Corporate take over?

Private, for profit schools have their place, but that place is _in addition to_, NOT _instead of_ Public schools.  I know I sound like a grumpy old dude when I say it, but when I was in school you were free to send your children to private or religious schools, but you didn’t get to take the money with you, you didn’t get to shirk your responsibility to society to help maintain schools for all.

This is what corporate interests reaching into the public sphere looks like. Surely we should have gotten the message with the billions and billions we have shoveled over to the likes of Halliburton in Iraq, that the public does not benefit from privatizing core services.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/01/30/e-mails-link-bush-foundation-corporations-and-education-officials/

That’s the profit issue, then there’s the question of what kind of education do the children actually get.  What happens when these voucher funded schools displace public schools? Do we accept that children will get a partial education?

http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/01/16/creationism-spreading-in-schools-thanks-to-vouchers/

False equivalences

The idea that “both sides suck” when it comes to politics is just complete BS.

http://www.oliverwillis.com/2012/01/27/equal-polarization-my-ass/

A few examples of how the GOP strives at every turn to dominate, regardless of the effect on actual people.
Lee Atwater – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater
Karl Rove – http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-moore23mar23,0,4268248.story
The K St Project – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Street_Project

Upward mobility a thing of the past?

So many politicians and pundits love to talk about “The Middle Class”, people “pulling themselves up by the bootstraps” to solid middle class people with jobs, houses and credit cards.  There’s a problem with that, the rungs of the ladder of upward mobility between low skill jobs and solid middle class are mostly missing.

There was a time, not that long ago, when a worker in the US could start out with menial, low wage jobs, that build their work record, and led to chances for promotions to more expectations and rewards, that was true when we had manufacturing jobs as those entry level jobs.  Today we have mostly jobs like slinging burgers, or running the cash register at a grocery store as the entry into the world of working, a problem with that is that there are very limited growth opportunities.

It’s not that I think that we should be simplistic about globalization, thinking that we could simply bring up the drawbridge, but we also shouldn’t pretend that the work environment for workers hasn’t changed.  Without a path for at least some, the people get to the breaking point, they don’t see a way to improve their lot, they see a very real risk of financial ruin if they get laid off, or they get sick, or their child gets sick, what is it that you expect them to do.  More and more are taking to protests in the streets.

What is hard work?

I was watching a politician being interviewed today and he said something to the effect of “There are many of us Republicans here who are ready to make the hard choice”  referring to addressing a few of the loopholes in US tax code that allows wealthy and corporations to pay little or no tax.  The person who talks for a living thinks that’s hard work, really?  These are the same dolts that want to raise the retirement age, Social Security and Medicare should start earlier if there are to be changes, what about that option?

I want every politician who thinks that their job is hard to disclose their work history.  I want to know how many days they spent, since the age of 40, doing hard work.  How many days did they work fixing the roads in a North Carolina summer, when it’s mid 90′s both heat and humidity? How many years did they work loading trucks at a UPS facility where there was a person with a stop watch checking up on you every so often? How many years did they earn their living lifting heavy things?  That is not work for the old, would you expect a 70 year old to be able to load a truck?  Would you have an ambulance at the ready to take the 65 year old road worker to the hospital?  Most likely not, because if they aren’t laid off when the station was closed, or are approaching 70 years old and shouldn’t be driving in any case.

I’m fed up with talking heads thinking that they do hard work.

What I did last weekend – Hint: It was a blast!

Some time around the middle of last week I found out about City Camp Raleigh it really looked interesting, we had nothing planned and it was free. I signed up pretty quickly.  I wasn’t able to get away from work for the Friday sessions, but that still left 2 days.  There’s a plenty written about the event, the ideas etc, but what I haven’t seen yet is the first hand perspective, so here it is.

Saturday started with a session on Open Data principles,  it caught my attention right away, as the day went on I went to a few other sessions, but kept coming back to the Open Data ones.  I was not the only one, teams formed around the ideas by the end of Saturday and submissions for Sunday were put in.  The team that I gravitated to was a great one, a great diversity of backgrounds and skills. We had a mix of very technical and some less so, but of course the extra skills in writing, speaking and business made for a really well rounded effort.  As it turned out, we had a secret weapon, well weapon isn’t really the right description, we had a semi official team member who is one of those state workers who handles the data, and is doing what the system and policies require.  This gave us a solid example to work with.

The core idea of the team, now called “Team Open It Up”, was that there is a lot of data out there that city and state government has, and will give you if you know to ask for it, and the format you get may not be all that “accessible”, it could and should be better.  By the end of Saturday we proposed that we would take a subset of some of that public data from the state, extract it from MS Access format, upload it to a public web site that would allow for on the fly reports and user download.

By presentation time on Sunday we had a web site up and running, a custom domain registered to host it, a download link that anyone can use to get the whole set of data, the entire year snapshot of data extracted to CSV (being the lowest common denominator) files a couple of tables uploaded to Socrata with some views / charts defined.

What a small team can do in less than 2 days is quite amazing, focus, passion, luck, and the spark that was the event, City Camp Raleigh made it all happen.  Then the big news, we WON! Now we have to finish turning this prototype into a full pilot that city and state folks can look at as proof that there’s interest, it’s easy and doesn’t cost a fortune.  I think that we’ll have that done in less than the 90 days that we were projecting it would take.

My great thanks go out to the organizers of City Camp Raleigh for putting on this event in and for the city I have now lived in for 10 years.

Real heroes that we will never know

A small group of hard men went to a very bad place,and did a job that few in the world were prepared to do the other night. A terrible human is dead, terrible yes, but a human nonetheless. I haven’t heard any condemnation from those who claim that “all life is sacred” when talking about abortion, but I don’t spend a lot of time looking for what those folks say.  This is not something to rejoice over, I don’t feel bad that Bin Laden is dead, but I will not rejoice over it either.

Think about who the real heroes are, there is a list of people who deserve credit, and most of them will never be known by name (nor should they).

- Intelligence teams
The National Intelligence apparatus has teams in many areas, CIA, NSA, DOD, etc.  The faces we may know are just figures in front, the women and men who spend countless hours looking at minute scraps of information and look for patterns and connections.

- SEAL Teams
The US has the finest trained team on the planet. Hard men, who train harder than most of us will ever work in our toughest days, they train constantly, they are strong, and athletic, but more importantly, they are VERY smart.

These are the people who did NOT go to work for Blackwater, KBR, etc when they could increase their personal wealth by very considerable numbers of dollars.

I wish that the world were such that the projection of force were needed, it is not.  As long as that is so, I regret it, but respect for the few who take on the hard work because they could imagine doing nothing else with their lives.

Modern day Robber Barons and Pinkertons

In the late 1800′s we had the Robber Barons, they ran what they saw as “Their Country” as benevolent, wise men.  After all, the populace simply couldn’t be trusted to understand the issues.  Until the Homestead Strike, when their hired muscle went in loaded for bear and people died.  A bit later on there was the Ludlow Strike , where the National Guard came in to play.

In the 21st Century we have several new Robber Barons, but the most vocal and active among them are the brothers that are Koch Industries, they fund astroturf groups like Americans For Prosperity and Citizens United. They aren’t using direct violence, they fund the Tea Party groups that disrupt town hall meetings, and eventually we did see violence.

In the 19th century the wealthy called on hired hands to do their dirty work, and now we have the same.  The primary difference I see is that at least the Pinkertons were honest about it, they took cash to bust the strikes, today the fools do the work, most of them for free.

The states, finances and unions

Watching the goings on in Wisconsin has me looking for data about things that I’ve heard talk about.  It seems that for the most part my take on others work was as I thought.  States that pay more in federal taxes than they get back in services tend to be have a higher percentage of union members, they also tend to have a state economy in better shape.

I was listening to “The Dianne Rehm Show” regarding public pensions on the drive home from New England the other day, there was some disagreement about how municipal pension plans should keep track of their books, but what the American Enterprise Institute guy couldn’t deny was that the issues that states are having are mostly their own doing.

I have gathered some data, because I really don’t like making statements of opinion or claim things to be facts without some references.  There’s a Google Docs spreadsheet that is pulled together for ease of reference, but the sources of that data are also listed below.

Some states put more into the federal tax coffers than they get out in services and funding, and there are others who get more out than they put in.

http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/22685.html

Rates of union membership by state seems to generally fall along the same lines.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.t05.htm

Something that was talked about on “This Week” this morning is that states that have no collective bargaining for public workers are actually in generally worse fiscal shape than those who do have collective bargaining.  This would tend to say that the GOP is making things up to suit their long held political goals.  I’m shocked!

http://www.stateline.org/live/ViewPage.action?siteNodeId=136&languageId=1&contentId=15158

Paul Krugman says “Whaddya know, we’re being sold a bill of goods”, it’s a short piece, but look at the article that he references. It’s good to actually show your work.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/the-truth-about-pensions/?smid=tw-NytimesKrugman&seid=auto

How is this not a conflict of interest?

When members of the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) participate in strategy sessions for anything, they are inherently exhibiting that they have a likely opinion on a particular topic.

I have the hardest time with this because the Supreme Court sets it’s own rules, and when there are questions, they make their own determinations if something is a conflict of interest, or they should recuse themselves.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/01/group-demands-doj-probe-citizens-united/

When SCOTUS has life tenure, and because of being the pinnacle of one of the branches of government, they are subject to very little scrutiny from outside, I’m very concerned when we have this kind of behavior.

—-

Update: Clarence Thomas reported his wife’s income as “none”, over 5 years she earned over $600K!

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-thomas-disclosure-20110122,0,2413407.story

——–

Update #2:  Now Ms. Thomas is now officially a lobbyist, “and calls herself an ambassador to new U.S. Congress members and the Tea Party” Will she charge her the Koch brothers for every hour she spends with her husband?
Read more: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2011/02/05/Justice-Thomass-wife-turns-to-lobbying/UPI-99181296885303/#ixzz1DCFBqH2f

Repeal “Affordable Care Act”? Really?

It seems that tomorrow the new majority in the US House of  Representatives will be working to repeal a law that they don’t like.  Should we trust that it’s really bad for us?  I think not.

A study (conducted at Harvard and Cambridge Alliance Hospitals)  from Sept 09 tells us that they estimate 45,000 people die in the US each year from things that could have been avoided if they had the benefit of the level of care that those of us with insurance get.

We have some folks looking at what the results would be if they get their way.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/01/repeal_consequences.html

Do we know if all of these things will come to pass? No, but do we really want to go backwards?   I have personally seen a minor benefit for my Mother-In-Law, she has “donut hole” issues paying for medicine, and they are much less so this year.

When campaigning they were full of Repeal/Replace language, but we hear nothing of the replace part now.   I’d be inclined to actually listen to them if any of the following were true.  They were presenting an actual replace plan. The effort were more than political theater.

As a society we have made a decision that we will not let you die on the curb if you are hit by a bus and have no insurance, with that should come insurance for all.  While I think that an individual mandate is legal, I don’t think that it’s enough, I’m an advocate of single payer, the Federal Government be the insurer of all the population.

Single Payer could actually save us money, that’s important, but not nearly so important as what it would say about our priorities, people before profits.