It’s only right that we should take note of the fact that Joe Courtney voted with the good guys on the recent NSA vote. Congrats to Lon Seidman too, who keeps Joe educated on these issues.
We should also take note of the fact that the vote went down to defeat because“liberals” like Pelosi were more worried about embarrassing a President who is clearly doing the wrong thing, than they were about doing the right thing themselves.
A friend sent me this graphic. Each differently colored area represents a land mass in the United States with a population equivalent to that of California. In some instances, the same number of people have thirty senators to California’s two.
Now, I realize this is the result of the much vaunted and praised “Connecticut Compromise”, allegedly proposed by our very own Roger Sherman. However, I question whether the infallible Founders ever foresaw just how lopsided the Senate would become. In his better days Madison actually toyed with the idea of getting rid of them altogether.
In any event, this map shows why the racist, “religious” (hate for Jesus) and “libertarian” (free stuff for me, but not for thee) mentality has such power in Congress, despite the fact that the adherents to these philosophies represent an ever decreasing proportion of the country. While it is true that each of us Connecticut residents is worth more than one Californian (and who can argue with that), the real advantage goes to the slack jawed yokels.
Additional thought: This reminds me of the rotten boroughs that once rendered the House of Commons as unrepresentative as our modern Senate. One advantage of having an unwritten Constitution is that it’s easier to deal with anomalies like this. Our Constitution, having long since become holy writ, will never be amended to deal with our rotten Senate, because the method we use to amend the Constitution gives veto power to …guess who: the same states that benefit from the current imbalance.
So, I just learned Mick Jagger turned 70 today, so I really must reprise the greatest Rock n’ Roll song ever.
So, this week I'll be combining my "good news" feature with some appropriate music, killing two birds with one stone, if you will.
First, for the good news, how about this, the development of a new, more improved method of harvesting the sun's energy:
Solar panels are becoming passé. Why put solar panels on top of building construction materials when you could just tap the power of the sun directly through the construction materials themselves?
Bloomberg reports on the rapid growth in building-integrated photovoltaics, or BIPV. These are solar power–harvesting cells that are incorporated into the walls, roofs, and windows of buildings — integrated seamlessly instead of being bolted onto a finished building as an apparent afterthought.
So, that's good, and it would be churlish of me, and totally in character, to wonder if the powers that be will find a way to make sure that it will be a very hot day in December (coming soon to a location near you) before these products are widely used.
And this is good too. I wrote before about a woman named Leslie Cohen Berlowitz, who ran the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Ms Berlowitz ran into trouble not because the treated her underlings like dirt (which she did) but because she faked her Ph.D. The Boston Globe found her out, and we now have the good news that she's resigned. No doubt the staff is celebrating today, so we can celebrate with them. A source who should know tells me that while she's been out on leave (paid, of course) the formerly traumatized staff members have begun to do things like talk to each other. Okay, the cloud within this silver lining is that she's walking out with almost half a million dollars of benefits after having been overpaid for years, but still, let's look on the bright side, shall we?
Finally, for your musical edification, a song which tells us all to "smile". This song is apparently based on music that was played in the Chaplin movie Modern Times, so a lot of the youtube videos feature images of Charlie, along with this great rendition by Nat King Cole:
Good advice, but the music seems to be working at cross purposes to the lyrics, doesn't it? Still, a great song and fully in keeping with this feature's mission of finding some good out there at least once a week. I couldn’t, by the way, find a good version of this song with an actual video of the artist; not even Elvis’s (Costello, that is) version.
I got an email recently from my esteemed Congressman defending (or at least I saw it that way) his vote on the recent Student Loan bill. First, let me say that I know Joe has worked hard on this, and I’m sure he’s disappointed with the final “bi-partisan” (fear that word) product. He voted for it, as I read the email, with the expectation that it will be fixed down the road, but that’s very unlikely, for the simple reason that bad things rarely get fixed in this country; certainly not as often as good things get destroyed. This is especially true now, when we have a Republican controlled (both end of the Capitol, when it comes down to it) Congress, and a president who, on many issues, is more Republican than Democrat. Bear in mind that this travesty of a bill was backed wholeheartedly by Obama, and, not coincidentally, it’s a big give back to Wall Street and the banks, who were temporarily discomfited by the real student loan reform we got a few years ago.
Fact is, in order for this, as well as many of the other horrendous bi-partisan bills to which we’ve been subjected, to be reversed, we, at a minimum must get a Democratic House and filibuster reform in the Senate. But the Democrats are striving mightily to blur the distinctions between the parties; the student loan sell out being a good example. You and I may know there’s still a real difference, but the Democrats have done nothing to persuade the low attention voter who keeps hearing that they’re all the same, and sees precious little to persuade him that’s not true.
Better, it seems to me, to go down fighting, as has Elizabeth Warren, then agree to give today’s students a break while guaranteeing tomorrow’s will be screwed. The government stands to make big money off the backs of tomorrow’s students and their parents should this bill remain in force (and it will).
Read the linked (Student loans tied to market rates while Wall Street Banks have a fixed 6% return from the government for the past century), for a contrast, which of course involves banks.
So, I think Joe made a mistake. The chances of this bill being repealed or reformed in the near future are probably nil. These folks want us to believe we can’t perform highly skilled jobs, and then do their best to prevent us from getting the education we need to do them. To the Republicans this is a virtue; for Democrats it’s just collateral damage due do a gridlocked Congress. But, it’s funny, when a Wall Street friendly guy or gal gets appointed to a government position, all that obstruction disappears and before you can blink the vote is taken and the flunky gets through.
Much has been written about the fact, as reported by the Times, that the banks, not being satisfied with using our money to gamble, are now using it to corner the market in metals, enabled as always by a compliant Fed and Congress. Read the Times article for the details, if you haven’t already. It’s almost comical if it wasn’t so tragic; they have to shift the metal from warehouse to warehouse in order to keep the market cornered. (So, for once, they’re creating jobs, for the guys that shift the metal from place to place) There’s comment here and here, and others scattered around the web, but I want to simply ask a question that I don’t think has been asked elsewhere. Consider this, particularly the stuff in bold face:
Before Goldman bought Metro International three years ago, warehouse customers used to wait an average of six weeks for their purchases to be located, retrieved by forklift and delivered to factories. But now that Goldman owns the company, the wait has grown more than 20-fold — to more than 16 months, according to industry records.
Longer waits might be written off as an aggravation, but they also make aluminum more expensive nearly everywhere in the country because of the arcane formula used to determine the cost of the metal on the spot market. The delays are so acute that Coca-Cola and many other manufacturers avoid buying aluminum stored here. Nonetheless, they still pay the higher price.
(via A Shuffle of Aluminum, but to Banks, Pure Gold – NYTimes.com)
So my question is, as the title suggests: Don’t Coca-Cola, Pepsi, the Auto Companies, or the various corporations that still make real things out of aluminum own any Senators? Is class solidarity so strong among the captains of industry that they prefer to get hosed by the banks to turning on the bankers? Can they really pass on the increased costs to their customers without losing sales, given the ever increasing poverty of the masses? Or, do the prefer to absorb the loss rather than put pressure on Congress to give them some relief. Where are the armies of lobbyists seeking to stop this highway robbery?
This weird disconnect between what would appear to be the enlightened self interests of corporations and what they actually do is not confined to their response to rent seeking bankers. It seems that corporations are peculiarly reluctant to advocate for their own self interest when that interest happens to coincide with the interests of the other kind of people; the ones that get born instead of formed at the Secretary of State’s office. Most of our corporations, (think GM, for example) would benefit from a single payer health care system that would relieve them of the cost and obligation of providing health care to their employees. Those costs almost bankrupted GM. But do they ever advocate for a sane health care system that would save them gobs of money? Answer: No. On the other hand, as soon as someone proposes any regulation that might make the air a bit cleaner, or the climate a bit healthier, they’re out in force to stop it, though the financial impact on them is as nothing compared to health care costs.
Personally, I think it gets back to what I’ve often said is the guiding principal of the corporate mind: It is not enough that they succeed, everyone else must fail.
As promised in the previous post, I’ve gone looking for happy songs. I’ve found a bunch. Take your pick, or watch them all. First up, Sir Paul (the Beatles version not being available on video) singing Good Day, Sunshine.
Willie Nelson, singing’ about Blue Skies:
Dick van Dyke, lip syncing in the movie version of Bye Bye Birdie.
Bing. If I’m not mistaken this song has the same message as Monty Python’s Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.
The guy sure had a great voice.
So, as promised, today’s blogging will all be about good things. My picks might be quirky, and you might argue that they don’t qualify as news in some cases, but this is my blog and I get to set the rules.
Anyway, first up is good news of the heartwarming variety, which you will have missed unless you subscribe to the Boston Globe. It seems a Korean War vet is going to North Korea to search for the remains of a friend who he tried without success the save. He got the Medal of Honor; his friend was a black man who had to fight for the chance to die for his country.
WASHINGTON — In the decades since returning home to Massachusetts from the Korean War, Thomas J. Hudner Jr. has been haunted by what he left behind.
The former fighter pilot risked his life, and earned the nation’s highest medal for valor, by crash-landing his own plane and attempting to save his downed wing man, Jesse L. Brown. But he was unable to pull Brown from the burning wreckage before Chinese troops closed in.
Now, 60 years after the war, Hudner, frail at 88 but determined as ever, is making one final attempt to give his friend a long overdue homecoming, setting out to find Brown’s remains and bring them home.
It is the final chapter in a saga that is about not only loyalty, but about race. Hudner is white, and Brown was African-American.
Their story is credited with advancing equality in the military, which had been integrated just two years earlier. Hudner’s efforts to save Brown helped put to rest lingering doubts that whites would risk it all for their black comrades in the heat of battle.
Hudner is set to arrive Friday in North Korea to examine the purported wreckage of the F-4U Corsair in the rugged mountains where Brown, the Navy’s first African-American aviator, is believed to have died.
It will be an unprecedented expedition, stage-managed by the notoriously propagandist Communist regime. Hudner, who deliberately crash-landed in the snow after seeing Brown waving through billowing smoke, “has regretted the fact that Jesse Brown was never recovered,” according to an overview of the mission shared with the Globe: “He dreams about traveling to the Democratic Republic of Korea and visiting the wreckage of Brown’s Corsair, to pay his respects to his fallen comrade and search for any trace of his remains.”
For Brown’s widow and childhood sweetheart, Daisy Brown Thorne, 86, the news of the expedition came as a shock before the stirring implications, after these many years, sunk in.
“At first I don’t know what my reaction was,” she said in a phone interview from her home in Hattiesburg, Miss. “Then I was really happy that he wanted to go and happy that he is going to get a chance to go back. Whatever the success is, it will bring some closure.”
(via The Boston Globe)
Who cares if the Koreans make propaganda hay out of it. In the days of Trayvon Martin and Fox News racism, a story like this can’t help make you feel good.
Now, for something completely different. I’ve often noted that there’s a bit of a double standard in this country. The right and the South, their politicians included, are allowed to mock us Northerners and liberals endlessly, but its taboo for us to respond in kind, and point out, for instance, that they are a bunch of slack jawed uneducated racist cretins that live off the dole while lecturing us on self sufficiency. It is, of course, asking too much of our own politicians to stick up for us. Well, enter Lewis Black. Odds are, you’ve seen this, but if not, definitely watch it. It’s funny and feel good at the same time. I mean I hate the Yankees and all; it’s my duty as a Red Sox fan, but I love New York and I love the fact that the people in our biggest city have by and large developed a culture of tolerance that’s an example for the world.
So, that’s it. Edition One of what I hope will be a weekly series of no-downer CTBlue posts. I hope you enjoyed that. I’m trying to figure out something to go along with it for music tonight. Back to doom and gloom tomorrow.
I’m informed by a regular reader (yes, I have some) that this blog is too depressing lately, a charge to which I plead guilty. There are many reasons for this, chief among them being the fact that it looks like this time we really are on the Eve of Destruction (you aging hippies know what I’m talking about). Anyway, that’s no excuse for non-stop doom and gloom, so, as my Good Friday videos always advise, I am going to look on the bright side of life. Well, not always, as the song suggests, but at least once a week, hopefully starting tomorrow. I will look on this as a challenge, much like the ever more difficult challenge of finding a fresh Friday night video by an artist or group that I have not yet featured, yet also know something about. If there’s anyone out there, please feel free to let me know if you stumble upon any good news for this new feature. Surely something good happens at least once a week, and I will henceforth do my best to root it out and do it justice.
I was only mildly surprised that this article appeared on the Washington monthly website. It’s a generally good site, but there is an establishment bent that can’t be denied. The article is by Robert D. Atkinson, President of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. One suspects an industry front group, but lets put that aside. Mr. Atkinson pleads for half loaf immigration reform if we can’t get the real thing, given the absolutely desperate need in this country for “high skill” immigrants:
Some, particularly Democrats, want to tie any movement on high-skill immigration reform to comprehensive immigration reform, recognizing that if a high-skill bill were to pass, the pressure to pass comprehensive reform would lessen. Unfortunately, we cannot afford to let more years pass without reforms that address the need for more high-skill immigrants, particularly in science and engineering. If comprehensive reform goes belly up, which hopefully it will not, Congress should at least pass a stand-alone bill that liberalizes and reforms high-skill immigration or we risk falling further behind our global competitors.
High-skilled immigration has played a vital role in U.S. innovation by making up for the deficits in our current education system in turning out more scientists and engineers. While STEM jobs play a key role in supporting U.S. economic vitality, the U.S. underperforms in STEM education. In 2006, the U.S. had 26 percent of the OECD’s K-12 students but just 14 percent of high-performing math students. Between 1997 and 2009, enrollment in the music theory Advanced Placement test grew by 362 percent, while enrollment in the Computer Science AB test grew just 12 percent. It’s so bad that three times as many students take the Art History AP test as the Computer Science test.
In fact, we appear to be well down the path John Quincy Adams predicted when he said, “I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.” The only problem is while art history might be personally satisfying it does nothing to make our economy innovative or competitive.
(via The Washington Monthly)
Actually, I believe it was John Adams himself that authored that quote, but put that aside. Oh, what the heck, in fact, I’m sure it was Adams, Sr., , but that’s my useless liberal arts background showing.
This is all a smokescreen to allow our high tech companies to pay low tech salaries to workers that come here under the H-1B program. The workers are exploited, and they replace American workers that, our overlords assure us, don’t want to, and can’t, do the jobs they must train their replacements to perform. I don’t know if his figures on our educational system are accurate, but the reasoning sure is specious. The mass of parents out there have not earned their bread through “mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture”. They have earned it, and lately been unable to earn it, by the sweat of their brows, and if their kids don’t study those subjects its because people like Atkinson would much rather deplore the state of the American educational system than do something about improving it, other than breaking unions and pushing the odd meme that we can improve our educational system by creating for-profit schools, paying rent seekers a bundle, and paying teachers even less. Of course, he has a solution for that, I’m sure, exploited H-1B teachers to replace the home grown variety.
