Skip to content

Friday Night Music-Romney’s Song

Friday, July 20, 2012

Filed in Music | | Comments (0)

The Future of Education?

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Kevin Carey of the Washington Monthly suggests that it's time to rehabilitate an age old educational scam:

Deep in the recesses of my spam filter, among phishing lures and ads for unregulated “enhancing” pharmaceuticals, vaguely named online universities occasionally promise to transform my valuable personal and professional accomplishments into a convenient and inexpensive college degree. The pitch has been around for decades, quickly migrating from one form of cheap, marginal media—matchbook covers, the back pages of men’s magazines—to another. “Credit for life experience” is well-understood shorthand for “sketchy diploma mill that could get you fired from a real job in twenty years if you’re not careful.”

It may also be a great idea whose time has finally come.

The U.S. economy desperately needs more Americans with college credentials: by 2018, more than 60 percent of U.S. job openings will require some form of post-secondary education, according to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Unfortunately, our existing system of colleges and universities doesn’t appear up to the challenge. …

…

Which is why more people are starting to ask: Is there a way to get students legitimate college credit without the college itself?

Enter “credit for life experience,” or, to use the currently popular phrase, “prior learning assessment.” Legitimate organizations are increasingly offering innovative ways of assessing the skills and knowledge that prospective students, especially working adults, already have between their ears—the human capital they’ve accumulated though past schooling, work experience, or independent study—and building on this preexisting knowledge base with carefully tailored coursework.

(via The Washington Monthly)

What this represents is an abdication of our responsibility to provide an education for our young people. This sort of thinking represents a lot of what is wrong with so-called progressives. The right-wing demands, and when it doesn't get its way, it continues to demand until gradually, and lately inevitably, it gets its way. One of those demands is the destruction of public education, and slowly but surely that is happening. Too many of us, on the other hand, see such changes taking place, and rather than demand, as we should, that the cost of education be borne by all, we seek to accommodate by buying into proposals like this that, no matter how well intentioned, will inevitably further widen the distance between the elite and the masses. One system of education for our masters, one for the rest of us. (The article actually speaks approvingly of degrees conferred by Wal-Mart on its employees: “The process will include granting credit for work experience and on-the-job training earned in various Wal-Mart job categories”.)

Another point: There is a distinction between education and training. That is not to denigrate training, but it does not confer the tools one needs to think critically, and that is the area in which Americans are woefully deficient. Education should be about more than job skills, the process should create thinking citizens. If we thought critically, we’d be voting right, and we wouldn’t need degrees for life experience, because we would not have allowed the conditions to develop that seem to justify them. We would have, as we once did, free or cheap public universities, with a middle class that can afford to pay what should be reasonable education costs. We don’t have that anymore, and this proposal assumes we never will. It’s an abject surrender to the right wing. I’d rather go down fighting.

 

Filed in Decline | | Comments (0)

An alternate theory

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

New London’s own Joshua Green speculates that Romney may have paid no taxes in 2009, thus the argument that he need only disclose back to 2010:

The “zero tax in 2009” theory—again, this is sheer speculation—gains further sustenance when you consider it’s the only year for which nobody knows anything about Romney’s taxes. He’s revealed what’s in his 2010 and 2011 returns, and he reportedly submitted 20-some years’ worth of returns to the McCain campaign when he was being vetted for vice president in 2008. Steve Schmidt, McCain’s chief strategist in that campaign, said on MSNBC last night that while he didn’t examine Romney’s returns himself, nothing that McCain’s vetters found in them disqualified Romney from consideration.

That would indicate that 2009 is singularly important and, if there’s anything to this theory, incredibly vexing for Romney because there’s no way he could release additional returns without including that year. And the chaos that would ensue would be bad enough that it’s probably worth enduring significant damage to avoid.

(via Businessweek)

The theory may be true, but I wouldn’t take Schmidt’s statement to the bank. My guess would be that they never seriously thought about Romney and were just vetting him for appearances sake. After all, everyone who has ever run against him thinks he’s an asshole, and McCain is likely no exception. So, faced with the prospect of reviewing hundreds to thousands of pages of returns they couldn’t understand anyway, for a guy they had no intention of choosing, they probably just punted and went with the obvious choice: Sarah Palin. Which, by the way, proves just how penetrating their vetting process was.

 

Filed in Romney | | Comments (0)

Mitt’s plans

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

I understand that focus groups have refused to believe that anyone running for president would actually take the positions that Romney has taken. That’s one of the reasons, of course, that Republicans (e.g., Linda McMahon) try so hard not to tell anyone what they will do if elected. Better to spout banal talking points. But I digress. I doubt that the group was even told about this, but I’m fairly certain they would not have believed it had they heard it:

The plan Romney has endorsed would change the US tax system to one of territorial taxation. That means that foreign income from US multinationals would be exempt from US taxation. While this seems intuitive, it would turn every country in the world into a foreign tax haven, and encourage US companies to book profits abroad and abandon the US. As Clausing says, this is justified with a bit of legerdemain:

Advocates of a territorial system argue that because many of our trading partners have moved to a territorial system, we need to follow if our multinational corporations are to remain competitive. Yet most countries with territorial systems have hybrid versions of territoriality that are far different from the version being suggested for the United States. Those hybrid systems include tough antiabuse provisions that discourage the shifting of income and employment to low-tax havens; the result is often a higher tax on foreign income than applies in the United States.

In other words, you can move to territorial taxation with these other controls and discouragements; but that’s not the plan on offer. Instead, the plan is to turn loopholes into freeways for Mack trucks. In fact, other countries’ territorial taxation regimes typically tax profits from tax havens which offer drastically lower tax rates.

(via FDL News Desk)

The idea, of course is to create a world where no corporation goes taxed. Now, the Romneybots justify this by arguing, as noted above, that we really must keep up with the rest of the world, except, it need hardly be said and therefore it is not, for those antiabuse provisions which smack of regulation. Among other things, it’s funny how we are often advised to follow foreign examples, except in those cases, such as health care, in which doing so would benefit the common person. Then, the USA is number one by definition, and following the example of the foreigner is unpatriotic.

 

Filed in Corporate Crime, Republican Corruption, Romney | | Comments (0)

All Good Questions

Monday, July 16, 2012

TJ Walker, described as a subscriber to Forbes, has penned 35 questions that Mitt Romney should (and never will) answer about his years at Bain. As a sample, here’s five through seven (I especially like seven)

    5. You earned at least $100,000 as an executive from Bain in 2001 and 2002, separate from investment earnings according to filings with State of Massachusetts. Can you give an example of anyone else you personally know getting a six figure income, not dividend or investment return, but actual income, from a company they had nothing to do with?

    6. What did you do for this $100,000 salary you earned from Bain in both 2000 and 2001?

    7. If you did nothing to earn this salary, did the Bain managers violate their fiduciary duty by paying you a salary for no discernible reason?

(via Forbes) (via Buzzflash)

The rest are well worth reading. Good for Obama for keeping up the pounding and not letting the serious people stop him.

 

Filed in Romney | | Comments (0)

Our psychopathic overlords

Monday, July 16, 2012

Barry Ritholz devotes a long post to proving something we all know intuitively, that many Wall Streeters and politicians, are psychopaths:

According to psychologists and sociologists – many on Wall Street and D.C. are not like you and me. They are literally psychopaths.

Reuters reported Tuesday:

In a survey of 500 senior executives in the United States and the UK, 26 percent of respondents said they had observed or had firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace, while 24 percent said they believed financial services professionals may need to engage in unethical or illegal conduct to be successful.

Sixteen percent of respondents said they would commit insider trading if they could get away with it, according to Labaton Sucharow. And 30 percent said their compensation plans created pressure to compromise ethical standards or violate the law.

A number of commentators think the numbers are low, because of self-reporting. For example, Richard Eskow writes:

I discussed the survey with a few other people familiar with the banking industry, and they had the same reaction I did: If anything, those numbers sound low. That makes sense. Admitting your criminal inclinations to a total stranger isn’t as easy as telling a them your favorite color or what kind of music you like.

(via The Big Picture)

Apparently, some of our overlords actively recruit psychopaths, which makes a weird kind of sense. They are ideally suited to the pursuit of money no matter the cost to other humans.

As with the bankers, the political culture is now such that being a psychopath is practically a requirement of the job, though I would argue it’s for slightly different reasons. Who else would endure the slings and arrows of modern day politics, in which anyone who has a shred of decency is inevitably exposed to endless and baseless attacks? Only a small number of otherwise normal people can absorb that sort of punishment and remain decent. Psychopaths, on the other hand, can not only absorb it, they almost glory in it, so they can survive and thrive in today’s political climate. And, of course, they are willing to do anything it takes to win, having neither empathy, conscience, or principles. The Democrats have their share of these folks, but their natural homeland is the Republican party, which has long since expelled any politician with a particle of integrity. While this process has been going on, the American people have been trained to expect their politicians to be psychopaths. They expect nothing more, and rarely get it. The reaction of the nation to Watergate now seems almost quaint. Similar crimes were committed almost non-stop in the Bush years, and no doubt Obama has committed his share, but no one would dream of impeaching a president for those kinds of crimes. If Obama is ever impeached, and it may happen if the Republicans gain control of the Senate, it will be for crimes that can be perceived only in the fevered brows of the psychopaths who will be doing the impeaching.

 

Filed in Corporate Crime, Crazies | | Comments (1)

Friday Night Music-Romney’s lament

Friday, July 13, 2012

Filed in Music | | Comments (0)

Equal justice under law

Friday, July 13, 2012

 

It’s truly amazing what the government can do when it sets its mind to it. The Obama Justice Department has made a name for itself by going after internet “pirates”, read: people who Hollywood believes is costing it money.

Richard O’Dwyer, an enterprising 24-year-old college student from northern England, has found himself in the middle of a fierce battle between two of America’s great exports: Hollywood and the Internet.

At issue is a Web site he started that helped visitors find American movies and television shows online. Although the site did not serve up pirated content, American authorities say it provided links to sites that did. The Obama administration is seeking to extradite Mr. O'Dwyer from Britain on criminal charges of copyright infringement. The possible punishment: 10 years in a United States prison.

(via New York Times)

When I was in law school, and I admit it was a different era, it was considered black letter law that a country’s criminal jurisdiction stopped at its borders. That is, it could not punish a person for behavior that violated its laws, if that behavior took place elsewhere. I’m fairly certain that we still hold to that rule in reverse, and that we’re not about to allow other countries to put our citizens in jail for activities performed here and legal here. Apparently, England feels differently, as Mr. O’Dwyer is going to be extradited, if court rulings against him stand up.

But, sleeping under bridges, and all that. The law, I’m sure, would forbid bankers to do as Mr. O’Dwyer has done, secure in the knowledge that they wouldn't do it, but somehow can’t find a way to prosecute them for the criminal behavior that we all know helped bring the economy to its knees. More akin to O'Dwyer’s situation, the law can’t seem to find a way to stop corporations from avoiding their taxes by taking advantage of offshore tax shelters. A British citizen is subject to U.S. copyright law, but somehow it’s impossible to subject American corporations to U.S. tax law, not to mention Republican candidates.

 

Filed in Corporate Crime, Lawyer stuff | | Comments (0)

In a nutshell

Friday, July 13, 2012

The Republican argument, boiled down to its essence.

 

 

Filed in Humour, Republicans | | Comments (0)

An implied confession

Thursday, July 12, 2012

 

It seems many Republicans are upset about the fact that Obama is successfully introducing the real Willard to the American public:

Conservatives have lit up talk radio programs across the country, worrying whether Mr. Romney’s business record has been “Swift Boated,” referring to attacks waged against Senator John Kerry’s military record in 2004.

The Romney campaign headquarters in Boston has been inundated with advice and criticism from donors and supporters who worry that Mr. Romney has lost an opportunity to introduce himself on his own terms.

“Team Obama is doing just what we did in 2004, which is to define the opposition furiously and early,” said Mark McKinnon, a strategist who worked on George W. Bush’s re-election campaign. “Most voters don’t have a deep sense of Romney other than he’s not Obama. And in this cycle, that may be enough, but it’s a very risky approach.”

(via NYTimes.com)

Many years ago the Republicans tried to introduce the term “bork” for unfair, spurious or groundless attacks on a political figure. It never caught on, and was certainly never used by Democrats, because it referred to the confirmation hearings of one Robert Bork, who was denied a Supreme Court judgeship not based on any lies about him, but on a cumulation of truths that convinced even normally spineless Democrats that he should be rejected.

The term “swift-boat” on the other hand, introduced by the Democrats and others of like mind, has now apparently been adopted by the Republicans, implying a recognition that the campaign they waged against Kerry was bottomed in lies, something they would have denied with vehemence at the time. Alternatively, of course, they might be conceding that Obama’s claims about Romney are true (which they are) but that there is something still unfair about them. That dog, of course, won't hunt. In truth and in fact, Romney is not being swift boated. He is being exposed for precisely what he is. Kerry was portrayed as something he was not. But when the Republicans use the term, they are confessing to their past sins.

 

Filed in Language, Republicans | | Comments (0)