Supernatural: "Heart"

Watched "Heart." Sam Winchester is a character that isn't lucky with the ladies at all while his brother Dean usually has no trouble hooking up with them. Sam meets a nice and attractive woman and the two of them hit it off. Wouldn't ya know it? She turns out to be a werewolf! Yeesh! Ain't that always the way? And no, there's no cure for being one of those, so Sam is very unhappy with the way he has to end their all-too-brief affair.

The Housing Crisis - updated

When Congress was debating G.W. Bush's warrantless surveillance of American citizens (Allegedly, he and his people were just monitoring al Qaeda, but there's never been any formal, credible confirmation of that), US telecommunications companies made it quite clear that they didn't wish to be held accountable for anything they did. Congress was very accommodating and failed to apply what we quaintly term the “Rule of Law.” Apparently, the same general rule applies to banks and their mortgages and their wrongdoing vis-a-vis homeowners.

Bank executives argue that New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman is using the lawsuit to go after claims already covered under the settlement

The NY AG Eric Schneiderman is the fellow who has distinguished himself as the hero of the foreclosure crisis that has already resulted in several million homeowners losing their dwellings. The chart at the Calculated Risk blog, the “Total Delinquent and Foreclosure Percent by Month” shows that foreclosures held steady at under 5% per month until around mid-2006 and then stopped rising at the end of 2010 at a little under 11% per month. The drop in foreclosures at that point was not due to a greater rate of compliance and solvency among homeowners, “Foreclosures were in full delay mode in 2011,” which means that “only” 804,000 homes were repossessed and “foreclosure filings jumped 21 percent in the third quarter of 2011,” meaning that banks are cleaning up their procedures and clearing their decks for many, many more foreclosures.

The problem, as far as the mega-banks (Ally Financial, Bank of America, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo) are concerned, is that they thought they had a 50-state settlement negotiation in place that would wipe the books clean with a minimal slap-on-the-wrist fine for them ($25 billion) and continued or slightly altered foreclosure mills for homeowners. But in August 2011, Schneiderman made it clear that there was far too much illegality and far too many questions as to why homeowners were being foreclosed upon to just blindly continue, so he began pursuing criminal charges against the banks.

Initially, homeowners at risk of foreclosure and activist groups representing them were wary that President Obama was going to neutralize Schneiderman by appointing him to the state/federal task force on securitization and origination issues, but thankfully, Schneiderman and the California Attorney General Kamela Harris agreed that the offered settlement was inadequate.

In exchange [for the $25 billion settlement], attorneys general would agree to release the banks from further action related to the improper servicing of loans as well as claims against originating mortgages. Several attorneys general, including New York's Eric Schneiderman and California's Harris, have voiced concerns that those releases are overly broad and would preclude them from carrying out ongoing investigations.

Prospects for serious homeowner relief are looking good and it appears that that ol' quaint “Rule of Law” just might prevail in the end, not because of any action at the Federal level, but because the state attorneys general have been doing their jobs and looking out for citizens and homeowners.

Update:

Well, the settlement is complete and the Attorneys General failed American citizens by agreeing to a truly horrible deal.

As former Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Cynthia Kouril said on FDL this morning, “The court system will be permanently corrupted by forged and perjurious documents…This settlement is an incredible breach of the social contract between the government and the governed.”

So, how's the anti-war movement doing?

With the down-shifting of the Iraq War into a period not unlike that of the Vietnam War from "Vietnamization" and the pull-out of US combat troops in 1973, Iraq has grown a good deal quieter and has largely slipped off of the US cultural radar screen. The Iraq War brought the anti-war movement back into the streets and back into the public eye. But as there was never any threat of a draft, the youth of America were never mobilized as they were back in the 60s.
Although I would truly love to say that there has been a lot of intellectual back and forth and discussion in the anti-war movement, anyone who really wanted to get their teeth into a real discussion soon ran up against the fact that the justifications given for invading Iraq were transparently bad and didn't really stand up to any serious examinations.
Unlike the Vietnam War with its' "Domino Theory," there was no clear and compelling reason for the US to be fighting in Iraq once the WMD reason had been disposed of (The movie Fair Game concentrates on being an entertaining film, but it's quite clear from the narrative of the film that the WMD excuse was bogus and that the Bush Administration knowingly, consciously and deliberately put out bad information). The belief among the opponents of the war that either  the Bush Administration was seeking Iraq's oil or that it had messianic ambitions to remake the Middle East (In July 2010, The Guardian had a good discussion of the possible motivations behind Britain's joining in) served to explain to the public why the US invaded and then remained in Iraq, but the relative absence of any coherent, publicly-announced reasoning behind sticking with the war after the WMD reason fell apart made the severe splits within American families and the heated anti-communist-inspired arguments of the Vietnam War moot.
So the essential problem that the anti-war movement faced in making its case to the American people was not so much that The Establishment was making intellectually challenging justifications for the war, but that anti-war spokespeople were not in any position to get their message out. For many years, we tried large street demonstrations, marches, vigils, rallies, even an occupation of Dilworth Plaza in Philadelphia.
Of course, Indymedia has been enormously helpful to the cause for the past decade. In just the past month or so, taking a look at the Newswire of PhillyIMC, the anti-war movement has been documenting quite a few activities and reporting on a number of upcoming and potential problems. Frequent IMC contributor Stephen Lendman detailed various aggressive US moves against Iran. The radio show Between the Lines looked at the terrorist assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist and the Socialist Party USA presidential candidate Stewart Alexander called upon the US to stop threatening Iran. A member of several anti-war groups, Rich Gardner, looked at why the US appears to be suffering a "pyrrhic victory" in Afghanistan, not because the US is suffering disastrous casualties there, but because the war requires resources that the US simply can't assign to that theater (The US Government now apparently agrees, as "the US is [currently] treating the Taliban as a political force and a political stakeholder"). Finally, the Filipino Citizens Action Party, feeling that the Philippines are being squeezed between the US and China, is calling on both of them to resolve their differences peacefully.
The fight to keep America informed continues! Looking forward, United for Peace and Justice will conduct a meet & greet on Friday, February 24th at the Mexican Post, 1601 Cherry Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102 at 5:00pm as the kickoff to several days of meetings. Also, the United National Antiwar Coalition will be holding their National Conference starting Friday, March 23rd at 4:00pm at the Hilton Hotel in Stamford, CT.

improved and updated with editorial assistance from fellow IMCer Amy Dalton

Two reactions to a Kathleen Parker piece

Kathleen Parker has a piece up about abortion fights taking place. In the first, she claims that the Susan G. Komen for the Cure charity has the right to stop giving Planned Parenthood $680,000 a year. That's absolutely correct. Komen is a private organization and does indeed have that right. Yes, "given the rabid response from abortion-rights supporters, you’d think that Brinker and her organization were running puppy mills for soup vendors." That's true, because Komen executive made their decision for blatantly political reasons and then tried lying and dissembling and fudging about it. Komen decided to dive into the pool of a heated and divisive political issue and then acted surprised when the people on the other side of that issue started yelling about it.

Parker suggests: "Don’t like it? Don’t run in Komen’s fundraising races. Don’t buy a pink blender. Give directly to Planned Parenthood." What's Parkers' problem? That's precisely what lefty critics have done. No one has threatened to launch any sort of legal action, no one has threatened to burn down their buildings and no one has been beating up or assassinating Komen personnel. Critics have indeed loudly protested Komen's decision, but that's just as much our right as it is Komens' right to decide how to allocate their cash. Parker's complaints about "Coercion and intimidation" are just so much hyperbole. I'm not at all clear on where critics have gone overboard in their reaction to Komen's very bad decision and what Parker thinks the correct response should have been.

BTW, I think it's absolutely hilarious that the Bush Administration spokesperson, Ari Fleischer, is connected to the Komen story. "Fleischer personally interviewed candidates for the position of 'Senior Vice President for Communications and External Relations' at Komen last December." Very tellingly, "Fleischer drilled prospective candidates during their interviews on how they would handle the controversy about Komen’s relationship with Planned Parenthood," meaning that, no, the decision to cut off Planned Parenthood was made several months ago and they thought up the whole BS "if you're involved in an investigation" story as a very deliberate way to single out PP for getting cut off. The hilarious part is that "Whu-u-uh?!?! A former Bush Administration official made a clumsy and stupid PR move?!?! Na-a-a-ahh!"I mean, gee, those guys were so nimble and light on their feet when it came to PR [/snark].

The second part is that Parker is upset that Roman Catholic hospitals are being told to "provide health insurance that covers contraception, including in some cases abortifacient drugs." She and the Roman Catholic hierarchy feel that this constitutes an infringement on Catholic religious liberty and she and they also fear that "these requirements are the edge of the wedge." Sorry, I have absolutely zero sympathy for her arguments.

Back when I was in the Navy, Muslims who wanted to get military ID cards for their wives wanted to get them with their wives' faces veiled. We said no. We were willing to have the ID photo taken by a female, with no males nearby to see the wifes' unveiled face, but we were not willing to take a photo of a veiled face for an ID card. The military needed to be absolutely certain that the person holding an ID card was indeed the person they said they were. The religious desires of devout Muslims were incompatible with our military needs, so their religous desires took second place. Some devout Native Americans want to smoke peyote as part of their religious rites. As they were doing so long before white, Anglo-Saxon settlers occupied their land, the usual classification of peyote as a "controlled substance in Schedule I" is lifted, but it's lifted specifically for Native Americans so that they can continue their religious practices uninterrupted.

In both cases, the law and what the Federal Government needs, trumps the law of religious freedom and liberty. If Catholics don't like providing women with the means to control their wombs, then they can sell off their hospitals to private entrepreneurs who are willing to abide by the national law. If Catholics who practice medicine within those hospitals don't like it, they can go to another country or they can find another occupation. Under no circumstances does religious liberty take precedence over a woman's Constitutional rights.

Update: What Digby said.

Round-up late January 2012

In the war in Afghanistan: US troops are not losing, nor are they suffering enormous casualties. But they're paying an enormous price in money, manpower, time and effort to take ground. US troops successfully secured the Afghan city of Kandahar and more or less kicked the Taliban out, but it took 18,000 troops to do so. Kandahar is the Afghan city nearest to Quetta, Pakistan and thereby the one that's the easiest to supply. Every Afghan city that gets similarly secured and pacified is going to cost even more in resources.

The real problem, of course, is that the US still lacks what it obviously lacked at the fall of Baghdad in 2003, what I would call a "colonial corps," a group that I'd model on the Army Corps of Engineers. Essentially, a person would be assigned to each city section, town or group of villages and that person would look over each section, decide what was needed to rebuild and build it up, would request money and/or materials and/or engineering personnel from the US and would stay on to see to it that the money was properly spent. This would not be a military job as it has nothing to do with shooting and killing. The corps would need protection from the Taliban via the US military of course, but as the population benefits and prospers from US money and personnel conducting rebuilding operations, they'd hopefully need less military protection as the population would then feel encouraged and motivated to resist Taliban infiltrations.

Problem is, the US has no such corps and it's hard to see how any such group could be established at this point, over a decade after the initial invasion of Afghanistan. Back around the late 1800s to the early 1900s, Rudyard Kipling wrote stirring tales about the "Great Game" between Britain and Russia as they battled across great, largely empty spaces between Russia and India (Afghanistan was a frequently-used location for their battles). Well, there's nowhere near the enthusiasm in America now that there was then in Britain. Where is the occupation of Afghanistan in American culture? Where was the occupation of Iraq in our culture? Both the more-or-less concluded struggle in Iraq and the current struggle in Afghanistan are pretty much entirely absent from American popular culture. The cultural heroes of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, Jessica Lynch, Pat Tillman and Blake Miller, who, aside from leaders like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General David Petraeus, these are probably the most prominent. well-known personalities to emerge out of these conflicts and they all turned out to have stories that were considerably less heroic and inspiring then what was first reported on them.

There was a recent pro-troops rally celebrating the service of Iraq War veterans in St. Louis, MO, showing that the American people don't blame the troops at all. Americans feel that the troops just did as they were instructd to do, but the piece on the rally was interesting for what it didn't say, i.e., what the troops actually accomplished while they were there.  


Heh! Miss Piggy weighs in on an accusation from Fox News that the Muppets were a bunch of subversive Marxists. In a somewhat more-or-less related piece, doll protesters bewilder Russian police.


We'll probably hear this one repeated. A right-wing columnist claims that Mitt Romney gave 42% of his income in charitable giving. Problem: much of that 42% was actually taxes and a really big chunk of what remained was what he was expected to contribute to the Mormon Church.


Very happy to see that political commentators are finally getting over their romance with the idea of bipartisanship.

There is nothing wrong with a party running on its platform, then implementing that platform if elected. If people don’t like the result, they can vote for a new party with a different platform and expect it to be implemented. This is how most democracies work.

I regard the Occupy movement and the drive for austerity as directly opposed movements. One is the nemesis of the other. Very good case laid out against austerity. Good quote:

Thus in October 2010 David Broder, who virtually embodied conventional wisdom, praised Mr. Cameron for his boldness, and in particular for “brushing aside the warnings of economists that the sudden, severe medicine could cut short Britain’s economic recovery and throw the nation back into recession.” He then called on President Obama to “do a Cameron” and pursue “a radical rollback of the welfare state now.”

Strange to say, however, those warnings from economists proved all too accurate. And we’re quite fortunate that Mr. Obama did not, in fact, do a Cameron.

Obsession with government debt is dragging down the recovery and making it difficult to recover from the Great Recession. When you freeze Federal Government spending and refuse to help out the state and local governments, the result is not useful savings for the rest of us, the result is fewer critically-needed government services for all of us.

As a columnist for my local paper phrases it: "If you have few skills and little education, you face a big problem." Well, yes, I agree that that such people do indeed face a big problem and it's a far bigger problem than it was a few decades ago thanks to globalization. What annoys me about the piece is that the author simply takes that state of affairs as a given and doesn't suggest any solutions for it. His attitude appears as simply "The gods have decreed..." an attitude that strikes me as very fatalistic. The economist Dean Baker finds that the Washington Post has the same problem. He quotes the WaPo as saying:

"But it is not clear that the measures [those proposed by President Obama]— or any others — could compensate for the factors behind the decline of the middle class, including the rise of nations with abundant cheap labor and the development of new technologies that allow companies to operate with far fewer workers."

The problem in both cases is the fatalism that says "That's the way things are" and does not see fit to suggest any way to counter "the way things are." Our economic conditions have been created by human beings making deliberate, conscious decisions and can be unmade by using precisely the same process. "Is" does not automatically translate to "should be." As Baker puts it:

The reason that globalization has put downward pressure on the living standards of the middle class is that it has been deliberate policy under both Republican and Democratic administrations to force middle class workers to compete with their low-paid counterparts in the developing world, while protecting the most highly educated workers from the same competition. The predicted and actual result of this policy has been an enormous upward redistribution of income.

We can change this state of affairs. It's not just a given that we must simply adjust to. We may face a lot of resistance from the 1%, but that's to be expected. That's no reason not to wage the struggle.

The Client List

Interesting flick! Just saw it on a rental. Jennifer Love Hewitt plays someone who was the prettiest girl in high school, then a happily-married mother of three, then...a hooker! No question, Hewitt sure enough was a purty thang in I know what you did last summer, Heartbreakers (With Gene Hackman and Sigourney Weaver) and the TV series Ghost Whisperer, so I could see the role as being a natural for her in some respects. Before the movie goes into the sin, the downfall and then the redemption of Samantha Horton (Hewitt's character), she does something interesting, she adopts that good ol' American can-do, entrepreneurial attitude and gives some serious thought as to how she can improve her appeal and increase her share of customers. She comes up with an interesting answer.

BTW, I notice that the movie was apparently pretty successful as it's going to be a TV series!

Housing Crisis

After President Obama settled the question of the stimulus (The stimulus didn't end the recession, but successfully prevented another Great Depression), he turned his attention to housing. With many millions of homeowners underwater on their mortgages or having difficulty keeping up payments on them, Representative Boehner of the Republican Party asked:

“Does your plan compensate banks for the bad mortgages they should never have made in the first place?” Mr. Boehner asked. “Will individuals who misrepresented their income or assets on their original mortgage application be eligible to get taxpayer-funded assistance?”

Obama had already shown he was sensitive to criticism concerning perceptions of excessive government spending and had acquiesced in reducing his stimulus proposal from $1.2 trillion to a little under $800 billion. An essential problem with that approach however, was and is that criminal fraud plays a very substantial role in the housing crisis. 

Up until August 2011, all 50 State Attorney Generals were negotiating with five banks (Ally Financial, Bank of America, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo) that were accused of “robo-signing” documents and conducting illegal home seizures. In that month, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman decided to oppose what he felt was Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's undue haste in trying to get a settlement and to instead pursue criminal charges against the five banks. 

This month, Schneiderman accused Bank of New York Mellon, the 11th-largest U.S. bank by assets, of "repeated fraud and illegality" when it came to its actions as a trustee for various mortgage securities, and he accused Bank of America of fabricating missing documents when foreclosing on some homeowners who defaulted on their mortgages.

Other State Attorney Generals have followed Schneiderman off of the settlement group. By October, the blatant illegality of what the five “robo-signing” banks were up to was becoming really plainly obvious:

A Florida lawyer says financial institutions, trying to rush through thousands of home foreclosures, hired hair stylists, Walmart floor workers and former assembly line employees to work as the "foreclosure experts" that have come to be known as robo-signers.

[…]

The testimony is from 150 robo-signers -- so called because some of them signed as many as 10,000 affidavits a month.

By November 2011, three other State AG's had left the group and the Obama Administration's responses were becoming increasingly unsatisfactory:

To date, the Obama administration has attempted a seemingly endless number of programs designed to prevent foreclosures and heal the housing market. Each has been introduced with great fanfare and as an innovation that will not suffer from the failures of the previous program. Each has then failed.

One of the casualties of the foreclosure crisis in late 2011 was a firm that threw a Halloween bash in which employees dressed up as people who had lost their homes. Thankfully, the firm went bankrupt three weeks later.

In December, the State AG's that were still part of the national settlement was only 43 as the number of drop-outs was now seven. Still more illegality had been uncovered:

A criminal investigator for the Nevada Attorney General’s office said that out of tens of thousands of documents from LPS that his investigation of the fraud examined, an overwhelming majority seemed suspicious.

“It’s hard to find [a document] that you wouldn’t be suspicious of,” the investigator said, adding that legitimate documents from the company seemed to be the exception instead of the rule.

It wasn’t just the signatures that were fraudulent. According to the investigator, some of the forged documents contained information that had not been verified by those signing them. This sometimes led to the wrongful foreclosure of houses because of the innacuracies [sic].

“One out of every 69 homes in America received a foreclosure filing last year,” and with “newly aggressive Attorneys General investigating, and a new Occupy Our Homes movement raising awareness of the crimes, I [FireDogLake blogger David Dayen] think that the prediction of a resolution to processing problems will be just as shortsighted as ever.”

Foreclosures have been a very serious problem, but much worse is down the road. “Foreclosures were in full delay mode in 2011,” which means that “only” 804,000 homes were repossessed and “foreclosure filings jumped 21 percent in the third quarter of 2011,” meaning that banks are clearing up their procedures and clearing their decks for many, many more foreclosures. We're expecting foreclosures to jump even further in 2012. “[T]he New York Federal Reserve anticipates that 3.6 million foreclosures will occur in the next two years.”

Thoughts on flyers

From a Facebook buddy:

I think that a future event should have a well thought out flyer a month before event, to build up anticipation.

I agree completely. Having both produced and distributed many pre-event flyers, I believe each one needs the following elements:

• Identification of the group(s) sponsoring the event (Many groups like listing all of their co-sponsors, as well)
• Eye-catching graphic(s) - should be around a quarter of the page. Ken Heard feels children are necessary elements, I like flags myself, close-ups of people are good, pictures should be upbeat and on the cheerful side
• Time/date/place event will take place
• Sponsor contact information
• Any specifics, such as if payment/contribution is requested

For most events, that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for much else. As flyers are also posted in coffee shops, churches, colleges, etc., we also have to make sure that the flyer is designed cleanly enough to be read at a fair distance.

Girl Scouts of America revives old dispute about objectivity

Media Matters For America (MMFA) was cited by a Girl Scouts of America (GSA) guide to the media as a good fact-checking website to counter lies and misinformation in the media. Well, the right wing wasn't going to have any of that! As they're frequent targets of MMFA, they of course resented it's inclusion in the Girl Scout piece and especially the suggestion that it was a reliable source for girls and their parents. Quoted by MMFA from the Glenn Beck website:

Her daughter, Sydney, a 15-year-old who served as a Girl Scout for eight years, left the organization in 2010 after she found that it embraces some controversial stances. Now, Sydney co-edits "Speak Now: Girl Scouts Website," which provides plenty of other examples of what some may see as liberal bias.

Perhaps the Girl Scouts staffers were too busy to respond to us, but considering the fact that the Media Matters reference is, in itself, a form of misinformation, bias -- potentially even indoctrination -- we assumed that the book would no longer be on the market. But we were wrong. [TheBlaze.com, 12/27/11]

Steve Doocy of Fox News has a basic, fundamental objection to the Girl Scouts using MMFA, and that is that MMFA is "a site that is clearly with an agenda." So for an informational site to have a real point of view, to have an agenda even, is somehow inconsistent with being able to provide girls and parents with accurate information.


Problem: PolitiFact is considered to be a site that doesn't have an ideological point of view or any sort of agenda. Yet PolitiFact published their "Lie of the Year" and they named the Democratic Party assertion that Republicans, and specifically Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), want to "End Medicare." Turns out after a considerable amount of back and forth that PolitiFact now agrees that Democrats are charging Republicans with wanting to make such drastic changes to Medicare that it would be a program that would be essentially different from what it is now. PolitiFact appears to be really grasping at straws here and is trying to tell the public that there's a fundamental difference between "Ending Medicare" and "Ending Medicare as we know it."


So my question would be "What's so great about objectivity?" Isn't it better to have a site that makes no claims about being objective and above it all and to have no pre-concieved ideas about anything? Obviously, just because Politifact claims it's an objective source, that doesn't mean that they provide good, solid, reliable information.


Chris Wallace of Fox News purports to be an objective journalist, but the biggest problem with MMFA that he could come up with was:

But industry blog Mediaite says Media Matters has a, quote, "far left bent that is both transparent and indisputable." [Fox News, Special Report, 12/29/11]

Which again, is a "criticism" that causes many folks to dismiss MMFA out of hand, but I'm not really sure why having a "far left bent" is automatically disqualifying. My feeling is that if MMFA provides substantiated accusations, charges that are backed up with evidence, i.e., video, audio and photographs, and if they go the extra mile and provide contest for the accusations (Quoting whole paragraphs as opposed to just giving us the sentence or sentence fragments that are damning), well, what's the problem?


The Girl Scouts reportedly agreed that MMFA is not a source they should be using.

"Girl Scouts constantly reviews our materials based on feedback and suggestions we receive from our members and we update our materials on a regular basis," said the statement. "As a result of this process, upcoming reprints of journeys materials will not include links to Media Matters."

I see this far more as a matter of the GSA backing down to political pressure placed upon them by right-wing media figures than it is any sort of epiphany that MMFA really is biased.


Score another victory for right-wing pressure to conform to their idea of what constitutes "bias" and "objectivity."

Becky Sharp and evolution

In the piece "Gay gene, deconstructed," the observations were made that:

Most scientists who study human sexuality agree that gay people are born that way. But that consensus raises an evolutionary puzzle: How do genes associated with homosexuality avoid being weeded out by Darwinian evolution?

Some gays and lesbians do reproduce, said Pennsylvania State University anthropologist and geneticist Mark Shriver, but not as much as straight people do. Even if a gene decreases people's fertility by 1 percent, it's going to be eliminated.

To which I answer "Becky Sharp." Was she the heroine of Vanity Fair? Hmm, "heroine" would be much too complimentary a term.  "Protagonist" will do. Miss Sharp was a woman who very much enjoyed sex (It's made clear that her primary reason to marry the fellow she does is so she can have plenty of sex without the scandal of being a single woman doing so) and who bore a number of healthy children. Problem: She didn't particularly like children. She didn't enjoy spending time with children and greatly preferred the company of grown-ups.


Let's presume that that was the natural consequence of regular old human diversity and ask "How could such a gene survive?" Clearly, in an agricultural or an industrial society, it wouldn't. But in a hunting and gathering society, I can very easily see how people who were attracted to same-sex partners could ally themselves with the Becky Sharps of the world.


For humans, with their lengthy times for child-raising, producing the child is only a first step. To get a fully competent human being that can raise itself and take care of its own needs requires, what for any other mammal, would be a very extended period of care and devotion from at least one parent, but preferably from two of them.


In an agricultural or industrial society, a nuclear family is the preferred social unit because that's the ideal social group for assuring that material wealth is passed down from one generation to the next. Why don't we see nuclear families in hunting and gathering societies? That's easy, in that type of society, there's no material wealth to pass down.Everything that's used is taken directly from the environment and is easily replaceable.


Without being constrained by a nuclear family, where husbands and wives stay with each other and with their children, the Becky Sharps who don't like spending time with children can pass them off to a same-sex couple that is less likely to produce children themselves. The same-sex couple is then able to take over the job of raising the children that the Becky Sharps produce.


So, my theory is that the two types of people, women who produce children but don't like spending time with them and gay couples who are likely to produce fewer children than regular opposite-sex couples would, would ally with each other in a symbiotic relationship. Their own tendencies would complement each other.

Round-up of events - Nov 30th to Dec 9th

Wow! Awesome speech by the President! After so many "populist" appeals by the Tea Party (Genuine populism takes the side of regular folks against billionaires, the Tea Party was largely founded by billionaires), the President makes a genuinely populist appeal to the American people! Naturally, a fellow on Fox News has a problem with it. Very interestingly, he tips his hand as to how weak his case against the President's speech is. The President is "quoted" as saying "Rugged individualism doesn't work." Did Obama actually say any such thing? Here's the part where Obama says "rugged individualism":

OBAMA: Now, just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt's time, there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let's respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. "The market will take care of everything," they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes -- especially for the wealthy -- our economy will grow stronger. Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everybody else. And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn't trickle down, well, that's the price of liberty.

Now, it's a simple theory. And we have to admit, it's one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That's in America's DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. (Laughter.) But here's the problem: It doesn't work. It has never worked. (Applause.) It didn't work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It's not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the '50s and '60s. And it didn't work when we tried it during the last decade. (Applause.) I mean, understand, it's not as if we haven't tried this theory. [emphasis added]

Obama isn't saying that "rugged individualism" doesn't work, he's saying that trickle-down economics doesn't work. That's something entirely different from what the Fox News guy "quoted" the President as saying. This goes back to G.W. Bush and his constant "straw man" arguments. If an opponent has to make up straw men in order to make an argument, that indicates that they don't have any good arguments to begin with.

Right-wingers are now using urban legends to deny economic help to struggling constituents. People need help after being unemployed for months? Nah, right-wing Congresspeople are just contending that there are just too many lazy people collecting unemployment! How is that approach affecting the middle class? Very badly, as a matter of fact. Another urban legend appears to be the talking point that, by proposing to raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires, Democrats want to raise taxes on "job creators" and that small businesses in particular, would be devastated by those new taxes. Slight problem with that talking point:

We wanted to talk to business owners who would be affected. So, NPR requested help from numerous Republican congressional offices, including House and Senate leadership. They were unable to produce a single millionaire job creator for us to interview.

 NPR lists several other groups they contacted to try and locate these elusive "millionaire job creators" but, amazingly enough, couldn't locate any [/snark]

Heh! Elizabeth Warren is doing extremely well in her campaign to replace Senator Scott Brown (R-MA), so well in fact that Karl Rove is tossing everything and the kitchen sink at her! His latest ad accuses Warren of approving of the TARP bailouts of late 2008 (After an ad accusing her of being too close to the Occupy Wall Street crowd failed miserably). Warren responds by noting that Rove gets the situation completely backwards and that, boy, he sure is getting desperate.

Republicans block nominee for Consumer Financial Protection Agency (The vote "lost" with 53 in favor against 45 opposed as 53 wasn't sufficient to break the Republican filibuster). Republican Senator openly admits that the nominee was qualified, but that he opposes the whole idea of the agency to begin with.

Politico shows itself to be an organization utterly without integrity. Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) presented a ludicrously half-baked mess of a plan to end Medicare and to replace it with a voucher system. Not only that, the system would diminish in value to senior citizens every year, leaving them increasingly unable to afford health care. Naturally, just about every Republican member of Congress voted for the idea, a vote that Democrats would do well to hang about their necks in 2012 as the idea quickly proved to be wildly unpopular. To the absolute delight of partisan Democrats, Mitt Romney has now wholeheartedly adopted the Ryan plan as his own.

And in cheerful news, a Fox News host has to back down after calling the Muppets a group of communists.

Round-up on the news 19Nov2011

Very pleased to note that Democrats hung tough on the latest vote on the Balanced Budget Amendment.

In 1995, 72 of the 202 Democrats who voted crossed over and voted for the BBA. That’s quite a few, and it means that it wasn’t just conservative and Blue Dog Democrats; quite a few mainstream or even liberal Dems thought it was worth supporting for substantive or political reasons. Today, however, only 25 Democrats crossed lines to support the amendment, while four Republicans voted against it.

Yes, Democrats have previously gotten all wobbly-kneed, caved in and voted for packages that they considered insane, but lately, they're definitely learning and toughening up.

Bwah-hah-hah!!!! Michele Bachmann insists "I haven't had a gaffe." Uh, gee, some random, unknown person in a receiving line tells Bachmann that a vaccine causes mental retardation, so Bachmann insisted that this random person knew what she was talking about. Erm, slight problem, the claim is complete and utter poppycock. Rush Limbaugh even came to the defense of the vaccine, and when Limbaugh tells you you've "jumped the shark," you've really gone overboard! Oh, and her plan to run the government without taxing anybody was a good one! Bachmann's gaffes have been quite frequent.

Speaking of Limbaugh, the fellow got very confused and claimed that the former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was gay. No, gays, straights and lesbians all fall into the category of adults who make love to adults on a consensual basis. Rapists and pedophiles fall into a different category, that of people who abuse victims and who really couldn't care less what the gender of their victims are.

Thankfully, the Super-Committee/Cat Food Commission II seems to be headed for complete failure. The likely result is sequestration in 2013. Given that Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have declared, in response to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's claim that sequestration would result in a "substantial risk of not being able to meet our defense needs" that

"We are staunchly opposed to this draconian action. This is not an outcome that we can live with, and it is certainly not one that we should impose on ourselves. The sequester is a threat to the national security interests of the United States, and it should not be allowed to occur.”

In other words, sequestration is not a serious threat as these Republican Senators will clearly not allow it to gut their preferred programs. Unfortunately this is, by the count of the FireDogLake blogger, President Obama's fourth attempt at a "Grand Bargain." Sure would be nice if it were to be the last.

It's difficult to keep from sympathizing with Occupy protesters when law enforcement authorities get so completely out of control that they use pepper spray directly onto the faces of Occupiers who are just sitting there peacefully. Of course, pepper spray is torture and should never be used unless police officers are in extreme peril, a condition that very obviously did not apply in this case. Great picture from the same blog, by the way. What's the ultimate goal of the neoliberals who are the opposition to #OWS? Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam and the US have been negotiating, behind closed doors naturally, for a Trans-Pacific Partnership that would lock in many of the worst aspects of NAFTA, but in the Pacific instead of Central America.

And lastly, former Senator from Pennsylvania Rick Santorum, gets all philosophical and declares that, when contemplating the vast number of Americans who are getting food stamps as opposed to being able to work at jobs, that hey, well “suffering is part of life and it’s not a bad thing, it is an essential thing in life.” Um, yeah, considering that Santorum’s estimated net worth is between $880,000 and $1.9 million, this is a real generous, Christian attitude.

Occupy Philadelphia & Occupy Wall Street march in solidarity

On the evening of Sunday the 13th of November, marchers from Occupy Wall Street (OWS) joined up with members of Occupy Philadelphia (OP) to collaborate in a night-time march. The OWS people were on their way to Washington DC to make it clear that "We are the 99%!"
As I've pointed out, that concept is a bit more complicated than just a matter of dollars one makes in a year. We of the 99% don't consider, say, the filmmaker Michael Moore to be a member of the 1%, even though he obviously makes enough money to qualify. The question is one of collaboration in neoliberalism (Don't think "liberal," think in terms of "capital wants to be liberated from all constraints!") and in trying to act in ways that are contrary to the interests of the rest of us, the regular people.
Of very great concern I think, and something that I find utterly baffling when I try to examine it through the lens of Democratic Party self-interest, is that the Democrats are prepared to help the Super Committee/Cat Food Commission II remain in existence past the statutory November 23rd date for the Commission to issue its report.
What's the point of the Commission? To try and tackle the deficit problem.
How many Americans give a rat's ass about the deficit? 6%.
Well then, what do Americans care about? Jobs. To get jobs, a strong majority supports raising taxes on the rich.
Does the Commission want to raise taxes on the rich? Ha, ha, ha! They'll do no such thing, of course.
Is the Commission in the pockets of the 1%? Yup. The Commission needs to be disbanded immediately. Neither regular citizens nor any members of the Democratic Party stand to gain anything whatsoever from its continued existence.


Update:
Two comments I thought were worth reproducing:
Occu-Posse….March to DC
Submitted by Baja K (not verified) on Mon, 11/14/2011 – 8:21pm
How to find out where and when the NYC to DC Occupy March will be?
Those who’d like to join for all or part of the march can’t do so if the info doesn’t get out there and spread around a bit ahead of time. Various “Occupy” sites may have this info but it’s hard to find.
Check out some old Hopalong Cassidy movies where his posse, galloping along to the rescue of something, was joined by another group of members, and then later by more, and then more and more and more till the whole screen was filled with the cowboy version of what the march on DC might be.
Think “Occu-posse”. Don’t confuse with the James Bond film of similar-sounding name.
————-
I though that was a pretty good question, so:

From a publication called The Root:

CBS is reporting that members of the Occupy Wall Street movement are heading to the nation’s capital. A group from the encampment in New York City’s Zuccotti Park are embarking on a two-week walk to Washington, D.C. They left at noon today and will arrive by Nov. 23, the day of the deadline for the congressional “super committee” to come up with its deficit-reduction plan.

RT.com says:

Organizers on the OccupyWallStreet.org website have revealed plans for Occupy the Highway: The 99 Percent March to Washington. Protesters will be playing in safe, however, and will ditch the major roadways in exchange for more pedestrian-friendly thoroughfares. They intend on leaving New York City Wednesday at noon and plan to march roughly 20 miles a day, stopping along the way in Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore and elsewhere before arriving in Washington two weeks later.

The Inky tries to explain Occupy Wall Street

Raghuram Rajan, in the Inky of 11 Nov 2011 is absolutely correct, the Occupy Wall Street movement is using a rhetorical shorthand to describe what it's complaint with America's current status is and why they're out protesting. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement that began in the late 1950s, the opponents of Occupy Wall Street are in need of careful definition as the problem is nowhere near as obvious as it was for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his followers. The traditional media, of course, very clearly won't do that for us and those wanting clarity will obviously have to look elsewhere than into any daily newspaper or TV news show.*
The blogger and Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Juan Cole, has put out a piece describing the worldwide movement that Occupy Wall Street is a part of. Neoliberalism is the economic movement that wants capital and business to be liberated from government regulations and it both got Ronald Reagan elected President and greatly benefited from his administration. As Cole points out, the worldwide movement in reaction to neoliberalism encompasses not just the "Arab Spring" countries of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, but Chile, Spain and Israel as well as the United States.
It's irresponsible capital that seeks freedom from government supervision that's the problem, not merely those who earn lots of money. As Rajan makes clear, there are many people who earn lots of money that the Occupy Wall Street movement doesn't have a problem with. Rajan points to a long-term problem that indeed will require a coordinated effort from the whole of American society, but that particular problem doesn't explain why the Occupy Wall Street movement exists.

Update:

Further pieces defining who the 1% are and are not:

The people who tossed out Glass-Steagall are most definitely part of the 1% that we’re criticizing:
http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2011/11/clinton-and-gingrich-now-say-it-was.html
The wealthy people who are standing up with the 99% are very clearly not part of the group that we’re condemning:
http://firedoglake.com/2011/11/11/1-is-a-state-of-mind/

*As an example, the Inky ran a piece written by Senators Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) that was allegedly pro-litle guy and pro-small businesses, but the actual position they took was completely opposed to Net Neutrality. The piece was very shortly followed by a vote where all the Republican Senators voted against Net Neutrality, meaning the article was written in a deceptive manner, to suggest that the two Republican Senators were opposed to the interests of big corporations and in favor of small businesses.
In contrast to the assertions made by the Republican Senators, Internet program and content providers do not compete on an even playing field because of capitalism and competition, but because of government regulations. This is why the traditional media cannot be relied upon to accurately tell the public what the Occupy Wall Street movement is all about.

Fair Game

Finally got to see the DVD of Fair Game, the story of the Bush Administration's rush to war against Iraq in late 2002, early 2003. Very good and no, it doesn't leave the slightest doubt that Bush's people knew full well that in the two cases the film looks at, the aluminum tubes (centrifuges or missile launch tubes?) and whether of not Niger sold raw uranium to Iraq, that the Bush Administration very consciously, deliberately and with malice aforethought, lied to get Americans enthusiastic about going to war with Iraq.
I had never before heard the exact reasons the CIA gave for not believing that the aluminum cylinders were for missile launch tubes as opposed to being nuclear fuel enrichment centrifuges, but in the film, the agents laughingly answer a Bush Administration official that the tubes that Iraq possessed were three to four times thicker and twice as long as centrifuges would have been. Makes sense, as centrifuges wouldn't need to be very thick, but a launch tube would need to be able to withstand a rocket going off inside it.
I could tell when Joe's article came out in late 2003 that there were lots of problems with the idea that Iraq got uranium from Niger (Joe Wilson pronounced it Ni-zheer, precisely to distinguish it from Nigeria). There are no railroads in that part of the world and the film specifies that it would have taken 50 heavy trucks to have carried a sufficient quantity of raw yellowcake uranium to have made a few bombs. I looked at a map and saw that it was 400 miles from the Southeastern tip of Niger to the nearest ports in Benin or Nigeria. The author Tony Hillerman wrote about people living in isolated areas such as one finds in Niger and Northern Benin and Nigeria. Hillerman wrote about two Apache detectives who lived in the American West. When vehicles in those isolated areas move, they get noticed and commented on. People in the Hillerman novels get asked if they've seen, say, a blue car going West. They usually remember just such a car and approximately when it passed. Even if Niger could have gotten all 50 trucks the 400 miles in one day (That of course, presumes really well-maintained roads), it would still take quite a while to get all the yellowcake offloaded from the trucks and loaded onto a ship. There's simply no way that even the most minimal due diligence wouldn't uncover all kinds of testimony and other evidence about such a large shipment. Even if satellites didn't pick up such a large movement for that region, spies in the ports would definitely have gotten lots of pictures of the loading. Obviously, the ship would have been carefully tracked and intercepted long before it got to Iraq.
I was surprised to hear that Valerie Plame Wilson (Played by Naomi Watts) didn't tell her husband (Played by Sean Penn) that she had informed her supervisors in the CIA that Joe had previous experience being a General Services Officer in the late 1970s to Niger. And no, I never believed for a single moment that she "sent" him to there. Her explanation that she merely suggested that "Oh, if we need someone to go to Niger, my husband has relevant experience being in that area." Joe didn't work for the CIA, he went voluntarily and Valerie wouldn't have had the authority to send him anywhere as she simply didn't play any such role in the CIA.
What was always the most ludicrous charge thrown against the Wilsons was that Valerie had sent Joe on a "junket." When I served in the Navy (1991-2001), I spent two years in the Mediterranean (1996-1998) onboard the USS LaSalle (AGF-3), the command ship for the Sixth Fleet. I certainly got to the big party/tourist ports, Venice, Italy; Cannes, France; Mallorca, Spain, etc. But I also got to some not-so-wealthy, not-so-touristy places, Constanta, Romania;  Tunis, Tunisia and Poti, Georgia, among others. Now, if I were told by a US government official "Mr. Gardner, your country would appreciate it if you were to go to [one of these places to do whatever]", I'd salute, say "Aye-aye," get over there and make the best of it. But would I go to any of these places as though they were tourist destinations? Uh, hardly. There's a scene in the film where Joe turns on a tap and, instead of getting water, gets some sort of thick, black liquid. Clearly, Niger was not any sort of touristy kind of place that wealthy Americans or Europeans were visiting for the fun of it. So I never found it the slightest bit believable that Joe Wilson had set out to Niger for any reason other than what he said he was there to do, to see whether Niger had sent uranium to Iraq.
And yes, I agree with the films conclusion, that it's right for citizens to stand up when things are wrong and to publicly say so.I greatly appreciate both of the Wilsons for having done so.

British vs French or incrementalism vs overnight change

Had an extensive debate with a fellow member of UFPJ-DVN on Facebook about his use of the term “Working Class,” he was using the term in its classical Marxian Das Kapital 1867 meaning, to denote those who work for, and get a wage from, those who own the means of production. I was using it to mean people who are wealthy enough to own homes as opposed to those who rent apartments.

The immediate, practical difficulty here is “What is going to work to advance our goals?” Is it going to help the movement to insist on Millennial goals, on trying to overthrow capitalism and to try and replace it with communism? I pointed out here that communism failed. Communism simply couldn't keep up with capitalism. Did it fall into the dustbin of history or, as Ronald Reagan and other right-wingers insisted, was it pushed by US military expenditures? My own interpretation is that it fell due to

the fact that it simply doesn't work for certain sectors of the economy. Government control works fine for health care and education as those two sectors don't act like markets, with competent customers making informed, unhurried decisions in a reasonably fair marketplace. When, on the other hand, one is purchasing shirts or houses or lawn mowers, markets work fine. Now, we saw with the Triangle Waist factory blaze that corporate capitalist enterprises simply cannot be trusted (Remember, the blaze occurred in 1911, many decades after corporate industrial capitalism began, so it's not like it wasn't given a chance to regulate itself) that the Federal Government must assume oversight of corporate enterprises to see that workers are protected.

I believe there is an inherent, inborn tendency towards wealth and property to concentrate, for a wealthy person with a lot of land to obtain more wealth and land. As the Bruce Springsteen song goes:

Poor man wanna be rich,
rich man wanna be king,
And a king ain't satisfied,
till he rules everything, ...

For those people with more modest means, they must occasionally struggle to keep what they have. These struggles started with the development of agriculture and I simply don't see them ever ending. In the Soviet Union, we saw the development of the nomenklatura, in China, they saw the Red-Hat Businessmen. In both cases, the group that had the most (In Marxian terms, they're referred to as the Ruling Class) morphed and changed shape and adopted new terms, but never essentially changed from what they always were. My own preference is for the term aristocracy as I consider that to be a more accurate and descriptive term.

So what's with the title of this post? As either a tween or as a young teen, I read a piece comparing what the author termed the “British” and the “French” method of social change. The French method was what my fellow member obviously prefers, a sudden, vast, overnight change from the old to the new. The British method, by contrast, was referred to as “muddling through.” It consists of moving incrementally, moving in a general direction as opposed to being focused on specific goals, trying one thing at a time, seeing how it works, modifying it if necessary and then moving again.

We all saw how the French Revolution worked, it very quickly resulted in bloodshed and empire and their defeat at the hands of foreigners and a return to the bad old days. The Netroots, on the other hand,

have been quite successful. Their electoral strength was shown first in 2006 by the defeat of Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary for Senator of Connecticut. It was very much a partial victory, one step forward, another step back, but Lieberman was no longer speaking with any credibility for the Democratic Party as Democratic voter had booted him out of the party. He was still able to do some damage to progressive goals, but not as much as he was doing before. The Netroots had handed over the day-to-day control of policy to our President, who went in a Blue Dog Democrat direction and promptly suffered losses in the 2010 midterm, but we're pushing back again with the assistance of the Occupy Wall Street people.

The anti-war movement has very definitely gone in the direction of incrementalism. We don't describe ourselves as being pacifists as that implies we have a fixed and rigid and unchangeable goal, but as people who oppose this particular war or that particular action. The ultimate shape of our proposed policies may resemble those of doctrinaire pacifists, but by showing how particular policies are bad or ineffective on a case-by-case basis, we build a far more credible case for the general public that we're taking a thoughtful, flexible approach to the issues of the day.

Our approach to economic issues is similar. We don't oppose the wealthy simply because they're wealthy. We oppose particular wealthy people because they're cheating and not following the “rules of the game.” England had to conduct several land reforms between the Norman invasion of 1066 and the switch-over to industrial society during the 1800s. Land had gotten too concentrated and was held by too few people, just as wealth today is far more concentrated than it should be, so land got broken up and moved into many more sets of hands. The redistribution of wealth that occurred after the crash of 1929 (Second chart on this page) was done in a far less conscious and deliberate manner, but resulted in many good things for people of regular income. What progressives today would really like to see is another version of land redistribution or a more conscious process of returning some wealth back to regular people, as was done via the Great Depression. Obviously, we'd like to do that without going through another Great Depression.

Entertainment - Vampire Diaries

When I'm seeking entertainment, I have no desire to review issues that actually affect me. I don't have any desire to see shows or movies about people who are broke, I don't need to be reminded of that particular problem.
Now, in the latest Vampire Diaries, we have a blond vampire who's sleeping with a Latino werewolf, the brother of the series' heroine is caught up in a love triangle between his former girlfriend, who's now a ghost and his current girlfriend, who's a former witch. The fellow who's going out with the heroine is yer classic "bad boy," only much more so as he has the bad habit of biting and draining the blood of people he doesn't like (There are a lot of people he doesn't like as he's got a generally bad attitude). So you know, these are the sorts of problems I like seeing on TV, precisely because I'm most likely never going to run into them in real life. Falling Skies was also pretty cool for just that reason. Not much chance we'll have an alien invasion where our young people are drafted into picking up scrap metal and having the aliens carry off the metal back to their own planet. In the recently-canceled comics series Secret Six, a super-heroine was carrying on a kind of Romeo-and-Juliet sort of thing with a super-villain. It struck me that her hero buddies would probably be a lot more judgmental about her going out with him than his villain buddies would be about him going out with her.
Fun stuff to worry about and consider, precisely because I'm highly unlikely to ever run into such problems myself.

Privatizing education - a zombie idea that just won't die

(I wrote this in response to a piece in the Inky, gave it to a buddy of mine to check and he never got around to reading it. With the news that Rupert Murdoch' of the News Corporation (NY Daily News, Fox News, Wall St. Journal, etc.) giving the keynote speech at an education summit, I've decided the piece is just too relevant to continue to hold back.)

Re: "School choice programs are making inroads" Aug 28

Y'know, it would sure be nice if the Inky would expand their explorations of certain issues beyond simply reprinting right-wing think-tank handouts. A perfect case in point is a piece from the Heritage Foundation "School choice programs are making inroads" that they published on August 28th. A better explanation of the article's thesis comes from a piece from a Heritage Foundation blog ("FamilyFacts.org: Education Spending Skyrockets While Achievement Remains Flat" March 29th of this year) makes the more detailed case that while spending on education has gone up, achievement by students has remained flat. The New York Times, however, took a detailed look ("Growth in Education Spending Slowed in 2009" May 25th) at why education spending has gone up.

As economists have pointed out, the main driver of the growth of federal budget deficits is America's health care system. Not surprisingly, health care for teachers and other school personnel is a major factor in the rise of schooling costs. We also might keep in mind the rise of mandates in education, things that parents would like to see schools do and teach. The Heritage Foundation blog is correct, there are many, many more persons working in positions in schools today that weren't there 100 or even 50 years ago. 

As far as costs go, however, it's important to keep in mind that once a school has paid for things like their grounds, their building and their furniture, there are standard yearly expenses like books and uniforms and sports equipment and daily expenses like cafeteria food. But the vast majority of money was, and I believe still is, spent on salaries for the teachers, the administrative staff, the janitorial staff and others.

I worked as a secretary for a private school from 1985 to 1990. Computers were just beginning to become standard equipment (Popular use of the Internet was still a long way off) and I used a typewriter for most of the documents that I produced for some of the teachers. These included tests and student evaluations.

When, near the end of my time there, I brought in a laptop computer, I produced student evaluations for teachers faster and better, but as I had a lot of free time anyway (I got lots and lots of reading done on that job, sometimes finishing big hardback books in a week), it didn't make much difference to the workloads of the teachers. They still gave me drafts written in pen and I still typed them out on paper with carbons. Technology was a nice thing to have, VCRs were helpful and although photocopiers were in use, lots of paper reproductions were still done via the mimeograph (slide projectors weren't replaced with computer slideshows until long afterwards), but as teaching was mainly done through teachers talking to students from the head of the classroom and with students writing their thoughts and answers and essays on paper, technology didn't make a whole lot of difference to the teacher's workload.

Education simply is, was and always will be a very labor-intensive field. Obviously, money can make some difference, students can achieve more in a clean, well-lit and physically comfortable classroom then in a place where the roof leaks and books are in short supply. But once a certain level of spending is reached that enables classrooms to reach that level, a point is quickly reached where the school's spending hits the point of diminishing returns. At that point, money continues to be helpful, but ceases to be critical to whether a school can teach children effectively.

So the idea that the educational system is simply throwing money at the problem of bettering education is not very credible.

There's no question that the school choice movement is a growing one. The real question is why that is. From a generally rah-rah piece on privatizing schools ("Julia Steiny: The Excellent School-Choice Movement Accidentally Leaves Vulnerable Children Behind" June 9th):

Mind you, research shows that apart from a few truly great schools, the choice movement hasn’t boosted academic performance overall.  Charter schools, for example, have roughly the same range of good, bad and indifferent as regular district schools.

And from a question and answer session with the Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute ("Frederick Hess: Questions and answers" January 23rd):

So far, charters have had mixed results. They haven’t been shown to be consistently better than traditional district schools...

A piece in Z Communications ("The History of the School Privatization Movement" March 15th) states:

However instead of improving funding to these struggling schools, the one intervention supported by statistical research, they continue to aggressively shift education funding from public schools to private charter schools – despite the Stanford study showing that charter programs don’t improve achievement levels...

So if proponents of charter schools/school choice aren't delivering better quality schooling for our youngsters, then what's the point? Z Communications makes the case that the movement is a neoliberal attack on liberal activist government generally.

It's a very generously-funded movement (Counterpunch "The Future of Charter Schools" August 26th, 2009) that forces teachers to be mere

...technicians, dispensaries of information for memorization purposes in accordance with the testing regime of NCLB

As I suggested in my opening, there is very considerably more to the school choice issue than any right-wing think-tank hand-out will ever tell you.

Of straw men and arguments

George Will makes an interesting assertion in opposition to Elizabeth Warren's famous YouTube talk to a group of supporters:

Warren is (as William F. Buckley described Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith) a pyromaniac in a field of straw men: She refutes propositions no one asserts.

Let's look first at exactly what a straw man argument is. G.W. Bush was famous for using them. Bush would address and “refute” arguments that no one was making in the first place. Bush tackled the question that perhaps the Iraq War was making terrorism wordwide worse. There was strong evidence for this, as terrorist incidents worldwide shot up enormously after the Iraq War was launched. But Bush spent his answer insisting that US interests were attacked before the Iraq War was launched. That's all very fine and well and entirely true, but that didn't address the essential criticism, that the Iraq War increased terrorism.

Have right-wingers asserted the opposite of what Warren asserts, that when they build factories and turn out products, that they owe their success entirely to themselves? As a matter of fact, some commenters quoted by the right wing Instapundit do exactly that:

you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; No, you did not educate them. You babysat them for 12 years. Then I hired them, taught them how to be responsible and show up for work, taught them how to communicate in clear sentences, taught them that there are rights and wrongs and (unlike with your schools) wrongs have consequences in the workplace. Then paid for extended education for my employees so they could continue to improve themselves and better add value to what we do around here.

No, sorry, but when Warren's argument is met head-on and addressed directly by critics, it's not a straw man argument! George Will adds an interesting paragraph:

The collectivist agenda is antithetical to America’s premise, which is: Government — including such public goods as roads, schools and police — is instituted to facilitate individual striving, a.k.a. the pursuit of happiness. The fact that collective choices facilitate this striving does not compel the conclusion that the collectivity (Warren’s “the rest of us”) is entitled to take as much as it pleases of the results of the striving. [emphasis in original]

Of course, Will completely fails to tell us how on Earth government is supposed to “facilitate individual striving” without taking “ as much as it pleases of the results of the striving.” Government is supposed to build useful things for us for free? Sure, I'll go along with Wills' statement near the end of his piece:

Society — hundreds of millions of people making billions of decisions daily — is a marvel of spontaneous order among individuals in voluntary cooperation.

But where is society supposed to get the money to produce “such public goods as roads, schools and police” if society cannot “take as much as it pleases of the results of the striving”? The airy-fairy philosophy of Will falls apart on the practical question of “Where are we supposed to get the money to pay for all of this?”

A Review of Deena Stryker's Lunch with Fellini, Dinner with Fidel

Ebook available from Girlebooks .

Full disclosure: I've known Deena for awhile, having worked on her website and I saw much of the material that she used in this, her autobiography, before she wrote it.

The theme of an independent woman, striking out on her own and blazing her own path is by now a familiar one, but this ebook is a very well-done tale of a woman doing just that in the early 1960s. Deena Stryker sets the tone of the book early on as she describes being 15 years old in 1949 and being on a train in Germany and being confronted by a train conductor over her lack of a “Tripartite Pass.” She never heard of such a thing before or since, but the way in which she handled her confrontation with the conductor was striking and showed someone who was ready to fearlessly confront the world.

Deena was aware of the “women's lib movement” in the early 60s, but didn't have a lot of contact with it. She spent most of her early decades shuttling around between her native Philadelphia, Europe (Paris, Rome and several countries behind the Iron Curtain) and Fidel Castro's Cuba. She gained great sympathy for the viewpoints of Communists. The Cuban government was so pleased with her piece on them in the French magazine Paris Match, that she was invited back to Cuba to conduct more interviews, but she was always more ideologically in tune with West European Social Democrats.

Before Deena went to Cuba, she wrote a book about the Italian film director Federico Fellini and followed him around while he made the movie 8 ½. She saw the making of the film in up-close detail, but was still quite impressed by Fellini's talent when she saw the film again 13 years later.

Deena has two sons, but she remained single. She made it into the US Government as a speech writer to the Assistant Secretary of State for Cultural Affairs under President Jimmy Carter. She lives today in Philadelphia and still keeps up with world and political affairs enough to maintain the blog http://otherjones.com/.

Decisions reached on Occupy Philadelphia

The occupation will begin at City Hall at 9:00am on Thursday, October 6th. Come one, come all! Bring the kids, bring the grandparents, heck, bring the family dog!

Occupy Together has put together some down-loadable posters here.
Here are the Occupy Pennsylvania websites.

Now, I've always had a problem with the Cat Food Commission and don't have much use for Cat Food Commission II, or the Super Committee. But now it's become clear that the second iteration of the Cat Fod Commission is simply unable to produce a useful consensus. The Republican Party is holding firm on a no-cuts-to-the-military and no-tax-increases platform which means all of the automatic cuts will fall on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and any other socially vital program.
No, let's call for the complete elimination of the Commission.