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Dubious Achievement Awards

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

If, like me, you make at least a daily pilgrimage to Daily Kos, you are aware that David Perdue, Republican candidate for Senate in Georgia, is having some problems. He's a businessman, you see, with the kind of background that we are told we need in our legislatures. He proudly specialized, according to his own sworn testimony and campaign statements, in sending American jobs overseas.

You may not be aware that there's a businessman running for governor of Massachusetts, and, like Perdue, he was a whiz at exporting American jobs. So much so, that he got an award for it:

It’s a photo Democrats might have only dreamed of laying their hands on. Republican Charlie Baker, the avowed jobs creator, receiving an “Outsourcing Excellence Award.” In a tuxedo.

But on Tuesday, Martha Coakley’s campaign circulated just such a photo, documenting the politically awkward award that Baker received in 2008 from the Outsourcing Center, an industry group, when he was chief executive of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care.

via The Boston Globe

Now, based on what I've read about both these guys, I think Perdue would have every right to resent the fact that Baker got this award, as Perdue seems to have been the far more productive outsourcer. But I'm not writing this to make the case for either of these guys. No, I'm writing to share my sense of wonder that anyone would think it was a good idea to give an award for exporting American jobs, and to share, as well, my astonishment that anyone would think it was a good idea to accept such an award. I mean, there are plenty of assholes in the world, but so far as I know, they don't get together every year and give one of their number an “Outstanding Asshole Award”. Baker's record should disqualify him from being governor, but the fact that he accepted that award is proof positive that he lacks the kind of judgment needed in a governor. It illustrates as well, how remarkably comfortable they are in showing their contempt for the people whose lives they are systematically ruining.

It's an unfortunate fact that like Perdue, Baker may win. In Baker's case it's because the Democrats saw fit to once again nominate Martha Coakley to high office. Coakley's incompetence as a campaigner will never be equaled. She is the person most responsible for inflicting Scott Brown on a defenseless nation. For that alone she should have been expelled from the party, but, she lived on to fight (and probably lose) another day.

Filed in Inequality, Republicans | | Comments (0)

Louisiana to Texas: We don’t want your garbage unless it’s radioactive

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Every once in a while I'm surprised at the reach of this humble blog. A few days ago I sounded the alarm about the need to keep Texans out of the country in order to protect us from the Ebola virus. Well, when I came upon this story I could only assume that the attorney general of Louisiana somehow stumbled on my efforts, embraced my reasoning, and decided to go me one better:

Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell has a plan to stop Ebola: File a restraining order. Caldwell, a Republican, called the proposal to dispose of Dallas Ebola victim Eric Duncan's incinerated belongings at a Lake Charles landfill “absurd” and pledged to use the legal process to stop the transfer. WBRZ Baton Rouge reports:

“We certainly share sadness and compassion for those who have lost their lives and loved ones to this terrible virus, but the health and safety of our Louisiana citizens is our top priority. There are too many unknowns at this point,” Caldwell said. The Louisiana Attorney General's Office is in the process of finalizing the application for temporary restraining order and expects it to be filed as early as Monday morning.

Additionally, the office is sending a demand letter to Texas state and federal officials, along with private contractors involved seeking additional information into the handling of this waste.

via Mother Jones

Some might say, indeed have said, that there is zero chance that this garbage could pose a threat to anyone in Louisiana. But I say that at this point anything emanating from Texas poses a threat. And, as the Louisiana AG says, the state of Louisiana feels that any public health risk to its citizens is not worth taking. Quite laudable really.

Now, you might wonder why Texas is sending its garbage to Louisiana in the first place. Well, it turns out that Louisiana has sort of marketed itself as the garbage dump of the nation, though I'm sure it takes pains to make sure that the garbage it imports poses zero threat to its citizens:

But Caldwell's stance is especially bizarre in light of the great lengths Louisiana lawmakers have gone to position the state as a repository for every other kind of waste. Fracking waste disposal, for instance, has become a $30 billion industry nationwide over the last decade. Much of that wastewater has been dumped into old wells in Louisiana. Louisiana may also soon begin accepting thousands of tons of other states' shale wastewater, which will be shipped down the Mississippi on barges. In Louisiana you can even store radioactive materials in an abandoned salt cavern, and then, after the salt cavern collapses, creating a massive sinkhole and forcing hundreds of people to permanently relocate, pour wastewater directly into the sinkhole. Just don't try to truck the ashes of an Ebola victim's belongings across the Sabine.

Those radicals at Mother Jones seem to think that Louisiana's being at least a mite inconsistent here, but I just don't see it that way. After all, there is no conclusive, 100% sure, ironclad evidence that sinkholes full of a mixture of radioactive waste and wastewater pose a threat to public safety, whereas everyone agrees that if you get Ebola you could die, and, besides, there is no conclusive, 100% sure, ironclad evidence that burning a person's effects to a crisp actually destoys the living Ebola causing organisms that might be in those effects. So it's perfectly obvious that there's no inconsistency here, at least going by the standards normally applied to Southern Republicans.

Filed in Crazies | | Comments (0)

Time to clamp down

Sunday, October 12, 2014

DALLAS — A Dallas nurse who treated the Liberian man before he died of the Ebola virus last week has tested positive for the disease, officials said Sunday.

Although the nurse was wearing protective gear, the director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Sunday that the latest report indicated a clear breach of safety protocol at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital.

Earlier the hospital did not recognize the Liberian man, Thomas Eric Duncan, 42, as a potential Ebola patient when he first sought treatment there. Mr. Duncan, the first person diagnosed with Ebola in the United States, died last Wednesday.

via The New York Times

Now, I'm not usually one to sound the alarm about immigration, but it's pretty clear from the above that it's past time when we should clamp down on unrestricted immigration from Texas. Right now, anyone who wants to enter this country from Texas can do so. There are literally no restrictions on flights from Texas into the United States, and anyone traveling by car can get in to the US without even going through customs.

This state of affairs could be tolerated when the only negative effect of letting in Texans was the resulting lowering of the average IQ here in the US. It hardly made a difference, considering that we still had Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and the rest of their Confederate brethren to contend with. But now that Texas has turned out to be ground zero for the North American Ebola outbreak and, as expected, they've proven themselves totally incompetent to deal with this situation, we real Americans have to take action to stop the steady infiltration of Texans into the United States.

We have to assume that anyone from Texas; anyone who thinks Jesus invented football; anyone who thinks Rick Perry is a fit public servant, is a potential carrier of the Ebola virus, in addition to being a certain carrier of the stupid virus. Already, Texans, any one of whom could already be infected, are creeping over the border and escaping into Oklahoma, which, God knows, can't afford to have its IQ diluted further. There have already been reports of abandoned cowboy hats discovered on the Texas-Oklahoma border. It's time that Obama took action against this growing threat. I'm not necessarily advocating putting all Texans into concentration camps until they've been shown to be Ebola free and capable of thinking rationally, but it's certainly something we should consider given this dire emergency.

I urge everyone out there to keep an eye out for illegal Texan immigrants and report them to the local authorities. They might look entirely normal, but you should be able to tell they're Texan after talking to them for just a few minutes. If they know the name of every player on their local high school football team there's a good chance they're Texan. Don't panic. Do avoid intimate contact. That should be easy, as you likely won't be tempted. Call the police. Keep them talking about football until the authorities arrive. Until Obama finallly gets his shit together and puts up a wall around the Texas border, it's up to us to contain this invasion.

Note: I have been advised that given the current state of discourse on the internet, I should point out that the above is intended as satire.

Filed in Issues | | Comments (0)

Last night I went to a debate

Thursday, October 9, 2014

Last night I attended the Ritter-Formica State Senate (CT -20th) debate. I find attending debates a frustrating experience, and this was no exception, for the reasons I'll get into. We were there (my wife and I), to support Betsy Ritter, a good friend, true progressive, and excellent legislator.

But I'm not here to talk about Betsy. This post is about Connecticut style Republicans, as exemplified by Paul Formica, Betsy's opponent.

Let me start with what should have been the lead (but goes unmentioned) in the article about the debate in the New London Day. Formica had no idea that there is a measure on the ballot this year to change our constitution to allow the legislature to implement early voting, easier absentee ballot access, etc. Right now, the constitution defines the criteria for absentee balloting and voting, and any changes require a constitutional amendment. It's a frankly ridiculous provision. The League of Women Voters asked each candidate for their views. Formica implicitly accused the audience of sharing his ignorance by suggesting that the League rep read the ballot question,allegedly for the benefit of the audience, but really for his. They did, but that still wasn't enough for him to understand what the question was about, or craft his usual “I think we should talk about that” answer. One would think his ignorance of this very important ballot question would give the New London Day's Editorial Director (Paul Choiniere) pause before giving Formica the Day's endorsement, but Formica has that endorsement in the bag. The Day will cite his business experience, (he runs a fish market) and tell us all that we need that valuable experience in the legislature, despite the fact that there is really no good evidence that business people do much in the legislature other than look after their own interests. After all, that's what they're taught to do.

But let's get to the Republican modus operandi, as practiced by Mr. Formica.

Connecticut is not a crazy state. See, contra, Texas, Alabama, Missisissippi, …oh, heck, pretty much all of the old Confederacy and a few other states thrown in. Flat out crazy does not sell here. Nonetheless, we have our share of crazies, be they gun nuts, “libertarians”, John Galt worshippers, religious cranks, or racists. Some of these people may be Democrats, but if so, no one has found one. The rest are Republicans, and though they are not a majority of the state by any means, they are rapidly becoming at least a plurality of Republicans in this state, as the non-crazies become more and more repelled at the monster that the national Republican Party has become. So, folks like Formica have a problem. Crazy doesn't sell, but if you go full bore sane you risk alienating the only remaining loyal Republicans. What's a not totally insane person to do?

The answer, at least the one adopted by Formica and many others, is to say nothing while implying you are for everything and also against everything. As with Schrödinger's cat, your true state is discovered only when the box is opened (if then). Formica's answer on the gun legislation was a classic example. (I can't quote verbatim, I can only give the gist). Betsy was quite clear that she supported the gun legislation as written, though she felt there might be some areas in which it can be strengthened to protect victims of domestic violence. Formica felt we should discuss possible alterations to the bill. The details? What details? He felt we shouldn't criminalize law abiding citizens, which is an oxymoron, of course. If a person breaks the law by possessing an illegal gun, they are not law abiding. But in the end, he gave not a hint what he would actually do if he were in office, other than saying that he was willing to talk about guns and everything else. In fact, it's fair to say that he did not give a single direct answer in the entire debate. Now, I must be truthful and say that there was one question that I thought Betsy danced around. It's something politicians do, but when it's all they do, you have to wonder.

One question that Formica evaded was particularly interesting, and particularly telling. It is a standard Republican talking point that the John Galts of the world are being stifled by excessive taxes, regulations, and other various governmental impediments that prevent them from delivering the capitalist nirvana and good life for all that would otherwise exist without the nefarious government. Choiniere actually used a question (see below) which asked for specific examples of government regulations that were stifling business. Now, given Formica's endless repetition of this Republican trope (a variant of it appeared in almost every one of his responses, you'd think this was a softball question. But no. Formica's response was to start to dance again, and then make the mistake of mentioning the newly enacted requirement for paid sick days as an example of government overreach. He said that he himself paid sick days to his employees, but it was something that was none of the government's business. So that's the best he could do on the question, and you could tell he realized he had put his foot in his mouth when he let that detail slip.

Let's take a little side trip, for this example exposes another fundamental problem with the Republican “philosophy”, quote marks used because it's hard to call something so incoherent a philosophy. To his credit, Formica pays his employees for sick days. Undoubtedly, most small business owners do (my law firm does, for example). It's hard for even a low level psychopath to look someone in the eye and tell them that they have to work sick or their kids will have to go hungry. But the folks at McDonald's don't look anyone in the eyes, and it appears to be easy for them and their Walmartian ilk to view human beings as expendable production units, whose dignity as human beings need not be considered or respected. It follows that it is Formica's “philosophy” that these psychopaths should have an economic advantage over people like him that treat their employees like human beings. It would never happen, considering the format of these debates, and Choiniere's question selection, but should't this be asked: why isn't it the role of the government to assure that every worker is treated with a certain level of respect and assured a decent days wages. In a nutshell, why shouldn't the government establish terms of employment below which the psychopaths cannot go?

The examples of incoherence abound. We heard in response to every question that taxes are too high and spending is out of control, yet we were never told precisely where this out of control spending is taking place. We were also told, in fuzzy generalities, that we need to have great schools, good health care, etc., but we were left to wonder how we were going to pay for these things after we cut taxes. Magical thinking abounds on the right.

When asked what he thought about non-profit hospitals turning into for-profits, Formica responded that he felt the market should decided these questions (before catching himself and reverting to generalities, but he didn't retract the magic of the market comment). We hear this a lot from Republicans. Yet, when it comes to cases, particularly when it comes to throwing money at corporations, the acts don't seem to be consistent with the words. After telling us that we should be at the mercy of a for-profit corporation when it comes to our health care (Our local hospital is clearly headed in that direction), he told us that one of his greatest accomplishment's as first selectman of East Lyme was his support of a Joe Courtney initiative to develop rail transportation to New London's harbor. (Sort of ironic coming from Joe's 2012 opponent) But, one must ask, if that rail transport is such a good thing, shouldn't the market have already taken care of it? Indeed, why support any government program that supports any business (as Formica surely does), for isn't the government getting in the way of the market's all knowing, always beneficent, invisible handian operation? In actuality, the Republican philosophy, as implicitly advanced by Formica, is this: The market should decide whenever the market's decision benefits our overlords, but when they want to put their snouts in the trough, by all means we should fill it with goodies.

I suggest that Formica is not unique; he is typical. Foley, for instance, is much the same. These folks run for office without giving us the slightest hint of what they intend to do when elected. Mostly because they know we wouldn't like it if they told us. That's why, in the case of people like Foley, it's so useful to catch them in unscripted moments when they let their guard down (usually in front of their fellow plutocrats) and give us an idea of what they really think, when they, for instance, start talking about “Wisconsin moment[s]”.

Now, a few word's about the New London Day. Paul Choiniere, head of the Editorial section of the Day, selected the questions from among written questions emailed to the Day, or submitted by the audience. But that was a total farce. Besides the obligatory gun question (the Day is ever anxious to appease its right wing detractors (they who cannot be appeased)) the selected questions all reflected the Day's obsessions, with the possible exception of the very first question, propounded only by Lawrence and Memorial Hospital, a self-serving question asking whether the candidates would commit to relieving hospitals of the hospital tax. I know that at least two people submitted questions about climate change, but those questions, along with any other question that did not involve “economic development” or taxes, went unasked. This is standard Day practice; it did the same thing at the recent debates involving the state representatives that represent the Groton area. Wait, I must correct myself, there was also a question about the common core. But the essential point stands; the Day's solicitation of questions is a farce. Your question will be asked so long as it is a question that Paul Choiniere would have asked anyway.

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Involuntary Servitude in the 21st Century

Saturday, October 4, 2014

You just know where this one is going:

After his 12-hour shifts at an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Jesse Busk says, he and 200 other workers typically waited in line for 25 minutes to undergo a security check to see whether they had stolen any goods.

Upset that the temp agency that employed him refused to pay workers for that time, Mr. Busk sued. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments about this hotly contested issue.

The nation’s retailers are paying close attention because such security checks are common. The Supreme Court is to determine whether the check and related waiting time were part of Mr. Busk’s regular, compensable workday or, as the temp agency argues, were time after his workday and not compensable.

via The New York Times

Poor Mr. Busk. He’s got no chance. For one thing, his lawyer shows signs of some sort of mental defect:

Mr. Busk’s lawyer, Mark R. Thierman, disagreed [with the employer’s position]. “The antitheft check is integral and indispensable because the company said you have to do it,” he said. “If the company tells you to do it, it doesn’t matter whether it’s related to what else you do on the job.”

Mr. Thierman said that if an employer ordered a worker to do something, that work should be compensable, whether or not it was integral and indispensable to primary work activities. He cited a 2005 Supreme Court case, IBP v. Alvarez, which said that if a company required its employees to arrive at a particular time to begin waiting, even if there was no work to be done at that time, the waiting time would be compensable and not just preliminary.

“It’s by definition a principal activity because you were told to do it,” Mr. Thierman said.

He argued that under Integrity Staffing’s logic, if the company ordered an employee to mow the lawn outside the Amazon warehouse for 25 minutes after his 12-hour shift, the company would not have to pay for that work because it would not be considered “integral and indispensable” to his principal activity of tracking down goods ordered online.

I mean, what's with this guy? Does he think we're living in the Age of Reason or something? That sort of clear cut reasoning hasn't had any place before our Supreme Court since long before Bush v. Gore.

You might wonder where the Justice Department is on this issue and whether it has made the mistake of following Mr. Thierman where logic and common sense led the poor deluded guy. Well, fear not:

The Obama administration has filed a brief backing Integrity Staffing. Signed by lawyers from the Labor and Justice Departments, the administration’s brief said the Ninth Circuit’s focus on whether antitheft checks were done for the employer’s benefit was “an insufficient proxy for determining” whether they were integral and indispensable to a principal activity.

The administration argued that the security check at the Amazon warehouse was little different from a security check at an airport that construction workers must go through on their way to a project at the airport. The 11th Circuit has ruled that the time spent in that airport security check was not compensable and not integral to the job, on the grounds that it was ordered by the Federal Aviation Administration, not the employer, and was not of particular benefit to the employer.

Now, I'm just a country lawyer, pretty much on an intellectual par with poor Thierman. My response to the Justice Department would be that no employer pays their employees for the time it takes to get to and from work, and that in the case of the construction workers, getting through airport security was analogous to getting through highway tolls. It's not an employer's fault if you have to leave for work earlier, or get home later, because of traffic delays. It is the employer's fault if they insist that you can't end your workday until they do a strip search. But as I say, like Thierman I'm somewhat simple-minded.

Of course, it's always possible that the Justice Department has a hidden agenda here, and they have, in fact, bought into Mr. Thierman's weird premise that an employer ought to pay its employees for the things it requires them to do. Given our present Supreme Court, the Justice Department may have concluded that the best way to help the workers was to oppose them, on the grounds that there are five justices who will reflexively oppose whatever Obama supports. So, who knows. The court may surprise us. But don't hold your breath.

Filed in Computer Stuff, Lawyer stuff | | Comments (0)

Hoist ’em high

Friday, October 3, 2014

One of the more evil things the Republicans do is suppress the vote. Unfortunately for them, they cannot yet explicitly restrict the electorate to Republicans (they're working on that), so, every once in a while a Republican is bound to get swept up in the net. And, it was bound to happen, sooner or later, that one of the perpetrators themselves would get hoist up high by their proverbial petard. So, this is really delicious:

Arkansas Attorney General candidate Leslie Rutledge is crying foul over the cancellation of her voter registration form. Rutledge, the Republican nominee for Attorney General, was kicked off the voter rolls after it was discovered that she failed to cancel previous voter registrations in Washington, DC and Virginia, and re-register in Pulaski County when she moved. Pulaski County Clerk Larry Crane, a Democrat, said he was legally obligated to remove her after receiving a letter flagging this issue.

Rutledge and Republican groups are calling the removal a “dirty trick” that was politically motivated. But what happened to Rutledge is in fact very common, and becoming even more common after the state implemented a number of strict voter restrictions, including a controversial voter ID law being litigated in court Thursday.

Democratic Party chair Vincent Insalaco pointed out in his statement that “a thousand eligible voters had their absentee ballots thrown out earlier this year following the implementation of more rigorous voting guidelines.”

…

The Republican National Lawyers Association has also come to Rutledge’s defense, expressing outrage that she was “systematically removed from voter rolls within 90 days of a federal election.” RNLA Chairman J. Randy Evans went on, “The fact is that it is a clear and unmistakable attempt at the most harmful kind of voter suppression in violation of federal law – removing a qualified female voter from the rolls notwithstanding her valid registration and actual votes in the last 4 elections in violation of her civil rights. Democrats should be embarrassed.”

Ironically, the RNLA has been instrumental in pushing mass voter purges across the country, specifically defending the right to purge voters within 90 days of the election.

Rutledge, however, is proud of her role in defending Arkansas election laws accused of discriminating against minorities and low-income voters. “Whether it was concerning Voter ID, Redistricting, Obamacare, or the IRS targeting conservative groups, I sat at the table side-by-side my fellow Republican attorneys and we developed legal strategies to proactively stand against or at times defend our citizens from the overreach of this Administration,” Rutledge wrote in an Attorney General questionnaire.

via Think Progress

Don't you just love the RNLA's description of Rutledge as a “qualified female voter”? I hope the county clerk sticks to his guns. Wouldn't it be loverly to see Ms. Rutledge in court claiming the law she championed was unconstitutional, inasmuch as it was never intended to apply to “qualifed female voter[s]” who were also white and Republican. But what am I saying? In the South, that might be a winning argument.

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Small enough to jail

Thursday, October 2, 2014

The New York Times reports that car dealers have taken a page from Wall Street:

Lenders in the housing boom created so-called liar loans, which enabled borrowers, even those with no income or assets, to inflate their income. Government authorities are now taking aim at a new generation of liar loans. Only this time it is subprime auto loans.

via The New York Times

People are going to jail. Here's why:

Federal and state authorities, a group that includes prosecutors in New York, Alabama and Texas, are zeroing in on the most powerful, and arguably the least regulated, rung of the subprime auto loan chain, used-car dealerships, according to people briefed on the investigations. Already, they have found hundreds of fraudulent loans that together total millions of dollars.

Yes, that's “millions” with an “m”. Unless they can convert that “m” to a “b”, or better yet to a “tr”, they're cruising for a bruising. They may have learned a bit from Wall Street, but not enough. If you don't steal enough, you could easily wind up in jail. In fact, in this country, it's fair to say that the amount of time you're likely to serve for theft is roughly inversely proportional to the amount that you steal. Do the math: Steal an infinite, or near infinite amount and you do zero time.

Oh, I should give them credit for another lesson learned. The higher ups in these dealerships are shocked!, simply shocked! when they discover what their salesmen are doing with these loans. Much like Jamie Dimon, they never suspected the folks they are paid so handsomely to manage (but again, and this might land them in jail, not as much as Jamie) were doing exactly what they expected them to do.

Filed in Corporate Crime | | Comments (0)

Deliver yourself from evil

Monday, September 29, 2014

When Google was founded it adopted a motto: “Don't be evil”. At least at Google, that motto has long since been set aside, and to the rest of us, it has merely become ironic. Now Apple has taken a slight swing at Google, and I thought I would highlight it a bit.

Now, don't get me wrong. I fully appreciate the fact that Apple is evil too, but if there must be evil in the world, it is better that the evil empires do battle with one another on occasion than that they spend all their time picking on us peasants.

So, to specifics. Several months ago when I first heard about the changes coming in iOS 8, I heard that Apple was going to add DuckDuckGo as a choice for the Safari default search engine. I have heard zero about it since then, and forgot about it until today, when I checked, and indeed, you can choose to bypass Google for the far less evil DuckDuckGo. I have several apps that allowed me to use DuckDuckGo as a default even before iOS 8, and I've found its search results to be as good as Google's, with no ads, and they don't track you. Or at least they say they don't. I don't know how they make money, but I don't much care. When I have the choice, I use their search engine. So, don't be evil. Go to your settings App on your iDevice, and take Google out of a piece of your life. No, you can't escape them. They will probably always know where you are, and what you're doing at any given time, but it might make it just a little harder for them.

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This passes for progress in today’s world

Monday, September 29, 2014

Well, here's some good news and bad news:

The Department of Defense released proposed rules today targeting the practices of a broad range of high-cost lenders and prohibiting them from charging service members interest rates over 36 percent.

The new rules would overhaul the Military Lending Act, which, when enacted in 2007, narrowly defined potentially abusive loans. But as ProPublica and Marketplace reported last year, high-cost lenders easily circumvented the law by offering longer-term loans. As a result, those pitching payday, auto-title, and installment loans continued to peddle credit from stores lining the streets near military bases.

via Pro Publica

So, the good news is that loans of over 36% will be banned; the bad news is that loans of up to 36% will be allowed. There was a time, deep in the distant past, when there were such things as usury laws, that actually imposed reasonable limits on the rate of interest anyone but a criminal could charge. (Criminals were not allowed to charge those rates either, but they did. That's why it was a crime.) This was back in the day, by the way, when you could get a rate of interest on a savings account that was larger than microscopic, so the spread between what you could get for your money and what you had to pay for money was far narrower than today. Rest assured, 36% was beyond the pale.

As the quoted article goes on to say, service people are particularly vulnerable to these predators for a number of reasons, including the fact that, unlike the folks who build our weapons and push us into war, they are not that highly paid.

So, we have come a long way, to a time when the journalists at Pro Publica can proclaim in all honesty that it really is a very big deal that these predatory lenders are being restricted in any way whatsoever. It runs against the trend after all. One small step, but no giant leap.

Filed in Corporate Crime, Good News | | Comments (0)

The future of education

Thursday, September 25, 2014

We should never forget that a substantial number of the people who are getting rich in this land of ever increasing inequality are doing so by sucking hard at the government teat. Among the worst offenders is the relatively new for-profit education industry. There was a time when even the rich kept their hands off of education, perhaps recognizing that there were some things that shouldn't be all about money, but of course those times are past. Right now, the big money is going to the for-profit universities, but that's only because the for profit secondary and primary education companies have not yet gotten a big enough share of the market to start siphoning off the truly big bucks. But there day will come, and in the case of the for profit universities we can see a bit of our future:

Many students who enroll in such colleges don’t realize that there is a difference between for-profit, public, and private non-profit institutions of higher learning. All three are concerned with generating revenue, but only the for-profit model exists primarily to enrich its owners. The largest of these institutions are often publicly traded, nationally franchised corporations legally beholden to maximize profit for their shareholders before maximizing education for their students. While commercial vocational programs have existed since the nineteenth century, for-profit colleges in their current form are a relatively new phenomenon that began to boom with a series of initial public offerings in the 1990s, followed quickly by deregulation of the sector as the millennium approached. Bush administration legislation then weakened government oversight of such schools, while expanding their access to federal financial aid, making the industry irresistible to Wall Street investors.

While the for-profit business model has generally served investors well, it has failed students. Retention rates are abysmal and tuitions sky-high. For-profit colleges can be up to twice as expensive as Ivy League universities, and routinely cost five or six times the price of a community college education. The Medical Assistant program at for-profit Heald College in Fresno, California, costs $22,275. A comparable program at Fresno City College costs $1,650. An associate degree in paralegal studies at Everest College in Ontario, California, costs $41,149, compared to $2,392 for the same degree at Santa Ana College, a mere 30-minute drive away.

Exorbitant tuition means students, who tend to come from poor backgrounds, have to borrow from both the government and private sources, including Sallie Mae (the country’s largest originator, servicer, and collector of student loans) and banks like Chase and Wells Fargo. A whopping 96% of students who manage to graduate from for-profits leave owing money, and they typically carry twice the debt load of students from more traditional schools.

Public funds in the form of federal student loans has been called the “lifeblood” of the for-profit system, providing on average 86% of revenues. Such schools now enroll around 10% of America’s college students, but take in more than a quarter of all federal financial aid — as much as $33 billion in a single year. By some estimates it would cost less than half that amount to directly fund free higher education at all currently existing two- and four-year public colleges. In other words, for-profit schools represent not a “market solution” to increasing demand for the college experience, but the equivalent of a taxpayer-subsidized subprime education.

via Naked Capitalism

Needless to say, not only is the government doing nothing to contain this scam, it is actively helping the industry while making life even harder for the exploited. From the same source, but a different post:

As a new story by Shahien Nasiripour in the Huffington Post tells us, the Administration is now giving student loan servicers the “too big to fail” kid gloves treatment. The apparent justification is that correcting the records of borrowers who may have gone into default through not fault of their own would lead schools with bad servicers to lose access to Federal student aid, which could prove to be crippling to them.

So understand what that means: the law was set up to inflict draconian punishments on schools that used servicers that screw up and/or cheat on a regular basis, presumably because the consequences to borrowers were so serious. But rather than enforce the law, which would have such dire consequences for bad actors as to serve as a wake-up call for everyone else, the Administration has thrown its weight fully behind the education-extraction complex.

The inevitable result of all this will be that we will be paying more for less education at every level. The amount of money being spent on primary and secondary education in this country is just too great for these leaches to ignore. They will get their share by hook or by crook. I'll say again, Jonathan Pelto may have his faults, and his drive to get Foley elected is surely one of them, but he's been absolutely right about the direction in which Malloy is trying to bring us so far as education is concerned. We are heading toward a no-longer-public educational system in which our taxes will be paid as tribute to a few mega corporations whose highly paid CEOs will flourish while our kids are taught by the primary and secondary school equivalents of the adjuncts that are starving while teaching college students.

At the post-secondary level the solution is obvious: if you want to run a for-profit institution your students will just have to do without federally guaranteed student loans. End of problem. Of course, we have long since abandoned the idea that we should impose simple efficacious solutions when Rube Goldbergian ineffective window dressing solutions are available, else we would have reenacted Glass-Steagall instead of the unworkable Dodd-Franks bill.

It should be noted that this dumbing down of our educational system suits the purposes of the .01% quite well. Yesterday I wrote about the student protestors in Colorado who were demonstrating against their school boards attempt to substitute propaganda for history. The Koch Brothers are behind the school board with both money and PR support. Nothing suits the purposes of the plutocrats more than a population of sheep too ill informed to even realize they are being regularly shorn.

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