker is the chairman of the board, who is not a workers' representative). Several European countries also have "extension laws" that permit the government to extend the benefit of a union contract that is negotiated in some workplaces to all workplaces, regardless of whether these workplaces are themselves union shops or not. These laws assure that employers who pay union wages are not at a disadvantage. It is notable that Germany, with its strong pro-labor legislation, had a significantly lower rate of unemployment than the US throughout the sub-prime crisis, and this advantage continues today.

Right now a 7th grader says he's still in pain after a local police officer is shown kicking him on a cell video.

As the video is going viral on social media, and boy and his parents are demanding an apology and an explanation.

"A second video of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford smoking what has been described as crack cocaine by a self-professed drug dealer was secretly filmed in his sister's basement early Saturday morning.

The clip, which was viewed by two Globe and Mail reporters, shows Mr. Ford taking a drag from a long copper-coloured pipe, exhaling a cloud of smoke and then frantically shaking his right hand. The footage is part of a package of three videos that the drug dealer says he surreptitiously shot around 1:15 a.m., and which he says he is now selling for "at least six figures.""

A Michigan couple is furious after police shot and killed their 10-month-old lab-pit bull puppy in their own backyard.

Bianca Alakson and Ryan Showalter said their dog, Rock, was in their backyard Sunday morning when police began chasing a suspect through their Redford Township neighborhood, WDIV-TV reported.

Police said they saw their suspect in the couple's home. When officers went through the gate into the backyard to find the suspect, Rock charged, one officer said.

The officer fired one round, but when that didn't stop the dog, he fired a second, fatal shot.

When the air conditioning went down at LaGuardia Airport on Monday, several Transportation Security Administration agents were sent home due to illness, causing massive lines and overheating in the sauna-like conditions.

The air conditioning system went out Monday morning and one of the two security checkpoints at LaGuardia's Terminal C lost power at the same time, Fox affiliate WNYW reports. The conditions forced passengers to mass around the one remaining checkpoint, raising the already-warm temperatures.

A record number of Americans are renouncing their citizenship as they seek to remove the burden of filing complicated and costly tax returns simply for living in another country.

According to Bloomberg News, just over 1,000 Americans gave up their nationality in the three months from January to March. That's a significant increase from the 670 who did so in the same time span last year, and it's already one third of the way to matching the total number of Americans who renounced their citizenship in 2013.

Last year, data from the Internal Revenue Service showed that approximately 3,000 Americans gave up their passports - a number that tripled the average of the previous five years.

Although the reasons for doing so can range from one individual to another, many of the cases have been linked to the Foreign Accounts Tax Compliance Act, which has been gradually taking effect since it was passed in 2010. Looking to crack down on tax dodgers and institutions that help make that behavior possible, Congress passed the legislation in the hopes that it would bring in hundreds of billions of dollars in unpaid taxes.

Since the US is one of the few countries that taxes its citizens regardless of where they live, however, the law has ended up ensnaring all Americans who live and work overseas and use foreign accounts to pay bills at home. As of 2012, all banks working with the US are now required to divulge information on their accounts held by American citizens.

A billionaire who bought a popular beach only to close it off to the public finally spoke on the contentious issue on Monday, although his comments seem to have only generated more frustration among concerned Californians.

Vinod Khosla, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who co-founded Sun Microsystems - a computing pioneer perhaps best known for developing the Java programming language - took the witness stand in a civil trial on Monday regarding his purchase of Martins Beach.

The civil suit was first filed in San Mateo County in March 2013 against the then-unidentified owner of the beach for painting over a billboard welcoming people to the seaside location, locking the gate, preventing entry, and hiring armed guards to keep the public out.

The beach had been open to the public for 100 years, acting as a popular swimming location for the duration of that time. It is located 35 miles south of San Francisco and was especially popular among surfers trying to ride waves that are hard to find elsewhere. Private ownership of California beaches has become an increasingly contentious issue as more billionaires have come out of Silicon Valley.

Listen to the following speech by Andreas Popp at the Easter 'Monday Demonstration' 2014 in Berlin, where 6,000 demonstrators gathered to voice their disgust with the West's war against Russia, continued U.S. occupation of Germany, and global socio-economic injustice.

Andreas Popp is a businessman and author who, together with his friends at Wissensmanufaktur Institute, has developed an alternative "Plan B" for the western economy and society since they realized that the current system does not serve the people, and cannot be 'healed' from within.

German mainstream media continues to ignore the peaceful weekly Monday demonstrations, now being held in over 34 German cities - defaming them ludicrously as "a new right-wing movement", whatever this should mean - as well as the efforts and offerings of Wissensmanufaktur and many other activists.

Watch this extraordinary speech by former mainstream journalist Ken Jebsen at a demonstration against globalization and for peace - Berlin, May 5th 2014.