First, let me say, read the comments on his post. They are a wealth of information as well.
Second, as is my wont, let me run the numbers:
The top 15 luminaries at this institution earn a total of $3,928,000.00, with the 15th most highly paid getting $145,000.00 a year.
There are 200 teaching staff, none of whom make $145,000.00 a year, or their names would be on the tax records used at LGM.
Assuming that they each average $100,000.00 a year, this means $20,000,000.00 spent on teaching staff, which means that 14% of the teaching budget is spent on such notables as the , “Vice President of Campus Environment ,” “Associate Assistant Vice President/Dean”, “Vice President of Institutional Advancement, ” and “Associate Vice President and Chief of Staff”.
According to the comments, almost all the teacher are adjuncts, so that number is probably less than $60K, it’s primarily a liberal arts institution, which would mean that of these people have get the ⅓ of what is spent on instructors.
When you further consider that it is likely that each of these bits of administrative deadwood have 5 flunkies working directly for them on average (and my guess would be that there are at least 10 working for both the marketing and alumni development chiefs) , and that each of them earn $30K a year, and this goes up to more than 50% of the teacher budget.
Note from the comments also, “It is telling that she refers to customers rather than students.”
A major problem with higher education, and higher education costs, is the explosion of overpaid and under-worked administrators.
Another one is that, particularly at the top schools, there is monopolistic collusion as to prices and aid awards, allowing prices to skyrocket.
Instead, we have people talking about climbing walls for students, and those palatial some new dorms.†
College is a microcosm of society, where an unproductive and parasitic managerial class suck the marrow out of business, the economy, society, and the “customer”.
*Product – What product or products should we offer? Price – How should our products be priced? Place – Where should we offer our products for sale? Promotion – What’s the compelling story we tell about our product and where do we tell the story to get people to buy our product? †In fact, the high end student amenities are predicted by monopoly theory. Once monopolists stop competing on price, they jack up prices and compete on bling.
As a member of the International Cannabinoid Research Society, a collector of antique marijuana apothecary jars, the founder of an industrial hemp business and “a pot smoker consistently for 47 years,” Don Wirtshafter, an Ohio lawyer, has fought for decades to make marijuana legal, calling it “my life’s work.” But when Ohio voters go to the polls Tuesday to consider a constitutional amendment to allow marijuana for both medical and personal use, Mr. Wirtshafter will vote against it. Issue 3, as the proposed amendment is known, is bankrolled by wealthy investors spending nearly $25 million to put it on the ballot and sell it to voters. If it passes, they will have exclusive rights to growing commercial marijuana in Ohio. The proposal has a strange bedfellows coalition of opponents: law enforcement officers worried about crime, doctors worried about children’s health, state lawmakers and others who warn that it would enshrine a monopoly in the Ohio Constitution. The result has been one of the nation’s oddest legalization campaigns. It pits a new generation of corporate investors against grass-roots advocates like Mr. Wirtshafter, who deplores “opportunists seeking monopolistic gains” and laments that America would have been much better off “if they would have just let the hippies have their weed.” A recent poll by the University of Akron shows voters evenly split, but if the proposal passes, Ohio will be the first state to approve marijuana for personal use without first legalizing medical marijuana. That would put Ohio, a swing state, at the forefront of the national movement to overhaul marijuana laws — just in time for the 2016 presidential campaign. Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio, a Republican candidate for president, opposes Issue 3. ……… To complicate matters, the Ohio General Assembly has put a competing initiative, Issue 2, on the ballot; known as the antimonopoly amendment, it would block Issue 3 by prohibiting the granting of special rights through the State Constitution. There is certain to be a protracted legal battle if both measures pass.
There is also the matter that the granting of monopolies in the production of Marijuana might be unconstitutional.
We see state monopolies, and state granted monopolies and oligopolies, in alcohol because section 2 of the 21st amendment has been interpreted by the courts of giving states near absolute control over the alcohol trade within their borders.
This does not apply to weed.
The story is twisted:
The story of how Issue 3 got onto the ballot begins here in Columbus, the capital, with Ian James, a political consultant whose company, the Strategy Network, specializes in gathering signatures for ballot initiatives. In 2009, his firm helped legalize casino gambling in Ohio through a measure that amended the State Constitution and specified where casinos could be located. ……… Mr. James said he had “taken that premise and applied it to marijuana.” In early 2014, he said, he began meeting with lawyers and a potential investor, James Gould, a Cincinnati sports agent, to talk about a “tightly regulated system” to make marijuana available in Ohio. An organization called the Ohio Rights Group, then represented by Mr. Wirtshafter, was already gathering signatures for an initiative to make medical marijuana legal. But Mr. James had a more ambitious plan. With help from Mr. Gould, he found 10 investment groups willing to put up a minimum of $2 million each to finance a campaign to pass an amendment that would legalize marijuana for medical use and personal use in small amounts; set up a commission to regulate it; and designate 10 parcels of land — each owned or optioned by funders of the initiative — where marijuana could be legally grown and cultivated for commercial use. ……… The backers call themselves ResponsibleOhio. Among the investors: the former professional basketball player Oscar Robertson, the fashion designer Nanette Lepore, Mr. Gould and two great-great-grand-nephews of President William Howard Taft. Each investment group has committed as much as $40 million to build facilities if Issue 3 passes. ……… But perhaps the group’s most contentious marketing effort has been Buddie, an anthropomorphic marijuana bud who looks a bit like a spear of asparagus wearing green cowboy boots and a blue cape, and who has been turning up on college campuses around the state. Critics liken him to Joe Camel, the cartoon character accused of marketing Camel cigarettes to children.
To say that I have mixed emotions about this is an understatement.
My win-win scenario is for Issue 3 to pass, and for the federal courts to strip the monopoly provisions from the statute, but my second best alternative is for the corporate ratf%$#s to lose.
I have no clue as to how I would vote on this if I lived there.
Tony Blair has denied reports that ministers were instructed to ‘burn’ a report questioning the legality of the Iraq war less than three weeks before British forces invaded the country.
The Mail on Sunday quotes an unnamed senior No 10 figure saying that the then attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, presented a 13-page legal opinion on 7 March 2003 that suggested the war could be challenged under international law because of the lack of UN backing.
The paper’s source says: “There was pandemonium. The date when war was expected to start was already in the diary, and here was Goldsmith saying it could be challenged under international law. They said ‘burn it, destroy it’ and got to work on the [attorney general].”
………
On Thursday, Sir John Chilcot announced he would publish his long-awaited report into the Iraq war in June or July next year, giving government officials up to three months to carry out national security checks on its findings. In a letter to the prime minister, Chilcot said the text of his report – which is expected to be around 2 million words long – would be finalised in the week of 18 April 2016.
Blair’s office denied that he was the cause of the delay, saying he had replied to documents he received as part of the Maxwellisation process – in which witnesses who are to be criticised are given a right to reply – in August this year after receiving them in January.
Someone within the Chilcot commission has concerns that this report is going to get buried, and so stuff is leaking out.
Assuming that this report is accurate, and it certainly smells true, it creates a real possibility of some sort of repercussions to Tony “The Smiler”, even if it is just making him toxic enough that foreign governments who have been paying him big bucks (Pounds) as a “consultant” might terminate their deals.
I’d like to see him in the Hague, along with Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, and the rest of their Evil Minions™, but that is not going to happen.
From the time Folake Ogundiran’s daughter started kindergarten at a Success Academy charter school in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, the girl struggled to adjust to its strict rules. She racked up demerits for not following directions or not keeping her hands folded in her lap. Sometimes, after being chastised, she threw tantrums. She was repeatedly suspended for screaming, throwing pencils, running away from school staff members or refusing to go to another classroom for a timeout. One day last December, the school’s principal, Candido Brown, called Ms. Ogundiran and said her daughter, then 6, was having a bad day. Mr. Brown warned that if she continued to do things that were defiant and unsafe — including, he said, pushing or kicking, moving chairs or tables, or refusing to go to another classroom — he would have to call 911, Ms. Ogundiran recalled. Already feeling that her daughter was treated unfairly, she went to the school and withdrew her on the spot. Success Academy, the high-performing charter school network in New York City, has long been dogged by accusations that its remarkable accomplishments are due, in part, to a practice of weeding out weak or difficult students. The network has always denied it. But documents obtained by The New York Times and interviews with 10 current and former Success employees at five schools suggest that some administrators in the network have singled out children they would like to see leave. Nine of the students on the list later withdrew from the school. Some of their parents said in interviews that while their children attended Success, their lives were upended by repeated suspensions and frequent demands that they pick up their children early or meet with school or network staff members. Four of the parents said that school or network employees told them explicitly that the school, whose oldest students are now in the third grade, was not right for their children and that they should go elsewhere. The current and former employees said they had observed similar practices at other Success schools. According to those employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their jobs or their relationships with people still at the network, school leaders and network staff members explicitly talked about suspending students or calling parents into frequent meetings as ways to force parents to fall in line or prompt them to withdraw their children. ……… Suspensions at Success, which typically last one or two days, are frequent compared with traditional public schools. In the 2012-13 school year, the most recent one for which state data is available, Success schools suspended between 4 percent and 23 percent of their students at least once, with most suspending more than 10 percent. According to the most recent statistics from the city’s Education Department, from 2013-14, traditional public schools suspended 3 percent of students that academic year. ……… At Success Academy Fort Greene, the same day that Ms. Ogundiran heard from the principal, her daughter’s name was one of 16 placed on a list drawn up at his direction and shared by school leaders. The heading on the list was “Got to Go.” ……… The notes also appear to allude to the possibility of getting one child on the “Got to Go” list classified as a 12:1:1 special education student. Those students are entitled to classrooms limited to 12 students, with one teacher and one aide, so Success Academy, which offers only five such classes in a network serving 11,000 students, might not be able to meet the needs of every 12:1:1 student. Ms. Fleischman, the education manager, warned her colleagues in a follow-up email that the goal should not have been put in an email and that, in any case, a 12:1:1 classification “does not guarantee a withdrawal.” Asked this month about that remark, she said that she was saying only that the parent of a 12:1:1 student would not be required to take the student out, and was not alluding to any effort to ensure the child would leave.
I would also argue that it s a violation of anti-retaliation laws, and I would further argue that the parent, or an enterprising prosecutor, might also consider racketeering as icing on the cake:
Anyone who has reported on campus sexual assault knows that school administrations rarely respond, even when they feel unfairly maligned, because they fear violating the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA. Passed in 1974, FERPA is a federal law that bans the release of students’ personal information without their consent. “Schools are not supposed to talk about their students, even when the media is saying, ‘Hey, I can’t believe you did this,’ ” says Derek W. Black, a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law who specializes in education law. “And sometimes that means the media doesn’t get the story straight, but it does protect the student.” That’s why it was so surprising when Eva Moskowitz, the high-profile head of Success Academy, a network of New York City charter schools, responded to a negative PBS story by releasing the disciplinary record of an ex-student featured in it. Black says this was probably illegal, and it has left the student’s mother, Fatima Geidi, furious and frantic with worry over her 10-year-old son’s reputation. “For a grown woman, an adult, to attack a child is disgusting,” Geidi told me. “There’s no other way around it.” The skirmish began on Oct. 12, when PBS NewsHour ran a segment titled “Is Kindergarten Too Young to Suspend a Student?” It came as a national backlash has been building against overly strict discipline in public schools, particularly toward very young students. Last year, the Obama administration urged schools to abandon so called zero-tolerance disciplinary policies, warning administrators nationwide that it would investigate racial disparities in student punishment. Shortly before the PBS NewsHour piece ran, a report from the Center for American Progress documented that students are being suspended and expelled as early as preschool. “[I]t is clear that what were intended to be last resort and occasional disciplinary tools have become wildly overused and disproportionately applied to children of color, resulting in dramatically negative long-term effects,” the report said. ……… The NewsHour segment focused on the suspension of kindergarteners at Success Academy schools, which are known both for their high test scores and their highly structured environments, with a code of conduct running six pages. According to PBS reporter John Merrow, at one Success Academy charter with 203 kindergartners and first-graders, there were 44 out-of-school suspensions in a single year. Merrow spoke with nearly a dozen families, but only Fatima Geidi and her son, Jamir, agreed to go on camera. Jamir, who left Success Academy last year because he and his mother couldn’t tolerate the frequent suspensions, described some of the infractions that got him in trouble: “I would always have to keep my shirt tucked in. And let’s say I wasn’t wearing black shoes, and I was wearing red shoes. Then that would be an infraction.” Viewers didn’t get the impression that these were the only reasons the boy, now 10, was disciplined. Fatima Geidi, said that even at his new school, where Jamir hasn’t been suspended, he’s had “meltdowns” and “outbursts.” Still, the segment made it seem as though Success Academy throws kids out for petty misbehavior. Moskowitz herself said that a single incidence of using “sexually explicit language” would get a 5-year-old suspended. ……… But Moskowitz didn’t just object to the numbers. She wanted to combat the allegation that Success Academy suspends kids without good reason. And so she made Jamir Geidi’s record public, posting a letter to PBS on the Success Academies website that listed 19 specific incidents of misconduct, some of them violent, along with long excerpts of teacher reports on Jamir’s behavior. (Her letter referred to Jamir as “John Doe,” but since he was the only student named in the PBS segment, there was no question about who she was talking about.) Fatima Geidi disputes some of these examples as either false or exaggerated. Whether or not they happened the way Moskowitz claims, Black says that in revealing them, she likely broke the law. “A student’s records themselves are private, as well as the contents,” he says. “If those are going to be disclosed to outside third parties, they clearly have to have consent.” With the help of Leonie Haimson, co-founder of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, Fatima Geidi sent Moskowitz a cease-and-desist letter, demanding that her son’s information be taken down. “I’ve seen violations of FERPA, but not in such an obvious, egregious way,” Haimson told me. “Not in a press release sent to the media and posted online. I have not seen this level of violation.” Moskowitz is unapologetic. In a letter to Geidi, she wrote, “The First Amendment limits a person’s ability to use privacy rights to prevent others from speaking. When somebody chooses to make statements to the press, they waive their privacy rights on the topics they have discussed, particularly when, as here, those statements are inaccurate.” ……… Whatever you think about the dispute among Fatima Geidi, Merrow, and Moskowitz, however, Jamir Geidi is 10 years old. A document describing him as frighteningly violent now appears in the first page of his Google results. If that’s OK, it doesn’t just hurt him and his mother. It sends a message to any current or former Success Academy parent who might take public issue with Moskowitz’s methods. Fatima Geidi, “was the only parent whom PBS contacted who was brave enough to speak out” under her own name, says Haimson of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy. “One reason why parents are very afraid—and teachers are afraid too—is they knew they risked the kind of tactics that Eva Moskowitz used against Fatima’s child.” FERPA is supposed to protect such children. We’ll see if it does.
Moskowitz’s argument is bullsh%$.
She is forbidden by law from releasing specific student records.
She can contest the News Hour report, and she can say that the school was justified in its disciplinary actions, but she cannot release student records without specific approval of the parents.
That is the law. (there is an exemption for military recruiters, but that’s another story)
It is this sense of impunity and lawlessness that permeates the charter school movement, and this should not be supported by taxpayer money.
After 6 years of failure, and complaints from teachers, poor and minority have complained that the Obama administration’s support of relentlessly mindless testing and a corporate for profit model for public schools.
Well, now that the protests are reaching into white school districts, Obama finally has to pay attention to parents and teachers, as opposed to listening to corrupt grifter and banksters who are determined to make their fortunes off of public education money:
Faced with mounting and bipartisan opposition to increased and often high-stakes testing in the nation’s public schools, the Obama administration declared Saturday that the push had gone too far, acknowledged its own role in the proliferation of tests, and urged schools to step back and make exams less onerous and more purposeful. Specifically, the administration called for a cap on assessment so that no child would spend more than 2 percent of classroom instruction time taking tests. It called on Congress to “reduce over-testing” as it reauthorizes the federal legislation governing the nation’s public elementary and secondary schools. “I still have no question that we need to check at least once a year to make sure our kids are on track or identify areas where they need support,” said Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, who has announced that he will leave office in December. “But I can’t tell you how many conversations I’m in with educators who are understandably stressed and concerned about an overemphasis on testing in some places and how much time testing and test prep are taking from instruction.” ……… As a new generation of tests tied to the Common Core was rolled out last spring, several states abandoned plans to use the tests, while others renounced the Common Core, or rebranded it as a new set of local standards. And some parents, mostly in suburban areas, had their children opt out of the tests.
(emphasis mine)
That last bit is exactly the same racist tripe that Duncan used 2 years ago, when he stated his mystification over the the fact hat there were white suburban parents were opposing his ruining the public schools.
I don’t think that either Duncan or Obama understand why white people are finally turning on their educational vision, but I do think that they understand the political reality.
Black people, brown people, and teachers they could ignore, but once it was white folks, they were forced to at least pretend to listen.
H/T Atrios, who also pithily notes both that the not-for-profit schools are hip deep in this sh%$ as well.
He further notes that law professors are overpaid, and that the suggestion that they would make money hand over fist if they went back to the private sector is specious.
If you do the math, associates are expected to Bill about 1800 hours a year, which given the rule of thumb that you need to work somewhere between 1⅓ and 1½ hours for each billable hour is a soul destroying work environment.
Do the math. That is 48-54 hours a week, year in and year out.
The people who are teaching future lawyers are doing so because they don’t want that life.
This is why you have so many top flight lawyers are so eager to become judges.
This is how it’s done. Oligarchs pillage and loot so they can push their own version of history on everyone.
In 2011, a shipment of somewhere between 200 to 300 small clay tablets on their way to Oklahoma City from Israel was seized by U.S. Customs agents in Memphis. The tablets were inscribed in cuneiform—the script of ancient Assyria and Babylonia, present-day Iraq—and were thousands of years old. Their destination was the compound of the Hobby Lobby corporation, which became famous last year for winning a landmark Supreme Court case on religious freedom and government mandates. A senior law enforcement source with extensive knowledge of antiquities smuggling confirmed that these ancient artifacts had been purchased and were being imported by the deeply-religious owners of the crafting giant, the Green family of Oklahoma City. For the last four years, law enforcement sources tell The Daily Beast, the Greens have been under federal investigation for the illicit importation of cultural heritage from Iraq. These tablets, like the other 40,000 or so ancient artifacts owned by the Green family, were destined for the Museum of the Bible, the giant new museum funded by the Greens, slated to open in Washington, D.C., in 2017. Both the seizure of the cuneiform tablets and the subsequent federal investigation were confirmed to us by Cary Summers, the president of the Museum of the Bible.
For their part, Hobby Lobby is claiming it’s just screwed-up paperwork. Nothing more than that. Just a customs mix-up that has taken well over 4 years to resolve. Not really.
Here’s hoping that there will be a criminal prosecution, and a very pious Muslim cellmate, in their future.
The EU appears to have broken a promise to reinforce environmental protections in a leaked draft negotiating text submitted in the latest round of TTIP talks in Miami.
In January, the bloc promised to safeguard green laws, defend international standards and protect the EU’s right to set high levels of environmental protection, in a haggle with the US over terms for a free trade deal.
But a confidential text seen by the Guardian and filed in the sustainable development chapter of negotiations earlier this week contains only vaguely phrased and non-binding commitments to environmental safeguards.
No obligations to ratify international environmental conventions are proposed, and ways of enforcing goals on biodiversity, chemicals and the illegal wildlife trade are similarly absent.
The document does recognise a “right of each party to determine its sustainable development policies and priorities”. But lawyers say this will have far weaker standing than provisions allowing investors to sue states that pass laws breaching legitimate expectations of profit.
“The safeguards provided to sustainable development are virtually non-existent compared to those provided to investors and the difference is rather stark,” said Tim Grabiel, a Paris-based environmental attorney. “The sustainable development chapter comprises a series of aspirational statements and loosely worded commitments with an unclear dispute settlement mechanism. It has little if any legal force.”
………
US officials maintain that few such cases are ever likely to be brought under the TTIP, which could wipe away tariffs in the world’s largest ever free trade deal.
However, environmental cases accounted for 60% of the 127 ISDS cases already brought against EU countries under bilateral trade agreements in the last two decades, according to Friends of the Earth Europe. Europe’s taxpayers paid out at least $3.5bn to private investors as a result.
Natacha Cingotti, a trade campaigner for the group, said that only a carve-out of environmental protections from the tribunal process could prevent such cases mushrooming after a TTIP deal.
“This new leak illustrates that the European commission is not serious about protecting essential safeguards for citizens and the environment in the context of the TTIP talks,” she told the Guardian. “Powerful corporate polluters are likely to get VIP treatment under it, while the only chapter that could bring strong language to protect essential regulations to build a sustainable future is weak and unenforceable.”
This is what always happens, because the goal of all of these deals has been to encourage a race to the bottom in terms of labor and environmental standards while making sure that the interests of parasitic financial interests are protected at all costs.
The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said on Friday that the additional scrutiny and criticism of police officers in the wake of highly publicized episodes of police brutality may have led to an increase in violent crime in some cities as officers have become less aggressive. With his remarks, Mr. Comey lent the prestige of the F.B.I., the nation’s most prominent law enforcement agency, to a theory that is far from settled: that the increased attention on the police has made officers less aggressive and emboldened criminals. But he acknowledged that there is so far no data to back up his assertion and that it may be just one of many factors that are contributing to the rise in crime, like cheaper drugs and an increase in criminals who are being released from prison. ……… Mr. Comey’s remarks caught officials by surprise at the Justice Department, where his views are not shared at the top levels. Holding the police accountable for civil rights violations has been a top priority at the department in recent years, and some senior officials do not believe that scrutiny of police officers has led to an increase in crime. While the department had no immediate comment on Friday, several officials privately fumed at Mr. Comey’s suggestion. ……… After civil rights leaders and the Justice Department accused the Seattle Police Department of discriminatory policing and excessive force, the number of officer-instigated stops declined and crime ticked upward, said Kathleen O’Toole, the police chief. Chief O’Toole said it was up to police leaders to insist on reversing that trend. The critiques made the department better, she said. Crime is down this year, and her city has hosted police officials from places such as Baltimore wanting to understand why. “There’s never been as much scrutiny on police officers as there is now,” Chief O’Toole said. “We should embrace it.”
Yes, we should embrace greater police accountability.
Being a cop may be a tough job, but it is also one which pays relatively well, and when juxtaposed with its good job security, it means that you can generally find people willing to do the work.
This means that to the the degree that bad cops are flushed out of the system, they will be replaced by good cops.
Then you have to flush the bad attitudes and practices out of the system.
Also, as I have noted before, I think that a significant portion of the police force is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a counselor friend of mine believes that it is nearly universal after about 5 years, and mentally ill cops are not going to be good cops.
In terms of addressing PTSD, I would start with the following:
Eliminate routine overtime in police departments.
Forbid moonlighting by cops in security positions.
Make vacation longer, at least 6 weeks a year, and mandatory.
Also, again, no moonlighting on vacation.
Mandatory counseling for all police officers on at least a monthly basis, because if all cops have to talk to a counselor, there is no stigma.
Stop having cops act as revenue agents through ticketing and the like. Everyone has a God given right to hate the taxman, and being widely loathed is not conducive to mental health.
Understand that these changes would require a significant increase in base pay, probably by at least 20%, but we are living the alternative, and it ain’t pretty.
Rear Admiral Brian Losey engaged in an illegal, and wide ranging campaign of retaliation in an attempt to punish whoever reported him for minor travel irregularities, but he still got his promotion.
This lack of accountability is pretty much an archetypal example of senior leadership acting in a manner in opposition to good order and discipline of the force, but that does not matter. General officers cover for each other:
The Navy is poised to promote the admiral in charge of its elite SEAL teams and other commando units even though Pentagon investigators determined that he illegally retaliated against staff members who he mistakenly suspected were whistleblowers. Rear Adm. Brian L. Losey was investigated five times by the Defense Department’s inspector general after subordinates complained that he had wrongly fired, demoted or punished them during a vengeful but fruitless hunt for the person who had anonymously reported him for a minor travel-policy infraction, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. After conducting separate, years-long investigations that involved more than 100 witnesses and 300,000 pages of e-mails, the inspector general upheld complaints from three of the five staff members. In each of those cases, it recommended that the Navy take action against Losey for violating whistleblower-protection laws, the documents show. The Navy, however, dismissed the findings this month and decided not to discipline Losey, a preeminent figure in the military’s secretive Special Operations forces who once commanded SEAL Team 6, the clandestine unit known for killing terrorist targets such as Osama bin Laden. He now leads the Naval Special Warfare Command and has served in Afghanistan, Iraq, Panama, Bosnia, Somalia and other conflict zones. Senior Navy leaders reviewed the inspector general’s investigations but “concluded that none of the allegations rose to the level of misconduct on Admiral Losey’s part,” Rear Adm. Dawn Cutler, the Navy’s chief spokeswoman, said in a statement. She added that “no further action is contemplated.” ……… Critics say the previously undisclosed investigations into one of the Navy’s top SEALs underscore the weakness of the military’s whistleblower-protection law and how rarely violators are punished. Under the law, commanders or senior civilian officials are prohibited from taking punitive action against anyone who has reported wrongdoing in the armed forces to the inspector general or members of Congress. In comparison with other federal employees, whistleblowers working in the military or national security agencies must meet a higher burden of proof to win their cases. The odds are stacked against those who seek redress. ……… The complaints against Losey also illustrate the Pentagon’s long-standing reluctance to discipline top brass for wrongdoing and how the military typically conceals misconduct investigations from public view. The armed forces rarely disclose the existence of such cases except in response to public-records requests, which usually take months to process. ……… The turmoil began in July 2011, three weeks after Losey took charge of the military’s Special Operations Command for Africa, headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany. Someone filed an anonymous complaint with the inspector general alleging that Losey had improperly sought a government-paid plane ticket for his adult daughter when his family relocated to Germany. In fact, Losey had paid for the plane ticket himself, and the complaint was soon dismissed. But enraged by what he saw as an act of disloyalty, the admiral became determined to find out who had reported him, according to the inspector general reports. ……… “I don’t understand why Brian did what he did. He went hard over stupid on it,” said a senior military official who knew Losey well and served at the time with the U.S. Africa Command, the parent command for Losey’s group. “He was concerned about disloyalty. But as I had another commander tell me, loyalty goes both ways,” said the military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the confidentiality of the investigations. In the end, it turned out that Losey had the wrong people on his list of suspects. Investigators determined that none of the people he retaliated against had filed the original complaint about his daughter’s plane ticket. ……… The official said the Navy issued Losey a formal letter of counseling this month, advising him to be thoughtful and careful when handling such matters in the future but finding no wrongdoing on his part. Meanwhile, the inspector general also recommended that the armed forces take action against two colonels who served as senior aides to Losey. Investigators determined that they had punished suspected whistleblowers, effectively acting on behalf of the admiral.
This sort of crap is one of the reasons that our military has had a long run of failures since 2001.
The price inmates pay to call their friends and family is set to decrease after the Federal Communications Commission voted Tuesday to cap the rates. The vote was part of a years-long push to decrease the cost of prison and jail calls, which have been described as predatory and are dramatically higher than general rates for the public. “The truth is that each of us is paying a heavy price for what is now a predatory, scaled market regime,” said Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, a Democrat, who has led the charge. “None of us here would ever consider paying $500 a month for a voice only service where calls are routinely dropped for no reason.” The FCC also implemented new rules it said would “discourage” advance payments [kickbacks to the jails] that the few dominate calling services give to prisons to win exclusive contracts, sometimes described as “kickbacks.” Advocates and even the phone companies themselves pushed the FCC to go further to end the payments altogether, which are technically called site commissions. But the FCC said its authority to do that is questionable. Clyburn encouraged states to reevaluate those payments and to cap rates at even lower levels at the local level, as a few states have already done. Most inmates’ calling rates will drop to 11 cents per minute, though rates will be capped at higher prices in smaller prisons and jails. Other transaction fees will be capped between $2 and $6. The cap is a more than 50 percent drop from previous limits, and those only applied to calls between states. The new cap will apply to all calls within a state and between states. Civil rights groups and others have pointed to the benefits of inmates being able to make calls affordably and how close contact with family can help reduce recidivism. Phone companies have been required to ensure that their rates for inmate calls are reasonable and fair. One way they have justified higher-than-normal prices in the past is by factoring in the upfront payments for contracts. The new order would allow these payments to go forward but would prevent phone companies from factoring them in when calculating phone rates.
I understand that a part of the corrections is punitive, but that is not an excuse to gouge prisoners and their families, particularly when the rest of us bear the cost of though increased recidivism and general misery.
The bad guys lose today, for a while at least.
I fully expect moves in congress to reverse this decision.
If there are two edicts I try to follow whenever I’m writing, they are, first, write what is true and, second, avoid cliche at all costs. I bring that up only as a preface before saying the following: the UK is walking down an Orwellian path. It’s nearly the cliche of cliches to say something like this, and yet it happens that the cliche is true. While there is most certainly a real thing known as a threat from Islamic terrorism, there is also such a thing as overreaction. What started as the British government’s attempt to ban extremist thought from social media and television (under the notion that some thoughts are too dangerous to enjoy the freedom that other thoughts deserve) then devolved into the conscripting of teachers that were to be on the lookout for children that might become radicalized. To assist them with this, the government helpfully provided spy-software to use against students. Spy-software which itself was found to be exploitable in the most laughably easy of ways. This employed two of the most horrifying aspects of Orwell’s Oceania: the concept of thought-crime and the employ of citizens to fearfully surveil one another. And now it seems the UK is going even further, adopting Oceania’s reputation for the swallowing up of citizens should they be found suspect of thought-crime by those watchful citizens. Specifically, the Family Division of the Judiciary has put out a memo declaring exactly how it will remove children from the homes of anyone it suspects might radicalize those children. Here’s a snippet. Recent months have seen increasing numbers of children cases coming before the Family Division and the Family Court where there are allegations or suspicions: that children, with their parents or on their own, are planning or attempting or being groomed with a view to travel to parts of Syria controlled by the so-called Islamic State; that children have been or are at risk of being radicalised; or that children have been or at are at risk of being involved in terrorist activities either in this country or abroad. Only a local authority can start care proceedings (see section 31(1) of the Children Act 1989 – the police powers are set out in section 46). However, any person with a proper interest in the welfare of a child can start proceedings under the inherent jurisdiction or apply to make a child a ward of court.2 Usually, in cases falling within the description in paragraph 1 above, it will be the local authority which starts proceedings under the inherent jurisdiction or applies to make a child a ward of court, and the court would not expect the police (who have other priorities and responsibilities) to do so. There is, however, no reason why in a case where it seems to the police to be necessary to do so, the police should not start such proceedings for the purposes, for example, of making a child a ward of court, obtaining an injunction to prevent the child travelling abroad, obtaining a passport order, or obtaining a Tipstaff location or collection order. Given the complexities of these cases, I have decided that, for the time being at least, all cases falling within the description in paragraph 1 above are to be heard by High Court Judges of the Family Division. In other words, the High Court Judges within the Family Division are now tasked with determining whether children will be made wards of the state based solely on suspicions of possible radicalization. Children torn from mothers and fathers in Muslim homes will be subject to the whims and inherently flawed watch of the larger citizenry. A citizenry, mind you, that has had its vigilance unduly ramped up by the government’s past actions and requests. It’s hard to imagine a better recipe for the unfair targeting of Muslim families than this. Unfortunately for all concerned, this same memo imagined just such a recipe, making things even worse. ……… Tax avoidance [Note: Tax avoidance uses legal, though frequently unethical, techniques to lower the tax burden. Tax evasion is a crime.] is a sore point in the United States, where the largest companies, including Apple, Amazon and many others, routinely try to minimize their bills. In Europe, the cases have hit a raw nerve in countries where citizens have been squeezed by years of austerity, and stoked friction among member states that are jockeying with one another for jobs and investment. ……… After asking Dutch tax authorities and Starbucks to provide details of their tax deals last year, the commission determined the company’s tax setup with the Netherlands had no realistic economic justification. The case zeroed in on Alki, the British-based entity at the center of Starbucks’ efforts to reduce its Dutch and European tax bills. In 2001, Starbucks installed its European corporate headquarters and a massive new coffee roasting plant in Amsterdam after conferring with Dutch tax authorities. The setup proved beneficial: Starbucks created several Dutch partnerships that were not subject to the country’s corporate tax, including one named Emerald City, a nickname for Seattle. Emerald City owned Alki, which was set up in London to house Starbucks’ intellectual property. The intellectual property included logos and the recipe for roasting coffee beans, which Starbucks subsidiaries pay Alki a royalty to license. Because of its structure, Alki was not subject to corporate tax in the Netherlands or Britain. ……… The recipe was basically the temperature for roasting beans, and appeared to be more like instructions than intellectual property. Yet counting it as such allowed Starbucks’ roasting unit to reallocate most of its profit to Alki in the form of royalties, the commission said, nearly wiping out the Dutch tax bill. No other Starbucks companies or roasters paid royalties for the same information, the commission said.
Crap like this happens, because we as a society have made a conscious decision to encourage rent of this sort behavior.
IP protections are there to incentivize creativity, and when we extend those incentives far beyond what is necessary for this, we create a cesspool of corruption and self-dealing.
It also one of the things that contributes to a less equal society, because the unearned proceeds create resources to lobby for even more rentier behavior.
If there are two edicts I try to follow whenever I’m writing, they are, first, write what is true and, second, avoid cliche at all costs. I bring that up only as a preface before saying the following: the UK is walking down an Orwellian path. It’s nearly the cliche of cliches to say something like this, and yet it happens that the cliche is true. While there is most certainly a real thing known as a threat from Islamic terrorism, there is also such a thing as overreaction. What started as the British government’s attempt to ban extremist thought from social media and television (under the notion that some thoughts are too dangerous to enjoy the freedom that other thoughts deserve) then devolved into the conscripting of teachers that were to be on the lookout for children that might become radicalized. To assist them with this, the government helpfully provided spy-software to use against students. Spy-software which itself was found to be exploitable in the most laughably easy of ways. This employed two of the most horrifying aspects of Orwell’s Oceania: the concept of thought-crime and the employ of citizens to fearfully surveil one another.
And now it seems the UK is going even further, adopting Oceania’s reputation for the swallowing up of citizens should they be found suspect of thought-crime by those watchful citizens. Specifically, the Family Division of the Judiciary has put out a memo declaring exactly how it will remove children from the homes of anyone it suspects might radicalize those children. Here’s a snippet. Recent months have seen increasing numbers of children cases coming before the Family Division and the Family Court where there are allegations or suspicions: that children, with their parents or on their own, are planning or attempting or being groomed with a view to travel to parts of Syria controlled by the so-called Islamic State; that children have been or are at risk of being radicalised; or that children have been or at are at risk of being involved in terrorist activities either in this country or abroad.
Only a local authority can start care proceedings (see section 31(1) of the Children Act 1989 – the police powers are set out in section 46). However, any person with a proper interest in the welfare of a child can start proceedings under the inherent jurisdiction or apply to make a child a ward of court.2 Usually, in cases falling within the description in paragraph 1 above, it will be the local authority which starts proceedings under the inherent jurisdiction or applies to make a child a ward of court, and the court would not expect the police (who have other priorities and responsibilities) to do so. There is, however, no reason why in a case where it seems to the police to be necessary to do so, the police should not start such proceedings for the purposes, for example, of making a child a ward of court, obtaining an injunction to prevent the child travelling abroad, obtaining a passport order, or obtaining a Tipstaff location or collection order. Given the complexities of these cases, I have decided that, for the time being at least, all cases falling within the description in paragraph 1 above are to be heard by High Court Judges of the Family Division.
In other words, the High Court Judges within the Family Division are now tasked with determining whether children will be made wards of the state based solely on suspicions of possible radicalization. Children torn from mothers and fathers in Muslim homes will be subject to the whims and inherently flawed watch of the larger citizenry. A citizenry, mind you, that has had its vigilance unduly ramped up by the government’s past actions and requests. It’s hard to imagine a better recipe for the unfair targeting of Muslim families than this. Unfortunately for all concerned, this same memo imagined just such a recipe, making things even worse.
The UK is beginning to resemble the movie “V”, and a that the local media seems transfixed and appalled by the fact Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t hate poor people for being poor.
There are worse things than having Donald Trump leading the polls, and David Cameron and his evil minions™ is one of them.
This may be why airlines are waging a war on travel websites. The tools available on these sites make it too difficult to f%$# the customers like a drunk sorority girl:
Once upon a time, there were reasonably well-known ways to pay less for your airfare. Airlines had rules governing ticket prices, those rules were consistent across airlines, and almost everybody knew what the rules were. (If you booked further in advance, the tickets were cheaper. If you stayed a Saturday night, the ticket would be cheaper. That kind of thing.) Those days, however, are long gone. Airline tickets are no longer priced according to simple rules: they’re dynamically priced according to insanely complex algorithms which, to the naked eye, make no sense at all. Cheap tickets still exist, of course—the problem is that there’s no reliable way of finding them. If you managed to luck into such a ticket a few weeks or months ago, good for you—but don’t for a minute expect that if you behaved exactly the same way today, then you would get a similar result. A recent paper by Symeon Meichanetzoglou, Sotiris Ioannidis, and Nikolaos Laoutaris sums up the current status quo: “complexity asymmetry,” they conclude, “defeated the web.” The paper is based on a massive database of 1,449,349 flight tickets involving 63 destinations and 125 different airlines—and finds that even the most common-sense rules of airline ticket pricing are regularly violated. For instance, let’s say you want to book a round-trip flight from Brussels to Stuttgart. The researchers studied six different airlines flying that route, with 619 different fares, and found that 24.5% of the time, it was cheaper to buy two one-way tickets (one from Brussels to Stuttgart, and one from Stuttgart to Brussels) than it was to buy a round-trip. And when they looked at airlines rather than routes, they found similar outliers: one Dutch airline was cheaper more than half the time when buying singles rather than round-trip tickets. (Especially, it seems, on the Frankfurt-Zurich route.) ……… A few years ago, Delta got in trouble for showing higher prices to its frequent fliers than to everybody else; it blamed a “computer glitch.” Ever since then, conspiracy theories have abounded, especially among people who search for flights, find relatively cheap ones, and then find that the fares have suddenly increased when they decide to buy. Is it a good idea to use some kind of private browsing mode when shopping for tickets, so that the airlines can’t identify you and jack their prices accordingly? The answer, frankly, is that although it won’t hurt if you do that, you’re going to end up outsmarted whatever you do. The airlines and flight search engines have infinitely more information than you do, and that information asymmetry is always going to work to their advantage. If you find a cheap fare, good for you; if you don’t, it’s not your fault. The system is rigged against you. The battle of consumers against the airlines is over. And the airlines have won.
There are industries that hate their customers more than the airlines ***cough*** cable companies ***cough***, but this is a veritable rogues gallery of evil that they have joined.
It turns out that Lockheed-Martin and the Pentagon are adding insult to injury, and requiring that F-35 customers fund software upgrade laboratories, because these will be the only entities capable of maintaining the aircraft.
So in addition to everything else, the JSF will be a “forever” source of revenue for LM, while ensuring that foreign operators will never develop expertise necessary to be a competitor: (Paid subscription required):
Foreign air forces using the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter are being compelled to build and fund $150 million software laboratories, based in the U.S. and almost 50% staffed by U.S. personnel, that generate data crucial to the fighter’s ability to identify new radio-frequency threats. This regime is more stringent and far-reaching than earlier U.S. fighter export deals. Those usually withheld key software — known as source code — from the customer, but in most cases allowed local users to manage their own “threat libraries,” data that allowed the electronic warfare (EW) system to identify radio-frequency threats, with in-country, locally staffed facilities. For the U.K. in particular, the reliance on U.S.-located laboratories looks like a pullback from its earlier position. In 2006, concern over access to JSF technology reached the national leadership level, and prompted a declaration, by U.S. President George W. Bush and U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, that “both governments agree that the U.K. will have the ability to successfully operate, upgrade, employ, and maintain the JSF such that the U.K. retains operational sovereignty over the aircraft.” That promise seemingly contrasts with the severe limits now being imposed on non-U.S. access to the system. ……… Another source close to the U.K. user community notes that Lockheed Martin has advertised the capability of the “fusion engine” — the software that combines inputs from different sensors and datalinks — to identify targets and implement rules of engagement automatically. But if the logic of the fusion engine itself is not understood at the U.K.’s operational level, he says, “You can imagine that this slaughters our legal stance on a clear, unambiguous and sovereign kill chain.” The restrictions are also likely to be cumbersome. By contrast, “Swedish air force Gripens are often updated between sorties,” a Saab spokesman says. Signals intercepted and recorded by the fighter’s EW system on one sortie can be analyzed and the system updated in hours.
If this sounds like incompetence, it’s because you do not understand the goal of the program.
The goal is maintaining and extending US hegemony in the weapons market, so that they have money for overpaying retired generals as “consultants”.
The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), the UK body that hears complaints about intelligence agencies, has ruled that the communications of MPs and peers are not protected by the Wilson Doctrine, which was thought to exempt them from surveillance by GCHQ and other intelligence agencies. Back in July, the UK government had already admitted that the Wilson Doctrine “cannot work sensibly” when mass surveillance is taking place, but today’s decision goes further by explicitly rejecting the idea of any formal immunity from spying. As The Guardian explains: “The [Wilson] convention is named after former prime minister Harold Wilson, who pledged in 1966 that MPs’ and peers’ phones would not be tapped. In December 1997, the then prime minister Tony Blair said the doctrine extended to electronic communication, including emails.” In its judgment, the IPT wrote: “We are satisfied that the Wilson Doctrine is not enforceable in English law by the Claimants or other MPs or peers by way of legitimate expectation.” The IPT agreed it was “a political statement in a political context, encompassing the ambiguity that is sometimes to be found in political statements.” ……… One of the two Green party politicians who had brought the complaint to the IPT, MP Caroline Lucas, said after the ruling: “This judgement is a body blow for parliamentary democracy. My constituents have a right to know that their communications with me aren’t subject to blanket surveillance—yet this ruling suggests that they have no such protection. Parliamentarians must be a trusted source for whistleblowers and those wishing to challenge the actions of the Government.” She went on to call for new legislation providing protection to MPs, peers, Members of the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly Members, and MEPs from extra-judicial spying.
This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.
The background:
THE integrity of research and expert opinions in Washington came into question last week, prompting the resignation of Robert Litan, an economist, from his position as a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution. Senator Elizabeth Warren raised the issue of a conflict of interest in Mr. Litan’s testimony before a Senate committee examining a proposed Labor Department rule designed to protect consumers in their dealing with retirement-plan brokers. The testimony was based on a paper Mr. Litan had prepared for the Capital Group, a mutual fund company. Mr. Litan disclosed that the Capital Group, which has a stake in the debate, had funded his paper, but he did not disclose that it had also commissioned it. Mr. Litan concluded that the regulatory rule, while well intentioned, would be too costly. He resigned because he testified as a Brookings fellow, violating a recent Brookings rule change that would have prohibited that. Senator Warren was herself criticized by economists and pundits, on the left and right. Hal Singer, a fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute and a co-author of the research she criticized, said, “This is McCarthyism of the left.” But at stake is the integrity of the research process and the trust the nation puts in experts, who advise governments and testify in Congress. Our opinions shape government policy and judicial decisions. Even when we are paid to testify as expert witnesses, integrity is expected from us. After all, our payment is not contingent on the kind of opinion we provide. In fact, this was Mr. Litan’s defense. The Capital Group hired him to write a paper on the topic, but it did not dictate the conclusions. (Mr. Litan did get feedback from the Capital Group on his paper’s initial outline, as he told Senator Warren in response to follow-up questions after his testimony, and “some editorial comments.”) Yet it is disingenuous for anybody (especially an economist) to believe that reputational incentives do not matter. Had the conclusions not pleased the Capital Group, it would probably have found a more compliant expert. And the reputation of not being “cooperative” would have haunted Mr. Litan’s career as a consultant. And Mr. Litan’s defense that people should judge the content of his work and not its funding is also invalid. This is O.K. for a peer-reviewed journal, but not for Congress. Lawmakers hold expert hearings because they lack the expertise to evaluate certain technical subjects. They rely on the integrity of the process. The assumption is that researchers will value their reputation of integrity more than their fee for any individual job. At some level this assumption is correct. Underlying this conclusion is not only an economic calculation (the compensation for lying once can hardly offset the revenues lost because of the reputational damage) but also a professional one: For most of us, academic prestige is more important than any amount of money.
As Alan Greenspan once noted, “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder’s equity—myself especially—are in a state of shocked disbelief.”
Or as Upton Sinclair stated more succinctly, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
As I say, “Do you want some cheese with that whine?”
BTW, if you are not aware, the Progressive Policy Institute, the home of Hal Singer, who was co-author, and hence co-employee of The Capital Group, isn’t in the least progressive. It’s a vestige of the now shuttered Democratic Leadership Council, which spent its existence worshiping at the alter of Ronald Reagan, so they spend most of their time attacking progressives.
BTW, Charlie Pierce notes quite accurately that the problem here is note “McCarthyism”, but rather that the think tank scene in DC is a particularly egregious form of pay-to play. (the PPP is even more heinous in this regard than Brookings)
It now appears that Obama is replacing a man dedicated to a corporate for profit takeover of education with a man who actually ran schools on based on that all of the least savory aspects of blueprint.
In particular, it appears that he is a big fan of expulsions and suspensions to get low scoring children out of his charter schools.
If you read the news reports following the announcement of John King as our new Secretary of Education, you’d think he had run some of the most successful schools in the country. Here, for example, is Vox:
1) He’s the founder of a successful charter school chain Unlike Duncan, King has been a classroom teacher: He taught for three years, two of them in a charter school, after getting his master’s degree in teaching from Columbia University. In 1999, he became co-director of Roxbury Prep, a Boston charter school renowned for getting high test scores despite serving an exclusively low-income black and Latino student body. King, the New York Times wrote in 2011, was instrumental in designing the charter school’s curriculum and disciplinary structure — including required school uniforms and rules against talking in the hallways. [emphasis mine]
John King, hand-picked by President Obama to lead our nation’s schools, took the lead in designing Roxbury Prep’s discipline policies. How has that played out?
These are the latest out-of-school suspension rates for school districts in the Boston area, from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.* Roxbury Prep not only has the second highest suspension rate in greater Boston; it’s the second largest in the state. The only school with a higher suspension rate is City On Hill; guess who used to teach there (p.12)? This isn’t at all a surprise; as the Boston Globe reported in 2014, Roxbury Prep had previously held the top spot with a suspension rate in 2012-13 of nearly 60 percent. Later on, Roxbury moved under the umbrella of Uncommon Schools, a charter management organization with schools in New York and New Jersey as well as Massachusetts. John King, consequently, rose to become Managing Director for the entire Uncommon chain. Soon, the high suspension rates that were a hallmark of Roxbury Prep became common in all of Uncommon’s schools. In Brooklyn, for example, Uncommon runs several charters; here are their relative suspension rates, as reported by the NY State Education Department: ……… High suspension rates are not good for students. You know who says so? The very USDOE John King is now going to lead: ……… Recently, King defended the “no excuses” discipline found in Uncommon Schools to noted education scholar Pedro Noguera:
I’m not against charter schools, let me be clear, I’m in favor of any good school that’s good for kids. But some of the charter schools that are being held up as a model believe that their goal is to regiment, to completely control their students. To control how they sit, control their eye contact, control their movements in the hallway. Many of them have silence in the hallway and no talking in the lunch room. John King, the new commissioner of education of New York state, is held up as a real reformer because he founded a very successful charter school in Boston called Roxbury Prep and went on to found a network the called Uncommon Schools. And I would say that academically this school is far out-performing many public schools that are serving the same population of kids. So I would acknowledge that they are doing a much better job. I would also acknowledge that the model they use does not appeal to me. I’ve visited this school, and I noticed that children are not allowed to talk in the hall, and they get punished for the most minor infraction. And when I talked with John King afterwards, I said, “I’ve never seen a school that serves affluent children where they’re not allowed to talk in the hall.” And he said, “Well, that might be true, but this is the model that works for us, we’ve found that this is the model that our kids need.”
So I asked him, “Are you preparing these kids to be leaders or followers? Because leaders get to talk in the hall. They get to talk over lunch, they get to go to the bathroom, and people can trust them. They don’t need surveillance and police officers in the bathroom.” And he looked at me like I was talking Latin, because his mindset is that these children couldn’t do that. [emphasis mine]
Apparently, John King believes that schools can and should have high suspension rates — in contradiction to the stated policies of the department he will now lead. From what I read, King will not be officially nominated, serving as the “acting” secretary for the remainder of Obama’s term. That’s a damn shame. I would have dearly loved to have had a senator bring all this up. I would have loved to hear King explain whether he supports current USDOE policy on suspensions and, if so, how he can align that with his own career history as a school leader.
One of the commenters on this post explains the real dynamics here:
Of course the suspension rates are high: one reason the favored charter chains (KIPP, Success Academies, Uncommon schools, et.al.) receive the subsidies and media promotion they do is because they insist on their schools being a cross between prison, boot camp and a behavior-modification Skinner Box for Those Children.
You know Those Children, don’t you? They are ones who must be conditioned and trained, rather than educated (notwithstanding all the false, insipid talk about “scholars”), the ones society has seen as dangerous since they were toddlers, and which these schools are determined to neuter, emotionally and culturally, before trying to re-make them as passive, unquestioning vessels of future labor productivity.
Needless to say, Those Children are subjected to authoritarian, repressive school environments that King and his ilk would never in a million years subject their own children to, as seen when it was revealed that he sent his own young children to a Montessori school that doesn’t use Common Core (though, naturally, he lied about that).
On a more practical basis, high suspension rates are a way for the schools to grease the skids for removing Those Children who might undermine their precious test scores, thereby threatening the false “miracle school” narratives they peddle.
Sen. Charles Grassley is demanding more information about the American Red Cross and its “apparent unwillingness to fully cooperate” with a government investigation into its disaster relief work. Grassley asked the head of the Government Accountability Office for a list of material the Red Cross refused to provide to investigators, as well as the names of officials who didn’t cooperate and any communications in which the charity explained why it was not cooperating. “The lack of transparency is cause for concern as the Red Cross is a federal instrumentality created by Congressional charter and receives millions of dollars every year from donors across the country,” Grassley, an Iowa Republican, wrote in a letter today to the head of the GAO. The GAO report, released earlier this month, explored the Red Cross’ government mandated role in responding to disasters. It found that there is no regular oversight of the Red Cross despite a string of flawed disaster responses. It also recommended Congress find a way to fill that gap. ……… The head of the GAO inquiry said earlier this month that the Red Cross had not given “unfettered access” but that investigators were able to get the information they needed “to sufficiently answer our research questions.”
Seeing as how the American Red Cross seems to have a long history of inefficiency in the execution of large scale disaster aid, as well as bait and switch in their fund raising,* there seems to be some justification in heightened oversight, particularly given their federal charter.
This sort of crap has been going on since the late 1980s, when Red Cross refusal to properly test their blood products killed a significant portion of the US hemophiliacs.
So now we know: One of the principal reasons Republicans spent so much public money investigating the tragic Benghazi episode was to bring down Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers. Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the likely successor to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), told Fox News’s Sean Hannity explicitly on Tuesday night that the Clinton investigation was part of a “strategy to fight and win.” He explained: “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought.” The Republican-led House hasn’t been particularly good at governing, but perhaps governing has never been the point. Why govern when there’s a future election to influence?
That the Benghazi investigation is a crock of sh%$ is not a surprise.
That a Republican party leader basically admitted that it was all a politically motivated freak show on a public program is a bit of a surprise.
