I agree with Krugman, but I’ll show you the photo that made me lose faith in Bush:
Photo by: Melissa Phillip / Houston Chronicle / AP
It is singer Harry Connick, Jr. praying over the dead body of a grandmother in the devastation of the New Orleans Superdome. TEN THOUSAND AMERICANS were stranded in the Superdome, for days, without plumbing, trash disposal, even fresh air.
Our President was up in the air, looking weak and impotent, while a singer was down below with his hand on the dead body of someone’s mother and grandmother, giving her a blessing.
For the last 8 years in America, we have been led by the ‘Ownership Society’ believers, which is a misnomer, because they like you to believe you have ownership, but ownership actually belongs in the hands of multi-national corporations. Here is a great video on opening up Science, and scientific information, to the global brain.
Problem is, the corporations have a vested interest in keeping things secret: their profits depend on their ability to beat someone else to the marketplace and claim ‘ownership’ of scientific information.
That thinking should be outlawed. All information should be common. Billions of humans, thinking. That’s where our future lies. In connecting those minds and taking ideas to fruition. Not hiding science information so one company can make profits.
Donald Trump filed a lawsuit in Chicago to be relieved from his payments to Deutsche Bank, based on a ‘Force Majure’ clause in his loan documents. This clause ‘allows the borrower to delay completion of the building if construction is delayed by things like riots, floods or strikes. That clause has a catchall section covering “any other event or circumstance not within the reasonable control of the borrower,” and Trump figures that lets him out, even though construction is continuing.
He wants a state judge in New York to order the bank to delay efforts to collect the loan until “a reasonable time” after the financial crisis ends.
Deutsche Bank thinks the idea that an economic downturn should free people from the obligation to pay their debts is laughable.
It pays to be rich, doesn’t it? To be able to add clauses to contracts that protect you, but not to allow the same protection to people who buy from you. There is a bible story about a lender who can’t pay his own debt to the king… The king forgives the debt, the lender goes home and tries to collect from someone poorer than he, the king hears and blows his top, throwing the man he forgave into prison for not sharing the loan forgiveness.
The Donald should be offering leniency to his purchasers if he’s going to argue for his own release.
All ‘white men of a certain age’. If they are ‘retired military’, then they’ve spent their careers in uniform but have now crossed the aisle, so to speak, and are paid analysts. But they don’t represent the diversity of the United States, let alone the diversity of the parts of the world we are militarily micro-managing.
Its a global world. We need our military, like our government, to reflect all Americans. The power elites cannot just be white men of a certain age…
Why not?
Because, if you read the rest of the article, your skin will crawl. Retired General Barry McAffrey was hired by a small defense contractor, then went out hawking their wares, for a hefty consulting fee:
He sent a personal note and 15-page briefing packet to David H. Petraeus, the commanding general in Iraq, strongly recommending Defense Solutions and its offer to supply Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles from Eastern Europe. “No other proposal is quicker, less costly, or more certain to succeed,” he said.
Thus, within days of hiring General McCaffrey, the Defense Solutions sales pitch was in the hands of the American commander with the greatest influence over Iraq’s expanding military.
“That’s what I pay him for,” Timothy D. Ringgold, chief executive of Defense Solutions, said in an interview.
General McCaffrey did not mention his new contract with Defense Solutions in his letter to General Petraeus.
Nor did he disclose it when he went on CNBC that same week and praised the commander Defense Solutions was now counting on for help — “He’s got the heart of a lion” —
or when he told Congress the next month that it should immediately supply Iraq with large numbers of armored vehicles and other equipment.
White generals retire from their ‘world cop’ position, to become talking heads and give advice on military spending, hawking their own clients’ wares without telling ANYONE, General Petraeus, Congress or media outlets like CNBC, that they are banking millions of dollars from military equipment manufacturers precisely for speaking up for them and advocating for more, more, more military spending and more, more, more war escalation.
They are sending non-white kids to their deaths in non-white countries, but their integrity-challenged careers continue unabated, these white men of privilege, collecting large paychecks to keep each other in business, at the expense of a generation of young men and women of diverse backgrounds all around the globe.
Perhaps our retired military should work for the Peace Corps or UNICEF for five years before they are allowed to take incomes as talking heads for military contractors. They should be ‘on the ground’ holding hands of dying innocent civilian collateral damage, or should dig wells to provide water in tribal towns, or teach computer skills to kids in refugee camps, before they can make millions selling weapons.
The Big Three CEOs — Richard Wagoner of General Motors, left, Robert Nardelli of Chrysler and Alan Mulally of Ford — went begging on the Hill. (By Chip Somodevilla — Getty Images)
There are 24 daily nonstop flights from Detroit to the Washington area. Richard Wagoner, Alan Mulally and Robert Nardelli probably should have taken one of them.
Instead, the chief executives of the Big Three automakers opted to fly their company jets to the capital for their hearings this week before the Senate and House — an ill-timed display of corporate excess for a trio of executives begging for an additional $25 billion from the public trough this week.
The photo of the Auto Execs caught my eye.
Have you noticed lately how the huge majority of business leaders asking for bailouts are old, white guys? Now my dad was an old white guy, my brothers are white guys, my sons will be old white guys, but its such a cliche in business that the old white guys parade around at the top of corporations, unable to understand or have empathy for their customers.
These guys had thousands of chances to whip their companies into new paradigms. They’ve known we need smaller cars with better gas mileage. But they wanted to sell big, huge tanks. So they did!
Now they’re flying private jets, at a fuel/carrying cost of $20,000, to ask for bailout money from overburdened Americans, the same Americans who’ve been looking for smaller, less costly cars! Excuse me? NO.
They should have taken Greyhound. Or carpooled. But they don’t pay their own transportation costs, so they have no idea how the rest of us live.
I took this photo at my kid’s sporting event: a huge luxury SUV, with GOP and Support our Troops stickers, pulled up and onto a curbed red zone, so the driver wouldn’t have to park in the parking lot like the rest of the families.
Same thoughtlessness as these auto execs, flying their huge planes in while their employees are wondering how they’ll survive the winter.
I’m thrilled with Obama, but just pointing out that 1/2 the population in America has never been represented in the highest office in the land, so we can’t see how it would age a woman.
And most Presidents won’t let their wives have active roles in policy or speaking for women, so Presidential wives aren’t chronicled in the same way woman Presidents will be, someday.
Students learn by doing at the Promise Academy Charter School. Credit: Courtesy of Harlem Children’s Zone
In the late 1990s, education-reform advocate Geoffrey Canada began an ambitious social experiment, pledging to do whatever it took to improve the lives of New York City’s poor children. The Harlem Children’s Zone has since grown into a ninety-seven-block community-service project that includes Promise Academy charter schools, social services, parenting classes, and early-childhood-development and after-school programs.
Through his innovative approach, Canada has demonstrated that it’s possible to bridge the achievement gap if disadvantaged kids receive early, continuous educational opportunities. Test results show that in 2004, the Promise Academy middle school’s first year, only 21 percent of its students were at grade level in reading and 9 percent were at grade level in math. Three years later, those figures had improved to 33 percent and 70 percent respectively.
Paul Tough, an editor at the New York Times Magazine, chronicles the Harlem Children’s Zone’s successes — and its setbacks — in his new book, Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America. Edutopia.org spoke with Tough about early-childhood development, the role of parents in education, and whether Canada’s model can work in other parts of the country.
Edutopia.org: In the book, you use social science research to identify tools and strategies that can close the achievement gap. What does the research tell us?
Credit: Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Paul Tough: Poor kids need different types of support than middle-class kids. Lots of research talks about what happens in the first few years of a kid’s life and how poor children don’t get the support and input — things as simple as language or as complicated as an outlook on life, self-esteem, and how you interact with institutions — that middle-class kids tend to get. This means that poor kids need something different when they arrive in school. There’s nothing inherent about kids in poverty that means that they can’t do as well anybody else. It just takes a lot.
Now, we can get to the practical questions: What exactly is it that’s missing in the inputs for these kids in early years? What interventions can we make? That’s exactly what Geoffrey Canada is trying to figure out.
What can be done if you don’t have a Geoffrey Canada in your community?
At a community level, the thing that I’m most surprised isn’t being done is parenting programs such as the Harlem Children’s Zone Baby College. I think it has to do with an awkwardness around the question of teaching parents, especially poor parents. It makes people anxious, for lots of good reasons. It’s easy to seem condescending if you’re talking to parents in the wrong way.
Your portrayals of some classrooms and teachers suggest that there are dynamic leaders out there.
I chose a couple of scenes from the middle school as they were preparing for the first round of citywide tests. There were lots of moments of teachers browbeating kids and trying to make things fun and trying to keep their attention and trying to pull them along. But I didn’t choose those scenes because I thought they were an example of the kind of teaching that would solve this problem; they exemplified the distance that the kids had to go.
Where it was clearer to me that the teachers were doing something helpful was in the lower grades — actually, in prekindergarten. The prekindergarten teachers were just so focused on and conscious of language, on how to get language into every part of the day to expand these kids’ vocabularies, which all this research shows is exactly what the students need the most at that stage.
At what point in the reporting did you begin to think Canada’s methods were actually working?
I spent the first couple of years really focused on the middle school, where I didn’t necessarily get the feeling that this works. And then the problems pushed me toward research. These kids were entering sixth grade but reading at a second- or third-grade level, and I just didn’t know the answer to the following question: How do you get a kid like that to read at grade level? Geoff just sort of had this faith that he was going to be able to do it by giving them more time in class and more intensity
I felt I wanted to know the answer. I started focusing my reporting on the prekindergarten and elementary school. The research was clear about how effective interventions were in early years, and Geoff was the one person who was really testing it out and putting it into action. The two things began to dovetail.
Do you think the Harlem Children’s Zone project, which has a 2009 budget of $40 million, is replicable? How do you see this playing out in other cities?
I think that it’s absolutely replicable. It is going to take a lot of money. James Heckman, an economist, makes the most convincing case when he says that the reason to invest in early education and comprehensive education of this sort is not just out of a sense of moral obligation or social justice, but also out of economic necessity. That money will pay off when it’s spent earlier on.
As for the logistics about how others are going to replicate it, I don’t know yet. I hope people don’t just clone it. The members of the education-reform community — the people who are running organizations such as Teach for America, New Leaders for New Schools, KIPP, and Achievement First — are essential. They already have the right mind-set and resources. They’re bringing a way of thinking about working with poor kids that has not existed in the past, which is very scientific and very much about results. It’s not about being satisfied with a feel-good story of one kid who succeeds; it’s about being satisfied by big numbers and consistent results.
Much of this research shows that parenting is crucial to a child’s academic achievement. Do we need to rethink our definition of a teacher? Should our expectations of teachers change?
One thing social scientists and Geoff are saying is that the old division between school and everything else is obsolete. If we want to think about helping kids, we have to think about every part of their day and every part of their lives and how best we can intervene to improve their chances.
I was really struck by the principal of the elementary school, Dennis McKesey. There’s this debate in a lot of schools about whether the parents or the teachers are responsible, and if the parents aren’t doing their jobs, can we really be expected to educate the kids? What Dennis says is that we have to think of ways to compensate for the parents, but it’s also his responsibility to get the parents to do their part. He’s asking himself, “How do we make connections with parents and bring them along so they are the asset and resource we need to help the kids in our classes?” It’s a new and important mind-set about looking more holistically at what you can do as a teacher for the kids you’re teaching.
Have you received much response from teachers?
Most of it came through my Slate blog, Schoolhouse Rock, in September. It’s been very gratifying to hear from teachers. They have a hard job, especially those working in poorer communities. Judging from some of the emails I receive, they don’t feel like they get any support. They don’t get support from their principals, and they’re not in schools focused on solving this problem. Those are painful to get, but I’m also hearing from teachers who are inspired by the book.
Bernice Yeung is a freelance writer in San Francisco.
“Obama’s “Promise Neighborhoods” could challenge the traditional division between education policy and poverty policy—between improving schools and improving the lives of poor families. Geoffrey Canada’s argument is that it no longer makes sense to think of each one separately. If we try to fix the schools in a low-income neighborhood without addressing the other needs of students there, it’s not a real solution to the neighborhood’s problems. And it isn’t enough to provide social services to poor children if their neighborhood schools are still giving them a lousy education. A true solution to the problem of underachievement in inner-city public schools is going to require more nurturing families and safer neighborhoods as well as better teachers and more accountable schools. That’s the real point of the Harlem Children’s Zone, and, I think, it’s going to be the next chapter in the debate over schools.”
We don’t torture, according to White House Press Secretary Dana Perino in a press conference today. For the umpteenth time, she states:
Hmmm: we only ‘interrogate terrorists to protect the country from imminent terrorist attack’. That’s why you see these soldiers SMILING as they taunt their captives.
Bush says ‘this government does not torture people’:
Danger Room: What’s Next in National Security, WIRED Magazine’s blog on the Military, has the following post:
Pentagon Wants $581 Billion From Obama –
War Costs Not Included
By Noah Shachtman
Give the boys in the Pentagon credit; they’ve got chutzpah. While the federal government hemorrhages money — and everyone from Goldman Sachs to General Motors to the city of Philadelphia is looking for more Washington cash — the Defense Department is getting ready to ask for its biggest budget yet. The Pentagon is telling the Obama transition team that it wants $581 billion for the next fiscal year, an increase of $67 billion. And that doesn’t even count cash needed to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The cash request “includes $524 billion in spending authority approved by the White House Office of Management and Budget this spring… as well as $57 billion in additional needs the Office of the Secretary of Defense identified over the summer,” reports Inside Defense.
Back in October Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, wrote an open letter to the next president elect and it was published in the New York Times. Within the article, Pollan outlines why the next president may be looking at a food crisis and how next to automobiles, the American food industry is the biggest consumer of fossil fuels. Not only did Obama read the piece but he mentioned it in an interview with Time’s Joe Klein.
Pollan outlines for the next president the connection between cheap oil, the food industry and the rising cost of healthcare. When Obama spoke with Klein about these topics he clearly understood how these subjects were interconnected as well as how they fall under a larger umbrella of how we use and produce energy and its impact on our wallets and the environment.
It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.
Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply follow Nixon’s example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it takes to boost production. But there are reasons to think that the old approach won’t work this time around; for one thing, it depends on cheap energy that we can no longer count on. For another, expanding production of industrial agriculture today would require you to sacrifice important values on which you did campaign. Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on — but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them. Let me explain.
After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis — a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact.
In addition to the problems of climate change and America’s oil addiction, you have spoken at length on the campaign trail of the health care crisis. Spending on health care has risen from 5 percent of national income in 1960 to 16 percent today, putting a significant drag on the economy. The goal of ensuring the health of all Americans depends on getting those costs under control. There are several reasons health care has gotten so expensive, but one of the biggest, and perhaps most tractable, is the cost to the system of preventable chronic diseases. Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. It is no coincidence that in the years national spending on health care went from 5 percent to 16 percent of national income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount — from 18 percent of household income to less than 10 percent. While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet.
The biggest problem with our energy policy has been to lurch from crisis to trance. And what we need is a sustained, serious effort. Now, I actually think the biggest opportunity right now is not just gas prices at the pump but the fact that the engine for economic growth for the last 20 years is not going to be there for the next 20, and that was consumer spending. I mean, basically, we turbo-charged this economy based on cheap credit. Whatever else we think is going to happen over the next certainly 5 years, one thing we know, the days of easy credit are going to be over because there is just too much de-leveraging taking place, too much debt both at the government level, corporate level and consumer level. And what that means is that just from a purely economic perspective, finding the new driver of our economy is going to be critical. There is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy.
I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they’re contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That’s just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.
We have a new President who can read, analyze, synthesize and repeat back to you. Thank goodness for brilliant people like Michael Pollan, and for our new President, who actually stands a good chance of harnessing all our ills.
