1/ I am copying this whole column because it's so important......it makes me sick to hear the right wing bash teachers, talk about gutting the public school system and trying to privatize education of our kids to corporations......
It's stupid......stupid.....read this column from Charles Blow, and look at the statistics on how we fail our children......
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Starving the Future
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Published: August 24, 2012 359 Comments
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America is in trouble.
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Emerging economic powers China and India are heavily investing in educating the world’s future workers while we squabble about punishing teachers and coddling children.
This week, the Center for American Progress and the Center for the Next Generation released a report entitled “The Race That Really Matters: Comparing U.S., Chinese and Indian Investments in the Next Generation Workforce.” The findings were breathtaking:
• Half of U.S. children get no early childhood education, and we have no national strategy to increase enrollment.
• More than a quarter of U.S. children have a chronic health condition, such as obesity or asthma, threatening their capacity to learn.
• More than 22 percent of U.S. children lived in poverty in 2010, up from about 17 percent in 2007.
• More than half of U.S. postsecondary students drop out without receiving a degree.
Now compare that with the report’s findings on China. It estimates that “by 2030, China will have 200 million college graduates — more than the entire U.S. work force,” and points out that by 2020 China plans to:
• Enroll 40 million children in preschool, a 50 percent increase from today.
• Provide 70 percent of children in China with three years of preschool.
• Graduate 95 percent of Chinese youths through nine years of compulsory education (that’s 165 million students, more than the U.S. labor force).
• Ensure that no child drops out of school for financial reasons.
• More than double enrollment in higher education.
And the report also points out that “by 2017, India will graduate 20 million people from high school — or five times as many as in the United States.”
As I have mentioned before, a book written last year by Jim Clifton, the chairman of Gallup, called “The Coming Jobs War,” pointed out that of the world’s five billion people over 15 years old, three billion said they worked or wanted to work, but there are only 1.2 billion full-time, formal jobs.
This should make it crystal clear to every American that we don’t have any time — or students — to waste. Every child in this country must be equipped to perform. The country’s future financial stability depends on it.
As if to underscore that point, the Center for American Progress pointed out that “between 2000 and 2008, China graduated 1.14 million people in the STEM, or Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, subjects; the United States graduated 496,000.”
But instead of dramatically upping our investment in our children’s education so that they’ll be able to compete in a future that has more educated foreign job seekers, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction. A White House report issued last Saturday noted that:
“Since the end of the recession in June 2009, the economy lost over 300,000 local education jobs. The loss of education jobs stands in stark contrast to every other recovery in recent years, under Republican and Democratic administrations.”
Not only is our education system being starved of investment, but many of our children are literally too hungry to learn.
A survey of kindergarten through eighth-grade teachers released this week by Share Our Strength, a nonprofit that seeks to end child hunger, found that 6 in 10 of those teachers say “students regularly come to school hungry because they are not getting enough to eat at home,” and “a majority of teachers who see hunger as a problem believe that the problem is growing.”
The report quotes a teacher in the Midwest as saying, “The saddest are the children who cry when we get out early for a snow day because they won’t get lunch.”
It is in this environment that Representative Paul Ryan proposes huge cuts to food assistance programs. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, Ryan’s plan “includes cuts in SNAP (formerly known as the food stamp program) of $133.5 billion — more than 17 percent — over the next 10 years (2013-22), which would necessitate ending assistance for millions of low-income families, cutting benefits for millions of such households, or some combination of the two.”
Representative Todd Akin, he of “legitimate rape” infamy, even said earlier this month that the federal government should stop financing the National School Lunch Program altogether. That man is just a font of humanity.
We will need to make choices as we seek to balance the nation’s budget and reduce the deficit, but cutting investments in our children is horribly shortsighted.
And, as we pursue educational reforms, beating up on teachers — who are underpaid, overworked and always blamed — is a distraction from the real problem: We’re being outpaced in producing the employees of the future.
We’re cutting back, while our children’s future competitors are plowing ahead.
2/ One of the better political commentators on the air, Bill Maher talks about the invisible man at last week's convention - "W".......he's been programmed out of existence, which bemuses Maher.....good one.....4 minutes.....
3/ A most interesting article from the "American Conservative" magazine [no less] - they make the point our superrich live completely in a bubble and have no clue how "normal" people live, and could care less. We're just "noseeums".....
This country is where they make their money, and they can choose to live here or many other nice places around the world. The story also comments on the corruption in our politics and how great wealth can buy influence, favours, tax loopholes etc.........
This is a conservative journal.......even they are worried.......
It was 1993, during congressional debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement. I was having lunch with a staffer for one of the rare Republican congressmen who opposed the policy of so-called free trade. To this day, I remember something my colleague said: “The rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American citizens.”
That was only the beginning of the period when the realities of outsourced manufacturing, financialization of the economy, and growing income disparity started to seep into the public consciousness, so at the time it seemed like a striking and novel statement.
At the end of the Cold War many writers predicted the decline of the traditional nation-state. Some looked at the demise of the Soviet Union and foresaw the territorial state breaking up into statelets of different ethnic, religious, or economic compositions. This happened in the Balkans, the former Czechoslovakia, and Sudan. Others predicted a weakening of the state due to the rise of Fourth Generation warfare and the inability of national armies to adapt to it. The quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan lend credence to that theory. There have been numerous books about globalization and how it would eliminate borders. But I am unaware of a well-developed theory from that time about how the super-rich and the corporations they run would secede from the nation state.
I do not mean secession by physical withdrawal from the territory of the state, although that happens from time to time—for example, Erik Prince, who was born into a fortune, is related to the even bigger Amway fortune, and made yet another fortune as CEO of the mercenary-for-hire firm Blackwater, moved his company (renamed Xe) to the United Arab Emirates in 2011. What I mean by secession is a withdrawal into enclaves, an internal immigration, whereby the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot.
Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension—and viable public transportation doesn’t even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare?
Being in the country but not of it is what gives the contemporary American super-rich their quality of being abstracted and clueless. Perhaps that explains why Mitt Romney’s regular-guy anecdotes always seem a bit strained
4/ And would you like to see where these oligarchs live? Here is a photo gallery of some of the most expensive real estate in the world.....
5/ I know the GOP convention is over, and we're wading through the Democratic gathering this week, but Matt Taibbi recaps the Republican hoopla in his inimitable style......excellent political commentary for you junkies.....
I didn't watch Mitt Romney's acceptance speech last night. I can't do it: even under normal circumstances, watching politicians of any stripe talk about anything at all makes me unable to sleep. And a convention speech, which is almost always a deeply schizoid address authored by 38 different infighting political consultants and amplified by the heaviest possible doses of network TV's goofball effects and nuclear-powered stagecraft, is generally the most unwatchable of all political performances. So I try always to watch such speeches the next morning, and am just now taking in the Romney address.
The Republican convention in general has been a strange affair. The vibe around Republican politics in general was much happier in the days before the Bush presidency cratered. Republican politics before Bush imploded was a confident brew of guns, Jesus, and Freedom.
A Republican politician's job back then was, if not easy, pretty clear: you bashed welfare queens and free-riders, told tearful stories of fetuses composing operas in the womb, and promised to bomb America's enemies back to the Stone Age. You didn't have to split hairs or hedge bets: you got up on stage, took a baseball bat to liberals and terrorists and other such perverts, and let the momentum of the crowd carry you to victory. You were like Slim Pickens at the end of Dr. Strangelove, riding high with a nuke between your legs, waving your ten-gallon hat at and going out in a blaze of yeeee-hah!!!s.
6/ We in Central Florida live in ground central for attack ads, and Robyn Blumner is sick of the lying and BS on TV.......all she wants is for the campaigns and the SuperPacs, mostly the right wing ones, to stop lying.......
She lays out three simple rules that would clean up this disgusting political sewer.......good story.....
My DVR's ability to zip past political commercials is the only thing standing between the television and a big rock.
Living in a swing state in an era of poisonous politics means never having to say to yourself, "Gee, I wonder how the guy running for president will destroy the country today?" Just turn on the TV and the answer appears in neatly packaged 30-second spots. Apparently the attack ad accusing President Barack Obama of giving welfare recipients a free ride is doing so well it has been upped to airing once a nanosecond, almost as frequently as Mitt Romney has been seen warbling an off-key America the Beautiful.
No matter one's political leanings, it is easy to become cynical. Yes, Obama's stance on welfare is relevant, but not outright lying about it. And yes, Romney's overseas tax shelters are fair game, but not the use of embarrassing lounge lizard video.
We are in another presidential election cycle where persuading the electorate using facts, evidence and reasoning is lost to emotional manipulation and lies.
7/ The Daily Show was truly on form last week, and this is a four minute bio of Mitt Romney that didn't make it on this air.....but should have!
Very very clever, and very funny......
8/ An excellent collection of political humour from last week, including Letterman, Maher and Stewart among others.....7 minutes of pretty good jokes......
9/ This is the Daily Beast's selection of "must see" movies coming this fall, and we may have some really good films to enjoy.....there's Oscar chatter about "The Master" and Ben Afflek's "Argo".......
Now that the dog days of August are behind us, it’s time to brace yourselves for an onslaught of fantastic, award-bait movies. From Paul Thomas Anderson’s Scientology film The Master to Daniel Day-Lewis’s portrayal of the titular former president in Spielberg’s Lincoln, here are The Daily Beast’s picks for the most anticipated movies being released this fall.
10/ Regular readers will know how much I like a decent zombie movie, so check out the trailer for "Resident Evil - Retribution" coming next week.....woop, woop.....very cool stuff, in 3D with lots of CGI.....and Milla Jovovich for eye candy.....
Lads, one for you! Click on the small picture.......wonder why it's not a "must see"?
11/ Here's something different - a satire of "The Bachelor" as a webisode of 8 minutes......produced by Ben Stiller [with a cameo], it follows the making of a new series of this "reality" show where a fireman "hunk" has to choose between 16 girls to see who he would marry.....
He certainly has an interesting choice of ladies.... The blind one is hot......
This is actually quite amusing, so it's worth a few minutes even if the network version of "The Bachelor" turns your stomach......
12/ Richard Eskow lists the ways we are no longer free......
His premise is we have the wrong target - it's not the Gumment we need to be afraid of, it's big capitalism.....read his 10 ways we are gradually being hemmed in with fewer choices, and tell me he's wrong......
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Is that how you feel when you're dealing with your bank?
While the Right portrays popularly elected government as a faceless oppressor, large corporations and ultra-wealthy individuals – what we're calling “Big Wealth” -- are trampling on our individual rights and liberties every day. We should be fighting for “economic freedom,” as Corey Robin notes, and explaining how Big Wealth is crushing other fundamental liberties as well.
Here are 10 critical examples, drawn from the headlines and from our everyday lives.
1. Our American liberties end at the workplace door.
If you have a job, the Freedom Train stops at the workplace door. More employees are hired on a part-time or temporary basis to deny them rights and benefits. Many of your privacy rights are gone. Your employer can use your company computer to read your correspondence, and your company cell phone (if you have one) to track your movements.
Free speech? You can be fired for expressing political views online, even when you're not at work. As employment lawyer Mark Trapp told Bloomberg Business Week, the“freedom to speak your mind doesn’t really exist in work spaces.” Or, in some cases, outside it.
The longstanding right of workers to organize and form a union is also under assault. A corporate-funded group called ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, is coordinating the loss of union rights for public employees. Governors and legislators are using budget shortfalls created by corporate misbehavior and tax cuts for the wealthy to argue that governments can no longer afford to honor union contracts.
Your rights don't even begin where your, er, bathroom breaks begin. As Mary Williams Walsh reported in the New York Times, “employees at lower rungs of the economic ladder can be timed with stopwatches in the bathroom; stonewalled when they ask to go; given disciplinary points for frequent urination; even hunted down by supervisors with walkie-talkies if they tarry in the stalls.”
2. We're losing our “right to life” in many different ways--from birth through old age.
It's always striking when some of those who defend an unborn child's “right to life” ignore the fact that the United States ranks 49th in infant mortality, according to the latest statistics. Or in the fact that African American infant mortality is 2.5 that of Caucasians. Or that lower-income families of all ethnicities suffer much greater infant mortality in this country than their wealthier counterparts.
13/ August fails.......12 minutes of accidents, drunks, youthful idiots and general mayhem brought to you by TwisterNederland, a Dutch website.....
14/ The mantra from both political parties is jobs, jobs, jobs but the reality is that although work is coming back in the private sector these are not the jobs of old - most of the new careers are paying low wages with minimal benefits.......good article from the Times.......
This is especially true in Rick Scott's Florida.......
Majority of New Jobs Pay Low Wages, Study Finds
Brian Blanco for The New York Times
A waitress at Arco Iris Restaurant in Tampa, Fla., last week. The food industry has added 300,000 low-paying jobs in the recovery.
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: August 30, 2012
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While a majority of jobs lost during the downturn were in the middle range of wages, a majority of those added during the recovery have been low paying, according to a new reportfrom the National Employment Law Project.
Related
Who Wears the Pants in This Economy? (September 2, 2012)
The disappearance of midwage, midskill jobs is part of a longer-term trend that some refer to as a hollowing out of the work force, though it has probably been accelerated by government layoffs.
“The overarching message here is we don’t just have a jobs deficit; we have a ‘good jobs’ deficit,” said Annette Bernhardt, the report’s author and a policy co-director at the National Employment Law Project, a liberal research and advocacy group.
The report looked at 366 occupations tracked by the Labor Department and clumped them into three equal groups by wage, with each representing a third of American employment in 2008. The middle third — occupations in fields like construction, manufacturing and information, with median hourly wages of $13.84 to $21.13 — accounted for 60 percent of job losses from the beginning of 2008 to early 2010.
The job market has turned around since then, but those fields have represented only 22 percent of total job growth. Higher-wage occupations — those with a median wage of $21.14 to $54.55 — represented 19 percent of job losses when employment was falling, and 20 percent of job gains when employment began growing again.
Lower-wage occupations, with median hourly wages of $7.69 to $13.83, accounted for 21 percent of job losses during the retraction. Since employment started expanding, they have accounted for 58 percent of all job growth.
The occupations with the fastest growth were retail sales (at a median wage of $10.97 an hour) and food preparation workers ($9.04 an hour). Each category has grown by more than 300,000 workers since June 2009.
Some of these new, lower-paying jobs are being taken by people just entering the labor force, like recent high school and college graduates. Many, though, are being filled by older workers who lost more lucrative jobs in the recession and were forced to take something to scrape by.
“I think I’ve been very resilient and resistant and optimistic, up until very recently,” said Ellen Pinney, 56, who was dismissed from a $75,000-a-year job in which she managed procurement and supply for an electronics company in March 2008.
Since then, she has cobbled together a series of temporary jobs in retail and home health care and worked as a part-time receptionist for a beauty salon. She is now working as an unpaid intern for a construction company, putting together bids and business plans for green energy projects, and has moved in with her 86-year-old father in Forked River, N.J
15/ Pink with her latest - "Blow Me [one last kiss], an undistinguished song with an unusual video.....shot as a French art movie, Pink dresses up, gets jilted, flirts with lesbians then has her revenge in a dramatic way at her ex-lover's wedding......great video that tells a story..........
16/ In November there will be 11 constitutional amendments on the Florida ballot, sounding harmless but actually stealth laws designed to screw us all. The Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel advises us to vote no on all of them, and tells us why.
A yes vote on any of them means you trust the corrupt scum in our Legislature to have our best interests at heart.....
Attention Florida voters: Just say "No" to all 11 constitutional amendments on the November ballot. And don't be fooled by their high-minded and compassionate-sounding, but intentionally deceptive, titles. They are not what they seem.
Put on the ballot by the tea-party-dominated Florida Republican Legislature (aka the "voter suppression folks"), they are Trojan Horses, designed to fool you into voting against your best interests. They intensify the war on women, give greater power to the Legislature over the judiciary, gut government revenues, destroy the historic and fundamental separation between church and state, and create tension (and expensive, futile lawsuits) with the federal government.
17/ Even though the official policy of the State of Florida is to ignore climate change, the cities in South Florida are taking the risk of flooding and drainage seriously.....a very good article about what is happening in Miami-Dade County and other cities in South Florida......
Note - nowhere in the story is any State agency or initiative to mitigate sea levels rising mentioned.....the State of Florida has abandoned South Florida......amazing......
Rising sea comes at a cost for South Florida cities
A proposed $206 million overhaul of Miami Beach’s antiquated drainage system is just the first of many big-ticket bills South Florida faces.
BY CURTIS MORGAN
CMORGAN@MIAMIHERALD.COM
Climate change may be the subject of debate in some places but in South Florida it’s become a costly reality.
In Miami Beach, where prolonged flooding in low-lying neighborhoods has become the norm after heavy storms, city leaders are weighing a $206 million overhaul of an antiquated drainage system increasingly compromised by rising sea level.
The plan calls for more pumps, wells to store storm runoff, higher sea walls and “back-flow’’ preventers for drain pipes flowing into Biscayne Bay. Those devices are intended to stop the system from producing the reverse effect it often does now. During seasonal high tides, the salty bay regularly puddles up from sewer grates in dozens of spots, such as near the local westside bar Purdy Lounge. Extreme high tides — like one in October 2010 — can push in enough sea water to make streets impassable, including blocks of the prime artery of Alton Road.
“It’s the first time, as far as I know, that any community in South Florida and actually in the entire state of Florida is taking into account sea level rise as they plan their storm water infrastructure,” said Fred Beckmann, the city’s public works director, during a public hearing on the plan earlier this month.
It won’t be the last time.
South Florida counties and cities, as well as the South Florida Water Management District which oversees flood control for the region, all are beginning to draw up projects for keeping the coastline dry as sea level creeps up. The potential costs could be staggering.
The district alone has identified three flood control gates along coastal Northeast Miami-Dade — critical to draining storm water from Pembroke Pines and Miramar in southwestern Broward — in fast need of retrofitting with massive pumps. Rising seas threaten to reduce the capacity of a system that now depends on gravity, the storm water flowing downhill into the Atlantic. Cost estimates run $50 million or more for each pump alone and buying land for them could double or triple the bill. Nine other gates could need similar work down the road.
Fort Lauderdale, where high tides also push salt water up storm drains in the ritzy Las Olas Isles section, is also planning to install back-flow preventers, said Jennifer Jurado, director of Broward’s environmental protection and growth management department. Hallandale Beach already had to install pumps on storm-water injection wells, at about $10 million each, to combat increasing back-pressure, she said.
“The overall issues are so much greater, I think we’re easily looking at hundreds of millions of dollars,’’ she said. That’s just for the next 20 to 30 years, to handle a moderate three to seven inch rise.
A study last year by the Florida Atlantic University Center for Environmental Studies found that the projected rise over the next 70 to 100 years would require one city alone, Pompano Beach, to spend from $500 million to $1 billion to overhaul drainage and water supply systems, as well as coastal roads and facilities.
“If 50 years from now we’re looking at a foot and a half or two feet and rising, our region is going to be confronted with some very serious problems,’’ said Barry Heimlich, an FAU researcher who co-authored the study. “It’s going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars.’’
Lawmakers in some states have blithely dismissed the threats of global warming, most notably those in North Carolina, where state lawmakers earlier this year passed a law ordering that only historic trends, not projections, be considered in coastal planning.
In South Florida, political leaders and planners aren’t in denial. In 2009, Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Monroe counties formed a climate change “compact’’ to work together to confront a problem South Florida will see sooner than just about anywhere.
A string of studies by insurers, environmental groups and government and university researchers have singled out Miami-Dade County at the top of the list of at-risk cities, with tens of billions of dollars of property that could be damaged by heightened storm surge or flooding.
Earlier this year, a report from Climate Central, an independent research and journalism organization, suggested Miami-Dade and Broward counties alone have more people vulnerable to flooding than any state except Florida and Louisiana. Other studies suggest some of the lowest-lying Florida Keys may be the first to be inundated.
Todays video - billed as the worlds funniest commercial.......not really, but good......
Todays pet joke.....
An Ellisville school teacher called the local phone company to report her telephone failed to ring when her friends called - and that on the few occasions, when it did ring, her dog always moaned right before the phone rang.
The telephone repairman proceeded to the scene, curious to see this psychic dog or senile lady. He climbed a telephone pole, hooked in his test set, and dialed the subscriber's house. The phone didn't ring right away, but then the dog moaned and the telephone began to ring. Climbing down from the pole, the telephone repairman found:
1. The dog was tied to the telephone system's ground wire with a steel chain and collar.
2. The wire connection to the ground rod was loose.
3. The dog was receiving 90 volts of signaling current when the number was called.
4. After a couple of jolts, the dog would start moaning and then urinate.
5. The wet ground would complete the circuit, thus causing the phone to ring.
Which demonstrates that some problems CAN be fixed by pissing and moaning.
Todays alien joke...
Two aliens landed in the Arizona desert near a gas station that was closed for the night. They approached one of the gas pumps and the younger alien addressed it saying, 'Greetings, Earthling. We come in peace. Take us to your leader.'
...The gas pump, of course, didn't respond.
The younger alien became angry at the lack of response.
The older alien said, 'I'd calm down if I were you.'
The younger alien ignored the warning and repeated his greeting. Again, there was no response.
Annoyed by what he perceived to be the pump's haughty attitude, he drew his ray gun and said impatiently, 'Greetings, Earthling. We come in peace. Do not ignore us this way! Take us to your leader or I will fire!'
The older alien again warned his comrade saying, 'You probably don't want to do that! I really don't think you should make him mad.'
'Rubbish,' replied the cocky, young alien. He aimed his weapon at the pump and opened fire. There was a huge explosion. A massive fireball roared towards them and blew the younger alien off his feet and deposited him a burnt, smoking mess about 200 yards away in a cactus patch.
Half an hour passed. When he finally regained consciousness, he
refocused his three eyes, straightened his bent antenna, and looked dazedly at the older, wiser alien who was standing over him shaking his big, green head.
'What a ferocious creature!' exclaimed the young, fried alien. 'He damn near killed me! How did you know he was so dangerous?'
The older alien leaned over, placed a friendly feeler on his crispy friend and replied, 'If there's one thing I've learned during my intergalactic travels, you don't want to mess with a guy who can wrap his penis around himself twice and then stick it in his ear.'
Todays Australian joke
An elderly man in Queensland had owned a large property for several years. He had a dam in one of the lower paddocks where he had planted mango and avocado trees. The dam had been fixed up for swimming when it was built and he also had some picnic tables placed there in the shade of the fruit trees. One evening the old farmer decided to go down to the dam to look it over, as he hadn't been there for a while. He grabbed a ten litre bucket to bring back some fruit. As he neared the dam, he heard voices shouting and laughing with glee. As he came closer he saw it was a bunch of young women skinny-dipping in his dam. He made the women aware of his presence and they all went to the deep end. One of the women shouted to him, 'We're not coming out until you leave!' The old man frowned, 'I didn't come down here to watch you ladies swim naked or make you get out of the dam naked.' Holding the bucket up he said, 'I'm here to feed the crocodile.' Moral: Old men may walk slow, but they can still think fast. |
