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.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/20/how-the-presidency-ages-m_n_145117.html

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.

Learning Zone: Harlem Project

Gives Poor Students an Edge

by Bernice Yeung

Winning Formula:

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.

This article originally published on 11/19/2008

“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.”

The bailout is a parting gift to the people that George Bush once referred to jokingly as “my base.”

“And I think, you know, Amy, the last time I was on Democracy Now!, we were talking about Henry Paulson’s original three-page proposal, the $700 trillion stickup, where he basically said, “Give me $700 trillion. Don’t ask any questions. I can never be challenged by any arm of government or any court of law.” Now, that aspect of the bailout was supposedly dealt with, and we were all reassured that there was going to be transparency, accountability, legality. But now we’re finding out that, in fact, Henry Paulson has achieved his original goal by stealth, because there is no accountability, and lawmakers are very hesitant to challenge this, because they’re afraid of causing a run on the banks, of causing more market instability. So, essentially, what the Bush administration has done is said, you know, “We dare you to challenge us and be responsible for the great depression.” And the Democrats, not known for their firm spines, have so far failed to challenge them in anything other than rhetoric.

Goodman: And what’s very interesting about this, of course, as I talked to you before the election, but now the election is over, and the Democrats are not in a weaker position, but in a far more powerful position, and they are meeting this week.

Klein: Right. They have a lot of leeway in which to act on this. You know, if Barney Frank means what he says, that this violates the act, then of course they can challenge the deals that have already been signed, these terrible equity deals that are so much worse than what Gordon Brown negotiated in Britain. I mean, let’s remember, Gordon Brown got voting rights at the banks that they bailed out, seats on the boards, 12 percent dividends for UK taxpayers, as opposed to the five percent negotiated in the US and no voting rights and no seats on the board. Other thing Gordon Brown did is he got it in writing that the banks had to start lending, as opposed to Henry Paulson, who didn’t get it in writing, and the banks are not lending.

So, there is room to move, but, you know, the logic that has really gripped lawmakers is that they can’t rock the boat. And we hear this across the board, really, in the talk of, you know, who to appoint as Treasury Secretary, how to approach economic policy in this period. We hear all these phrases — you know, continuity, smooth transition. And really, that’s code for more of the same, because what the market wants is for there not to be tough regulation, is for the free money to keep flowing. What will upset the market, what will create a rocky transition, is if it’s clear that there’s a new sheriff in town, that they’re going to have to follow the law, that they’re going to cut off all of this corporate welfare, there’s going to be real accountability, real conditions attached to the money. You know what? The market really doesn’t want that.

Unfortunately for the market, voters have just voted for change. They voted for a candidate who really turned the election into a referendum on this economic policy of rampant deregulation. So you’ve really got a problem here. How do you reconcile the market’s desire for status quo with the voters’ demand for real change? There is no way to do that without a few bumps along the way. And I’m quite concerned that what we’re seeing from Obama’s team is an accepting of this logic that they need to give the market what it wants, which is continuity, smooth transition, which is really just code for more of the same. And when you hear names like Larry Summers being bandied about for Treasury Secretary, that’s feeding the market exactly what it wants, which is more of the same.

Goodman: I wanted to go more to these — what you’re calling “borderline criminal” deals, the Washington Post revealing as part of the bailout, lawmakers changed Tax Code Section 382, which limits the kinds of tax shelters companies can use to — during corporate mergers, created to stop companies who avoid paying taxes by acquiring shell companies valued by the losses on their stocks. And then, going on in the piece, it says congressional aides admitted lawmakers agreed to keep the change hidden to avoid public outrage. Staffers with Senate Finance Committee chair, Max Baucus, a Democrat, reportedly asked that an administration briefing on the tax code change be kept secret. One congressional aide said, “We’re all nervous about saying this was illegal because of our fears about the marketplace. To the extent we want to try to publicly stop this, we’re going to be gumming up some important deals.”

Klein: Right. I mean, this is — that’s an incredible statement, Amy, because really what they’re saying is, we can’t afford to enforce the law, because there is an economic crisis, that somehow, because there’s an economic prices, legality is a luxury that Congress can’t afford. That is a very scary statement. But this is what I mean by this logic that you have to — you know, the market, particularly a bear market, has the temperament of an ill-tempered two-year-old. I mean, it throws temper tantrums whenever it doesn’t get what it wants, whenever it is frightened. So it is really dangerous to pander to the tastes of the market in this period. It needs a little bit of tough love. That’s what people have voted for. But there will be a temper tantrum if there is a clear message that the law is going to be followed.

Read the rest of the article, here…

Robert Greenwald made a great documentary on the war profiteers, Iraq for Sale.  I wish someone could get out a quick documentary on the bailout profiteers!

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’:

What do we call this?

Its torture, Ma’am. We torture.

Read,Write,Web blogs about the massive increase in instant mobile messaging. We’re interconnected, especially while ‘on the go’:

According to new numbers being released by VeriSign, Inc., mobile messaging is a fast-growing trend worldwide. The medium experienced a surge here in the U.S. thanks to the recent presidential elections as Obama utilized the platform for making announcements, but that isn’t the only reason for the growth.

Explosive Growth

In Q3 2008, VeriSign Messaging and Mobile Media Divison’s mobile messaging networks enabled more than 58.3 billion messages per day to travel through their pipes…10% more than in the previous quarter and up from 280 million per day in Q3. Based on these record-breaking numbers, VeriSign projects that their mobile messaging networks will enable close to 200 billion total messages by the end of the year.

Enterprises and financial institutions have seen growing numbers of mobile messages sent, too. From Q3 2007 to Q3 2008, the total number of messages delivered rose from 129 to 227 million - a 115% increase.

Much of that activity comes from SMS’s new position as the preferred platform for mobile banking. VeriSign’s Mobile Banking platform, which includes seven of the top ten banking brands and three of the top five credit card companies, has grown 35% since last quarter alone.

My read: we are in the throes of global interconnectedness that will re-write all of our paradigms and systems.  We just can’t see how that will yet unfold.

The Green Daily blog wrote the following post:

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.

Michael Pollan breaks it down:

Farmer in Chief

By MICHAEL POLLAN

Dear Mr. President-Elect,

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.

Click here to read the rest of this brilliant article.

Here is Barack Obama, being interviewed by Joe Klein, of TIME Magazine:

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.