Some restraunteurs seem to have managed to have a long gripe session printed in the chronicle.

Evidently it is very hard to hire cooks in SF due to a lot of demand for a small pool of workers, and the fact that cooks have the audacity to demand to make more than $12 an hour. Then they complain that the fact that they have to pay waiters minimum wage is taking to much money from their payroll. Simple solution, pay waiters more money, don’t accept tips. Raise your prices to cover the difference and pay out the difference. If you have to raise prices at your restaurant, raise them and pay you workers are real wage. Everyone benefits. Eating at expensive restaurants is supposed to be expensive. If you can’t hire good workers you need to pay more. Simple as that.

See this FoxNews story.. Also, this KARE11 story. These stories each excerpt from a longer statement that was read by polisci grad student, Isaac Kamola. Here’s an earlier draft (written by the umn student strike solidarity group):

We, the students, are here today to express our frustration at the inaccessibility of the administration at our University. We are here to say “no” to the silence and exclusion from the decision making process that affects our whole university community.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is a good start: Governor Commutes Sentence in Texas. But still, it’s embarrassing that the US is right up there with China, Saudia Arabia, and Iran, which collectively account for 94% of all state-sanctioned executions of their own citizens. Why do we prefer punishment over rehabilitation? According to some studies cited in Wikipedia, sending people to prison actually increases their risk of offending, while rehabilitation is the only effective way of reducing repeat offenses. I think that one reason the US government prefers punishment is because punishment helps keep the powerful in their places by keeping the poor politically disenfranchised (they can’t vote when their in jail) and by scapegoating the poor for the problems in this society. If we instead invested the resources into rehabilitating so-called “criminals,” we would have to confront the high costs of rehabilitation, which would then lead us to question whether it might be cheaper to address the deeper problems that condition poor individuals to adopt criminal behaviors, such as educational and economic inequality (poverty and poor education correlate very strongly with likelihood of criminal behavior). But again, such investigations would lead to a critique of the capitalist and anti-democratic institutions that keep the rich and privileged in power. It’s a vicious cycle that we can only pull out of by persistently and collectively criticizing and organizing against capitalists and their lifestyles of excess.

Today’s story, Elite Colleges Open New Door to Low-Income Youths, seems to have its heart in the right place. It’s an uplifting story about an African-American kid from a poor family in Miami who got a full scholarship to Amherst, and did well there, eventally being nominated for the Rhodes scholarship. With his 1200 SAT score, he would not have been admitted had it not been for Amherst’s new policy of taking into account economic background in admissions decisions.

Although these programs of affirmative action on the basis of economic class are a step in the right direction, I think that they do more to reinforce an ideology of meritocracy than to address the deeper problems of economic inequality. Read the rest of this entry »

At least 27 colleges have challenged the US News college rankings reports by refusing to fill out their surveys. I know that Reed had done this awhile ago, and maybe a few others had, but now it seems like a movement is underway. According to an InsideHigherEd article, two weeks ago, 12 college presidents called for their colleagues to stop filling out the institutional reputation part of the survey. Then a few days ago, 15 more colleges, particularly some historically black colleges, decided to do the same, arguing that the rankings have been inherently unfair to them. Read the rest of this entry »