Cash Money Missionaries, originally uploaded by The Infamous Gdub.

I have nothing to post at this moment, but this is the flickr found photograph of the century. This is the real caption. Cash money missionaries.

As we all know now, once the Bush administration they immediately got to work on winning more elections, getting their buddies rich and attacking Iraq. Of course, these were all a lot of work so they forgot to do one thing: govern.

As witnessed by the fact that the handling of Hurricane Katrina was so incompetent it would be funny if it wasn’t tragic. A new story in the Washington Post reports that the hundreds of millions offered in aid by foreign governments was either left on used or wasted. Some choice excerpts after the jump: Read the rest of this entry »

…because they’ll get into one of the other hundred or so elite schools that will almost guarantee them an education sufficient to maintain their class standing, and reinforce economic inequality in America. 

This NYT op-ed piece, Young, Gifted, and Not Getting Into Harvard, appears to make a progressive point, with its argument that rich parents shouldn’t worry so much about their kids getting into the most selective elite schools, and that rather than pressuring them into that mold, they should appreciate their uniqueness (let them be rebellious and go surfing) and accept that they’ll at least go to a good state school.   

However, this article, and the liberal left generally, obscures the fact of economic inequality in America and the obstacles to equality of opportunity for education that could allow poor people to break out of their poverty through hard work and ability.  One of the biggest examples of such obstacles is that real estate taxes go to the school district in which they are paid rather than being redistributed equally across the country.  Another example is opposition to inheritance taxes.   Also, private schools and tutors.  These all give advantages to the rich in educating their kids from an earlier age and preparing them to get into good colleges.  The reason that the rich are so much more heavily represented in good colleges is not that the poor can’t afford it, but that the poor have not had the preparation to get good enough grades and SAT scores to get accepted.   I am getting this argument from Walter Benn Michaels’s well-argued book, The Trouble with Diversity: How we Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality.  He cites many statistics to make this point, such as that average SAT scores rise in tandem with average family income (98).  Also, see UCLA’s Higher Education Institute’s report, “The American Freshman - Forty Year Trends”: today’s college freshman have family income 60% above the national average. 

 Articles like this op-ed provide legitimation for rich kids who go to good schools to believe that they got there on the merit of their own abilities and hard work rather than thanks to their parents money.  The left needs to stop subscribing to such self-delusional, self-congratulatory stories.  Face it: the educational system in America is rigged.  Rather than getting caught up in discussions about the relative prestige of different relatively elite colleges and elite lifestyles, we should instead critically discuss and politically challenge the institutions that reinforce inequality between rich and poor.  Economic inequality is THE fundamental problem in America.  All other problems stem from it (crime, low political participation, addiction, domestic abuse, etc.).

You bought it.

As Borat says, “we support your Global War of Terror.” The stats are looking good: a State Department report to be released this week will show a 29% rise in terrorism attacks over last year, principally thanks to the great job the American military has done of feeding terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq (link from Juan Cole)…

Based on data compiled by the U.S. intelligence community’s National Counterterrorism Center, the report says there were 14,338 terrorist attacks last year, up 29 percent from 11,111 attacks in 2005.

Forty-five percent of the attacks were in Iraq.

Worldwide, there were about 5,800 terrorist attacks that resulted in at least one fatality, also up from 2005.

The figures for Iraq and elsewhere are limited to attacks on noncombatants and don’t include strikes against U.S. troops.

Sorry about the light posting lately, I have a deadline at work that has occupied a lot of time. Rest assured, I will make that deadline and help improve the interwebs.

Are you sick of hearing tales of the so-called ‘liberal bias’ in universities? Well, next time you see someone say this on a blog or wherever, ask them what study they are using as the basis of their claim. If they cite one of the eight most popular studies (e.g., by David Horowitz, the ACTA, and others) that supposedly prove ‘liberal bias’ in the academy, then you now have an easy way to refute them: tell them that these studies do not meet minimum research standards, and thus their results are invalid. To back up your rebuttal, refer to the thorough and convincing critique by John Lee, “The ‘Faculty Bias’ Studies: Science or Propaganda,” which you can find at Free Exchange on Campus and which was funded by the American Federation of Teachers, one of the staunchest defenders of the democratic ideals of education.

“Low price at any cost!” Do we want a government that replicates Wal-Mart’s model of catering to consumers and capital without concern for the negative externalities absorbed by workers, the environment, and other public goods?

From NYT story today -

OSHA Leaves Worker Safety in Hands of Industry
WASHINGTON, April 24 — Seven years ago, a Missouri doctor discovered a troubling pattern at a microwave popcorn plant in the town of Jasper. After an additive was modified to produce a more buttery taste, nine workers came down with a rare, life-threatening disease that was ravaging their lungs.

Puzzled Missouri health authorities turned to two federal agencies in Washington. Scientists at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which investigates the causes of workplace health problems, moved quickly to examine patients, inspect factories and run tests. Within months, they concluded that the workers became ill after exposure to diacetyl, a food-flavoring agent.

But the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, charged with overseeing workplace safety, reacted with far less urgency. It did not step up plant inspections or mandate safety standards for businesses, even as more workers became ill.

On Tuesday, the top official at the agency told lawmakers at a Congressional hearing that it would prepare a safety bulletin and plan to inspect a few dozen of the thousands of food plants that use the additive.

That response reflects OSHA’s practices under the Bush administration, which vowed to limit new rules and roll back what it considered cumbersome regulations that imposed unnecessary costs on businesses and consumers. Across Washington, political appointees — often former officials of the industries they now oversee — have eased regulations or weakened enforcement of rules on issues like driving hours for truckers, logging in forests and corporate mergers.

Since George W. Bush became president, OSHA has issued the fewest significant standards in its history, public health experts say. It has imposed only one major safety rule. The only significant health standard it issued was ordered by a federal court.

… (read the rest of the story here)

And a similar case of a government agency failing to perform its duty to the public: the department of education… see this NYT story: Cuomo Says U.S. Is Lax on Student Lenders.

The problem with the Bush administration’s corruption of these agencies seems easy to articulate. If Bush’s OSHA panders to businesses and consumers, they are abandoning the principles on which OSHA was founded: to serve the public good by protecting worker’s health. Likewise for other regulatory agencies, like the EPA: their corruption to serve industry is an abandonment of their mission to serve the public good by protecting the environment. None of these agencies should be guided by principles of serving businesses or consumers. Those are corporate and private interests, not public interests. There are other organizations and associations that already represent their interests, such as consumer advocacy groups and industry associations. The point of public deliberation in a liberal democracy is that each of these groups and organizations should be able to express and argue for their positions. If we actually had a critical public sphere (rather than the manufactured publicity of most mass media), then these arguments would be able to be adjudicated in public on the basis of careful reflection on reasons supported by empirical evidence. When the agencies that are supposed to articulate reasons in favor of protecting workers’ health, the environment, and other public goods, abandon that job and instead become mouthpieces for other, private interests, then they have lost their legitimacy, and hence they have lost the public’s trust in them, and hence the public has a right to revolt and overthrow the part of the government in charge of them. Hence, we should impeach Bush. (cf. Locke, Rousseau)

With democrats in charge we are starting to get new coverage of some of the rather egregious lies to come out of this war.

Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch. People who I think really are admirable people who were lionized with lies to sell the public on the war. I think Jessica Lynch is even more of a hero for coming out and telling the truth. She could have gone with the flow, pretended the story was true and gone on a right wing speaking tour. But she decided to tell the truth instead.

via tbogg.

CNN today has been hammering the story of the Blue Angels today. It would seem a Blue Angles jet crashed on Saturday, killing the pilot. Now it is a tragic accident and I am sure very said for those who knew the pilot. According to the Department of Defense six American service people died on active duty in Iraq on Saturday alone. Why is CNN doing the Blue Angels full on scattered with a dash of Virginia Tech? Because it makes good tv. It’s new and interesting. Read the rest of this entry »